boy you said a lot in those little words Moo. ZC plan is so simple. Just eat and don’t count nothing, don’t worry, just listen to your body if it wants higher fats, leaner meats or seafood and go for it. It means so much to me because I was crazy, literally crazy in counting carbs, try to fast, eat this, not that and all that stupid diet stuff. Now life is eat meat/seafood and live. Live simple. It so suits my life and how great I feel shows this zc plan is life to me.
nothing wrong with a little celebration
So happy you are doing so well and keep trucking along strong Moo!!
woke up still wanting seafood. ok. I can do that.
hit some crab legs on good sale.
today is about 2 lbs. of snow crab legs with a lot of butter of course
later, hmm, I have chicken or small piece of steak to eat. Either, I don’t care…after my brunch time crab fest I won’t care what little I grab after to fill me up a bit.
Holding my low, all bloaty from vacation is gone. Now waiting to see if I can shift off ANY little tweak of a lb.off me for June. I think I can, I think I can LOL whatever, I love eating this way, nature will do it all for me if I hold clean zc and let it go down as it will
I wouldn’t call these pretty but I still show them
The soup, not a great look and we forgot some plants and didn’t some others… Yeah, there will be plants on the photos, vaguely… I don’t even know what a soup would be like without plants, I guess it would work for fowls and would be bad with anything else? Okay, I probably never tasted pork soup, it should be good as I love pork with a passion… I know I don’t like beef soup but I don’t like beef in general. Except in some dishes, goulash is very good but carby…
Soup is a slightly problematic thing for me lately as I usually like to do things “properly” or almost properly but I basically know one soup I can make easily and often and what is good and it is a mixed vegetable soup. With barely any vegetables and full with poached eggs. My experience with soup from meat and bones is around zero and I strongly prefer fowls. But I can’t have many chicken per year while I need my soup every week. I may use some spicy egg milk instead, though… We will see what will happen but soup is very very important for me.
The not very interesting but in the end, yellow enough rooster soup. It became surprisingly fatty, Alvaro should contain his desire to fry onions in fat in the very beginning. It’s not like such a soup needs that.
Not photogenic but who cares? The bony roaster meat we used for the soup (with some cabbage leaf stuck to them). A bigger (but not really big, only 3.5kg cleaned) rooster, minus his limbs were used. But 4 legs and lots of organs were added. As it’s the only soup from that 2 roosters, the bony parts of the other one will become a nice stew! We love stews.
And the legs for the cats. It’s odd, they aren’t as ugly in this photo as chicken legs tend to be. Many Hungarian people LOVE eating these, some eats 10 chicken legs and call it a meal!!! I find them not just inedible but gross, usually… And I don’t use this word lightly. But chicken legs on a plate, they creep me out.
It tastes good. I even tasted the breast, the only part (besides the legs but that’s just bones and skin, so not food) I dislike in fowls and rabbits. And it was surprisingly nice. Dry but I could eat it if Alvaro wouldn’t enjoy lean meat… So mostly he will eat that (except if I eat all of the others and there are a lot of breast meat available. He eats meat super slowly and I never saw the point in eating meat in tiny amounts). But it’s not bad cooked in the soup. Not horribly dry, just lean, it’s tender and soft… Definitely food in my books. I would add some sauce or eggs or pork and it would be quite nice. So I am impressed.
The livers are surprisingly tiny, I froze them for later when I will fry them. They weren’t much bigger than normal chicken livers.
I still didn’t do a carnivore day but the rooster surely brings me closer to normalcy. I don’t see the world in black and white and the shade of the gray is important.
site was down when I tried to past again recently. All going well with eating plenty of beef and I managed to get blueberries in the freezer without eating them all. I really like a handful of frozen berries here and there in the Fall and Winter to remind me what Summer tastes like. . .
I believe l already had Corona back in March as I had exposure possible, a weird lung infection unlike anything I felt before, and most telling is that I have mostly lost my senses of taste and smell for months now. It is really weird but apparently a possible side effect of the virus. I don’t know what else could have caused it so quickly, and I keep hoping to get back to normal soon.
