7 ms·

I've been on an all meat diet for ~3 months. I've lost ~20 pounds (I was 30-40 pounds over what I consider my ideal weight) and feel great. Oddly, no scurvy or

I've been on an all meat diet for ~3 months. I've lost ~20 pounds (I was 30-40 pounds over what I consider my ideal weight) and feel great. Oddly, no scurvy or other health issues. I do not supplement apart from salt and other seasonings. Probably 50% of my calories are from grass fed beef, combined with other high quality meats, eggs and a little diary. There are people who get good results from only beef. And there are people who have done this for many years without adverse health effects. There is a ton of conventional wisdom / "science" that says we can't thrive on an all meat diet. Anecdotally, there are a ton of people who do. My health cares not for your wife's education.

simplecomplex 8y ago
The requirement for vitamin C is a fact of human biology, and established science. Either you’re getting it from your dairy or other dietary sources or eating enough meat that’s raw enough to get your minimum. My experience as a lactose person is that people tend to greatly underestimate how much dairy they consume, which is largely fortified (edit: as others point out it’s not fortified with vitamin C). When you say all meat diet are you sure you’re not exaggerating? You probably consume all sorts of other stuff in small quantities. You don’t have any candy ever (often a source of vitamin C)? No potato chips ever? No cheese ever? No fortified yogurt or milk ever? You don’t ever eat cheeseburgers with buns or cheese or mayo?
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  > No cheese made with fortified dairy ever? No fortified yogurt or milk ever? You don’t ever eat cheeseburgers with buns or cheese or mayo? I don't think I've ever seen dairy fortified with vitamin C. In the US, at least, dairy is typically fortified with vitamins A and D.
- geowwy 8y ago
  The carnivore diet is getting pretty big, a lot of people have been on it for years. I think their theory is you don't need as much Vitamin C when you don't eat carbohydrates. On the other hand there are carnivore Youtubers like sv3rige who drink vegetable juice but don't talk about it on their channel, so who knows if it's true or not: https://youtu.be/rQlvvbHqtj8?t=25 https://youtu.be/rQlvvbHqtj8?t=25
  - simplecomplex 8y ago
    Yeah I find it hard to believe anyone eats literally 100% meat no exceptions. I’ll bet $1000 Jordan Pederson is full of shit when he claims he eats nothing but cooked beef.
    - andai 8y ago
      Recently, he added chicken to the menu.
    - virtuallynathan 8y ago
      You’d be surprised... perhaps if you expand you definition of meat to animal products (eggs, cheese, fish, shellfish, etc), then I would say a growing number of people do this.
    - geowwy 8y ago
      I don’t see what Jordan Peterson gains by lying. If anything it’s just another thing people can use to attack him.
      - simple_phrases 8y ago
        He and his daughter do consultations at $150/hour based on the diet, so he has $150/hour to gain by lying.
        sridca 8y ago
        By your strange logic contractors and freelancers would automatically be lying as well.
        simple_phrases 8y ago
        Funny, I hire freelancers all the time and work as one myself. There are plenty of frauds who are all talk until it comes to proving their value, and then they can't. Why? There is an incentive to lie for a profit. However, I never claimed that Peterson is a fraud because he charges for consultations. I responded to a comment asking about what he had to gain from lying by showing that he has ample financial incentive to do so. Just because you disagree with my comment, doesn't mean you should strawman my post. People wouldn't be suspicious of Peterson's claims if he provided proof. I mean, even breatharians agreed to be documented while following their purported diet. Surely Peterson can do the same.
- RandomInteger4 8y ago
  I may be mistaken, but I don't think there's dairy in the carnivore diet. Just meat, organs, and maybe bone marrow? Also, I'm not sure why you would think that burger buns and potato chips are so irresistible as to doubt people don't eat those things?
  - gwilkes 8y ago
    Dairy is optional on the carnivore diet, some believe it is better without as it can be another source of allergens. Others are less dogmatic and see no issue with it. Lastly, some recommend to go without for some time like a month or so and then reintroduce to see how you do. In this way the carnivore diet can be used an elimination diet to discover allergens.
KitDuncan 8y ago
Did you do any blood tests before and are planning on doing some in the near future? I'd be really interested in hearing how they compare. Three months also might not be enough time to develop any serious deficiencies. Weight loss isn't a really good metric. I also lost a similar amount of weight in the first few months of going vegan. Around 40 pounds after half a year and I feel great. My blood tests came back more than great even after 3 years now.
jjjensen90 8y ago
I'm glad you feel good, but your health hasn't really been established yet. A few things to remember: - 3 months is not enough time to know if a diet is good for you personally in the long term, even anecdotally - weight loss is a poor metric for the healthiness of a diet - anecdotes are not what you should base decisions about your one and only body on (remember that some diet pills in the 90s worked well and spread by word of mouth because people lost weight but also caused heart attacks in some)
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > weight loss is a poor metric for the healthiness of a diet Most people are near-totally uninterested in their actuarial life expectancy. As a result, close to 100% of people on a diet are looking for weight loss. Whether you should consider it a "health" objective is a more interesting question. From a Darwinian perspective, attracting a mate is much more important than whether you live to be 67 or 72.
  - jjjensen90 8y ago
    While you are right, it's not a choice between pure life extension on one side and pure weight loss for attractiveness... Because the "healthiness" of a diet, in my opinion, includes its sustainability (do you regain the weight immediately after stopping?), reliability (can you use the diet to reduce your weight in a controlled way?), compatibility with exercise (which can also work to make you more attractive and therefore more successful in the Darwinian sexual selection sense). Another reason that "scale weight" is a poor indicator of the healthiness of a diet is that depending on the diet you may be losing mass via fat loss, muscle loss, water loss, etc. What's more important is body fat percentage reduction if we are talking about both traditional Western attractiveness and (usually) physical health overall. There are diets and lifestyles that make you more attractive and also increase your life expectancy.
    - deno 8y ago
      Sustainability should be whether or not you are going around hungry. Because if not, then why would you ever stop the diet, or even worse go back to the old habits? Why would it be surprising that you would then gain your weight back? And yeah muscle tissue is the important one. Any diet is sustainable until you burn through all your secondary reserves. How many buff vegetarians do you see? In my experience, you need to be a bona fide nutritional expert to maintain muscle mass on an exclusively plant-based diet.
radicalbyte 8y ago
Good going. It's amazing what creating a caloric deficit combined with weight training can achieve. I've also lost weight, I'm down about 9 kg of real weight (using the weight from week 2 of diet as start point) in 4 months. I took four weeks in Jan "off" from my diet, just eating when I was hungry (unfortunately lots of crisps). I still dropped 2kg over that period but 0.5kg of that was muscle. I changed me eating pattern such that I ate a normal balanced evening meal (50% veg, 25% protein/carb) with either a banana for breakfast and two slices of bread with filling for lunch OR porridge for breakfast and a banana for lunch. On trainings days I have two eggs on my bread and ham if I have it in stock. I've also added about 2kg of muscle mass overall. I would strongly recommend following a "diet" that you can stick to long term. I've done the whole meat-only diet, I've done the 6-a-day bodybuilders diet. I've done soup diets. Every single time I've put most of the weight back on afterwards and have had to battle hunger the whole way through. With my current attempt it's far easier because I'm not hungry and I love what I'm eating.
blattimwind 8y ago
> My health cares not for your wife's education. From all I've seen nutritional sciences barely qualify as a science given the large corpus of falsehoods produced by it, even in recent years. (Remember cholesterol in eggs?)

