Phase 2 Data Summary:

• 27.6 lbs weight loss

  • 9/8/24 to 10/6/24 (14.2 lb loss)

    • Lean Mass Change: +4.4%

  • 10/6/24 to 2/23/25: (13.4 lb loss)

    • Lean Mass Change: -0.1%

• Biomarker Changes During Phase 1:

  • LDL Cholesterol (LDL-C): 67.2 to 72

  • Apolipoprotein B (ApoB):

    • Calculated: 72 to 70

    • Measured (10/3/24): 89 (single measurement)

  • Triglycerides (TG): 144 to 121

  • HDL Cholesterol (HDL-C): 61 to 49

  • NMR LipoProfile (LabCorp):

    • LDL Particle Count (LDL-P) (nmol/L): 1382 to 1056

    • Small LDL Particles (sdLDL-P) (nmol/L): 734 to 447

    • Insulin Resistance Index (LP-IR): 49 to 56​​

• ​Supplement Stack (Pending)

• Phase 1 Blood Test Results (Pending)

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The Carnivore Diet and Me

Phase 1 was preoccupied with eating meat.  That’s right.  As I mentioned in "My Life Before N=1", my goal at the start of the phase was to just lose weight.  Shirts didn’t fit anymore.  Looked bad in photos.  I had no health focused ulterior motive for weight loss.  It was all about the cosmetic and the superficial.  Raising self-esteem.  The ability to remove a T-Shirt in front of others, without embarrassment, before jumping into the pool.

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The only variable making this weight loss pursuit different from other diet starts in the past was getting a baseline blood test before the start of the Carnivore Diet, including a fasting insulin.  I followed the baseline tests with two NMR LipoProfiles on 10/3/2024 and 3/10/2025.  The tests didn’t create any initial concerns, and the NMR tests were more of a curiosity at first, showing above normal numbers that didn’t appear to be problematic from what was a very limited, uneducated perspective.

 

That said, there were some measurable changes worth noting. After starting the diet, LDL-C rose by about 25 points from baseline to 93 then dropped to 72 in the 3/10/2025 NMR.  ApoB started at 89 (was never previously measured), HDL-C dropped by 20 points to 41, and my triglycerides dropped from 145 to around 105, then rose to 121 on 3/10/2025.   

 

So it would appear that Carnivore did not have a dramatic impact on elevating blood lipids overall during the phase, and the triglyceride reduction was a nice side effect of reducing carbs.  This conclusion, though, gets a bit complicated once you know a few more details about my experience with the diet.

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Swimming In Pools of Fat

The Carnivore Diet kicked off my N=1 journey and at the start, had turned me into a huge advocate of its ability shed pounds quickly while daily indulging in the forbidden non-fruits of the four major food groups (what were those again?).

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In case you read the page “Making the Decision” where I describe the path taken to discover and start this diet, my initial opinions about this forbidden non-fruit proved I was stuck in a long lived in box. How can you eliminate virtually every vegetable, every source of carbohydrates, from your daily diet, dramatically increase saturated fat intake and live to tell others about it?

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Appears that you can, or at least that's what the diet feels like when you are 100% invested at the start.

Within the first week after diet start, my energy levels rose. My activity increased. I forgot about taking my afternoon nap since I had no need for one anymore. I recall feeling the same after starting the Atkins' diet several decades earlier. You wake up more refreshed, your appetite is diminished, the pounds start to melt away, and the spotlight increasingly brightens as you discover you have arrived at the first day of the rest of your culinary life.

 

Dropping the carbs not only becomes easier, the sheer avoidance of carbs became a bit of an obsession. For instance, despite knowing that alcohol is not considered Carnivore Worthy, I had no intention of stopping its use, instead just adapting the type.  Prior to starting the diet, and looking back this was nothing I was proud of doing, I was consuming almost a bottle of wine a day during dinner prep, and at least two pints of draft beer when dining out. So, the start of Carnivore required a shift to that habit. Ideally, no alcohol at all. But like others I knew who were doing the diet, they managed to slip in a few whiskies and seltzers in the evening, dodging the carbs while crossing fingers that their livers wouldn’t mind.

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Alcohol is one thing, but carb avoidance went a bit farther for me than that. I do the cooking at home, and my wife does the dishes. Been doing it that way for decades. Starting a diet like Carnivore forces you to eat at home more, and while I was fully dedicated to the diet, my wife continued on her same diet, which is more like a poor man’s Mediterranean with an occasional side of Cheeze Its. I would make her pasta every now and then, and to check for the al dente' cook on the noodles, I would take a quick bite to assess doneness, then spit the tiny shards of that toxic mush into the sink. Yup. No carbs. None whatsoever.

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It’s Easy to Lose Weight When You Don’t Eat

The weight started coming off fast, and working with my personal trainer, he was always getting after me about tracking my food intake to ensure I was hitting my new Carnivore macro goal which started at 65% Fat, 30% Protein, and 0-5% Carbs. Given my age, weight and height, we had decided that I should be getting about 130-140 grams of protein a day.

