Just a Carnivore Questions

(Drew) #1

Evening all carnivores,

I just had a question of sorts and maybe advise or guidance.

Does anyone else (perhaps other then me) not enjoy steak all that much? I tried ribeye, T-Bone, and even beef stew pieces. I just can’t find myself to enjoy the texture as it’s always tough to chew. I’m 37(male) with good teeth, no issues eating anything else. I’ll describe my daily routine.

On a daily basis (except Saturday/Sunday), I’ve been eating 1lb beef (from a farmer(s)) with 7 eggs (I get eggs direct from the chicken), milk (specifically Amish Country & 2 cups/day) and I also add either 2 burgers (beef patties) or 2 salmon patties (wild caught, both from Costco) along with cooking with butter (2tbs) to add the extra fat and I use sea salt.

Average is about 150-200g in protein, I don’t know the specific on fat with all that unfortunately nor calories. Protein was easy to pretty easy to gather and I go to gym 6 days a week (5 good days, the 6th day is mostly what couldn’t be finished before the gym closed and extra cardio).

Saturdays I don’t have any of the above and try to use that day as a variety meat day such as adding ribs though it’s restaurant purchased and sadly not bare so it has some sort of sauce/rub on it and smoked. I may also try to add some sort of steak even if small.

Sundays though I add bison or venison in substitute to beef for the meal plan above but the rest is normally the same.

Also, I do fasting, my window is normally 1p-7pm but I don’t cook anything more except finish/snack on what I don’t eat above to finish it all throughout the day and have milk before going to the gym.

Am I safe with just eating above as is, should I add anymore to up my intake of fat somewhere? Or am I pretty good as is? If someone is able to calculate the correct amounts.

I do have LMNT (unflavored) and only take it if I feel sluggish/tired.

Appreciate the reading of a long message!

Drew

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #2

You don’t have to eat steak. The steak I can afford is tough, too. My inner Scotsman strongly objects to paying the sorts of prices my supermarket demands for the better cuts.

Fortunately, ground beef patties and beef stew are much cheaper, and they taste good when cooked. The are also much easier to chew than cheap steak. Beef heart is usually cheaper than other cuts, and it tastes like lean roast beef.

(Alec) #3

I have been carnivore for 2 years. My advice:

  1. Forget about fasting. Eat when you are hungry, don’t eat when you are not. Sometimes that may mean 2 meals a day (1-7pm), sometimes it may mean something else. I think this is especially important when you are a heavy exerciser. Sometimes the body just needs more energy, and you need to listen to it.
  2. Steak is not obligatory… carnivore is perfectly OK without eating steak. I spent a good 6 months figuring out which meats worked for me both taste and economy-wise. I do eat steak, and I tend to eat rump… it is close to the cheapest (A$18/kg), and for me it tastes good. One important thing about choosing a steak… find steak with plenty of visible fat. Tastes great! Also experiment with how long you cook it for… some steak needs a fair bit of cooking, some needs hardly any.
  3. Milk… I would recommend you drop the milk as it has quite a bit of sugar in it. Cream is a much better option.
  4. Don’t worry too much about fat/protein ratio, but I do recommend that you try to make your meat fatty meat… lean meat is not really what you want. Don’t fear the fat, eat it if you can find it. I always choose the fattiest meat I can find… steak, pork, lamb, chicken (I don’t eat the chicken breast…. not fatty enough). Your tastebuds will tell you pretty quickly if you are overdoing the fat… it starts tasting horrible!
  5. Keep at it, and don’t give up if you hit some hurdles. I have found through 2 years of eating carnivore that this is the best eating regime I have ever done (and I’ve done a few!!), and it has resulted in my being the healthiest I have been for 40 years.

Take care and best of luck!
Cheers
Alec

#4

I never ate steak as far as I know, I can’t afford ruminants (maybe a pound a month if it’s the cheapest kind) and love pork. Not like I would be a carnivore but I am trying to stay close (winter is the best, I have actual carnivore weeks there) and I don’t get much nutrients from plants so I depend on my carnivore food. I do eat eggs and various dairy items as well, it works well enough this far.

No one can calculate your fat intake as “beef” says nothing about it. I can’t calculate mine (I do try, it’s good enough for me but I am very much aware it’s not accurate at all) and I know the cut but they are wildly different from the same cut… (Pork tends to be fattier too, it’s easier to track some generally leaner meat. But beef can’t be fatty too.)

If you eat lean meat, you probably eat too little fat…? But it’s impossible to say, there isn’t enough information.
In lucky cases, your body tells you very clearly if you undereat. I never could undereat as my body doesn’t let me. Occasional lower-cal day may happen but that’s fine (and super rare, sadly).
Lean meat is fine but you need enough fat somehow. I have plenty of beloved very fatty items (I have a very serious butter phase now. butter is a great snack, it improves even an otherwise quite great meat, I actually put it into everything now, fortunately I learned to eat much lean meat so I can afford it :smiley: I would overeat fat if I used fatty meat AND my beloved butter and cream now) and as fat doesn’t really satiate me, it’s easy to add a ton if the need emerges.