simplecomplex 8y ago

The requirement for vitamin C is a fact of human biology, and established science. Either you’re getting it from your dairy or other dietary sources or eating enough meat that’s raw enough to get your minimum. My experience as a lactose person is that people tend to greatly underestimate how much dairy they consume, which is largely fortified (edit: as others point out it’s not fortified with vitamin C). When you say all meat diet are you sure you’re not exaggerating? You probably consume all sorts of other stuff in small quantities. You don’t have any candy ever (often a source of vitamin C)? No potato chips ever? No cheese ever? No fortified yogurt or milk ever? You don’t ever eat cheeseburgers with buns or cheese or mayo?

inferiorhuman 8y ago
> No cheese made with fortified dairy ever? No fortified yogurt or milk ever? You don’t ever eat cheeseburgers with buns or cheese or mayo? I don't think I've ever seen dairy fortified with vitamin C. In the US, at least, dairy is typically fortified with vitamins A and D.
geowwy 8y ago
The carnivore diet is getting pretty big, a lot of people have been on it for years. I think their theory is you don't need as much Vitamin C when you don't eat carbohydrates. On the other hand there are carnivore Youtubers like sv3rige who drink vegetable juice but don't talk about it on their channel, so who knows if it's true or not: https://youtu.be/rQlvvbHqtj8?t=25 https://youtu.be/rQlvvbHqtj8?t=25
- simplecomplex 8y ago
  Yeah I find it hard to believe anyone eats literally 100% meat no exceptions. I’ll bet $1000 Jordan Pederson is full of shit when he claims he eats nothing but cooked beef.
  - andai 8y ago
    Recently, he added chicken to the menu.
  - virtuallynathan 8y ago
    You’d be surprised... perhaps if you expand you definition of meat to animal products (eggs, cheese, fish, shellfish, etc), then I would say a growing number of people do this.
  - geowwy 8y ago
    I don’t see what Jordan Peterson gains by lying. If anything it’s just another thing people can use to attack him.
    - simple_phrases 8y ago
      He and his daughter do consultations at $150/hour based on the diet, so he has $150/hour to gain by lying.
      - sridca 8y ago
        By your strange logic contractors and freelancers would automatically be lying as well.
        simple_phrases 8y ago
        Funny, I hire freelancers all the time and work as one myself. There are plenty of frauds who are all talk until it comes to proving their value, and then they can't. Why? There is an incentive to lie for a profit. However, I never claimed that Peterson is a fraud because he charges for consultations. I responded to a comment asking about what he had to gain from lying by showing that he has ample financial incentive to do so. Just because you disagree with my comment, doesn't mean you should strawman my post. People wouldn't be suspicious of Peterson's claims if he provided proof. I mean, even breatharians agreed to be documented while following their purported diet. Surely Peterson can do the same.
RandomInteger4 8y ago
I may be mistaken, but I don't think there's dairy in the carnivore diet. Just meat, organs, and maybe bone marrow? Also, I'm not sure why you would think that burger buns and potato chips are so irresistible as to doubt people don't eat those things?
- gwilkes 8y ago
  Dairy is optional on the carnivore diet, some believe it is better without as it can be another source of allergens. Others are less dogmatic and see no issue with it. Lastly, some recommend to go without for some time like a month or so and then reintroduce to see how you do. In this way the carnivore diet can be used an elimination diet to discover allergens.

