I wrote yesterday about Kelly Hogan and Zero Carb Life. Today, I want to mention the very first modern person I ever heard of who made an intentional and ongoing nutritional plan to eat only meat. That person is Dr. Shawn Baker.
It was fall 2019, and I was exploring the low-carb rabbit hole on Reddit, and someone mentioned Dr. Shawn Baker and some of the points he makes about what he called a carnivore diet.
The funny thing is I didn’t recognize the name right away, but when I saw his picture, I recognized him because my husband was in school with him 25 years ago or so! This group of guys and their significant others would eat out together for all-you-can-eat crab legs or tacos or whatever the special of the day was on Tuesday nights after work. I met Shawn Baker at a few of those meals. He was the tallest and most muscle-bound man I’d ever seen IRL, and I remember he played Rugby.
When the group got together to eat out, he would keep eating and eating and eating at the restaurant that advertised all-you-can-eat deals until the restaurant manager would come out and say they had to cut him off. Then, he would argue with them a bit about whether this was an all-you-can-eat place or not. Although it felt outlandish to me at the time, it’s nothing compared to his current talking points. Suffice it to say, he’s been prepared and preparing for battle for years and years. God bless him. It’s amazing to catch up with him again in life and see him still saying the things that are unpopular to say and, at the same time, helping so many people in his unique way.
So, this new way of eating called carnivore that I was learning about in late 2019 intrigued me. I was pretty worried about trying it, though, because I had electrolyte issues when I would go very low carb. A couple of years earlier, I learned through trying keto that the leg cramps and sleeplessness could be cured by adding more fat. Yes, fat. I had tried supplementing potassium and broth and adding salt to everything, but adding fat solved the issue.
Dr. Baker is also an inspiration to me. Thanks to him, I made my first run at switching to a carnivore way of eating in January 2020. I lost 25 pounds in one month that month, and it was easy. The pounds just flew off. I have never had results like that before in my life.
In the past, the most I had ever lost after 18 months of trying was 30 pounds, and it took me only six months to put it back on once I folded and let carbs back in at a rate of more than 40 grams a day. It was just not maintainable for me.
The carnivore way of eating is maintainable, though. It strikes all the right chords for me, yet to others, it may look and sound like quite a weird idea of how to eat for good health. I can see now as I prepare to begin again that I’ll just have to have the courage to be a little weird and a lot determined to stick to the carnivore way of eating plan.
