Carno/keto overlap

#1

I see some people have switched from LCHF keto to full carnivore.
What effect would an overlap of the two (while transitioning to carnivore) have?
If I eat low carb (I now either do zero or <20g depending on what kind of a mood I’m in) do I need to watch my protein intake until I go full carnivore?
What about cycling some days from one to the other?
I like my greens and I don’t see a need to go full carnivore (and it looks unsustainable from a cost point of view). Weight trend is down, energy is good and health is better.
All that said, I’d like to see what all the fuss is about.

(Elizabeth ) #2

You really won’t know if you’ll have health improvements or whatever it is you might be looking for unless you try it for 90 days. if you can tolerate vegetables and can eat them that’s great. Those of us that go carnivore and stay that way mostly do it because it’s the only way we can achieve the health that we want. And in terms of cost many of us can eat 2 to 3 lb of meat a day for 5 to max $10 a day. It’s totally sustainable cost-wise, pork roasts can be found for a dollar a pound, eggs are cheap in terms of quality for the cost chuck roasts are cheap I always buy meat on sale.

#3

LOL the fuss of changing to zc is because it rocks and gives wonderful benefits to those who go ‘all in’.

But like E said in her post, if you can do very very well on Keto and are functioning great and more, then why drop the few veg you desire and you feel good eating them? In that you have to be able to eat a long term menu to hold this for life…and if you drop veg and you want it, you won’t be happy ya know.

If you cycle a few days of keto and carnivore together it will help you and maybe give you more perspective on how you wanna eat for yourself. In that you are just upping your protein and fat in your keto plan for the week a few days kinda thing and I believe that would be good for you if you are so inclined to try it.

Going zc and wanting these benefits means you have to go all in and not look back. Zero carb/carnivore is just meat/seafood and a little dairy if you can handle it so you kinda really want to walk into this way of eating, or truly require it for optimum health.

See I don’t like veg point blank. So I have no desire to eat 1 nibble, what I would bring back into my life is the crap…lol…I would go straight for ice cream, fries, pizza, any fast food, I liked all that crappy food so for me my best course in life is eat zero carb. It takes all my cravings away, I eat so much and am never hungry, my body composition changing to leaner and meaner, my overall health is thru the roof with energy and more so this works for me and never against me.

Cost isn’t bad. For all the crap you don’t buy, just buy meat/seafood on sale. It is affordable and many on zc never have trouble with the cost…do we all wish everything cost less? darn right we do HAHA

Thing with zc on what it gives each of us doing this plan, we can’t truly describe it in full because one has to live this plan in order to truly understand the wonderful benefits. At least 90 days all in to see how you change on zc from keto would be needed. And good chance you are gonna go thru adaption again too.

best of luck deciding how ya wanna roll!!

(Elizabeth ) #4

I agree and going back to the cost, how many of us dropped five bucks on a tiny container of raspberries when that could actually be 2 lb of ground beef or a full days worth of food on carnivore? Even a fast food stop, I treated my daughter her husband and three kids, well there’s four but the baby isn’t eating food yet, at a Carl’s Jr and when you take off the $7 for myself for 4@1/3 lb burgers, it was $52. That can feed me for a whole week if I’m careful and shop sales. And even on keto, the expensive dark chocolate for fat bombs, the coconut oil the almond butter the almond flour the cauliflower out of season, I’m actually spending the same as I was eating 1500 calories on keto as I am eating between two and three pounds of meat a day on carnivore. And a whole lot happier not hangry and I’m never hungry.

#5

Duly noted.

(Scott) #6

What I did and recommend is to do keto until you feel fat adapted and comfortable with it. No cheats, no snacks and feel unpressured. At that point maybe read a book or two and dive into some podcasts so you have some ammo for the resistance you will get. The only way around a lable of “fad diet” and "unsustainable " is research and logic. I thought about going carnivore for months after many of the doctors that started with keto say “I mostly eat carnivore now”. Once you decide that you are going to try it for one month the only thing you need to do is eat meat. No measuring, no counting and no weighing. As to affordability it is not any more expensive. If I cook a large ribeye I always have more than enough for lunch the next day. Fatty meats are better and I like it cold with lots of salt. Heck, sometimes in a bind I will wrap some cold cuts around some cheese and add a boil egg or some pork rinds. Well that was four months ago and I still get resistance but I am still feeling better every month on my one month trial. Good luck if you decide to go to the dark side.

