Carnivore tactical retreat

(charlie3) #1

After a year of keto I just finished a month of ZC. I was miserably hungry all the time, over ate prodigiously, and added a thin layer of fat on a formerly lean physique. The big dinner salad is back until I can keep that from happening again.

I love focusing on eggs, beef and fish but they are not filling enough for now. I’m not willing to give back 30+ pounds of body fat to see if it fixes itself.

I tried carnivore to see if that would improve progress in the gym, which had stalled after a few months. That turned out to be about overtraining, not food. To my great surprise my best progress is doing 1 set of 10 exercises, in 3 sessions a week, instead of 3 sets of 10 exercises. I discovered this by comparing 6 months of data from Cronometer, a Renpho biometric scale, and my training log. During my best month I was eating maintenance calories, including the big salad, but doing 20 minute lifting sessions instead of 60 minutes. One of the old sayings in barbell training is, the less you train the more you gain.

I want to go back to ZC as soon as I’ve got a satiety solution.

(charlie3) #2

Today I burned about 300 calories more than I consumed eating eggs, ground chuck, heavy cream, olive oil, avecado, and veggies. I didn’t eat more because I’m FULL! All the credit goes to the big dinner salad. Without the veggies I was over eating by 600 calories a day. Now I’ll get back to my prefered leaner appearance in 4-6 weeks with ease if I do the usual no food Saturday.

So I have VDS (vegetable dependency syndrome). Hopefully there’s a cure. Eliminating the salad saves time and money and the animal foods taste way better.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #3

Out of curiosity, were you eating only muscle meat, or did you include organs? And I’d be curious to know your ratio of protein to fat. I’ve never tried carnivore, and I’m curious how people go about it.

(charlie3) #4

I’ve been doing minimal suppliments from the start of keto. I continued those. My assessment looking at Crono during the ZC phase is there were no micro nutrient issues. The closest I come to organ meats is liver sausage. I stopped buying it during the ZC period because I began to snack on it. I eliminated cheese during ZC because of snacking.

During ZC I averaged 200 g of protein and 250 g of fat. My ZC food list was eggs, butter, heavy cream, ground chuck, and salmon. I started with cheese but eliminated it because of the snacking issue. I over ate an average of about 600 excess calories a day. I stopped ZC because I couldn’t control that, plus my keto meal timing, 16/8 and zero food on Saturday’s fell apart, all fot the want of a big, filling veggie salad. Go figure.

After a month of experience I prefer ZC but I won’t tolerate the reckless food consumption and weight gain. Others have the opposite experience. I want to figure this out.

(mole person) #5

It was going zero carb that made me realize that too much protein made me hungry. I’ve been successfully OMAD for over a year and never, ever had issues with being hungry in the evening hours after my big meal, but having ad libitum protein made me ravenous. What was interesting was that if I ignored the hunger in the evenings, I was not hungry at all the next day until my big meal came around again. However in spite of trying to work through that evening hunger signal it continued day after day.

Then someone suggested that my high protein might be responsible. I’d been following the carnivore advice to not worry about keto macros and my protein had gone from 50ish to 75-90 grams most days, with fat closer to a 1:1 ratio with the protein. As soon as I changed my macros back to 2:1 fat:protein my hunger stopped dead and OMAD was easy again.

Also, I’ve noticed a big difference in satiety from fat based on how it’s delivered. It’s massively satiating when it’s mostly still bound to the meat and much less so when it’s in any sort of liquid form. I think it may be basically a “proccessed” form of fat which crosses the gut much more quickly than fat still bound in cells.

(Ethan) #6

I found that carnivore gave me an extreme satiety sensation, but it is slightly delayed. That is, I can eat a ton quickly, but if I just take my time, I feel super full without being overly bloated or “stuffed.” If the cut of meat has a fat cap, I recommend starting with that. Eat that fat until it becomes unappetizing. Then eat the leaner portion slowly until you feel like your lower stomach has become full.

(charlie3) #7

Rose, I’ve had a struggle with my butcher over increasing fat % in my ground chuck. I want 70% lean. He did it a couple of times then stopped adding fat to the grind and also declines to sell me tallow separately. My impression is butcher shops throw away a lot of animal fat when they trim. I’m going to buy a meat grinder and find a source for tallow and learn the math so I can have the fat percent I want. To me meat is a fat delivery system first and a protein delivery system second. Having said all that I don’t think excess protein is making me hungry but I’d like to keep it no more than a gram per pound of body weight.

