Author Archives: GAHCindy

Do Troll the Vegans

Posted on by

It’s for their own good.

It seems at least some vegans feel that the rest of the world owes them a life devoid of delicious meaty scents. Especially while they’re running. While I’m running, I do not worry much about the smell of grass as I fly by the neighbors mowing their lawns. And I certainly wouldn’t ask the neighbors to please not mow their lawns until I’m finished, just because I don’t want to eat that. What is wrong with these people? (But we know what’s wrong with them. They need meat for their brains to work right.)

I did this at a grocery store last year. The look on the starving individual’s face was hilarious:

They’re just hungry, poor things. Grill all day, every day, meat eaters. The life you save will be the vegan that finally breaks down and asks for a bite of real, proper human food.

 

Carnivore Popcorn

Posted on by

Somebody asked me a while back what they could do for popcorn. My friend, I have found it!

You’re going to have to do a little footwork to procure the materials if you don’t buy your beef in bulk the way I do. If you do, tell your butcher you want the trim fat. And the suet and the marrow bones, and the organs! Don’t waste food! But this is about the trimmings. If you don’t buy your animals in bulk, you can probably go to any butcher and ask for fat trimmings. I promise, they will not think you’re crazy. Just march right up to that counter and ask!

When I got my first big ugly bag of fat with a bunch of red meat still stuck to it, I momentarily thought “What in the world am I going to do with this? Why did I ask for this?” I like suet for rendering, as it gets you a nice clean tallow, but this? This has a lot of meat still on it!

Um, hey…Carnivore person? It’s A BUNCH OF FAT WITH A LITTLE BIT OF MEAT ON IT! Isn’t that what you prefer to eat?

So I diced it up into about 1/4 inch pieces

And I fried it and ate it with my pitifully lean steak. (If you are one of those blessed people who have an air fryer, this would be a good use for it!)

You don’t need to eat this stuff as a side. It would make a marvelous small meal (aka, a snack).

You will never miss popcorn again, I promise. Just try it.

Tiger Nut Flour Chocolate Cupcakes

Posted on by

These are also sugar-free and low carb, depending on your definitions. 

Print Recipe

Gluten-free Chocolate Cupcakes

An allergy friendly cupcake. No dairy, no coconut, no nuts.
Prep Time10 minutes
Cook Time20 minutes
Course: Dessert
Keyword: allergy sensitive, dairy free, keto, low carb, sugar-free
Servings: 24

Equipment

  • 2 muffin/cupcake pans
  • 24 cupcake liners

Ingredients

Dry Ingredients

  • 3 cups tigernut flour sifted, then measured
  • 2/3 cups cocoa powder
  • 1/2 cups cassava flour
  • 1 T baking powder
  • 1 T instant coffee

Wet Ingredients

  • 1 cup monkfruit erythritol blend or preferred sugar substitute
  • 1 cup melted butter 2 sticks
  • 1 cup water Milk, coconut milk, almond milk, etc. can be used here.
  • 1 T vanilla extract

Instructions

  • Preheat oven to 350℉.
  • Sift tiger nut flour before measuring, then sift all dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl.
  • Add all wet ingredients to a mixing bowl and mix with a blender or stand mixer whisk attachment until sweetener is dissolved.
  • Add one cup at a time of the dry mixture to the wet mixture, blending thoroughly before adding the next cup.
  • If the mixture isn't quite thin enough to resemble cake batter, also add more water by the tablespoon as you go. Tiger nut flour is inconsistent, in my experience, so liquid measurements are approximate.
  • Spoon or pour cake batter into lined cupcake pans.
  • Bake for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into a cupcake comes out clean.
Print Recipe

Sugar-free Chocolate Butter Frosting

A sugar free chocolate butter frosting
Prep Time5 minutes
Course: Dessert
Servings: 24

Equipment

  • Stand mixer with paddle attachment or hand mixer

Ingredients

  • 2 1/4 sticks butter at room temperature
  • 1/2 cup powdered monkfruit erythritol blend sweetener or desired sugar substitute
  • 3 T cocoa powder
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 2 T avocado oil approximate

Instructions

  • Blend all ingredients together except the avocado oil, until homogenous.
  • Add avocado oil a little at a time, as needed, to reach a spreadable consistency.

We made these cupcakes for a birthday treat recently, and they went over well enough that I thought I’d share it. Since we have both dairy allergies and coconut allergies, and I’m just opposed to almond milk on principle, I used water for the liquid. You would probably get a better result with real milk or even fake milk.