#7

I so get this E. Fast food ain’t cheap no more. On camping trips my hubby and kid can rack up like $25 between the 2 of them easily and they are hungry just a few hrs later LOL I go into the RV as they go into the fast food joint and I get out my chicken or beef from the fridge and eat on that I brought from home and then have some salami or whatever in the car. I go a long time on that, they are like, hey I am hungry, lets stop again somewhere and I just sigh…big old sigh on those higher prices for crappy food :slight_smile:

#8

good point. not even about resistance etc…just so you know why zero carb works so well and the science behind it is very interesting and it helps one to know why you want to go in a certain direction ya know…it makes sense then. Without that info one can fumble around zc but if you don’t know why you are doing it and how great it is for the body, then it just won’t become important to a person in the end and then they call it a fad or whatever.

real good point for anyone wanting zc/carnivore to just go read, there is tons of info out there on it.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #9

Prof. Benjamin Bikman says that on a low-carb diet, the quantity of protein is not a concern. As we eat more protein, insulin does rise, but so too does glucagon, keeping the insulin/glucagon ratio low. On a high-carb diet, however, the more protein, the more insulin, but there is no compensatory glucagon secretion, so the insulin/glucagon ratio rises.

(Elizabeth ) #10

I’ve heard him say just recently that protein is not to be counted as energy because it’s so expensive for the body to utilize it, and the body will waste it

(Troy) #11

Good for you
That’s working for you👍
Appears You are all dialed up in your WOE

Like others said
Definitely look up some resources ( search Forum ) listen to some podcasts, Watch YT videos…

Great info and Science out there

Good luck

#12

If you aren’t very choosy about your meat (as I totally am), cost can’t be a problem even if you are poor. There are options, one doesn’t need to eat the fanciest steaks all the time.
And I think about it sometimes… vegetables are what I can’t afford when i am poor. They don’t satiate me at all, in the contrary, I just end up eating more animal protein and fat if I have some, making my diet more expensive… It may be just me, of course, we are all different. And health and well-being usually worth it even if it costs a bit more… As long as we can pay for it at all. Health has super high priority in my life. And while I don’t think plants harm me significantly, their carb content and the overeating they tend to trigger, do. But it’s me, again. You should figure our and decide your own way.

It seems you don’t want to try carnivore and you have the right for it, of course.

I just flirt with carni now and then and I have very good experiences so I will keep at that and if I manage to get enough food, I will try it properly even if not for many months.
But I can’t tell you what is it like switching between keto and carnivore as don’t do that. I switch between carnivore-ish (very tiny amount of plants. sometimes half a pickle or a few cucumber slices, onion in my stew, these things) and low-carb. It’s nice but I should come back asap. I know what I can afford or expect but you are a different person. But if you want my experiences…
I had a bunch of short time carnivore(-ish) trials in the last several months. Before that I did vegetarian keto with a higher amount of carbs but it was still good for me for ketosis, it seems. But the carbs messed things up. I ate too much sometimes, I was uncontrolled, had food addictions…
Carnivore solved it right away, in days. I always feel a bit better if I lower my carbs, there was that too.
My coffee addiction stayed but the rest? It was freedom, simplicity, relief. I ate little meat (I focus on eggs pretty much, I will change it a bit eventually as I manage to get enough meat. I love eggs so this cheap but great food probably always will play a huge role in my diet) and still, the lack of carbs helped tremendously. But the nutrients from the meat were needed and well, it would be a super bland life with only with my eggs and some tiny things spicing it up… Meat is great, at least good quality fatty ones I like. Pork is my fav but I eat chicken, beef, goat, rabbit, mutton (that’s awesome) and whatever I can get. I probably will try emu soon. Eating offal is a big traditional thing in my country, I like liver myself. Well that is cheap :wink: So much variety even for a poor one but if one can afford to get whatever they want in the amount they want, well that must be great. I start to wonder why don’t more people try carnivore. The food is good, simple… I spent so much time cooking vegetable dishes that couldn’t satiate me… There was joy involved but meat is even more tasty (though it depends on the meat and the vegetables. I ate tasteless and awesome bacon bought in the supermarket and tasteless tomato is too common nowadays. the ones in my garden are tasty but mostly too sugary. oh well).