Milk may be fine, I drink it too but 2 cups? Wow. I had such days (it’s too easy to drink 1 liter of milk in 1-2 hours too if one is me), it was okay as I am not sensitive to it and animal sugar is apparently fine to my body. If I had the same amount of carbs from plants, I would feel but not with milk. I still try not to overdo it but not because I worry about the sugar (though I wouldn’t want to have 40g sugar a day every day on carnivore… maybe it still would do something… occasionally? great, milk is nice and I love moderately sweet things). I probably just have a phase.
So it’s individual and you should figure out if it works for you or not.

Good luck!!!

Wow, really? I didn’t know that. I just noticed beef is special as it doesn’t need to fried into oblivion like everything else I used to eat… But I barely tried a few (cheap) cuts.
If I want a steak, I will go to a steakhouse first, I don’t trust my non-existent skills :slight_smile: I did fry a slice of beef before, I don’t call that steak (wrong cut, very inexperienced cook) but it was good and took not much time. But I am more like the “cut some fatty meat into little pieces and fry it” kind, I liked that with beef too. (Maybe steaks would be wasted on me but who knows?)

(Karen) #5

I eat a lot of steak… rump, sirloin and ribeye and absolutely love it. It is definitely how you prep and cook it. I never used to like rump as i always found it hard to chew but i guess trial and error has made it better.

I advocate getting it out of the fridge in the morning and leaving it covered on the worktop ( out of it packaging) to get t room temp, this make it more tender and better tasting. You can also, if you like, bash it a few times to tenderise it or marinate it for an hour or so … i don’t do either of these as the steaks i buy are usually tender enough by getting them to room temp.

As someone mentioned above buy meat with as much fat as possible which isn’ t very easy with rumps as the fat will affect the taste making it tastier.

You can also by chuck/stewing beef steaks and slow cook it over night. Unfortunately most places that have already diced their meat into pre-packed packs trim the fat off t make it as lean as possible and, again, without the fat it can make it quite tasteless when trying to so carnivore and not add all the usual stew/casserole veg.

Cheap meats belly pork, pork shoulder, pork chops, chicken (skin on) all nice and fatty.

(KM) #6

In the US, brisket is another flexible, inexpensive beef choice when it’s on sale. Large pieces will go on sale around the holidays, I’ve seen it as low as $2.99 per pound. It will typically have a huge fat cap, especially at this price. The tallow can be rendered and then used for cooking. It is a tougher cut, and needs long slow roasting, smoking, boiling (brisket is the cut used for corned beef) or crock-potting.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #7

I enjoy steak with the right sauce. Or in a stew. Bland cheap cuts can be transformed into rich loveliness. :stuck_out_tongue:

#8

I eat lean meat with sauce but it doesn’t make it as good as some proper, fatty meat… BUT it helps a lot. I use butter in the sauce nowadays :slight_smile: Sometimes just lean meat and butter, why to overcomplicate things? :smiley: My meat is tasty enough just a bit too lean. And I love butter if someone didn’t see this from me zillion times lately :wink:

Stewing meat is good too but it rarely worked for me if the meat was too lean. But it depends. Chicken breast - nope, rabbit - perfect, lean deer - good but not nearly as good as a bit fattier ruminant meat…
I noticed I handle lean meat in soups the best. It doesn’t help with the fat intake, not like I need such a help myself… But my soup can’t be too lean as I use eggs in it, that’s lovely. I can imagine using some cream though…

(Drew) #9

Thank you everyone for the messages and information!

To add or answer some.

My steaks are store bought so it could also be cheap tasting to me since I’ve been eating ground beef and had previously got steaks from a farmer, local farmer (but she ran out of stuff to sell for fall/winter) and another was Seven Sons in Indiana.
Thus it could be I don’t like the store bought ones as well.

I’m thawing a TBone I forgot I picked up couple weeks ago from a farmer and will eat that tomorrow to see how it compares.

I was doing bacon (also store bought) but it was upsetting my stomach and I had cut that out.

The milk I get is cream top but it does have 12g sugar & 12g carbs. Place is called Amish Country in Indiana that happens to deliver to my area. I get 2gallons every 2 weeks or 4x 1/2 gallon bottles. Some stores carry but I only found 2 within an hour drive of me that has it. This happens to be the closest from the cow I can seem to find.

Next closest farm is straight from their cow but such a long list/wait time. Going to try and get on it before spring.

I don’t add any sauce to my meats, hard to get bare at a restaurant for ribs, i can get my wings bare at least but unknown how they cook the wings.

I’ll have to talk with farmer I know as they have 1/8 cow/cuts to sell and a lot of that is steaks. See how this TBone goes. Seeing them this weekend so may get some other steaks to try before discussing 1/8 or more. Would be nice to get in on 1/2 of a cow, be a lot of meat.

I’ll have to try bacon that is not store bought, could be something changed in the bacon I was getting that doesn’t sit well with my stomach anymore.

