Food Freedom Friday Edition 340 - Carnivore & Still Hungry
You may have been following your carnivore or meat-based diet for a while and have been patiently waiting for those hunger-suppressing, craving-crushing benefits and you might find yourself questioning why you are still hungry.
When you deprive the body of energy for long enough, you get hungry. For many, this can happen relatively quickly and you might have found yourself munching on the closest available foods after a few hours of trying to stave off those nagging craving. That might get you across the line to your next meal, after which the process is on auto-repeat. In the standard caloric deficit, hunger is an ever-present threat. The diet, therefore, is largely a mind game. It shouldn’t be.
The carnivore diet is primed to fix the core issue with weight loss, and thereby radically improve your chances of successfully restoring your health and your weight. There is no nutrition plan that can rival a carnivore diet’s effect on appetite control, and that’s not simply due to the fact that your options have been narrowed down to five or six ingredients.
A carnivore diet suppresses hunger through:
· Ketones reducing ghrelin, the chief hunger hormone
· Removing carbohydrates prevents rebound hunger from hypoglycemia
· High nutrient density foods maximise satiety
· Fulfilling protein requirements, averting metabolic kickbacks from muscle loss
With all these benefits, there are still a few situations where feelings of hunger can sneak back in. Fortunately, in most cases, there are simple solutions close at hand to ensure your cravings get kicked to the curb.
Eat More Fat
Often, when coming from a, fat-phobic, standard Western diet some people tend to revert to the lower fat options like lean ground beef, sirloin, flat iron and filet.
This is not an optimal state for the body. With the carbohydrates removed, the metabolism is left to fuel itself with fats and proteins. If the fats in the diet are low, the body is unlikely to make full use of the stores available in adipose tissue, since that requires a decent level of fat adaption. Protein is a very inefficient energy source. It doesn’t oxidise easily, doesn’t store easily, and the amount you can absorb is limited.
Long term, too little fat can result in ‘rabbit starvation’ a form of malnutrition that exhibits itself in insatiable hunger and diarrhea and eventually, death.
Although death is not a potential side effect since it would require an extreme scenario to play out, eating too little fat on a carnivore diet can result in excessive hunger and low energy levels.
This phenomenon was likely the driving force behind ancient man departing the hunter-gatherer lifestyles and starting the agricultural revolution. The large, fatty mammals had been virtually wiped out, alongside countless other megafauna and large blubber-rich herbivores. Instead, they had to settle for hunting smaller, leaner prey. Fat became scarce, protein alone wasn’t enough, and they had to make a hard choice to ensure their survival. They were forced to add in carbohydrates.
In order to avoid this situation, simply replace chicken breast for chicken thighs, with a side of butter. You can swap the lean ground beef for medium, with a side of butter. The golden ratio to aim for is 1:1 protein to fat, by the gram. Manage that, and there are going to be plenty of fats coming in for the body to make use of.
Avoid Portion Control
Many embark on a carnivore type diet with the express intention of limiting calories on a diet that’s already highly satiating, and thermogenic to boot. As a result, they simply end up not eating enough.
They might lose weight, but it won’t be easy. The body isn’t healing, it’s not repairing nutrient deficiencies, and it’s not getting enough fats to restore long-dormant fuel pathways. Limiting portions on a carnivore diet results in missing the point of this way of eating. The goal is to provide the body with all the nutrients and energy it needs to heal and become revitalised. Hunger gets erased, and fat loss becomes a positive side effect. This is not achieved by adopting a 50% deficit with low-fat beef. That strategy might initially result in weight loss, but many periods of nagging hunger are the consequence.
Simplify the process by not approaching carnivore like a diet that boils down to calorie counting. Indulge, don’t restrict. Let the body get back to its ancestral baseline.
