Mid morning. I’ve only recently started Lulu on OMAD tho, as a younger pup she needed more frequent feeding.
Carnivore Rocktober - ZC Carnivore 31 day challenge October 2022
JJFiddle
(Judy Thompson)
#63
@MeganNZ plus treats, right? OMG these dogs expect treats constantly. I feed them after the morning walk and at about 6 pm. Opal ge
ts Ziwi (from my daughter since Opal is hers) but she won’t eat it so I put broth on it from my sous vide meats and occasional little bits of the meat, and she eats it eventually. Mimsy eats raw. Treats are dehydrated chicken and organ meats dried at 115F to keep them raw but crunchy.
Sometimes Mimsy refuses food for as long as a couple days but I just pick it up after 30 minutes and put it back in the fridge. I used to worry but apparently in the wild it’s natural for dogs to fast occasionally. She always comes back around.
Fangs
#64
Loving the doggie chat here 
pics are so cute and Megan we need a rottie pup pic for sure!
--------------simple day again
got a chuck roast to go in crockpot. well, 2 crockpots 
a zc one and a family one to make a beef stew in it…just plug and wait. yea I can do that cause first meal will be burgers and I think some bacon maybe with it, or a few small pork tenderloin cuts I got on cheap markdown I have defrosting for tomorrow.
either way, I am carnivore covered 
We are getting BBBrrrrr here and I am not liking it one bit. I get way more colder on carnivore than I did eating a furnance of carbs in my body so right now, I am searching for sweatpants and jackets LOL when I should be in Tshirt and shorts but seasons are a’chanin’ ugh but I know those coming out of winter SO WANT that warm nice season to come…lucky ducks. All who are going hotter enjoy your great summer of fun!! I will be freezing and putting on the fireplace for sure around here sooner than later I think 
robintemplin
(Robin)
#65
Karen, I’m not surprised your indoors is as fun and bright as your garden. Wish I could pop over for some tea and a chat!
Shinita
#66
Our cats had extra lovely bites, a little old leftover pork tongue tip (Alvaro didn’t eat it, I had better food - I LOVE tongue but not the lean tip), chewy parts from my meats… They are cats, they love to eat often and I like when I can feed them something better than some cheap (still expensive for us) cat food. But they hunt a lot and look good, healthy and happy so I don’t worry about them.
Finally, no rain and we get our Indian summer already, 20+ Celsius and lots of sunshine, yay!
The house will stop getting colder and airing will get rid of humidity, we used our dehumidifier several times lately… It’s good we have it, it’s very effective, taking out a few liters of water from the air in some hours. It’s loud so we prefer using it when we aren’t downstairs. Upstairs is fine but the kitchen and bathroom is downstairs.
I will write about my day when I finish it. But I can say I had a very meaty lunch 
I opened a bag of cream as its expiration date is close so I have creamy coffees now.
Alvaro wondered about our food costs and mentioned some worse parts of Afrika due to using up most of his salary on food… (And it is usually spent very well, we are skilled.)
Yeah, food prices are high and many people have low salaries (I might have mentioned, the price of 11kg Angus ribeye in LIDL, that’s a not uncommon monthly salary). Unfortunately, high intelligence isn’t enough but it easily manages to make one feel worse, more displeased when life isn’t so good.
But I didn’t want to bring this topic here, actually.
I woke up to painful cramps this morning 
I felt some twinge sometimes but I don’t think I ever had ia painful one during proper meat eating times What could I do wrong? (I have too many ideas.)
Oh well, another reason to stick very close to carnivore for months in winter, to see if lack of plant carbs and plenty of meat all the time solves this problem.
JJFiddle
(Judy Thompson)
#67
11kg is over 24 lbs, I had to look it up. Wow! In terms of $20/pound here, it would be $480 for that much ribeye. But that would be a pretty low salary, I admit.
Somebody wrote a book on low cost carnivore. It was hamburger, tuna fish, eggs, cheese. It can be done. I definitely pay less for meat that I used to pay for veggies on keto.
