Well, it is now September of 2024, and life continues. Just better. I'm still sewing, as well as a lot more renovations on my house since I'm in such better health now. The next bit, is only for those of you who want to feel young again, and are adventurous. Ha! No strings, nothing for sale, and a year and a half ago, I'd not have believed it either, but now, wow... I have been wanting to share this for a long time, and today I have a few minutes and have done this long enough to feel as if I have something to add to the health conversation for my fellow breast cancer survivors.
I have big news since before. And, firstly, I want to admit I was wrong about something big. For years, I've suggested people vastly increase their intake of veggies and fruits and eliminate sugar and flour. It worked for me to some extent, but I was only right about half of it. Eliminating the sugar and flour, wrong about the veggies and fruits. (Did your jaw drop just now?) My health improved with those things, but after learning more, it has grown better and better because I now know it had originally improved simply because of eliminating the sugar and flour. It was a good start, but not the most important part.
Last year, I still had arthritis, bad neck and back pain, neuropathy in my feet, kidney issues, and heart issues, which all turned out to be from inflammation still caused by diet. I was also carrying a fair amount of excess weight, still, and taking a lot of meds to combat symptoms from all those things. It was mostly the veggies to blame, and dairy! Yeah, I know, but hear me out. Veggies have things in many of them that cause inflammation, they are carb heavy, just to a lesser extent than sugar and flour, and we're only just now learning about it more.
Have you ever heard of the 'Carnivore' way of eating? Basically, it's Keto but more strict on carbs. Mostly meats and eggs and high fat. I thought it was crazy, until researching further, and finding tons of people online who had reversed their bad health by eating this way, then one by one as I asked around, I found people in my own area who had remarkable results that I saw, in person, and was amazed.
To make it simple, you just eat meat, mostly. Totally eliminating every carb possible. It's often simplified as "Beef, Butter, Bacon, & Eggs", but I also can tolerate dairy such as heavy whipping cream, sour cream, cream cheese, various other cheeses, chicken, fish, seafood, just not milk. There are those who go all ballistic if a Carnivore adds in a few seed spices or whatever, but whatever, you do you. I'll do what works for me. I use a lot of salt and some spices, just not the ones with sugar added like seasoning salt and such.
What's happened for me? Well, in just a few months, I've gone from size 18 jeans to size 8, which still amazes me! I no longer have any arthritis pain so don't take an anti-inflammatory or pain pills, I no longer have painful neuropathy in my feet so I no longer take Gabapentin (Neurontin), my heart issues have settled down to the point I've gone from 2 or 3 beta blocker pills per day to NONE, and...the biggest...I am no longer considered diabetic. Yep, you heard that right, my blood sugar is well controlled, with no medication at all. I also have hit my goal of no longer being charted as 'obese' for my height, I quickly went to 'overweight' and have since made it to the center of the chart's BMI for 'healthy weight'.
Turns out, I am not an anomaly. Almost everyone who eats this way, has eliminated the need for most if not all of their meds and are living incredible, pain-free lives! Auto-immune issues tend to go away, gut problems heal, hormonal problems balance out, etc.. There's no special 'diet' stuff to buy, no one is trying to sell you something to do this, you just toss the carb laden stuff out of your pantry and only shop the meat and cheese and butter section of your store, lol... Yep, easy as that.
I can hear some of you now, "THIS CAN'T BE REAL!" Well, I am 67 years old, and feeling as if I'm in my 20's. Believe me, I still have trouble believing it's real myself, and I am living it. I look in the mirror and I'm so different! Even my sagging eyelids are gone, my eyes are more open, and without plastic surgery to lift them. I used to think I had 'dowager's hump' on my upper back, looked as if my shoulders slumped, but with the weight going away, the hump went away! Anxiety, that's another one, it just stopped. Things that used to bother me, like climbing ladders, is so easy now. I have been painting ceilings, going up and down a ladder without a second thought. I'm actually considering going skydiving at some point, lol...and I was SO afraid of heights before. Now, that's just plain weird, but there it is.
My brain had felt as if it didn't work as well as before chemo all those years ago, and in recent years I'd felt as if age had slowed it, also. That's gone. I think clearly, remember things easier, and am simply HAPPIER. I wake up every day content, then smile, stretch, bound out of bed ready to take on the day. There was a time I had a walker to help me stand up in the mornings to get to the bathroom, but now I simply get up and walk. In the old days, I'd heat up a hot pack for my back while coffee was making, but I can't even remember where my hot packs ARE anymore, as I don't need them.
What changes me back to the way I was before? Well, I started feeling so indestructible that I tried eating a few carbs one day, and within 24 hours I had put on 9 pounds of water weight, I was in pain all over, my legs had swollen from the knees down, and it scared me back onto my eating plan, lol... It took me several days of clean eating to get back to normal. (Update: I wrote that above months ago, but it's been a solid year and a half, maybe even closing in on two years, and finally I can eat something with a few carbs and be over it by the next morning. Even blood sugar goes back to normal quickly, so maybe my pancreas has healed itself, too.)