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In case you haven't noticed, that is roughly two pounds of ground beef a day. Of course, ground beef isn't nearly as tasty as a well marbled Ribeye steak, and yet you need to eat a 1.5 pound ribeye just to get 115 grams of protein.  So even if you can eat that much meat, you need to make up the difference with eggs, bacon, sausage, and a protein shake (a potential Carnivore violation) during the day. No big deal, right?

When you are on the Carnivore Diet, getting answers to nuanced questions about it isn’t always easy.  You can read Dr. Shawn Baker’s original 2019 book about the Carnivore Diet, but I suspect that most people on the diet don’t take the time to read books when they can just click and go to social media and indulge in thousands of YouTube and TikTok videos, where the astonishing benefits of the diet are extolled and reinforced and repeated over and over and over again as soundbites that make the diet sound easy to do and impossible to refute.

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For instance, a big question from newbies is "how much food should I eat on the diet". Influencers tell them to "eat until you are full". This makes sense. Imagine a diet that not only makes food choice simple, but you don't have to pay attention to how much you eat. I mean, who WOULDN'T want to be on this diet?

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And this was the first wall I hit making me question the diet’s safety for me.  I was losing weight.  Primary goal accomplished, and as the influencers instructed, I only ate when hungry.  But, because the diet was so satiating, I was only getting about 900 - 1,100 kcals a day. I was OMAD (one meal a day) not by choice, but by necessity. I literally could not eat most of the day. Long periods of intermittent fasting was crazy easy, and the occasional mid-day cravings would be tempered by bulletproof coffee, which is pure fat, much of it saturated.

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And looking back at my blood test results in Phase 1, the lower overall energy intake was likely a factor that influenced my blood lipid test results.  If my food intake had been greater, I assume my lipid biomarkers could have been higher.  I can’t judge the diet’s high saturated fat content as a contributing factor for elevated LDL-C or ApoB since I didn’t eat enough fat overall to measure it objectively.

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And What Is a Side Effect of GLP-1 Agonists?

This complete lack of appetite gave me an idea of what it must be like when using a GLP-1 agonist.  It was certainly cheaper than the cost of that medication (as long as you stick to ground beef).

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I started tracking my food intake in FitnessPal after this reduction in food intake occurred and immediately discovered my protein intake was more in the range of 75-85 grams at best. Weight loss after the first month of the diet slowed down, and my Withings Body Composition scale was showing NO reduction to fat or lean mass percentage. I discovered that I was losing fat and lean mass in equal amounts. I only lost 13.4 pounds total during this period, but it was clear that despite regular resistance training, my protein intake could not keep up and I was losing lean mass at the same rate as fat.

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Before you say anything about those scales being inaccurate, I agree. The body fat and lean mass percentage values can be wrong. My recent DEXA scans in Phase 4 showed that the scale had erred on the lean and fat mass values. But, it did that consistently. Calibrated against my DEXA scans and the scale data from the same dates at the DEXAs, my scale had been overreporting Fat Mass by 4.0% and underreporting Lean Mass by 3.2%. Consistently.

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So, for me, eating until you are full wasn’t enough food.  Imagine. The CARNIVORE diet not delivering enough protein, especially when the influencers all assume fat, and not protein, is the main macronutrient you need to raise.  I tried adding protein shakes and lower fat proteins as afternoon snacks such as boneless, skinless chicken breast (another anathema), but these were easy to forget when your cravings go away.

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Booze and Beef

Having just beaten the protein horse to death, and being fair to the Carnivore Diet, my slowing weight loss during this phase had another reason.

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I was drinking several whiskies and seltzers, with a splash of allulose syrup, at home in the evenings before dinner through the last few months of 2024.  I rationalized this recalling my experience with the Atkins Diet several decades earlier, where I lost about 25 pounds eating boneless skinless chicken breast, and drinking Starbucks Breve Lattes and Rum and Diet Coke (I know, I wasn't a very discriminating drinker). Alcohol didn't get in the way of my weight loss then, or at least that's what I remember. I was so unaware of logging data and tracking my improvements back then that it most likely was a reason why the diet failed me as fast as it had succeeded.

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My drinking escalated after the 2024 holidays. A family issue had arisen that required my wife and I to travel out of state and stay in a hotel for most of January 2025. I maintained the Carnivore Diet rather well despite being away from home, and my satiety remained in check.  At the same time, though, I somehow ended up doing a shot of two of McClellan with my morning coffee to deal with that stressful situation, and a few more later in the day. A bottle would last for maybe 2-3 days, which would be soon replaced by another one.

 

Being honest, the alcohol did actually help to temper the stress in the short term, or so I rationalized it then, but the daily alcohol habit stayed with me when we finally returned home. I didn’t do straight shots in the morning. I added it to my black coffee instead, with a splash of allulose. This went on for about 6 to 8 weeks, during which intermittent fasting had effectively stopped, but the amount of daily food intake generally did not increase. 