Sorry about those cramps, I feel your pain! They say it’s dehydration but if I drink a bunch of water before bed, that brings up a whole other set of problems! I get cramps toward morning almost every night but they’re not as severe as they used to be. Mainly just my feet now and I can easily stop them just by getting up and walking a few steps. I take melatonin and magnesium at night to relax muscles. I dropped the 5-HTP to see hat would happen and it didn’t get worse so I left it off. I hate paying for those every month!
Shinita
#68
I got carried away again… Vegs are briefly (and usually just using their more broad group name) mentioned, without blur. IDK why they would be triggering to anyone but I thought I write that in advance.
$480 would be low too but not as low as his current salary. But at least many people have it way higher. And it’s close to the legal minimum salary so probably only people with pension are way below that. Those pensioners are famous for eating chicken frames, it’s a big stereotype. That’s the one and only below $1/kg bony meat (It has a price cap too so the price couldn’t get higher this year.) Half of it is bones but makes good soup! Too bad I dislike chicken and spitting out tiny free bones, I could spare money like that and the cats would be elated too.
Of course one can do cheap carnivore. That’s what I do for the carnivore part of my diet (and fortunately that is the vast majority of it).
It’s nothing like the (for me) expensive diets rich people vlog about as “cheap carnivore”… 
It’s on another level but it’s still enjoyable.
Tuna and cheese are super expensive, I definitely am careful with those Okay, I consume some cheese as we have it for Alvaro (and for me for variety sometimes, some dishes call for some too) but I do my best to keep it low so not 1 oz per day, that would be wasteful… I don’t particularly need or desire cheese, it’s just nice to have it sometimes and helps me out when I am bored of meat.
Tuna is for 2-3 times a year (the tiniest tin), it’s luxury, really. I could afford hake fish but pork is LOADS better and cheaper so no change. Sometimes I have some tinned herring, that’s okay. Expensive but it’s only a little tin for emergencies and variety.
If a meat is below $5/kg and it’s a substantial, lovely thing, it’s okay for me.
If it’s below $3, I consider it really cheap. But as that is fowl, only my occasional turkey wings have a real chance. Oh and chicken liver, that’s safely there still
If it’s way above $5/kg, it’s a once per month luxury. Cheaper ruminants are here.
Above $10/kg, I just don’t buy it, not even for Christmas… Maybe this year we will splurge a bit, I am curious about steak… But it probably wouldn’t worth it. No, I rather buy some seafood, that’s luxury too. That’s why I bought 110g shrimps or what last time… I want a TAD more with a bigger variety now.
Butter is in the last category, it’s just not meat and we don’t know how to live without it (or if we want to live without it) so we buy 200-250g in every 3 weeks or something. It’s not even so much money that way and we use it in tiny amounts at a time, savoring every little bite.
I truly need to remind myself that 10g butter doesn’t cost much, I am allowed to eat it if I fancy it… I consider butter something to be super careful with. It’s just fat, after all, I can get fat cheaper… But it’s butter, it’s special, it’s different. So small amount of butter it is. I wouldn’t eat much butter anyway, I don’t need it. But giving up the little is impossible.
Our vegs barely cost anything. It’s on me, I stopped cooking vegs, I told Alvaro our freezer is for meat (I actually keep a little vegs there now, for soup but after we use it up, I don’t want to replace it)… It went well He buys some on sale cabbage sometimes and he needs his raw vegs (we have a raddish now, for the whole week. it’s an icicle radish, barely fit the fridge) but it costs very little. It’s needed for him. It’s not for me so it’s good I don’t spend money on non-satiating, useless items. (My tiny juicy crunchy bites are pure joy, they are different but they really cost almost nothing per month.)
