Hello, I’m writing this in hope that someone might be able to help me out with my current condition. I’ve been carnivore for one and a half years, eating beef, butter, bacon and eggs. I’ve achieved great results in terms of energy, mood, mental clarity and slight muscle gain. In the beginning the adaptation phase took some time, but then I’ve stabilized and felt great ever since. I even did some 30 hours fasts in the past with no real issues, besides one bout of diarrhea after breaking the fast. But now it is different for some reason. I’ve started to experience stomach ache while still fasting and not eating anything. I’ve only been drinking electrolite water (1 gram of salt per 1 liter of water) so that I would keep my electrolites up while fasting. Then it all started going south. I went to the bathroom 4 times in 2 hours, and it was all liquid, and the bowel movements quite intense. I then slept it off and tried to recover my microbiome the next day by slowly introducing food again. I did only plain ground beef with a little salt, and water. One bite at a time, one sip at a time, taking it very slowly and spacing it out across the whole day. Needless to say, I have had the same results, completely liquid stools, 4-5 times a day. Before going to bed I tried to fix this by getting one vial of Enterogermina with a morsel of meat. Enterogermina has Bacillus Clausii, which is found in the soil. I’ve had instances where I took it years go when I was on a standard carb diet and had diarrhea, and it always helped me, no adverse effects, so I thought that could be a solution. But after waking up the next day, no signs of improvement whatsoever, went straight to the bathroom, and kept having gut discomfort for the next hours. This has never happened to me before, never thought that fasting for one and a half days could wreck my gut like this for several days. It’s likely that my whole microbiome died off because of the fast. Even just drinking water will give me diarrhea after an hour or so. Trying to avoid dehydration as best as I can, but not feeling well whatsoever. Right now I’m considering adding a bit of eggs into the meat and a little sip of quality kefir, which has 4 strands of good bacteria in it, hoping it can restore my gut microbiome. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Bad diarrhea for several days after 30 hours fast
Could you possibly have gotten ill from something else - a virus, or giardia (in water), perhaps? Diarrhea during a fast, due to the fasting, isn’t something I’ve experienced. Post-fast it’s more common.
Since you have been thriving as a carnivore for so long and not changed anything… I suspect the culprit is not your diet.
Hope you feel much better very soon!
Welcome to the forums!
I’m sorry you had to go through that. Unfortunately, there are a number of bacteria that can get out of control in the U.S. food supply, such as Salmonella spp., Listeria spp., E. coli, and so forth. They all cause diarrhoea. They seem to be part of the risks of factory farming.
Another possibility is that your fast-breaking meal might have been too rich in fat and/or salt.
If you can figure out what it was, let us know. Otherwise, don’t worry about it. As mentioned already, it is not likely that fasting itself caused the diarrhoea. It was more likely something you ate before hand, or some infection that you picked up from somewhere.
Like the others, I suspect your symptoms may not be from your diet. In fact a lot of people with the new covid strain going around since August report similar symptoms of diarrhea, stomach aches. etc. My wife got this strain back in mid August. I did not change my routine at all. I didn’t mask, etc. Right now my vitamin D levels are probably well above 60… I got no symptoms. So, if I got it, I just fought it off before it could get a foothold. If you suspect you may have covid or test positive for it, I can suggest a couple of things. First, you want to have high vitamin D levels, because vit D is what your immune cells need to make antibodies. The usual vitamin D from the store takes about a month to get through the body’s conversion process, so if you are wanting an immediate boost, you have to get prescription calcifediol your immune cells can use. Second, covid transfers itself around the body through your blood stream. You want to have maximum natural levels of nitric oxide, which destroys viruses. One way to try to do this is supplement with about 2 gr of citrullene. There are other ways to support NO levels starting with a healthy mouth biome, but I will forego explaining them here. Methylene blue is also supposedly antiviral.
I agree with you, it’s not the first time I fasted, and I’ve always recovered the day after, so it might be some kind of virus or infection that i caught
I think you are right, reading comments elsewhere it may be possible that I got a virus or infection while fasting
I think you might be right about that, although I’m not sure how I could have gotten it, it is possible that the cause might be a virus or infection, since it’s the first instance for me going through this for several days, it’s not the first time I fast, and I always recovered the very next day. If that was the case though, I think it’s kinda weird that I caught something in the precise moment of fasting… maybe my body was more vulnerable, or maybe just coincidence.