I can’t eat even the tiniest bite of chocolate, as I confirmed again recently at a friends’ child’s birthday party. I ate a few chocolate covered banana slices (to be polite, and not at all because I love chocolate covered bananas), and six weeks later, I am finally starting to dry up the resulting acne from my face. I remember during a health class in high school, the school nurse said it was a myth that chocolate causes acne. Well, it might be a myth for some people. It is not a myth for me.

Consequently, I can’t personally tell you whether this cake is any good at all, but the kids loved it!

 

A Palm Sunday Thought

Posted on by
I was teaching Sunday school this morning. I hadn’t prepared a lesson, but it’s Palm Sunday, so we went first to Mark ch. 10, and then to Psalm 118, which is the scripture the people were singing from as their King entered Jerusalem.
This is also the Psalm that names Him as “the stone that the builders rejected” that “has become the head of the corner”. The very next verse after “blessed is He who comes” says:
” The Lord is God,
and he has made his light to shine upon us.
Bind the festal sacrifice with cords,
up to the horns of the altar!”
All of those people, under the power of the Holy Spirit, were singing of the sacrifice coming to be killed for their sins. I doubt a single one of them had any inkling that He was the sacrifice. They were just singing the song of their Conquering King. Since it was the Passover, they would have expected Him to perhaps preside over the sacrifices, not be the sacrifice.
The chief priests must have been shaking in their boots.
The King was coming.

Book Recommendation: Atomic Habits

Posted on by

Lest anybody think my sudden return to blogging, even if it’s only five minutes a day, has anything at all to do with any sticktoitiveness within myself, I must recommend the book that got me back on the straight and narrow.

 

I’ve always been fairly organized, and pretty motivated to get things done, and I found a lot of stuff in this book that I had intuitively been doing already in those areas I’m doing well at. But I also found some ways of looking at things that really kicked me in the pants and made me realize that I’ve been wasting a LOT of time letting bad habits, procrastination, and fear pull me away from things that I really want to do, and am capable of at least to some extent, like playing piano and getting actual blog posts in the hopper on a regular basis.

Atomic Habits is well-written and full of practical and philosophical advice. Just don’t pay any attention to examples of healthy habits like getting vaccinated and eating vegetables, and you’ll be fine.

Do I Have the Guts?

Posted on by

To run this 7-mile race?

I’ve been running between five and fifteen kilometers a week for about three years now. I never really think of myself as a runner, since I only do it because I enjoy that freedom of movement and that much-vaunted runner’s high. But a young girl asked me the other day, while we were talking about some stuff “You’re a runner, aren’t you?”

And you know what? I realized that I kinda am. I don’t just run. I am a runner. I wouldn’t give it up for love or money at this point.

So, why don’t I raise the stakes a little?

I’m about to enter my first race. It would be, like every run I take, a race against myself. I have no expectation of beating any other human. I don’t wonder so much if I can finish it, or how fast–I think I can predict these things–but whether I have the guts to let other people see me possibly fail. Or wear the “wrong” socks. Or look all red in the face and frazzled at the end. And, most likely, “lose”. Even though, for me, just to show up would be a win.

To be honest, my times are abysmal. I’m nowhere near what I wish I was. Seven miles is about twice my usual run, which is habitually 5-6k. That’s all I have time for most days. The top females my age last year did it in about an hour, and I’m pretty sure I can do close to that, anyway.

I’ve never competed, except with myself. I don’t do things for spectators. Is my social phobia so deeply buried (carnivore did that) that I will actually make it out on the big day? And actually do it? Just showing up would be a win.

I’ll let you know if I’m a winner or a loser when the day comes. I just hit “submit registration”.

 

Why Carnivore Didn’t Work For You, Part 6: You Didn’t Know Your Reason

Posted on by

Why are you doing this, anyway?

I will occasionally come across somebody online who says that they tried carnivore, even though they didn’t have any particular reason to do so. By that person’s estimate, she had already been in perfect health and everything she was doing was working just fine. But she wanted to see if the carnivore way of eating would improve anything. And she usually finds that, in fact, she had been a lot less healthy than she thought she was. Her libido roars back to life, or the joint pain that she thought was due to “getting older” goes away, or the ringing in her ears stopped. All sorts of unanticipated pleasant things happen to people who eliminate plants from their diets. It’s almost magical!