Veg prices are often crazy but we don’t buy them then. We both can live without fresh vegs for a while (Alvaro starts to eat pickled vegs then, his Mom always gives us some). I am so glad I stopped eating vegs, they caused zillion potential problems, hunger, effort, time, money… Why I was dependent on them when they weren’t good for me? Makes no sense. They were tasty but all my food was tasty, I just missed them like crazy if I didn’t eat them so I needed them every day in not small amounts. And then it all stopped and I lost interest. Wow. I don’t stop marveling about it.
Alvaro has his legumes too (technically vegetables, they are in another group in my mind though. vegs are those carby low-protein thingies inducing hunger), quite cheap (we don’t buy the more expensive stuff like the really tasty bigger beans they would take ages to cook anyway) and very satiating (even for me and it’s almost impossible from a carby stuff but they are magical or something. Alvaro’s current dish is extremely tasty - the pork hock flavor permeated everything. and it’s a nice tasting legume too but that wouldn’t matter much to me at this point as I changed - , cheap and satiating at once and maybe only my still superior pork roast keeps me from eating it. I took some of the wonderful and tender smoked pork hock though that part is tempting).
I am aware I could eat cheaper if I swapped some of my meat and eggs to protein richer plant matter. It wouldn’t even be a bad woe though I guess it would be worse than carnivore, even for me. But I don’t want to take that route until I can pull off sticking super close to carnivore. Oh I deleted that part where I talked about meat and eggs nutritional superiority, right? Well that’s (eating superior items, I mean) tempting but I really should keep my plant carbs close to zero too if I want the best (of course I want that). And I never ever ate my “plan B” most useful plants often. They were nice once in a blue moon and that’s it. My tolerance to them must have done lower during my last years. I probably burned up those bridges along with many others. I don’t even have regrets I still eat too much plant matter if you ask me. But it’s not much now. Just unnecessarily too much.
Cramps. No, it’s not dehydration, I am a very thirsty one and drink much. And it was very, very obvious that my diet causes it. Before keto I never had it. Then I always got it when I went into ketosis but only on vegetarian keto, my carnivore trials took it off. But here and there it reappeared. It seemed less meat (or going off carnivore for a while) triggers it more easily, I didn’t get it in nice meaty carnivore times without off days…
I know it must be magnesium as magnesium pills always solved it and I knew my magnesium intake is lowish, no matter which of my potential diets I follow. I just can’t eat so huge amounts of my magnesium sources. So I just hope my default woe lowers my magnesium intake as I am very bad at supplementing things. But I do it if I must, eating a pill isn’t such a big deal… I still wish to avoid that.
My cramps are super quick though! Just a few seconds and not huge pain either but it is pain and a bit alarming, I never like when my own body parts refuse working as they should… So it goes away immediately, it’s just a warning (and that’s very useful. better my calves than my nerves… magnesium is super important and does all kind of stuff). But when I had them longer, a magnesium pill quickly helped (so quickly that maybe it was placebo at that point? whatever, it helped. and if I took magnesium, I could be sure I won’t get another cramp attack for a while).
Shinita
#69
I make a more proper comment now.
I sat down to my lunch, this was my vague plan (though I was aware it’s a bit much meat for me):
I didn’t finish the meat but had more smoked pork hock with 2 sponge cakes.
I didn’t get easy satiation today, I needed substantial meals so hopefully it will stay a TMAD day.
I had dinner (didn’t feel hungry but I was downstairs, it was late and Alvaro had dinner so I ate. and ate. and ate. apparently, my body wanted more fuel. I have problems with getting hungry for the second time after a bigger lunch), more meat, more eggs, more cheese… And coffee with cream. A little sour cream too.
I feel quite satiated and satisfied now.
[…]
Now I feel a bit too full. Tried to track… Between the mysteriously fatty pork and the smoked pork hock, it’s pretty much impossible but my protein must be high and I ate well but not too much…?
