3 weeks on carnivore “no results”!


#1

Ive been doing carnivore for three weeks now and no weight loss and dont feel any different. Im 5’7 180 and have at least 30lbs to loose and the scale hasn’t bugded. I was on a workout routine doing strength training 3 days a week prior to starting. I stopped working out to focus on diet and stretching currently. Im not doing this just for the weight loss but I will admit it is discouraging not to see any. Any idea whats going on??


(Robin) #2

Welcome! You’ll get some good feedback here from carnivores with much more experience than me. I am guessing most will say 3 weeks isn’t long enough to be concerned. And keep in mind that losing fat (which is what you’re doing) is different than losing weight.

I did end up losing a lot of weight. But many times the scale would stall while I watched my body composition and shape changing right before my eyes. Clothes are often your most reliable way to measure, and how you feel physically mentally, and energy-wise.

My only advice is to relax, lean into it… and know that your body will adapt to this and you will be much happier and healthier and yes… thinner.

Also… some people (like me) begin with keto and then make a natural slide into carnivore once they feel settled. You’ll lose the weight either way.
Glad you are here. You got this!


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #3

You expect results after only three weeks? Be patient, for carnivore eating is a long-term strategy. For most people, the adaptation period takes around six months, so give yourself plenty of time before giving up on this way of eating.

Neither a ketogenic diet nor a carnivore diet is a quick weight-loss strategy. They work primarily to restore health, and fat loss is a pleasant side effect. In fact, many people on carnivore report that their weight increases before it declines, so be prepared for that. Long-term carnivores all advise that, especially in the beginning, the answer to every problem a newcomer experiences is solved by eating more meat.


#4

Indeed and what’s more, neither guarantee fat-loss even when there is a significant extra fat mass. If one eats a ton, one hardly can expect fat-loss, at least most of us don’t work that way.
I never lose fat on keto, carnivore helps but I need more than just eating carnivore (as far as I can tell from my short carni times. once I actually lost fat in weeks but that wasn’t sustainable and I changed anyway). Even if one just do carnivore and loses fat, it’s often super slow. Not even a pound in 3 weeks… The OP isn’t very heavy and it’s normal to lose fat slowly then.

I find it so weird that people consider a woe working = losing fat… I don’t. Eating very low carbs is so much more than giving a chance to fat-loss. And there are big changes in the body, things may take time - but fat-loss usually is like that unless someone managed to eat the proper amount in a way that the body responds well…


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #5

Fortunately, the key is to eat to satisfy hunger, not to overeat past that point. There are a few people, of course, whose appetite hormones fail to work properly, but most people can sense when they’ve had enough, and stop. I’ve always found it interesting that Americans say, “I’m full,” whereas the French say, “J’en ai eu assez” (I’ve had enough). I believe that difference in attitude may well be significant.


#6

Read this all and then be smart and follow future info you require as you see fit that suits you as it rings a bell for you personally…

A TON OF ZC and why we do it for our science backing it!

best of luck forward.


#7

But it’s not so easy to get satisfy my hunger only once a day (and I still may overeat though not long term. long term OMAD is good, I don’t really need to care about carbs there as far as I can tell. If I only care about fat-loss but nope but I have bigger missions where less carbs is better ;)) :frowning:

Zero appetite doesn’t help, I still eat too much… I need satiation all the time and that’s tough, no matter what.

I don’t care about fullness, I don’t even know what that means. I want to get rid of the annoying need of eating to reach the satiation where I can chill.

Good food choices, good timing helps but it’s hard to focus on doing EVERYTHING right all the time. I am not that type. I want to chill and let things fall into line automatically…


(Bob M) #8

Have you tried a much higher fat ratio? Amber O’Hearn advocates that for some people. Basically, you eat fat FIRST, then eat meat. Aim to eat as much fat as you want, then add meat.

Some people swear by this.

This outlines the idea:


(John) #9

@All don’t worry. Many of us still new to Carnivore are experiencing exactly the same as you.
I am into my 3rd month and have yet to feel any benefits. It is frustrating but if you read all the good advice here, you will come to understand that you need to do a few things.

  1. Be patient. Different people take a different amount of time to reap the benefits. It can take 2 months, it can take 9.
  2. Don’t think that eating less will help you lose weight. You must eat well until you are full.
  3. Try to eat 2 or 3 times a day. Your body is in a state of repair. Fasting, OMAD can be introduced later when your body has repaired the years of damage.
    4 Make sure to take your electrolytes and magnesium and zinc.
    5 Make sure you eat fat. You are trying to make you body get its energy from fat rather than from carbs and sugar.