I can still smell really strong smells or sometimes milder, and my sense of taste is really off for most things. I can taste things a little like brown butter omelet, and beef is the clearest and strongest taste for me. I don’t like bacon at all at the moment as I can’t taste the flavor. I never thought I would not want to eat bacon, but lost my craving though still like ham in omelets.
I am holding weight-wise but not gaining. I hope to drop again soon and have been feeling energetic and doing very heavy farm work outside in the heat with no problems, which I attribute to this WOE as with carbs I get hot flashes and feel sluggish. Eating meat, I have stamina, sweat plenty and stay cool, and can go back out and work again even after a large meal of ground beef without feeling bloated or tired.
I got into a pretty tiny pair of shorts a few days ago, so my body is leaning out even if scale moves slowly. I also love the ease of just cooking a chunk of meat and being done with food prep for hours. I am not going back to my old ways of eating ever again, but I wish my tastebuds would go back online soon.
It’s great to see how well you are all doing. Thanks for sharing stories and pictures of the delicious food you are eating. I’ve got some snow in the freezer I think I will have for lunch today to try some new flavors to see if I can “taste” one of my favorite foods. . .
yea I tried the legs too and I didn’t like them enough to enjoy. I know so many people just love them to death, but I didn’t take to them that way…but lucky cats! I bet those cats are loving that treat!!
shades of gray are super important in life but every now and then black and white works best in a situation for an individual. My zc is my black and white in life for sure on way of eating I get what you are saying tho, if we don’t bob/weave/adapt thru life we can’t grow and change and evolve and learn about us and what we require while doing so to put ourselves in the best light. good post!
.Hawkeye, that was a fab update and great post for sure, I loved reading it
WOW if you had CV probably already, you sounded so sick thru that. So happy you are on the mend but the taste bud thing is wild. I think you just eat what you enjoy and can taste and just wait for the body to heal up again more and more and I know you will be back in good form sooner than later I hope!!
And yea our bodies become leaner and meaner without a drop on the scale to ‘prove it’…I also am having baggy clothes and not a lot of loss, and that to me is proof the body will always be leaner at a much higher weight as long as nasty old plant nasty, sugary carb processed food crap is not in our lives. ZC gives us normal life as it should be body wise, we just have to wait for results as we individually heal and change.
Go for the crab and hope you can taste and enjoy. I am hounding down 2 lbs of crab legs later also! We can compare our meals HAHA
One thing for me with the farm work, I also knew instantly the worse I got cause just walking down to the barns meant I was winded and sluggy, then after all the work I was exhausted and miserable. ON ZC this doesn’t happen at all and I have to say I know/see/feel/absolutely understand what zc has given me. I won’t go backward either
Oh I totally agree. I just meant if we can’t do something 100%, we shouldn’t stop to care. I am not that type (only a bit, sometimes) but so many people go off plan and they think if they fail, do it epically, it doesn’t matter… Well it DOES matter to my body that how far I stray, I can’t not notice it.
It’s another thing I don’t need proper carnivore to feel good but I better stay very close if I want to be as okay as possible. And I know which items are better than others. In the past, I mostly focused on net carbs (and quality and avoided very processed stuff) but it’s not that simple for me now. The communication with my body got better and better. It always gave me warnings but as I showed it better ways of eating, it got choosier and more sensitive. I still don’t get unwell very easily but I can feel if my diet could be better. Just a subtle thing, not a bother but information. My body should know what it likes and needs, I need its input. I can’t do this through reading, even if I can find good information, we are individuals with different needs. I like to read about experiences but my own body has the final say.
It is very easy for me to food prep carnivore foods for camping and field work. It is not easy to take the time to warm up the said foods for eating. I eat burgers and cheese cold, I have hot bone broth and coffee with HWC prepared for the day. But I’ve been working 12 hour days, sometimes 14, so I have no desire to heat the pot roast, beef, whatever dinner foods I made at the end of the day. So then I go hungry or eat all my cold food within the first day or two, then go hungry. My cravings on carnivore are bad. I barely had cravings on keto. I’ve been giving in around days three of four of field work, and sometimes stopping at a gas station to get crap food to eat while I drive 3 hours or so to the next site or home. It’s setting my health wayyy back. I need to stop it but I’m struggling to…
cooler in the car. I traveled with food all the time. when I started I was hungry and oh boy did I eat big then I ate way less…then I ate big again, then I ate less LOL but I knew I had to have food with me thru some times on plan as I changed on zc……cooler with tuna, meat, jerky and other stuff came with me at all times. My hubby thought I was nuts, but when I had to eat, I had to eat! So I found carrying food was the smartest thing I could do for me. I said I would do zc and have food all the time, even in the car LOL I planned and prepped and took care of me in my transition time into zc. best we can do!!