It’s good I can track differently. Still not fully accurate as my pork hock was cooked but it was about 580g (1.28 pound) pork (nicely fatty but not very fatty), a few eggs and some dairy. I can’t tell which was higher, fat or protein but I had plenty from both. But still below 150g? So it was a fine day and I shouldn’t get hungry at midnight. That got old ages ago.
I had lunch at 3 and dinner at 7…? Both meals were substantial and as usual, most of the meat was eaten for lunch.
I think I will keep this. Simple, meaty lunch, more varied dinner (or whatever I desire, I never wanted 2 very meaty meals yet but if it changes, it’s fine). It works well and it seems I automatically eat a decent amount of meat if it’s to my liking, not too little, not too much. (I will still check what happens with very fatty meat, I had problems with it before - but as it was very occasional, maybe I just needed more meat then, it’s possible. I always eat more meat after lower-meat times. But I shouldn’t use very fatty meat then as it doesn’t seem I ever need an excessive amount of fat.)
Karen18
(Karen)
#70
@JJFiddle cute piccy, loving the anima photos. I think I need to get a dehydrator and I am certainly picking up tips for when the time comes that i get a pooch. My daughter tagged me into a fb page event on 16th this month. Greyhound aware event and of course there are also people there to talk to anyone interested in removing retired greyhounds. Sian knows it was something I had talked about during lockdown. Still don’t think its the right time but it won’t hurt to gather some information.
@robintemplin any time … always a brew on offer lol.
Well it has rained all day, at one point i got some waterproofs on and thought I might be able to walk to Long Eaton but nope it was heaving outside however it did give me an opportunity to get another drawer, my tops drawer, sorted and cleared of stuff I def no longer wear… just wasn’t able to take it to charity shop in my trolley today. Took a few hours as I start one thing then get a bit distracted doing something else… one thing always leads to another.
Brunch was 2 duck eggs fried and 3 rashers bacon
Then about 3.30pm I started eating dinner; 2.5 pork chops with butter, a cup of the pork juice again diluted with the water I cooked the pork in, some mussels, a hard boiled egg, some bacon and 2 rollmops… think I got the munchies lol
Shinita
#71
I should experiment with NOT being on the forum after I write about my dinner. 10:45, I just couldn’t resist and when I went to the kitchen for a warm drink, I ate my leftover 130g pork roast piece (that’s 195g in raw weight). Dreamy. No regrets but I possibly don’t need this much protein and fat. Or who knows? Maybe my body knows what it does. But what if it’s a mind thing…? Oh well. It was something especially enjoyable. I probably badly need such things now. It was a hard week.
MeganNZ
(Megan)
#72
I don’t have a smart phone so rely on my friend to take pics. Keep asking her to take photos of Lulu but don’t know if she is. This is her as a young pup. Her temperament is as sweet as she looks.
MeganNZ
(Megan)
#73
This is my beloved foxie Tobias, who I had to have euthanized not long after I got Lulu. He gave me the precious gift of what I should have felt holding my babies, that I never felt. I’d hold/cuddle him on my chest and feel love for him. Physical feeling along with the emotional and mental.
This is Toby in his life jacket 
And out on a bush walk
MeganNZ
(Megan)
#74
And of course Grace! It’s really hard getting a good pic of Grace b/c she’s black and the lighting has to be right. Plus I prefer how she looks in photos when she’s not panting a bit, even tho it does look like she’s smiling.
Grace and Toby on the couch - Toby is wearing his thundershirt, Grace is wearing a saddle bag - dog therapy time - calming for Toby, draining for Grace. This is the Grace face I love.
Grace sprawled out across a queen size bed - she’s not a small dog lol
Grace being a therapy dog - Toby is leashed to her and Grace’s energy calms him
And of course Milly, my friend’s dog. We’re now a 4 dog house b/c Ruby just got a pup. So we both have an old grl each and a youngun.
Milly and Toby chilling on the couch.
The original pack on a bush walk
FrankoBear
#76
A big feed of cold leftover beef ribs with added salt and a small wedge of Jarlsberg cheese. An egg and some bacon earlier, at about 11am. Two morning coffees with a dash of full cream in each.