 

Worthy of note - the naps I no longer needed returned.  As much as I used alcohol to deal with whatever emotional state I was in, or simply consumed out of ritual, it rarely accomplished its goal of taking off the edge.  It just made me tired.  Whatever pharmacological effect alcohol was intended to have was mostly wasted on me.  It became increasingly clear that alcohol was just a useless, toxic, purposeless ingestion calories that did nothing except raise our shopping budget, drain my energy, and slowly erode my health.

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Thankfully, my faithful blood tests showed me the error of my ways.  My ALT/AST scores on 3/10/25 gave me pause (72 and 74, respectively), and my last month in Phase 1 eliminated the morning booze.  By the end of the phase I had ended all alcohol consumption in the home and by the end of April 2025, I would stop it’s use entirely.

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The Process of Elimination, Or a Lack Thereof

Another downside of the Carnivore Diet, and one that is regularly reported, is difficulty with managing your bowel movements.  Feast or famine.  Days can go by without it, or there are days where you can’t leave the bathroom for an hour.  This problem is far more complicated than influencers will tell you. “Eat more fat to lubricate your poop”.  The body doesn’t work that way, but it makes logical sense, and logic based on assumptions and limited access to facts is something many influencers use as long as it sounds good.  “Fiber is bad for you”.  “Vegetables are toxic”. “The diet is pure and there is nothing to poop”.  And so on.

And poop without fiber?  Well, it can be a rather messy and, uh, sticky experience.

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Despite how ‘deadly’ fiber is supposed to be, I started to use fiber supplements early 2025 which had skittish effects.  It didn’t work.  Doing my homework later, it appears you need food mass for the fiber to offer any benefit, and fiber needs liquid which the Carnivore Diet doesn’t provide unless you drink a lot more water than you would with a balanced diet.  Your microbiome also lacks fiber-feeding bacteria due to a reduction in biodiversity, so the fiber can’t ferment properly and can bind to bile, adding to the constipation.  So, if you are on Carnivore, then yes, fiber is a no no.

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With added fiber failing me, I would go to the influencers seeking answers to these questions, and I grew concerned once again about their rote responses. You can’t trust the influencers trying to explain this problem when they say “add more fat” or God forbid, “reduce the fat”.  The problem with elimination on Carnivore is far more nuanced than you are usually told.

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Carnivore lowers microbiome diversity which affects elimination.  Maintaining your sodium and magnesium balance is helpful to improve the process, but can be difficult when insulin levels are low, requiring electrolyte supplementation.  Some people on Carnivore a long time end up adding fruit to their diet (which is anathema) to help raise insulin so they can more easily retain electrolytes.  The diet’s lower residue and fermentation, the altered bile flow and reduced motility – these are factors where the diet’s imbalance forces you to make constant diet adjustments that a more balanced diet would never need, just so you can poop properly. 

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Leaving Carnivore is a Thing

Between the protein challenge and the elimination issues, I chose to adapt the Carnivore Diet by the end of March 2025.  I started adding cruciferous vegetables to raise carbs to 10% of intake and swap out fattier cuts for leaner ones, trying to lower fat and raise protein while still hoping to maintain ketosis which even under Carnivore was intermittent and elusive.

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And when you adapt the Carnivore Diet to add anything other than animal products, you are effectively booted from the religion. The influencer sermons instantly became irrelevant.  I stopped YouTube subscriptions to all things Carnivore, especially those who were so devoid of new ideas that they made mostly ‘react’ videos so they could dump on the Carnivore heretics who dumped on them.

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More often, even the more ‘trusted’ doctor voices in support of Carnivore betray their confirmation bias.  Some will say they don’t trust nutrition studies that show high saturated fat, for instance, can raise LDL-C and ApoB and can contribute to cardiac events over time, but they will eagerly glom on to new studies saying that saturated fat doesn’t result in increased cardiac events.  They cherry pick study soundbites while ignoring other important study data such as how the studies only covered one to five years of people who had no preexisting CVD, that the people studied were not on keto or carnivore, and there was no data to show how much saturated fat they consumed over time. It takes decades for plaque to form, but this point seems to be ignored. 

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So although there are some sincere voices in the Carnivore community, the blinders are usually on.  No diet is ‘one size fits all’, but you wouldn’t know that from these passionate acolytes. You need to pay attention to what works for you, not what others believe works for them.  Feeling great is not a measure of health.  CVD has no outward symptoms except when the stroke hits.  Liver disease is already well advanced before your skin starts looking like a banana.  Get your tests done.  Evaluate the results.  And don’t trust anyone in social media whose main objective is to keep pumping out the same noise but in different colors, shapes and sizes, while hoping you won’t notice the absence of context and nuance.

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Your life, our lives, depends on us becoming our own best influencers.  Phase 2 is when I finalized realized this truth and took steps toward that goal.