Tag Archives: Red Meat

Strong Medicine by Dr. Blake Donaldson

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This is a classic low carb book which has been out-of-print for a long time. The PDF is already available on High Steaks – Meat is Life and Just Meat, but I decided to make it available through my website as well. Dr. Donaldson went to medical school in the late 1800s and practiced medicine in New York until the mid-1900s. His book was published in 1961. He had very good success treating his obese patients with an all-meat diet. His general prescription was 6 oz of lean and 2 oz of visible fat three times per day from either lamb or beef. He never recommended pork, chicken, fish, or eggs, but only meat from ruminants. He says that if his patients did not eat enough food, enough times a day, they would invariably stop losing body fat. If you struggle with obesity and cannot seem to lose weight no matter what you do, his approach is definitely worth exploring. I really enjoyed it.

Strong Medicine by Dr. Blake Donaldson

 

The Type A-Type B Weight Loss Book by H. L. Newbold

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Dr. H. L. Newbold is one of the original low carb thinkers, although that is not how he would have described himself. He was a man before his time who was able to think outside the box. As a physician in New York, he catered to a very wealthy clientele that primarily wanted to lose weight. However, the value of his book lies not in its focus on weight loss, but rather on the insight it offers to people with food and environmental sensitivities and intolerances. He observed initially in himself, and then in his patients, that certain foods and chemicals caused uncontrollable cravings for carbohydrates and subsequent disordered “addictive” or “binge” eating. Through trial and error, he came to the conclusion that some people simply cannot tolerate what he termed “new foods,” i.e grains, vegetables, fruits, and even dairy and eggs; in other words, any food that became a major part of our diet after the Agricultural Revolution was capable of triggering cravings for these sensitive people. Interestingly, he also discovered that many man-made chemicals commonly in use around us today are also capable of triggering these irresistable cravings. He includes a long list of all the different chemicals he identified that might be a potential issue. His solution to this problem for himself and his clients was to: first, remove all the “new foods” from the diet and return to the foods of our pre-agricultural ancestors, namely meat, but more specifically beef; and second, to reduce our exposure to the many chemical poisons that surround us in our modern environment. Like many in the Zero Carb Carnivore community today, he found that fish, chicken, and pork were all far from being able to satisfy his patients appetites, and many of his patients also experienced negative reactions, like fatigue, after eating them.

Unfortunately, his unique and insightful book is out of print and there seems to be no interest in republishing it, and used copies are prohibitively expensive. Therefore, I have taken the liberty to create a high quality PDF version and make it available for free here on my website. I originally read it when it first came out in 1991 and I have revisited it many times throughout the past 25+ years. I encourage everyone who struggles with weight management or food and chemical intolerances to make the time to read this largely forgotten classic on the value of a diet based predominantly on red meat. A word of caution: He is very sexist and some of his comments may offend female readers. Additionally, keep in mind that he was a pioneer forging a new path and did not have any one else to fall back on for experience in eating an all-meat diet. Consequently, he tends to err on the side of caution by including an array of vitamin and mineral supplements, as well as a very small amount of vegetables and/or fruits simply because he did not know is meat alone would provide himself and his patients all the nutrients needed for good health. However, there are many others since the time his book was published who have decided to adopt an all-meat diet for health reasons, without the addition of any plant foods or supplements, and have remained perfectly healthy for many years and even decades. Nevertheless, please pay attention and listen to your own body which may have special needs and follow whatever path feels best to you. If you wish to meet and converse with other carnivores, please join us in our Facebook group Principia Carnivora. May your journey be blessed!

The Type A-Type B Weight Loss Book by H. L. Newbold 

 

Why Do You Eat Your Meat Raw?

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Why Do You Eat Your Meat Raw?

It seems like almost every week that a new person who has stumbled into our Zero Carb Facebook group Principia Carnivora asks this question. Since it comes up so often, I have decided to take some time to articulate my personal reasons for choosing raw meat over cooked meat.

When I first started a Zero Carb diet 21 months ago on January 1, 2015, I began with a wide variety of animal foods: eggs, cheese, butter, cream, bone broth, chicken, pork, and beef. All of it cooked. I really struggled with Zero Carb in the beginning because I simply did not feel that good no matter what I ate. Removing all plant foods from my diet certainly helped, but I was still experiencing a lot of negative symptoms from the animal foods I was eating. The biggest symptom with the most impact on my quality of life is chronic migraine headaches.

About 6 months into my Zero Carb journey, I finally discovered that I am histamine intolerant. Histamines are in all aged and fermented foods, as well as eggs and any foods that are slow-cooked, and this is why I have continued to struggle with chronic migraine headaches on a Zero Carb diet. One-by-one, I removed everything from my diet except for beef. And even with the beef, I have to make sure that I get it as fresh as possible and use it immediately. The longer beef – or any meat – is aged, the more histamines it will contain. The longer a steak sits on the shelf after being cut off of a main primal piece by the butcher, the more histamines it will contain.