It always interested me how different people are - but it matters how we are on our journey too.
My desires to eat something not on my actual woe (I don’t call them cravings as it doesn’t seem mine are nearly as serious as many others’… if I really don’t want to eat them, I don’t and that’s it) drastically diminishes as I lower my carbs. maybwe it has something with plants too, I never could figure it out. One day I should try <20g not-carnivore keto but I have no idea how to do it yet, without carnivore(-ish), I go over 50g or something, I don’t track then.
I just know that my carby days are quite uncontrolled though it’s WAY better since my little carnivore trials. It’s surprising how effective those little things were, 9 years on low-carb still kept my carby days crazy, even after fat adaptation… Maybe the almost complete lack of vegetables did it that automatically caused the almost complete lack of oily seeds? I don’t know.
So, those days are the worst. Low-carb is normal, why would I need even more carbs under normal circumstances but I had my lots of desires, hard to reach satiation and sweets every day. Keto was the same but my true sweets obsession went away - right away. Raging chocolate manic days (after I figured out how to make good homemade ones… I did 700g and I naively thought it will last long for us two…) - I dropped my carbs and I immediately was fine without chocolate or just with a tiny bit. Relief on the first day. I couldn’t do keto long-term yet but it was nothing like that obviously wrong craving.
Then keto became my new normal. It wasn’t very magical, I ate much sweets every day but I needed to eat something very low-carb on my vegetarian keto… And I liked sweets. It wasn’t obsession. I still couldn’t got satiated easily (I think satiation and desiring sweets are a set for me) but my hunger became much better with fat adaptation and my fasting window (that was about 16 hours when I went keto) become about 19 hours. I had no idea about IF back then, I just ate where and when and how much I felt like.
And then came my carni trials. The honeymoon phase (more like “my body is confused and forget to react properly”) was shocking, similar to OMAD, just better. Satiation reached super easily, ZERO sweets cravings. Or any carbs. A few slices of juicy, crunchy raw vegetables are nice sometimes, I mostly blame my salty food but not needed at all. It’s a totally different state of mind and body. For some reason, I have this with very long carb woes, cravings/temptations/desires turn off very effectively and right away.
After my body collected itself, my super easy satiation went away but now it’s very nice, I still don’t need too big meals (like with more carbs before my carni trials where TMAD is overeating unless I am super careful but OMAD isn’t good either) but I don’t get satiated with 2 eggs or a smallish piece of meat (able to eat some more but still not a proper sized meal), that was very confusing in the beginning and I don’t like to eat like that, unnatural, foreign to me. I have about perfect sized meals, automatically.
And I don’t crave carby stuff. I might find the idea nice and enjoy certain carbier things (most of them not at all but I always will have my exceptions I am sure) and no way I don’t eat a very tiny part of my own fruits, it’s basic even if I don’t desire them (but love them, always) but it’s complicated…
I mean, my sweets cravings stopped on every woe and I get easily satiated now. I always needed lots of food if I raised my carbs (resulted in overeating) , well it’s over after more than 4 decades, it seems. I don’t crave carbs if I eat carbs (in the contrary) and it’s very easy for me to get rid of my hunger. But it’s not that perfect satiation I have on carni when I can’t eat more and just feels right. Carbs still don’t satiate me (or not well), they just don’t make me much hungrier (like they did in the past, it was weird), something like this. I need to track to figure these things out… On individual carbier days as more in row is so not for me, I really burned a bridge again. Low-carb is surely out now longer term. It was nice for the first several years, I learned so much… Made so many recipes I can’t use anymore, oh well.
hey I know, like that little matters right? HAHA…it does to me big time.