Maybe you’re right, I doubt it’s covid, I never got it even during the pandemic, now where I live it’s almost non existent. Still, can’t rule it out either. Thank you for suggesting those supplements, I will look into them. I know about nitric oxide and it’s benefits thanks to a recent interview on 5minutebody, it is also present in bacon, since they add it, I used to have it regularly before this episode, now I have taken it out for the moment because I fear the high fat content might aggravate my diarrhea, but planning to reintroduce it soon. I also keep a health mouth biome by using my own home made toothpaste, so that should help.
Thank you to everyone for the opinions and the support, after almost a week I was finally diagnosed with gastroenteritis, it is still unknown if the cause is viral or bacterial. After particularly bad episodes I was given Loperamide compresses (2mg after each diarrhea), and Diosmectal (3g diosmectite powder every 8 hours). I was also given Rifaximin compresses (200mg, one every 6 hours), which takes care of any bacteria or infection specifically in the gut. Everything combined, plus the long fight my immune system put up for a week made the symptoms subside in a couple of days.
I have learned a couple of things during the way, and I’d like to share some troubleshooting that worked best for me, in case anyone might need to benefit from it in the future.
- Probiotics, especially dairy ones, are a no go. Researches have shown that during viral or bacterial gut infection, probiotics cannot work as a cure, but rather as a prevention if taken before hand, or as a way to boost microbiome recovery after antibiotic treatments. Furthermore I learnt from my mistake of drinking kefir, even small amounts, that any form of diary, even fermented, only worsens diarrhea.
https://www.optibacprobiotics.com/professionals/latest-research/gut-health/probiotics-for-gastroenteritis#:~:text=It’s not advisable to use,in stomach viruses like gastroenteritis.
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Try to avoid eggs. Atleast for me, and for many people, eggs tend to cause gas formation, and having gas during diarrhea only worsens the condition, because it pushes it out even more.
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Try our best to keep hydrated by drinking very smalls sips of water with minerals frequently. Avoid commercial electrolyte powders, as they have alot of junk in them, like sugar, sweeteners, additives, ecc. I know this is less of a problem in the carnivore community, but sugar can indeed worsen diarrhea, especially if it’s fructose. The crazy thing is that the mainstream advice is BRAT diet, which involves only carbs, with applesauce on top of that. Many advise even for sports drinks like Gatorade. Horrible advice. If you can get a hold of LMNT, then it’s great. I didn’t have it, so I just lightly salted my water (1g per 1 liter of water), and dissolved a 900mg tablet of clean electrolytes into my beef broth.
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Blend your meat. I know it doesn’t sound appetizing, but this made a huge difference. Managed to get some concentrated quality beef bone broth from Amazon (didn’t have any options at my local stores), consisting of only beef bones, water and salt. Put a good tablespoon of in into boiling water, and cooked diced beef in it. Use as lean of a cut as you can get, and don’t use any fat or butter. That is because fat cause more bile production in the stomach, which will pass straight through your gut during gastroenteritis, and we all know how fat help loosen the stools too. When you have up to 10 bouts of diarrhea per day, fat is the last thing you need. If you’ve been carnivore for long enough, the stored fats of your body will be used instead and keep you in ketosis. That’s another way to reduce food intake to the minimum, since your gut can’t handle much. The focus is to replenish nutrients with high quality meat and broth. I found out that by blending them together, you get the same effect of a pre-digested food. Much easier on the stomach, has to work less to digest them, and they get absorbed much more easily.
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Some prefer to fast, but in a situation where I was loosing nutrients and liquids constantly, I opted for the opposite. I always did intermittent fasting normally, usually having a feeding window of 4 to 6 hours each day, and fasting 18 to 20 hours. During gastroenteritis however I ate any time I was able to, and very slowly. For half a pound of beef and broth I would take an hour. Then rest for two hours, then eat again. Especially now that the symptoms have subsided and I can get to eat back normally, I find myself waking up in the middle of the night in order to eat, because after a week of nutrients deprivation and loss, I now have a ravenous hunger. As soon as I get my strenght back, I’ll be back to my usual intermittent fasting.
That’s about all the advice I can offer. I haven’t done anything out of the ordinary in order to contract this bug. For all I know it could even have been the ground beef I ate, since I ate mosly ground beef for months on end. Despite always freezing it, and cooking it well for atleast half an hour, I can’t exclude the possibility of it being a potential cause. It is known that ground beef is much more prone to infections because it has alot more exposed surface area, it passes through lots of machinery, and the cuts are usually from multiple cows, increasing the chance for cross contamination. It might not be necessary, but for now I’m sticking with whole cuts of meat, and chopping them myself, despite paying twice at much.