But there are, for the first few weeks of shifting to a carnivorous diet, often some unpleasant things to be gotten through. Most of these difficulties can be mitigated by reading the rest of this series: Why Carnivore Didn’t Work For You, and taking that advice. If you hadn’t read these posts of mine, though, or gotten advice from someone else who has been there, you might have jumped into the carnivore diet feet first, with no idea why, except that the Meat Life™ sounds like a pretty cool bandwagon, and you didn’t want to miss out.

So you got a few days or weeks in, and stuff started to happen.

You felt lethargic and depressed. You started to feel like you were hypoglycemic. You got explosive diarrhea, or stopped going to the bathroom altogether. It got so bad you just gave up and had the spaghetti one day, et voila, you felt better. Back to your old self. Man, you missed that bread! I mean, the tinnitus came back, and you’re looking a little puffy again, but at least you feel happy!

My friend, carnivore works, even for you. It really does. But because you didn’t have a very strong reason to stick through and troubleshoot whatever was going wrong, you didn’t get to a place where you could experience that. I truly believe that there is nobody whose health or mood is so good that carnivore couldn’t make it better. But without something driving you to eat better, all of the potential pitfalls of the adaptation phase–sugar cravings, social needs, bowel upheavals, or doubts about the medical safety of it–you will quit.

If you’re making a change so drastic as this with no good idea why, it’s going to be, for all but the most stubborn of people, an unsustainable change. If you want to give the carnivore diet a go, know why you’re doing it first. Maybe it is something as simple as “better overall health”. But if you don’t name the result you’re looking for, you’ll likely lose sight of your progress when faced with difficulties. Go ahead and let your reason be “just” tinnitus. But hold on to your reason, friend. You’re going to need it when you’re at the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet and your family is chowing down on muffins and waffles, while you’re stuck with the bacon and eggs.

It won’t be enough that you’re just trying out a new way of eating. You will need sweet reason to get you through. After a while, you’ll start to notice other little reasons that you can add to the list. Your psoriasis went away. You’re no longer anxious. You made it through a menstrual cycle without anybody having to call the cops on you. Write all that stuff down. Add every small victory to your list of reasons to stick with it.

And stick with it, friend. Carnivore works.

 

It’s Just Five Minutes

Posted on by

I can do five minutes!

There was a time when blogging was habitual to me. Somebody would say something, and I’d be discontent with the conversation, and I’d turn it into a blog post. Or I’d have an idea that seemed shareable, and even though I doubted anybody was even going to read it, I would post it. It was fun! I fell out of the habit; what with all the children running around, and having to school them, run the household, tend to dogs and chickens, I just ran out of time.

I thought. I thought I ran out of time. What I really ran out of, was the habit. So I’m going to try to do five minutes a day of blogging from now on, talking about whatever stupid thing happens to be on my mind at that moment. You don’t have to be here to read it, friend. It might be a while before anything worthwhile flows again. I miss my little corner of the internet, and this is me scratching up the straw and making a nice nest to settle back down in.

There. Five minutes. I did it.

What neglected joy could you be spending five minutes on today?

You Have to Stop Doing Carnivore

Posted on by

You’ll waste away!

Every time I see somebody I haven’t seen in a while, they tell me how great I look. Well, that’s nice of them, isn’t it? It also happens to be true. I look about as good as I am capable of looking. Not gonna be winning any beauty contests, sadly, but I’m doing OK! And then, at least half the time, that same someone will say with concern–or, I’m not above suspecting, envy–something to the effect that one can take this thing too far, and I should really reincorporate something sweet into my meals at some point.

There was a time when it would have been a fair observation that I was becoming too skinny. Back when I was doing keto and there were a bunch of vegetables taking up space I should have been using for protein and fat, I was getting to be a little bit on the stringy side. I got down to just 100 lbs, and I hated the way I looked. I still hadn’t lost all the visible fat in my belly, but everything just hung off of me. I was wasting muscle, not just fat. I knew I couldn’t go back to the way of eating that had made me sick to begin with, but I certainly couldn’t continue with keto. All of my research convinced me that removing even more kinds of foods from my diet, rather than adding anything else back, was the best way to make myself truly healthy, and not just not fat.

When I went carnivore, I put back on fifteen pounds or so, and most of that was muscle and bone. I wish I’d had a before and after dexa scan to prove it, but common sense and a good look in the mirror are really enough. I’m definitely bigger than I was, and I’m definitely not fat.