All last winter (2015-2016), I was eating very lightly pan-fried fatty beef chuck roast steaks. And when I say lightly, I mean 30-60 seconds per side, leaving the meat blue-rare inside. This was working to some extent, but I did not feel all that good. In fact, I got a terrible cold virus last winter that came back three separate times! I literally never get viruses, so to have the same one three times in just a few months was both very worrisome and very unpleasant. The last time I had a virus prior to this was in the winter of 1999-2000, when – incidentally – I was also eating a fair amount of cooked meat (one of my earlier attempts to escape veganism, LOL!).

So, I knew I should be eating my meat raw, but the cold, wet winter and the state of my mind at the time, were really making it difficult for me to do this. Once the weather warmed up a bit, however, I decided to give fresh raw ground beef another try. After a few weeks, I got used to it and then the taste of the cooked meat wasn’t all that enticing any more. Nevertheless, I continued to have a cooked meal here and there, very rarely. But each time I did this – I noticed that 1) I did not feel as well after eating the cooked meat as I did after eating the raw meat; 2) I did not digest the cooked meat as well as I digested the raw meat; and 3) I could tolerate much more fat when I ate it raw verses cooked.

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LEM Big Bite #12 All Stainless Steel Meat Grinder

One of the things I have personally found very helpful on my Zero Carb Journey is periodic fasts. I have completed three separate 16-day fasts (each were a combination of water and dry) over the past 21 months. Each of these fasts has helped me quite significantly. Histamines build up in the body over time and fasting is the single most effective method I have discovered to allow my body to eliminate them from “storage.” When the meat I can normally eat without issue begins to give me migraine headaches, then I know my histamine “bucket” is full so-to-speak and it is time for another fast.

I just completed my most recent 16-day fast a week ago. It went really well. But coming off the fast has been both challenging and enlightening. First, I decided to experiment with Fiji water and it gave me a migraine headache and caused me to feel generally crappy. This tells me that the company adds minerals to the Fiji water, which is implied but not directly stated on the label. I am 100% certain of this because I felt exactly the same way as I always feel after taking any supplements of any kind. They all make me very very very sick just like the Fiji water did.

After I recovered from the Fiji water debacle, I decided to try cooking my meat one night. I had broken my fast 6 days earlier and – up to that point – I had eaten only raw ground beef according to my usual custom. Although I am kind of unhappy with myself for choosing to cook my meat this night, I gained an enormous amount of clarity about what my body does and does not like due to this unhappy choice. So, ultimately, the experience was an extremely valuable one because of the new knowledge it brought me.

Needless to say, my body had a very negative response to the cooked meat. I started getting a migraine headache within a few hours of eating it and, 3-days later, I am still suffering the consequences. The next morning, lymph nodes throughout my body were incredibly painful. The effects from eating the cooked meat were so bad, that I actually had to go back on a short dry fast to give my body a chance to work through it. I tried eating my normal fresh raw ground beef the next day, but that just made the migraine headache and lymphatic inflammation worse.

This is one of the reasons I am such a huge advocate for both fasting and doing a bare bones version of the Zero Carb diet if you are new to this way of eating. There are so many potential variables when you eat any and all animal foods that there is really no way to tell how you are responding to them if you include them all indiscriminately. If you start with just fatty beef and water, then you have removed all of the most potentially problematic foods in one fell swoop. After you have eaten only beef and water for 30-days, you can then test other Zero Carb foods one at a time to see how you do with them.

Fasting takes this process one step further by eliminating all food for a period of time. This way when you add back a food, whether from a basic beef and water diet or from a fully fasted state, your body can give you a much clearer response to whatever food you are testing. This is what happened to me with this last fast I did. Being away from any cooked meat for a while prior to the fast, and then doing a long fast, made it considerably easier for my body to let me know that it really really really does not like cooked meat.

Prior to this, I was living in a fantasy world that I could sort of go back and forth between raw and occasional cooked – if and when I felt the desire for it – but this experience has shown me just how utterly delusional that idea was! From here on out, I am no longer seeing cooked meat as an option for myself. This was a very powerful transformative “a-ha” moment for me. I will never again choose to eat meat that has been cooked even the tiniest bit. Cooked meat is now in the same category as plant foods: it is no longer a “food” as far as I am concerned.

While some people might find this realization to be even more restrictive than what most would already perceive to be a very restrictive Zero Carb diet, I personally find it quite liberating to have finally reached a very definitive conclusion on this issue. There is no more doubt about it, and it is one less decision I need to make. It is all raw all the way for me!

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