I just keep eating all I want, when I want, any meat/seafood I want and finally the scale again gave up the tiniest bit. Not once do I weigh food, track food, don’t diet in any way…I just eat great meat and seafood and I eventually go down the scale…slow as a snail now, but I don’t care at all LOL
feeling wonderful. feeling that ‘thinner’ feeling I love. I love that empty feeling in the body with never being overloaded with crappy food, you know, that stuffed turkey feeling. I haven’t had that in so long and I almost forget what that felt like in truth cause no matter how much zc I do eat, I never produce that nasty sluggy feeling anymore.
yes I love zc as my plan.
I got seafood and chicken on the brain today. I wake up and think, hmm…I want…So 1lb. of shrimp later and chicken, I might just cut up a bunch and put it in alfredo sauce. Sounds like a plan for me
if hubby makes bacon later I will have some. I don’t bother with bacon as much anymore, but when hubby wants it, I say cook the whole lb and give me a bunch and I don’t have to do the work of making it I got to where frying bacon is annoying and I never liked it in the oven. Tried oven a few times, I still prefer it fried in a pan. go figure LOL
I probably don’t have any new ideas for you, but I’m thinking that if I were working in the field and camping overnight for days, I would like you, eat cold burgers and cheese, cold roast beef slices, and bone broth with big chunks of meat in it, like a stew. There are some tasty looking soup recipe’s on you tube, that incorporate beef, meat, bacon, eggs, and cream. Cold bacon would be a good one too, as well as canned fish, tuna, salmon, hard boiled eggs, pre cooked omelettes and of course hard cheeses, maybe including a carnivore pizza? Mmmm cold pizza for breakfast, just think of it, haha
If you have days where you have time to heat up the food, you can, but otherwise eat as is. Of course there is always raw beef, like Daisy posted. Eat big on days off and fast through days of low food supply.
Have you heard the story about Brian Gaudette, the military apache pilot who was grounded due to health problems, and ended up founding Captain Soup. I was impressed with his story when I saw it on the movie Fat Fiction, especially when he was able to be re-instated as an Apache Pilot, and then shipped 100’s of cans of his homemade bone broth concoction to wherever he was posted in the field. Maybe you could do something like that ;), or pay $10 a can for his elimination soup.
I find carnivore has really helped my cravings, but you have to be able to eat meat when you are craving something else. If your not happy with the food that you have with you, it’s kind of hard to beat them. As others have told me, when you crave crap, just eat more meat.
If keto worked so well for you, just incorporate that style of eating with your carnivory style. You would always be in some transition stage, but if all the food you can keep with you is a combination of meat and keto style foods, then it would at least keep you from noshing down gas station crap.
I didn’t care for the Carnivore DIet Book either, as I had anticipated way more clarity on what the woe was all about. Pretty lame actually, same for The Carnivore code, which I found a little more interesting, but still not much more information then what you get for free on the internet.
I keep a cooler in the car, but I eat all my cold food early on and don’t have time to heat my other stuff. I’ll try making ore burgers to eat cold…
@Moo cold roast beef slices is an excellent idea. I was taking cold carnivore pizza for eating while driving but I stopped out of laziness. I’ll try bringing some again. This week I brought carnivore soup with shellfish, pot roast in bone broth, and elk/sausage/ricotta scramble that I didn’t eat any of because I didn’t have the time/energy to warm it up. I should just bring food that I can eat cold. I’ll look into Brian Gaudette.
I think for carnivore to be sustainable for me I need to eat a higher fat:protein ratio. Right now I don’t have time to track and work on eating a certain ratio so I’m just trying to eat fatty meat and do some IF.
A thermos…hot insulated bag…buy one of those things and make food stay warm and you can eat the warmer food first as needed and enjoy it warm, then stock the heck up on cold foods you love to nosh.
you truly got this, even if you have to get hot/cold bags/coolers to sustain you. You can truly bring all ya need with you with planning…you got this!!
You should have seen what I packed in my rv…all for me. meat in the freezer by the boatload crammed in, tuna cans, sardine cans, beef sticks, sausage links, all makings for my alfredo sauce. I made sure I had it all cause if you don’t cover you…you eat whatever is at your disposal and just cave…I never want to cave so I over prepare like mad for trips and more…it saves me point blank. I ain’t shy on dragging tons of food with me whenever I think I might need it LOL
Fortunately lots of food is good cold - well, it depends on the person as my SO eats cold scrambled eggs without a problem, okay, I can do that too but I prefer them freshly made.