Now, most of the time, when somebody tells me I’m going to get sick from all this meat, I just show my skeptic a nice, firm bicep, or tell them how fast I can run or how much weight I can lift these days. I am well-built at this point, with a healthy layer of muscle everywhere it ought to be. I even get comments about my good build from strangers in public. Nobody thinks I’m skinny. Feels good, man!

I do still have a little bit of mommy-belly, an inch or so of dangly skin that’s pretty easily hidden under my clothes. I’ve carried eight babies and had 5 c-sections. It’s not perfect, and I don’t know if it ever will be. But that’s ok, because a perfect little tummy is not what I’m going for. It would be nice, but it’s not my goal. That’s what I really want you to understand: I’m not doing this diet so I can look small. I want to be appropriately sized, strong and fast enough to do anything I need to do, and sharp and quick enough to stay alive in an increasingly tricky world. (Have you seen the traffic around here lately?)

I can’t do this if I’m eating the way 98% of the people around me are eating. Sorry. It just won’t work. It’s not working for you, either, friend.

Beauty is a sign of health, and health is what I’m chasing. I won’t say I don’t care how I look, because I’m as vain as any woman. I like to look just as good as I can. Happily, when I chase health, I’m bound to catch a little beauty, as well! I can’t lose eating this way!

Carnivore is not a weight loss diet. If you are fat, you will lose weight on carnivore. Your body will no longer be receiving the signal from your food to store extra fat. But if you are too skinny, you can fix that with carnivore, too! Doesn’t that just blow your mind? How is that even possible? But it’s true. You can stimulate muscle and put on healthy fat with this diet. I did it myself, and I haven’t dropped below 115 pounds in a few years. In fact, I’m still slowly gaining a little muscle. It ain’t easy to gain at 40-something, but if you lift consistently, and eat enough MEAT, it is doable.

I never have to eat more than I want to, but I do get to eat until I’m full. And then I can stop eating until I’m hungry again. Now, my concerned friend, does that sound like an eating disorder to you?

People actually heal their eating disorders and get back to a healthy weight by eating only meat. The carnivore way of eating will recompose your body to its best advantage. It does not simply force weight loss until you die. It is not anorexia. It is not a weird cultish fear of food. It is not something people do just to shock the current culture and stick a finger in the globalist all-seeing eye. (Although I do see that last as an upside.)

Carnivore is simply optimal.

For everybody, though? Well, like I’ve said before, I don’t think everybody has to go carnivore. Most people who think they’re doing ok would see improvements in problems they never even thought were food-related, if they’d just give it 30 days. I do think absolutely everybody can thrive on it. There is nobody who absolutely has to have plants. They are non-essential. Plants, especially grains, are survival food, hibernation food, slave food. As long as I have a choice, I want to thrive, not just survive.

There are sometimes some bumps in the road for some as they become accustomed to the Meat Life™, but all of the difficulties I’ve coached people through are caused not by eating meat, but by the severe damage they’ve already done to their bodies with standard American fare. See my “Why Carnivore Didn’t Work For You” series, for a few ways things can go wrong. If you need any help getting through the transition to a diet (not necessarily carnivore) that will work best for you, get in touch with me by email (cindy at getalonghome dot com) or on social media. I’d love to help!

Dear friends and family, I cannot possibly take this lifestyle too far, because it is not weight loss that I’m pursuing. It is health that I am after, and I’m getting better all the time. Join me!

Want to chat? Catch me on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic.

 

 

Why Carnivore Didn’t Work for You, Part 5: You Went Too Fast

Posted on by

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

So you heard about this awesome, extreme way of eating. You saw the news that people were reversing diabetes, healing auto-immune diseases, lowering blood pressure, losing weight, getting ripped, and feeling incredible. You decided to jump into the lifestyle, went straight to the pantry, and threw out everything that never had a face. You went from eating all the things, to eating only beef, salt, and water on the first day.

And good for you! You knew what you needed to do, and you decided to just rip that band-aid right off and get on with it. That works beautifully sometimes! Probably about half of the people I’ve talked to personally about carnivore make this transition smoothly, with no trouble at all. Other times, unfortunately, a person will meet with so many trials in that first few weeks that they will give up. One of the things we carnivores often forget to mention is that we usually have a slower introduction to the Meat Life than this. Probably 95% of the successful Carnivorists started their search for health with keto, paleo, or something else a little off the beaten path, and only eventually pared it down to the bare necessities.