Big, long day at work. Called a break in the afternoon class to get some water. Had a headache brewing. Felt weak in my muscles just with walking. But I remembered I had a packet of table salt, like one can get on takeaway food. It was from a cafe eatery. I ate the packet of salt. It tasted good. And that’s a bit weird. But I had a good drink of cold water and had a few minutes of stillness. Then I felt great, and I was back into work. Even doing 2 hours admin overtime.
It reminded me of Dr. Stephen Phinney talking about how he put a bullion cube, we call them stock cubes, in a warm drink once per day when he was on a ketogenic diet.
In olden times that little pack of pick-me-up white powder could have just as easily been sugar to get a similar but more damaging result.
I think hydration monitoring on this WoE is important. We pee out a lot of water when we drop our insulin production. But along with that is the need to replenish electrolytes/ body salts for some of us.
Billie in the city. Black dogs are a challenge to photograph, I agree. That’s why I change the photos into digital painting. Billie is ZC carnivore OMAD at 2.5years old. So strong. Chicken frames alternate with ground beef, sardines and yoghurt. She does not know what dog biscuits/ kibble/ dry food are/is. No processed pet food in her diet. That may prove problematic if she ever needs to go to a boarding kennel. But she’s a Labrador, I’m sure she would work it out. It’s sort of easy to do as we eat very similar meals, so no extra prep time. Probably better fed than I feed myself sometimes. Billy is a strong black but she doesn’t drink coffee.
JJFiddle
(Judy Thompson)
#77
Carnivore dogs! Happiness. Your pics of Billie are always so beautiful and @MeganNZ all yours are wonderful. My fave of course is the one of Millie reading! Great pose.
@Karen18 a Greyhound! Perfect for you to run with! You’d have a blast with a dog like that!
This morning hubby got a migraine, usually preceded by vision disturbances. Monday I’d gotten him an apple pie so I assume it was that (it’s NOT always about what you ate, he insists) but he wants less lunch; sokay, I say, and leave out his salad.
I had a nice slice of tenderloin, ¼ lb grassfed burger, and deviled eggs, perfect.
My daughter came by and picked up her dog, it’s been so quiet in the house. Even though all Opal did was sleep
Tonight, ham and eggs. Then some yogurt. I made it lastnight - to not usually eat it but now I think I’ll really sleep well
Shinita
#78
@MeganNZ: All your dogs have love a lovely, friendly face, they make me smile and feel warm and fluffy!
I don’t get that from the cats (I mean, just by looking at their faces) but they are lovely too, especially Snugglepie who loves snuggling. I let her in at dawn when I wake up and can’t go back to sleep for 1-2 hours lately and she lies next to me (cats have no idea about personal space at all but it’s just right), purring and washing herself, it’s nice and calming.
MeganNZ
(Megan)
#79
haha I try not to give them treats often, kinda ruins the whole purpose of OMAD, which Grace esp needs b/c her body is fighting cancer. When they do get treats, usually when I’m doing some training, or reinforcing their recall, it’s raw meat or liver I have dehydrated for them. And they’re currently helping me on my death by pork belly challenge by eating some of the pork meat.
Karen18
(Karen)
#80
I feel like that @Shinita I often ask myself ‘Am I hungry or is it maybe just in my head’ I think it is easy to confuse hunger with perhaps just wanting a different taste in the mouth… I know I could easily last out for till the next day but ‘I just fancy something’ also I think with this way of eating I, personally, know I can eat as much as I want of Carnivore foods without worrying about the calorific or Carb content. I know that if I ever felt my weight was increasing then I would make some changes and curb a bit of the evening munchies but that isn’t happening. I think with having some days where I eat more than others it balances out okay … perhaps it is just the body and brain regulating what I need. I know I love this woe and can’t foresee me ever going back to a ‘standard’ woe hahaha this is MY STANDARD