Bear with it. You will get periods where you feel that you are punishing yourself and depriving yourself of the things you enjoyed eating and drinking. And you might start getting bored of eating meat day in an day out.

I know that day by day my dogs food is starting to look more appealing to me than another lump of meat!!

From one newbie to another, all I can say is bare with it. We are promised by the long term members that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.


#10

Some lucky ones don’t have that but it’s very familiar to me. But we have so many things to eat. Even if one doesn’t eat dairy, there are eggs (too bad it’s not good for everyone but hopefully they like meat more than me or get a better variety due to their location and budget). I would be DOOMED without my 6-10 eggs a day.
But pork roast is nothing like fried liver (and livers are very varied, chicken, pork, beef? super different!) or seafood either so one can have variety even just eating meat (tongue is lovely too. rabbit stew. you all know beef more than me, that’s another thing and even the different cuts are well, different)… It may not be enough but it should make the time during we gets super bored of meat longer. Whenever I finish my roast phase (3-4 days at a time), I take a little bread and eat organs or turkey or fish or all at once as I never eat much of either (maybe turkey but fowls don’t satiate me even with zillion eggs. I need at least some processed meat. they aren’t all the same bad, some of mine don’t even have sugar and it’s a rarity nowadays)…

I don’t think one should eat until full but I don’t even know what full means. We should eat well though, not too little. I actually underate in the very beginning sometimes, I ate as much as I physically could and it wasn’t enough… My poor body must have been super confused, I just swapped plants with meat :smiley: But it was extremely short term and that’s fine. It’s not like I could force-feed myself… But when my calories drop too much, I do the usual: tempting, energy dense food I can eat almost any time, I definitely don’t stop eating just because I am not hungry or even borderline satiated… But waiting helps too. Or drinking calories (it’s usually eggs for me, maybe a little cream or butter). My body needs its fuel and it throws ugly temper tantrums when it doesn’t get it (it doesn’t matter it says it’s satiated for 3 undereating days, it won’t end nicely) so I am motivated. But I know anyway that even mild starving harms metabolism and almost anything but that.


(Robin) #11

Good advice. I’m lucky that I have not gotten bored with just meat. Since I wait to eat until I am very hungry, I usually attack that meat with gusto!


(Linda ) #12

This^^^ Dr Cywes had me try pmsf cycling and it completely messed up my siatety then I started craving fat but that lead to weight gain i read Amber’s post ta couple weeks ago and started eating rib eye fat first then the meat…and that actually started to turn things around for me…
As long as I stay away from snacking on pork rinds eat fat first my appitite drops even to the point of one meal a day if I change meats I’m back to two meals and sometimes three…


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #13

Most of the long-term carnivores whose stuff I’ve read seem to find themselves eating three meals a day, so that doesn’t appear to be a problem.


(Robin) #14

Wow… who knew? I hope I can remember that if I ever have similar issues.


(Bob M) #15

I have seen plenty of converts to the high fat idea on Twitter.

On the other hand, I tend to do well on the higher protein, lower fat side of things. Similar to Ted Naiman.

I have yet to see any clear guidance as to why some do better with higher fat and some do better with higher protein, and I’ve seen nothing to let people know which one is appropriate for them.

That’s why people need to experiment.


#16

Nowadays no matter what I do (well I have my current attitude and usual tastes so it’s not really true), I get 65% fat. My plans, my actual days (always different from my plans, often quite much, I can’t help it), everything is 65%. I use extra yolks, I eat leaner stuff, doesn’t matter, it will be that. Funny. I tend to be at 65-70% but now it’s super fixed. It’s my ideal, actually so no problem. I need my high protein and I don’t want to eat a ton so I can’t really go really high fat anyway.
(Interestingly, 1200 kcal is 65% just like 2200. The first has too little protein though so that hardly can be the final for the day. But my 4100 kcal carnivore day a month ago reached 74%, I had a very fatty meat back then. with leaner stuff I would just stop earlier and closer to 65%).