I try to eat my ground chuck as rare as possible so more of the juices stay in the meat.

EZB, I’m used to satiety coming 30 to 60 minutes after eating. The problem is when it never comes.

I don’t have suspicions about veggies doing me harm. I don’t have any special sensitivites to any particular food. The ONLY thing veggies do is keep me feeling full day to day. The downside is they significantly increase my total cost of food and take time to prepare and eat. I’'ll do without them as soon as they aren’t needed for controling hunger.

(mole person) #8

It’s very odd that your butcher won’t sell you beef fat. All of the butcher’s in my area will, and one even gives me huge bags of it for free. Same with pork fat. Do you have any other options? Butchers at larger grocery stores can be asked as well.

(Chris) #9

Like most who fall off, you didn’t give yourself enough time to adapt. It’s pretty common. You have to commit long-term if want all the benefits you can gain from it. A small amount of weight gain is normal (especially if you’re eating dairy).

Not trying to take you down a peg, but for others who might see this thread and get discouraged. It’s about the long-haul, not about the drop in the bucket.

(Ethan) #10

I actually suspect cheese and dairy is what was killing my satiety signaling more…

(charlie3) #11

I’m not giving up, just cutting my losses and looking for a better plan.

I made a few mistakes starting ZC. I was ramping up and ready to start when I got laid off from work (which I don’t mind because I should be retired). But that meant I wasn’t rushing out the door to work in the morning. Eating early without the salad for backstop was a bad combination. I’d been doing 30 net carbs for most of a year so the intense carb craving caught me off guard. Then all the experienced ZC folks are saying the thing I need to do is accept getting fat. I may never be able to accept that.

You mention all the benefits, which begs the question. I’m a bit foggy about what those are besides the ones I’ve mentioned above. The keto establishement has research and mechanisms to talk about. So far as I can find the ZC world does not. I’ll say it again, I really like sticking to the carnivore food list. On keto I decide when to bulk or cut. I need the same with carnivore.

(Karim Wassef) #12

Satiety comes from fat.

In carnivore, it’s easy to indulge in protein and miss the ratio. If you go heavy on protein, you get hungry again.

You only need 0.7g/lb of lean mass… the rest should be fat.

Personally, I go for egg yolk… I’ll pasteurize it in a sous vide and eat it raw for my fat intake boost. Not for everyone but that’s how I did it.

I’d also blend it with heavy cream … fat on fat… make it into a savory whipped sauce with bone broth base and have it next to my steak… fat on fat on fat on fat…

then there’s mayo … I’m not a purist, I consider extra virgin olive oil to be an animal product when you add it to eggs to make mayo :smile:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #13
(Karim Wassef) #14

that’s awesome but they still use 1/2 avocado oil… :smiley:

(Ethan) #15

What temperature do you use and how long?

(Ethan) #16

Think this would work with tallow?

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #17

I don’t know. If you don’t mind wasting an egg or two, give it a shot. I imagine you would at least want the tallow warm enough to be soft, if not actually liquid. At room temperature, tallow is fairly hard, whereas bacon grease is soft, almost semi-liquid.

I was going to suggest avocado oil, but then I remembered that you’re not only kosher, but also carnivore, sorry!

(Karim Wassef) #18

135F for 1 hr

(charlie3) #19

I walked in to a second butcher shop and tried to buy beef tallow and was refused. There was the same mumbling about government regulations. The butcher said the left over tallow is used in their ground beef. So I asked if i could buy the meat plus tallow without the grinding and was again refused.

Now I’ve had a few days eating salad again. Staying at break even calories is effortless. A test will come on Saturday if I decide to try eating nothing that day, which was my custom for the previous year of keto.

My take on all this is not that ZC leaves me craving carbs so much as animal foods only is not filling enough. Just knowing that later in the day I’ll be eating a large amount of vegetables is enough to moderate hunger.

(Chris) #20

Try suet instead, you can render (or not) it yourself into tallow. If he refuses, next is to find a farmer. I recently bought 20 pounds from a guy 30 minutes from my house, from a freshly slaughtered heifer. I’m not sure where you live so I really don’t know if that advice is any good in your situation or not.