a keto wrinkle for my carnivore diet

I don't even think I need to weigh myself to know I have to switch over to the carnivore diet, so I'll be switching over officially next Monday, but unofficially, I'll be taking baby steps into the diet starting Friday (today). Thursday night, I made a carnivore version of budae-jjigae using the usual fatty American meats (hot dogs, spam, burger meat), and that will last me maybe two days, if that. Carnivore purists insist that about the only allowable drink on the diet is water, but I'll be drinking my sucralose-sweetened tea as well as coffee—which is revolutionary because I'm not much of a coffee drinker, or at least, I wasn't.

The problem, though, is that I have a bunch of keto stuff in my fridge and pantry, and using it only on cheat days means that some of it will go bad while it sits there in storage. To solve that problem, I've decided to introduce a wrinkle into my carnivore schedule: I'll do six days on carnivore and one day on keto. Metabolically speaking, this might be ill-advised since the whole idea behind going carnivore is to get your carb count down to nearly zero. That said, going keto isn't the same as having a cheat day as I'll still be doing my best to keep the carb count down to a reasonable level. So if I keep my two cheat days per month, then the other two or so weekends of the month will have one day reserved for keto dishes. Psychologically, I think it might be good for me to have some veggies and nuts every once in a while. Meanwhile, anything sugary, like SlimFast, will be relegated to cheat days.

If nothing else, this revised schedule still represents a simplified life. Eating carnivore for six of every seven days ought to do wonders for my blood sugar, and if the seventh day is a keto day, then my blood sugar ought not to spike that much.

Getting back to the budae-jjigae for a moment: one of the ingredients in the broth is gochujang, a red-colored chili paste that is actually 47% carbs (rice flour)—yikes. So while I've cooked my meat in the budae broth, I'll be eating the meat and maybe only a few spoonfuls of broth. Later on, the proteins I cook will be more in line with how carnivore is supposed to be done: pan-fried with something like bacon grease (ideally, you're to avoid even the "good" oils recommended for keto, such as olive oil and avocado oil, because they're plant-based; this really is the diametrical opposite of veganism). The ideal carnivore meat is fatty, so pork belly is perfect for carnivore, as is ground beef chuck. Tenderloin is possible on carnivore but a bit too lean, so I may have to add some fat if I ever do a filet mignon. Dr. Ken Berry is currently on the carnivore diet, and he somehow manages to keep the protein/fat ratio at about 50/50. That sounds a bit difficult for me, but I'm going to try all the same. The idea, as with keto in general, is to get the body burning fat instead of carbs—call this ketosis or fat-adaptation.

I'm also looking forward to this shift to carnivore as an opportunity to master some cooking skills that really need improvement, such as cooking steak. I don't think I've ever once cooked a steak the way you're supposed to. I recall throwing slabs of beef in a pan and cooking them until "done," whatever that meant, but I don't recall ever using the techniques used by the masters to produce a perfect steak. This is partly because I'm not really a steak guy. Oh, I'll eat a steak (and enjoy it) if you put one in front of me, but left to my own devices, I prefer to slice or chop my proteins up into thin or bite-sized pieces and cook them quickly until done. So I need to learn how to cook a steak right, and now, I'll have the chance to do so because, on carnivore, you can have a steak for every meal, in principle. I also want to master the cooking of scallops. I'm pretty good with other water-creatures like whitefish, salmon, and shrimp, and I'm not too bad with clams and other bivalves, but scallops are kind of hit-or-miss for me, so this is another protein I'd like to master. In theory, scallops shouldn't be too hard: I've cooked them to perfection inside sauces, but pan-searing them has rarely worked out as intended.

So while I'm tentatively beginning my foray into carnivore Friday afternoon, I won't be starting in earnest until next Monday. I need to make a Costco run to stock my freezer up with meat; I can also have low-lactose hard cheeses on carnivore (like aged Parmigiano and pecorino, and maybe even Gruyère, although Gruyère might be considered more firm than hard), but I'm going to have to avoid some other foods that are normally keto-friendly, like heavy cream and yogurt (lactose again; lactose, as the -ose indicates, is a sugar). While watching a Mikhaila Peterson podcast on YouTube (she's the nerdy, gorgeous daughter of Jordan Peterson), I learned there's an even more extreme version of carnivore called "the lion diet," in which you subsist only on ruminant meat (a ruminant is a hoofed animal that chews its cud; technically, a ruminant has a four-part digestive system consisting of the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum)—beef, sheep/lamb, goat, etc. I think I like my seafood a little too much to consider going lion.

And that's the plan. This will radically reduce my carb intake, and we'll see whether all this effort finally leads my body to enter ketosis which, according to the experts I watch online, ought to happen within four or five days. I'm not bothering to buy ketosis pee strips; I've heard that these can actually be wildly inaccurate. I might invest in a shoulder-mounted blood-glucose monitor (noninvasive—no finger-pricking); these monitors can be synced with a cell-phone app and programmed to monitor your blood sugar all day long, allowing you to see your body's rhythms. Maybe I'll buy myself a monitor for Christmas.

What will all this mean for intermittent fasting? Well, I suppose I'll still be on an IF-ish schedule, but I might snack at night if satiety is a problem. (Any snacks will be carnivore, of course.) Eating every day instead of doing 24-hour fasts on Tuesdays and Thursdays will be less burdensome, psychologically speaking. For now, though, the focus will be less on the fasting and more on the elimination of nearly all carbs by going carnivore. As I said earlier, carnivore is basically keto on steroids; it's what they call an "elimination diet" in that you're cutting out entire food groups and radically narrowing the focus of your eating. But carnivore allows you to eat until you're full, and to do so up to three times a day, so I have high hopes that this will make the diet easier to follow than regular keto.

Okay... wish me luck. And consider this a sort of thirty-day challenge (but only sort of, as I'll still have my precious cheat days). If carnivore produces results, I'll stick with it. It will certainly be a victory for the CIM schema, if so, since this is less about caloric intake and more about reducing insulin production and promoting fat-adaptation.