Every so often, I do add one food back and test it for a few days. Turns out, onions don't return the inflammation, so I have those again fairly often. Tomatoes in chili? Swelling and pain, instant weight gain, so just a little tomato sauce, but no beans at all. Carnivore is something of an elimination diet. You get off the carbs you're addicted to by eliminating ALL of them, then once you're in tip-top health after a few months, if you want to risk it, you can add something back, and if nothing happens in a few days or a couple weeks, add another thing. Not all people have inflammation from all the same veggies and fruit, you just have to see what YOU can tolerate, but honestly, we don't need carbs at all, there is NO daily requirement for carbs, none.
People were fairly healthy and trim until around the 1960's when more processed foods became available. Look back at school photos before then, all the children and almost all the adults were trim and energetic. Go look at schools now, and see how rare it is to see a trim child, go to Walmart and look at adults. We've normalized being overweight and unhealthy just in the last 50 or 60 years, so much so that we feel we look like everyone else, it must be fine. It's time we took our lives back from the rule of food 'manufacturers' and pharmaceutical companies who have ruined our health to buff up their bottom line. As long as we are addicted to carbs, they control us. No more for me, I'm ready to stay healthy! (Yes, I am about to dance around chanting, "NO MORE MEDS! NO MORE MEDS!", lol... forgive me, but dang, it feels GOOD to not need them anymore. I've not been to a pharmacy for any of 2024, and I had brought home a sackful every month for YEARS before.)
I can, from experience, tell you that most of the veggies and fruits I've eaten for years, are off the table for me now. Things we've been told were proven facts about healthy diet, have turned out to be false. Fiber? Yeah, no, we don't actually need it. Green leafy veggies? Nope. Thinking red meat is bad for us? Nope, not true for hardly anyone. My overall bloodwork is so much better after changing over, that it's ridiculous. Turns out, total cholesterol and LDL have nothing much to do with bad health at all, and they may go up on this, but thankfully my primary care physician is an enlightened sort who keeps up with the latest medical studies and knew in advance that those numbers weren't important or dangerous for me. Docs are now saying that it may be a few years to get all the labs to stop showing those in the red, but it'll happen. We've been lied to about needing statins, too.
The biggest thing is that I FEEL SO GOOD! ALL THE TIME! Without any meds! I've even FINALLY gotten off having to use a sleeping pill to get any meaningful sleep, because I'm less awakened by pain anymore and my mind is more settled at night.
Is it like this all the time? Yes. Unless, I get crazy and eat a cookie or two, or a few bites of sugary cheesecake. There are ways to eat those things without having sugar or flour or carbs, but why bother for the most part. I drink coffee with heavy cream and butter whipped in it, tastes like dessert, and though every cup has probably 350 calories in it, and obviously is very high in fat, it doesn't bother me or put weight on me. I eat all the meat and eggs I want, and eat until I'm full, no need to count calories or limit myself. You NEED to eat as much in fats as you can, and I choose butter mostly, but love fatty cuts of meat. And did I mention bacon? Yum.... Eat lots, it's fine. Eggs are amazing, and I've found that I have vision issues come back if I don't eat eggs, they are extremely nutritious, especially for the eyes it seems, and especially the yellows of the eggs.
Turns out, you CAN get all your nutrients in meat and eggs. It's better to occasionally have organ meats like liver to make sure, and some occasional seafood to get your iodine, but I suppose you could take a vitamin supplement if you didn't want to. I don't, other than a drop of Lugol's 2% iodine occasionally. If you want to experiment with this, look on YouTube for Dr. Ken Berry and watch some of his Monday night question and answer videos to get common questions about Carnivore answered.
Then, start noticing how many heart doctors are coming on YouTube to tell people that their patients are HEALING with this way of eating, watch Dr. Chaffee especially on that, and watch how many people who started out weighing several hundred pounds have switched to this and lost the weight, along with their diseases, you will have video proof of how great this is and be able to see each week's video as they shrink and gain good health again.
Sure, you have to learn a few things that do and don't work for you, but learn from others to start so you don't have to work so hard to learn. Once you experience what feeling great FEELS like again, you will find the new lifestyle easier and easier and easier to live with. Don't just go off your meds right away, wait until you know you don't need them, and ask your doctor how to decrease them safely and gradually because that is important. Some meds, I asked my doctor first, some were the kind I knew if I needed or not, like pain meds, and stopped when I no longer needed them.