Roasts are good cold I have nice memories eating chicken thighs cold as that was what my Aunt packed for the long way home. But as far as I know, most roasted meat is very good cold. I would eat very fatty pork warm if possible but they can’t be bad cold either. And for meat that has no massive fat parts, either way is nice. I never thought it possible but I enjoyed some cold rooster breast yesterday… I ate some super fatty smoked pork with it but just to get some calories too. Me, liking fowl breast, it’s surreal, I always avoided it. It must be a great rooster.
I ate egg loafs today, the ones with lard (partially smoked as I had some after I fried pork skin with lots of fat tissue on it) were really good cold. They were awfully fatty while warm and felt bad to me… So I have this sensitivity with warm, liquid vs cold, solid rendered fat others have? I’ve read about such things in the thread for… Oh my, I forgot, the folks with 80% fat and other rules? I mostly have a problem with rendered fat (not satiating) while fat tissue is about as great as protein (satiating wise and it’s nice too as long as I have meat with it) but it seems it’s not quite that simple.
My egg loaf muffins (I admit the front one has about 0.5g bamboo fiber to test it out - it did about nothing just the looks are a bit different) and the dark one has sausage spices They didn’t need it, the smoked lard was more than enough to make them irresistible when cold.
I haven’t taken pictures of my last 3 meals. Yesterday meal one was halloumi (so exciting to find and try it!!) and the rest of the raw chuck roast. Then I went to a cookout with my family. It was a little bit of a cheat. I had a few sips of homemade moonshine and a sip of rum and cream soda. I never drink, but tried them. Then I had several bratwurst, some buffalo chicken dip with pork rinds and one Chick-fil-A chicken nugget lol.
Today we went to the Texas Roadhouse and I had a 16 Oz sirloin with butter. Then for dinner I had some more bratwurst and a little bit of buffalo chicken dip
the crispy on that cheese is so inviting KD!! It is so cool you went to raw steak so soon in the change. Have you always liked raw a bit, many do I was never raw, I was cooked to death leather meat, but now I am eating blue rare meat and loving it. Not sure when I might go raw or not?? I just cruise along and just go with my taste changes as they happen.
HIP HIP HOORAY again for me LOL
dropped another .4 on the scale. Got me .8 down from my low. .8, what is that, a 1/2 lb.? down HAHA I hate my scale in the .2 numbers. Who cares, all I know is it went down again…after eating so darn great yesterday! I will take that any old day of the week
crab legs. ate my 2 lbs with a lot of yummy butter. but crab legs didn’t hold it for me yesterday in that they were work to steam up, work to crack open, and actually really annoyed the hell out of me. I am a crab maniac lover, but this mess of crab had me thinking it is too much darn work ya know. I like flash fry food, eat, done. The crab kept me cooking way longer than I wanted and longer time to eat. I don’t know…my mind is saying don’t bother buying these as much. Will see how I roll on it all. Old days I thrived on my crab as ‘my thing’ on my zc plan, now it is like, geez I don’t ‘require’ my crab as much…huh…go figure. Whatever, I just go with the flow of how I wanna roll on what I wanna eat
Moving more now too in that the constant days and days of rain have passed for a bit. Outside doing work with pool and it is sparkling and ready to swim, tons of mowing since returning from vacation.
ZC treats me so well. I was never on an eating plan…well lets just call them useless ‘diets’ as they were of course…an eating plan that gave me so much benefit and health like zc has given to me. I wish I could bottle this feeling and sell it for others to try and say, hey I want that
I always pushed the research about raw meat to the distant future, well, it’s not like I will need the info in the next years… Raw meat sounds scary. I know people eat it without problems but still, I would need lots of research as certain raw meats surely are very dangerous and I don’t trust just anyone with my health…
Besides, how raw or even rare meat can be edible and not even too chewy…? It’s a foreign word to me.
I only eat my eggs raw. And I always preferred raw milk. Maybe I have a logical gap here…? Well I trust the eggs, at least and anyway, what could possibly happen? Nothing as dangerous as with meat.