KitDuncan 8y ago

Did you do any blood tests before and are planning on doing some in the near future? I'd be really interested in hearing how they compare. Three months also might not be enough time to develop any serious deficiencies. Weight loss isn't a really good metric. I also lost a similar amount of weight in the first few months of going vegan. Around 40 pounds after half a year and I feel great. My blood tests came back more than great even after 3 years now.

jjjensen90 8y ago

I'm glad you feel good, but your health hasn't really been established yet. A few things to remember: - 3 months is not enough time to know if a diet is good for you personally in the long term, even anecdotally - weight loss is a poor metric for the healthiness of a diet - anecdotes are not what you should base decisions about your one and only body on (remember that some diet pills in the 90s worked well and spread by word of mouth because people lost weight but also caused heart attacks in some)

thaumasiotes 8y ago
> weight loss is a poor metric for the healthiness of a diet Most people are near-totally uninterested in their actuarial life expectancy. As a result, close to 100% of people on a diet are looking for weight loss. Whether you should consider it a "health" objective is a more interesting question. From a Darwinian perspective, attracting a mate is much more important than whether you live to be 67 or 72.
- jjjensen90 8y ago
  While you are right, it's not a choice between pure life extension on one side and pure weight loss for attractiveness... Because the "healthiness" of a diet, in my opinion, includes its sustainability (do you regain the weight immediately after stopping?), reliability (can you use the diet to reduce your weight in a controlled way?), compatibility with exercise (which can also work to make you more attractive and therefore more successful in the Darwinian sexual selection sense). Another reason that "scale weight" is a poor indicator of the healthiness of a diet is that depending on the diet you may be losing mass via fat loss, muscle loss, water loss, etc. What's more important is body fat percentage reduction if we are talking about both traditional Western attractiveness and (usually) physical health overall. There are diets and lifestyles that make you more attractive and also increase your life expectancy.
  - deno 8y ago
    Sustainability should be whether or not you are going around hungry. Because if not, then why would you ever stop the diet, or even worse go back to the old habits? Why would it be surprising that you would then gain your weight back? And yeah muscle tissue is the important one. Any diet is sustainable until you burn through all your secondary reserves. How many buff vegetarians do you see? In my experience, you need to be a bona fide nutritional expert to maintain muscle mass on an exclusively plant-based diet.

radicalbyte 8y ago

Good going. It's amazing what creating a caloric deficit combined with weight training can achieve. I've also lost weight, I'm down about 9 kg of real weight (using the weight from week 2 of diet as start point) in 4 months. I took four weeks in Jan "off" from my diet, just eating when I was hungry (unfortunately lots of crisps). I still dropped 2kg over that period but 0.5kg of that was muscle. I changed me eating pattern such that I ate a normal balanced evening meal (50% veg, 25% protein/carb) with either a banana for breakfast and two slices of bread with filling for lunch OR porridge for breakfast and a banana for lunch. On trainings days I have two eggs on my bread and ham if I have it in stock. I've also added about 2kg of muscle mass overall. I would strongly recommend following a "diet" that you can stick to long term. I've done the whole meat-only diet, I've done the 6-a-day bodybuilders diet. I've done soup diets. Every single time I've put most of the weight back on afterwards and have had to battle hunger the whole way through. With my current attempt it's far easier because I'm not hungry and I love what I'm eating.

blattimwind 8y ago

> My health cares not for your wife's education. From all I've seen nutritional sciences barely qualify as a science given the large corpus of falsehoods produced by it, even in recent years. (Remember cholesterol in eggs?)