I just did cook up some beef liver after my daily ground beef & eggs and found it to be quite good, was cooked in butter and also beef liver from the farmer.

(Geoffrey) #10

I think you are doing great.
I think @Alecmcq is spot on with his advice and I agree with cutting back or even cutting out the dairy. I personally only allow dairy once a week because it’s too easy for me to overindulge.
As far as your question about eating beefsteaks, NO, I enjoy all my steaks and I rarely have any that are tough but when I do I still enjoy it. I love steak especially fatty steak.
If you find steak or beef in general difficult to chew then you might consider slow cooking it to break down the collagen and make it fall apart tender. It can be slow cooked in a crockpot, oven or smoker. It will not be as nutritious because it’s fully cooked and the majority of fat will be rendered out but it will still be delicious especially if you put butter on it or pour the rendered drippings over the meat. Save the rendered fat for cooking other things also.
I have a simple recipe for tough meat where I cut the meat into chunks. Place in a crockpot. Put in enough bone broth to almost cover the meat and then cook it on high for three hours. Makes a nice hearty stew. Actually I haven’t decided if it’s a meat stew or a meat soup.
Anyways, I think your doing great and finding your path.

(KM) #11

I’m in Indiana too. Have you ever heard of Grass Corp? They’re supposedly locally based and look like a great source of pasture raised meats and dairy. I haven’t reached out to them yet, they’re expensive. I think they’re based in Leopold, down near KY, but they delivery to local drop off spots as far north as Indy.

https://grasscorp.net/store

#12

I am so lucky I like store-bought pork now. I used to find it tasteless while home-raised good pork tasted the best thing ever. It played a pretty big role in my long term vegetarianism… Then I tasted raw salmon in Japanese restaurants after losing my big reason for vegetarianism. I still didn’t eat pork for a long time.
And when I did, it was good. Wow. Farm pork is better, sure but not by very, very far. The same with beef though I rather buy deer as my ruminant meat.
I don’t know what changed but it makes sense to feel the difference very much.

Beef liver is a fav of mine :slight_smile:

By the way, farm beef costs the same as supermarket beef here. But I have a few hours right after the announcement on social media (about 2 a year now, it was way more before) to claim some meat. Maybe 2 days for the least popular parts.
It’s easy to get smoked stuff any time but fresh meat… That’s trickier. And I couldn’t get much or often. It’s a bit similar with pork but without the ridiculously tiny time frame and the farm is closer, a bicycle does the trick :wink:

I can relate… But no way I could keep myself from eating at least a few different dairy items every day so I trained myself to moderate the amount, it seems to work for me.
I need the variety too. But I can imagine it changing in the future. I can’t do these things suddenly, many can or simply need to cut out dairy…

(Drew) #13

Thank you Geezy, I’ll take it down to 1 cup of milk per day. I don’t have an issue with over doing it as I can keep myself to what I plan.
Plus I get water delivered so I got plenty water to drink all day.

I’m in Michigan, probably 2hrs from IN border but I’ll look into Grass Corp just to see what they got.
Never hurts to have multiple places to order from.
I love bratwurst myself and other stuff things, those I can overindulge in if I get a 12pk by having 2-3/day w/ my food.

(Drew) #14

Got my lipids done over the weekend, Dr only wanted the lipids because of high chrostel concern
However I don’t think this is to much of a concern, need to raise HDL though which I’ll have to research.

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(Edith) #15

I might have missed this somewhere. How long have you been eating a carnivore diet?

(Drew) #16

I want to say Jan 2023 if not April 2023. I was loose carnivore last year was I was having cheat days in 2022 but I don’t recall the last cheat day I had.

I was keto as well but transitioned into carnivore as time went on and became active again, exercise wise in the last 4 months. I was active last year but I stopped over winter, lost gain but then gained weight.
Fixed other issues, graves disease being the latest one but then my cholesterol went up in the last year. Can pull previous tests if needed.

(Edith) #17

Thanks. I was curious since we usually suggest being keto/carnivore for six months before getting lipid tests done, but it seems time-wise you are on the the mark for a first test.

(Drew) #18

Yeah, my lipids were high last year and Dr prescribed satin to me to take but I haven’t taken it. Had even said I likely wasn’t going to take it. I did metformin before but after I got my a1c controlled, I didn’t bother to continue it.
I know a higher hdl would be beneficial so I’m looking into how to raise that.

(Alec) #19

Drew
I think your trigs are too high and your HDL is too low.

  1. Reduce trigs by getting even tougher on ingesting any carbs. It’s carbs that drive the trigs.
  2. Increase HDL through eating saturated fat. As per previous advice, find fatty meat and eat, eat, eat!

Don’t worry in any way about total or LDL, these are VERY poor markers of disease. And don’t let your Dr talk you into statins. If you or he/she is in any way concerned about CVD, go get a CAC scan done which measures the actual disease. I did, and my CAC score of 10 is not zero, but it is very low (and my LDL is 450!!!.. go figure!)

Hope things are going well!
Cheers
Alec

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #20

A CAC score of less than 100 is a contraindication for taking a statin.