Well, I am still at the point where I prefer to fry/roast/cook the hell out of meats (or almost) so I am quite safe even on the too rare days when I have some proper meat. And smoked salted raw pork is safe. Nothing can survive that salt. Even I have serious problems with the last bunch but I need my daily little meat even if it’s only that. And fish. I am not against fish but they are just some soft things spicing my day up, not real meat to me. Maybe if I had a big amount with great variety, yeah, that could work. But now I just can’t bring myself to get some fish out of the freezer. I rather eat eggs. But I can’t live on eggs alone. They are very good though. Cheap enough, tasty, versatile, impossible to get bored of them for long and I can buy them.
The roosters aren’t almost as expensive and very nice, we will buy more next time! It was trying them out. We really need that mini freezer Alvaro’s mother doesn’t need anymore… We always had it months ago but then covid happened.
I am just greedy and now that we have roosters, I want red meat too because that’s very different and good to have both. Mutton if I may ask We already tried that out so we totally buy half a sheep when we can (it’s not even very much), we just need the mini freezer first. My tiny freezer part of my fridge is full with rooster, some fish and fruits, we stopped keeping a significant amount of vegetables there, I don’t cook them anyway, Alvaro should be able to handle that. And he does.
Am I whining? I tried not to but I surely am not perfectly pleased with my situation now. But it’s better with the roosters, I am just torn as it’s not much so I try not to eat them quickly but that means almost meatless days again, only with too-salty pork. No, fish. I have fish! Why I keep forgetting about fish? But they feel as I barely ate anything and they aren’t fatty enough. Maybe if I eat them with fat tissue cut off from the pork hocks, I have those. Yeah, it should work and it adds some smokey flavor to the fish. I don’t know if there are rules about combining these things but I am used to ignoring rules anyway.
I don’t think I ever ate big crabs (it would be really hard to get them here) but I am quite sure they aren’t proper meat to me either. And too much work and garbage and whatnot. Nope.
I had some great stuff in Japanese restaurants, though… All those super soft tasty raw fishes…! White and pink and red! I really need to revisit the Asian “all-you-can-eat” restaurant with their wonderful options and elegant environment… When I will have money for that.
Congratulations for your weight-loss, @Fangs!
I am so hopeful some carnivore OMAD/TMAD could help even my borderline hopeless case but going there, well I need some more time for that now. But I already changed, it should work (if not, EF but I am not compatible with that right now. fasting suits me. as long as I am satiated, of course, I don’t stay hungry). But my energy level and health are more important for me now. 70kg isn’t THAT much, my body can handle it and I am not vain. I just wanna finish things already.
Sorry, I really shouldn’t write here this much, I don’t even do carnivore now (well maybe today, I don’t know yet, it’s the plan. as my body isn’t indulgent anymore, I have huge motivation so I am hopeful I will be at least very close. not like I ate carbs galore in the last week but I still went a bit too far. my body easily get enamored with a woe if it works better for it and then I can’t go back so easily. I know it’s healthy and could handle things but it doesn’t want to. it’s useful) and when I do carnivore(-ish), it’s some weird egg-based thing… But even that is better than my old keto and I am enthusiastic. And I will do something about my options this year. (But keep my adorable wonderful beloved eggs too. Our love story won’t end in the near future for sure.)
ahhh S we like having you here on the thread. You ain’t all in zero carb obviously but I know I enjoy your chats about your meat you buy and what you can get and how you handle your food daily over there in Hungary…Hungary right? I am 99.9% sure that is where you are correct me if wrong.
70kg is not bad but of course our height determines how good or bad that weight is we carry on our frames ya know. 5 ft and it is bit much but if 5’8 it is a lot healthier. I am so fortunate I am 5’8 cause even at a higher weight it evens out on me. I think I am lucky on that tho HAHA
It is ‘certain meats’ when talking safety on raw. I would never do pork raw or chicken raw but a lot of people do actually eat those raw but I am more of that ‘go more toward safety type person’ and hold in line with certain things too. I get ya.
I was super well cooked meat. I had to have a steak cooked to death, to shoe leather, now about 5 yrs of changes here with zc….I am blue rare steak. Never once thought I would get this far LOL
in the freezer I think I will have for lunch today to try some new flavors to see if I can “taste” one of my favorite foods. . .