Okay I stop, I thought about these things a lot as I am between my old and my new lifestyle, circumstances bind me but my past too… But I feel almost no desire towards vegetables so I eat little of them even when I stray pretty far from carnivore. It’s the same with nuts. I was into peanuts anyway and my body told me it’s not its thing. Nothing serious but something was off. So it’s the past now.

I don’t know how frequent this thing is but I always benefitted from my lower-carb new default diets even when I strayed off. They stayed with me to some extent. I didn’t just go back to my former woe, I kept some new rules most of the time… I let my old desires die out naturally while training myself to enjoy the new and I know, better woe. Just not forcefully and quickly. It seems to work to me and carnivore very quickly changed me, it’s surreal. So even if I end up doing keto, it won’t be a nut and vegetables and sweets keto as before. Oh yeah, losing the decades long habit to eat sweets at the end of meals, that went super quickly, awesome. It was a tad ridiculous, seriously. Now I have the desire to end my meals with some tasty fatty meat (pork :D) but eggs are better than some sweet stuff too. Even if I eat something sweet off carnivore, I feel odd and must add some fatty protein to balance things out as much as possible. And my beloved chocolate is meh now. So I for one loves just playing with carnivore as it solved most of my dietary problems already. But switching on/off is still tiresome. Lack of meat never was source of my stress, now it is, oh well, I learn how to handle that. Even cheap boring lean fish from some nearby supermarket (almost the price of eggs and eggs aren’t expensive here) can be made into something tasty (especially if some pork is involved somehow. I cook with lard, by the way. or simply with pork fat tissue, I always have some leftover).

My old keto changed little. Except fat adaptation, that was a huge thing but not enough. To me, going lower, ignoring vegetables and oily seeds I used so much and adding meat was a huge thing. The biggest positive change since I went low-carb and stopped eating overly processed stuff, sugar (including lactose), gluten and almost all starches in one go. And just like that, it was super smooth, no problems - except when I run out of meat but that’s my newbie problem with my circumstances. I still have ties with certain carbs, it will take time to do what my body prefers basically all the time but it’s still way better than before.
So I say try what you can and maybe it will help you too. I can’t possibly now. I wouldn’t do a carni day and eat vegetable dish the next day, try at least several days and maybe even that will show you something…? But it’s up to you. Maybe you don’t need it.

#13

One more thing… Though I can’t say so much about it…

What do you mean? I don’t care if I do carni or low-carb or what, I keep my protein in some nice range. More like, it stays there, I am not a controlling one and my energy intake isn’t so high that my fatty protein diet could cause a super high protein intake.
High protein is fine for many of us. But some people have some condition so they need to eat little of it. Some of such people still do carnivore just a fattier version.
There are the ones with 80% fat, it’s doable, for them, at least. I tried, I can do it but it’s not natural for me as all my proper food is way less fatty. But I wouldn’t go too low, I definitely don’t want to eat unnecessarily much protein. If it feels right and it just happens, it’s not unnecessary but I never go super high :slight_smile: 160g protein is my highest this far and that’s fine for me even if I am sure 100g would be more than enough if we consider protein only, it’s not that simple, maybe I need more for other nutrients or eating comfortably? (But it’s hard to eat so very tiny protein - below 100g - even without meat - no matter my actual woe -, how people do it, I don’t know :D)

So, it’s individual. Do what works for you. Carnivore doesn’t make high protein mandatory.

(Kevin) #14

:slightly_smiling_face::+1:

:clap: I’ve never been strictly carnivore, but there are many days where I’ll grab something out of the refrigerator, like a piece of meat that’s already cooked (because that’s easy and fast to do). Then later in the day I’ll cook something, maybe just meat there too, and that’s it, that’s all I eat for that day.

I like greens too, and like the thought of the minerals, enzymes, and vitamins I’m getting, but for me some of the really basic and plain keto foods fill me up so well that it’s not an issue. Whether it’s just meat or meat/eggs/cheese, on many days I don’t think about greens. I don’t even want to think about more food.

(Scott) #15

Food for thought. I’ll bet 1/3 of fruit and veggies get thrown out due to spoilage. Factor that in to the cost.