Fast Less
Intermittent fasting has numerous benefits including reduced hunger, raised autophagy, improved fat loss, and better cognition. Fasting also fits seamlessly within a carnivore diet, since both encourage using fat as fuel. Ketosis can be considered a form of fasting, since insulin levels are kept low and the catabolic AMPK pathway remains open. There is little difference when transitioning from a fasted to fed, and you continue to experience many of benefits as you move through the feeding window.
The intense level of satiety from those nutrient-rich meals in turn make the subsequent fast that much easier. You can push it from 16, to 18, even as far as 23 hours without feeling a pang of hunger.
There is, however, a time when fasting can be excessive and going with an OMAD (One Meal A Day) protocol is often a step too far. Fasting is stressful on the body. By raising cortisol, it can compound the fact that carnivore already is a potent cortisol pump. Furthermore, the limitations of protein absorption per meal, can result in one meal being too much for the body to cope with.
All of which means that a large fasting window can increase stress to unhealthy levels, while challenging the body’s ability to digest and utilise protein. Which leads to loss of lean tissue, and subsequently raises hunger.
The goal is fat loss, not starvation, and the fasting switch should be handled with care. Allow ketosis to do the work for you, space the meals out, and maximise your protein absorption. You can still fast, but keep it under 18 hours.
Use Salt Liberally
A generous helping of salt is the simplest and most effective hack at your disposal on the carnivore diet. Many of the initial side effects with hunger and lethargy can be a result of a state of dehydration brought about by the body flushing out excessive amounts of sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium when carbohydrates are reduced.
Raise your sodium levels through the consumption of salt, and the body can start to retain and balance the other electrolytes, subsequently restoring insulin sensitivity, quelling hunger, and revitalising the system. To put it simply, you have to more to lose from eating too little salt, than eating too much. The body is perfectly capable of excreting excess salt, but it cannot make some if it needs more.
Salt also happens to be your number one workout supplement on a carnivore diet, as it maintains performance by preventing dehydration and promoting better blood flow. A teaspoon of a high quality mineral salt or electrolyte blend can be a gamechanger provided you’re training hard enough to use it.
Salt Recommendations
· 1.5-3 tsp of salt per day
· + ⅔ tsp to minimal requirement for hard exercise
· + ⅔ tsp to minimal requirement for keto or carnivore induction
· ⅔-1 tsp of salt per day for carnivore
Maintain at least 3500mg of potassium per day, ideally in a 3:1 ratio to sodium.
Emphasize Recovery
Do you best to ensure you are spending the majority of your time in parasympathetic dominance. Get your sleep in, practice regular breathwork, keep a meditation routine, and take regular walks in nature.
If you’re not able to de-compress and implement stress management techniques, you will begin to feel repercussions including raised hunger levels and carbohydrate cravings. Insomnia gives you insulin resistance and a spike in cravings. Chronic cortisol impedes digestion. Lack of regular activity compounds all these problems. An optimally formulated lifestyle plan shouldn’t’ not be condensed down to a few narrow windows around training and mealtimes, it has to be allowed to span the day.
Be Patient
Sometimes, you simply have to hunker down and wait for time to work its magic. When you’re early in your carnivore lifestyle, especially if you are transitioning from a standard Western diet, it is wise to brace for a few challenges and mild setbacks. The metabolism is having to switch over from glycolysis to lipolysis and finally to ketosis. That transition is going to take time, sometimes more than 6 months!
It takes at least a few weeks to start effectively using ketones, and then another few months to master them. The first stage will generally be enough to dampen cravings, but you can expect further kickback if your gut is busy healing and strengthening. Repairing dysbiosis results in the bad bugs fighting for their survival. Hunger can come and go during that period, but there are a few strategies you can implement to ensure these periods are mild and easier to deal with.
Finally
Remember that on a carnivore diet, hunger and cravings are typically suppressed because each meal becomes more filling thanks to the high protein and high fat intake you get from meat. This makes it very easy to stick to a carnivore type diet and ultimately helps to restore your health and well-being along with the ability to naturally reduce calorie intake which leads to more weight loss.