Friends may try to tempt you to eat something you know is going to hurt you, but then, are they really friends if they do that? Are they going to be there to help you painfully arise out of your bed the next morning when inflammation is back? Nope. You may want to avoid hanging out with 'temptation' until your carb addiction is over with for good, but after that, it is pretty easy to just smile and say 'no thank you'. I rarely eat out anymore. Restaurants use too much sugar and seed oils that are harmfull, it's not worth having swollen feet or feeling lethargic, just for a few mouthfulls of food.
If you think this is expensive, with all that meat, it really isn't. You can even do this with hamburger meat and hot dogs, just get the ones with the least sugar or carbs listed on the package, but mostly avoid processed foods with tons of ingredients, go for things with just one or two ingredients in them when possible. If you can look at a food and tell what animal it came from, it's probably ok to eat. Skip all cereals altogether, even oats. I loved oatmeal, but...well...it's animal food that cereal companies told us was healthy. It isn't.
When you consider how much you spend for meds, plus snacks, cookies, candy, colas, etc... you will likely find your grocery bill goes down to practically nothing. I've also found that if you go to your local grocery stores around 7 to 7:30 in the morning, you'll find large amounts of meats cut to as low as half price because it's soon going to be the last day they can sell it. That seems to be a secret your friends who know, don't tell you, lol...because they get all the great deals! Fill up your freezer, and thaw it to cook as needed. There are many weeks I eat for under $30 a week, easy. I'm certainly never hungry. Eating all the high fat stuff keeps you full so you don't want to snack, and I make it a point to get plenty of water because sometimes when you want to snack, you're really just thirsty or bored. It takes awhile at first for you to relearn what is actually hunger, and not just a carb addiction feeling, but that passes. I never actually feel 'hunger' at all, and now I want the kind of foods I eat, instead of wanting junk food.
Go check all this out on your own, and learn. Don't take my word for it. I've just given an overview, and few of my closest friends do this so I've had to learn from YouTube videos mostly, plus my butcher (who is carnivore and gives me tips and encouragement) and two of my auto mechanics (one who went from over 300 pounds to about half that size) and various people I've ran into who happened to overhear us talking about this. My heart doctor, oncologist, and primary doctor have all said they have proof this is working, because they did regular blood tests for years and the difference is dramatic. My primary doctor has tried to get his other patients to try this, but most would rather take pills.
Health conscious younger people are starting to do this now, so they can avoid the age related illnesses that run in their families. There's been some folks looking into using this as a way to avoid Alzheimers and senile dementia, because both have been linked to inflammation and high blood sugar, this eliminates both.
As for me, at 67 years old, I'm looking forward to a healthy, energetic, enjoyable life, doing anything I care to do again. Do I miss eating a bag of cookies? Maybe, but not so much that it'd make me go back to a pain-filled life full of various specialists, having to grunt as I try to get out of a chair. Hopping up like a teenager is something you'll get used to again FAST, lol..and you won't want to go back. The first time you eat something bad for you and feel what you once had thought was 'normal' before Carnivore, you will go right back to eating right.
This is probably my last year of seeing all of my various specialists for checkups, though I do enjoy seeing their faces when they see me now, lol... and some want to see how this goes. It's like age-reversal for me. I can run now, so I do. I can walk all day long without getting tired, so I do. I can stand for hours on concrete floors without resting, can drive without my arms going numb or my neck hurting, so I do. I can cut a tree up with my chain saw, load it in my truck, unload it at the burn pile, and repeat. I can lift heavy weights again, because along with all that protein, my muscles have grown and strengthened considerably. I'm now the one who races to help someone lift something now instead of waiting for someone to help ME, lol...
What I would like to remind you is that I am not a doctor, I am a patient, who had extraordinary results with this way of eating, following other individuals like me who had the same results. Don't follow anyone without researching it yourself. Also, don't follow people who say you need to buy 'their' product to get healthy, you can heal on your own without buying anyone's product. We simply should eat to live, not live to eat. Also, "Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food." Food really is our medicine, it gives our bodies what it takes to heal themselves.
With this change, even my gums lost their inflammation and healed, and a weird thing a lot of people have mentioned is that their hair started going back to their natural color. I thought it was my imagination, with my own hair, until reading a question someone else asked on social media on a Carnivore based page, and finding the other people started jumping in saying the same thing, lol... Doesn't happen to everyone, and not all the way back, but enough to make me wonder what causes it. Personally, I think it's the Redmond's Real Salt that most of us choose to eat as the purest sea salt, because it has a lot of trace minerals including copper, but what do I know.
To end this, don't lose hope. Ever. What you've experienced with cancer treatments doesn't have to be forever, like we once thought and were told. Keep your faith strong, and keep learning, keep moving forward, keep getting stronger. Look for the solutions, as always, because as survivors, WE WILL BE FINE. We are warriors who survived cancer surgery. Chemo? Another bump in the road we had to deal with. So, solving health issues as we age? Pffft..... we are survivors, I'm pretty sure we can all make it just fine as long as we approach life with open minds, willing to learn.
Love to you all!