I was on a ketogenic diet for about 6 months before I decided to try it without plants. Because I transitioned slowly to this way of eating, I avoided all of the potential pitfalls of rushing right in.

I changed my relationship with food slowly.

I did not intentionally transition slowly to carnivore, as I had never even considered carnivore until about a day before I started it. As with many carnivores, it just sorta happened. I fell out of love with carbs. For me, there was no traumatic divorce from my Standard American Diet. Food is an emotional thing for most people. You have a relationship with it, even if you’re not a carb addict. It’s there for you when you feel bad or bored. It’s part of the social atmosphere, especially at holidays. You can’t just quit eating, so every meal is fraught with the stress of choice-making. So rather than changing everything about your food all at once, you need to change the way you relate to food first.

My only goal at first was to lose weight, so I started with a “dirty” ketogenic diet. The thinking behind it made sense–cut carbs, eat more fat–so that’s what I did. I did the keto desserts, the butter in my coffee, the intermittent fasting to get my ketones up. I baked all kinds of keto treats and made fat bombs. I even ate Atkins and Quest bars. Those things do not provide adequate nutrition. They’re junk food! But I think they’re also just fine while starting out. While I was weaning off of the real granola bars and candies, they provided a crutch so that all of the rest of my eating could be good, low-carb, whole foods. They are still worlds better than the carbohydrate-full kind! I began to feel better and lose weight immediately.

After a few months of getting used to running on fat instead of sugar, I cut out all sweet treats and bread substitutes, keeping the vegetables and berries and low-carb dairy. I did that because I knew that the sweet treats were still giving me more total carbs than I was able to handle. My weight loss had stalled.

I then moved to a “clean” ketogenic diet, and I lost more weight. Most of the problems that I had had with my skin, my mental health, my asthma all went away with a clean, unprocessed ketogenic diet. But I still had milder problems at times. One day, I was talking with a friend about veganism, and I said without thinking much about it “I’d rather give up all plants than all meat.” And the idea was born. I had not yet realized that you don’t have to have plants to be healthy, but I had made the connection between plants and many of my symptoms. It was a couple of days later that I happened upon some carnivore on YouTube (probably Shawn Baker or Paul Saladino), and only after looking into it more deeply, to see if this actually makes sense, did I decide to eliminate plants entirely.

Changing my relationship with food wasn’t enough. I also had to change my gut flora. The gut micro-biome is one of most-studied and least-understood aspects of human health, so a lot of what I’m about to say is conjecture. The more we study it the less we seem to know, and I am absolutely not going to claim any expertise. Even the experts have no real idea what they’re doing, according to the experts themselves! But what I do know, and have seen many times, is that changing your food too quickly can lead to some awful symptoms.

Anybody who has brought a new puppy home knows that you have to mix some of their old type of food with the new food over several days to allow their microbiome to adapt.  I had to do the same with my dog when I switched him to an appropriate diet (aka: meat) for dogs. The kibble you get in the stores is not the right food for an animal. We went too fast with our daughter’s new dog, due to only having a handful of his old food to work with, and he had a horrible diarrhea requiring veterinarian care. The very same thing happens when humans change their diets too quickly.

You might not be in love with carbs anymore, but I guarantee you some of your critters still are! In addition to the gastrointestinal distress of the bacteria die-off and replacement, I often see people anywhere from two to six weeks into a no-sugar diet–whether carnivore, keto, or just lower carb–begin to have depression, brain fog, and lack of willpower to resist carbs, even though they were doing fine for the first few weeks. I have a theory, completely untested by Science™, that when certain microbes and parasites are being fed, namely those that thrive on carbohydrates, they send soporific signals to your brain, letting you know that all is right with their world. And when they’re not being fed? Look out. They get mad, and mean, and start to beg for sugar. Like a rampaging toddler who wants his toy NOW, they will make you unhappy until they get what they want.

AI rendering of “angry toddler who wants his toy”

That’s just my theory, for what it’s worth. What is not just a theory, because I’ve seen it happen time and time again, is that if you power through these difficult times, get back on the diet no matter how many times you fall off, you will get past this!

Moving more slowly in weaning off of the plant matter will help you succeed. Don’t add back sugar when you feel like you’re not going to be able to stick to this way of eating. Just add back some green vegetables or some low-carb berries. These kinds of foods will help calm that urge to really hurt yourself on the sweet stuff, and you will be able to move on into carnivore bliss in a few days.