I have no idea how anyone can eat fat first when we eat how we eat because the items together are good…? Leaner stuff with fattier stuff to balance them out? Not always but usually?
Maybe not for everyone. Or people sacrifices joy for results?
I am not affected anyway as I don’t eat extra fat. I could eat yolks first (and even fattier parts of my pork roasts first) but no thanks. My inner hedonist self runs the show and if I piss it off (actually, it’s almost exactly me), that wouldn’t end well. And I would gag eating the fat part of my pork anyway. It was a very fatty piece. And I can’t eat the lean pork chuck part in big enough amounts, I would just ignore it… I would hate all my food.
Okay, it obviously works for some and it’s normal I can’t understand everything.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #17

It has to do with how much nitrogen you dispose of daily. There is a certain irreducible minimum for each human being, and the amount varies widely from individual to individual. The reference study on which the recommended daily amount of protein is based calculated that the average daily amount of nitrogen lost by the research subjects was equivalent to 0.6 g of protein a day, but if you look at the graph of the subjects and how much nitrogen they actually lost, there was quite a wide range. The government RDA for protein is set at 0.8 g/day, but even that is probably not enough for certain people.

I read that study but failed to retain their method for measuring nitrogen loss. I am assuming, however, that it’s probably not something we can do at home. And we have to have protein of the right amino acid profile in our diet, because our bodies are not capable of utilising nitrogen from any other source.

However, if Ted Naiman is right, and Raubenheimer and Simpson are really on to something with that protein leverage hypothesis of theirs, then we all have an instinct for eating the right amount of protein to meet our needs, so it should be fairly easy to determine how much satisfies each of us. The study Raubenheimer and Simpson conducted on human beings calculated that we generally eat to get 15% of our total calories as protein—but again, as with the earlier study, the range is wide, and 15% of calories is the average for all the study participants. But if someone is not getting enough protein, no amount of fat will satisfy that need.


#18

I experienced that. But I have a range where fat can help but I need way more calories. Probably because fat satiates me less.
And when I have plenty of both, I have the luxury to eat a ton more though not right away. That’s how I need only 120g, apparently but easily can go over 200g (and actually can’t avoid it sometimes). Below 120g requires unusually high-fat to be okay.

I eat 34% protein nowadays (guesstimation, though, it’s impossible for me to do right if I eat fatty meat), every day, I wonder if it will change :smiley: Percentages must vary a lot among people even when eating the right amount of protein as their energy needs are different and not the same way as their protein need. I would expect differences regarding the same person too. My percentages definitely change when I eat half as much or twice as much as normal.


(Bob M) #19

I think Amber O’Hearn’s idea is that fat is protein-sparing. So, while you can probably eat too little protein, on her version, you might not and probably won’t.

She also theorizes there is something biologically “different” about people who like the fat-first paradigm.

The only “test” I know of is to eat lean protein and gauge hunger. If you’re hungrier, you might be a candidate for fat-first eating. (I get full easily by eating high protein, can go hours without hunger.)

The people following her program eat various fat, such as beef trimming, suet, butter, pork fat. My problem? Suet upsets my stomach. I really don’t like pork fat (too mushy, disgusting honestly). I don’t know how to get beef trimming. Eating just butter might be possible, though in the past when I’ve added butter to meat, I’ve never gotten full. But I’ve never tried eating just butter then meat.

Edit: about that protein sparing. If you’re eating a ton of fat, you should be getting most/all of your energy from there. Meanwhile, if I’m eating a high protein, low fat diet, some or even a lot of the protein has to be going to producing energy.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #20

I can’t see “protein-sparing,” since our need for nitrogen can be met only from protein intake, and not from fat. Carbohydrates and fatty acids are made out of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen and contain no nitrogen. Only the amino acids in the protein we eat gives us nitrogen, because as mentioned above, the human body cannot assimilate nitrogen from any other source.

On the other hand, Amber might have been using “protein-sparing” in the sense it has in the phrase “protein-sparing modified fast,” where it is muscle protein that is being spared. It is certainly true that the body does not metabolise protein when other sources of energy are available. Under normal circumstances, the body saves amino acids for structural purposes, as it takes far more energy per gram to metabolise amino acids than it does to metabolise glucose or fatty acids.

Also, as Richard has pointed out in a couple of other threads, while the body has a labile pool of amino acids ready to be built into proteins, its capacity is limited. The body has no real way to store amino acids, the way it can store glucose and fatty acids. Thus, a certain amount of protein intake is required every day.