World’s Strongest Man Goes Carnivore: Metabolism Scientist Explains

Eddie Hall, aka The Beast, who won the World's Strongest Man competition in 2017, who set the world deadlift record at over 1,100 pounds in 2016, and who can bench press 6 reps of 4 of me, including the bar, just went full-on carnivore.

The beautiful thing about this diet is you can just eat like an absolute king. Devour steaks, eggs, Like, eating whole chickens.

I'm now gonna break down in this video who Eddie Hall is and why he went carnivore, what he eats, how he's losing weight on almost 10,000 calories per day, as well as some interesting facts about what you can do about the carnivore shits and what the best way is to measure keto adaptation. You wanna stick around? This is gonna be a fun video and quite honestly a teaser for maybe even something bigger to come. Okay, let's first start with some statistics on Eddie so you can be acquainted with this apparently sweet teddy bear-like tattooed British Hulk. Eddie won the World's Strongest Man competition in 2017, and he's won the UK's Strongest Man in 6 consecutive years. He set the world deadlift record at 500 kilograms, 1,100+ pounds in 2016, and the world record for the axle press at 480 pounds in 2017, and If you're a Game of Thrones fan, here's Eddie beating the actual Mountain, fellow world strongman, half-Thor Julius Björkensson, at lifting heavy stones. Eddie also flexes 3 beautiful children, including one in the oven. Congrats, Eddie.

Little baby here just loves ribeye steaks.

Mwah!

Mwah? Are you saying more? Is that what you're saying? Mwah?

Now, at the time Eddie won the World's Strongest Man in 2017, He was over 400 pounds. And since retiring in 2018, he's been trying to slim down for his health, and because, in his words, "I felt consistently inflamed, tired, sore, and fat." As you can see, I'm a bit chubby at the minute. Which is why on August 5th, 2024, he went full carnivore in the hopes he'd lose weight and feel less inflamed and overall healthier. But before we get to his results, What did Eddie eat? This carnivorous mammoth of a man eats lots of beef, ribeye, eggs, butter, an obligatory 50 grams per meal in his words.

So I'm gonna smash in about 50 grams of butter every single meal.

Salmon, biltong, fellow South African heart, I suppose, cottage cheese, and Greek yogurt. In fact, it looks like he enjoys the same Greek yogurt brand as me. 5%, although clearly it's not having the same effect on me. Sad. Anyway, a representative macro breakdown for Eddie Hall in a day of carnivore eating looks like this: 9,828 calories, about 666+ grams of fat, 892 grams of protein with trace carbs from the dairy in his diet. Now, he's eating about 4 to 5 times per day, but even so, and even eating near 10,000 calories per day, Eddie is losing losing weight and is down 20 pounds, or about 20 pounds, in his first month.

And I'm losing weight. How can I lose weight on 10,000 calories a day? How does that work?

So here's a question: how is Eddie losing weight on almost 10,000 calories per day carnivore? I mean, the man is clearly slimming out, and at this point he has a six-pack at about 350 pounds, which is crazy. Well, I admittedly don't have a strict pre-carnivore diet plan for Eddie, so I suppose it's conceivable that he's eating in an estimated deficit at 10,000 calories per day, but I still think that's pretty unlikely. In fact, if you plug in Eddie's pre-carnivore weight, 370 pounds, age, 36 years, and sex, male, you get a basal metabolic rate via the Harris-Benedict calculator of about 3,000 calories, leaving 7,000 calories unaccounted for even if he were maintaining his weight. And he's losing weight fast. So instead, I think it makes much more sense to think about it this way, and this is consistent with the literature, that Eddie's weight loss on 10,000 carnivore calories per day is a function of the fact that calories and a calorie deficit is a result of the metabolic and physiologic drivers of obesity, which isn't calories. Calories don't cause obesity. You want more on that? Check out this video. For instance, there's a documented metabolic advantage of carbohydrate restriction, whereby trading carb calories for fat calories increases energy expenditure, and this could be happening in Eddie. In fact, I know for myself, to maintain my current weight, which is admittedly a lot lower than Eddie's, on a low-carb ketogenic diet versus when I was a higher-carb athlete, I needed to eat, or I now need to eat, over 500 more calories per day to maintain the same weight. As a low-carb athlete. I do love cheese and macadamia butter. And I have a robust calorie buffer on low-carb, like many other people, whereby I can overfeed based on my estimated needs to a pretty great extent, on the order of 5,500 calories for me per day, without gaining weight. In other words, when I do force myself to overeat, my body readily adjusts to dissipate that energy as heat and involuntary unconscious upregulation of metabolism. And you want more on that, check out this video where I ate over 6,000 calories per day. And what's more, new data show that very low carbohydrate diets like the one Eddie is eating can lead to literal pooping of more calories given the change in bile acid metabolism in the body. And if you want more on that, pooping calories, check out this video. It's pretty technical and it's pretty cool shit. Sorry, I had to. Anyway, on that topic, one of the issues Eddie was having when he went carnivore was the carnivore shits, i.e., loose stools on carnivore. Now, this is a frequent side effect of the transition from a carb-heavy diet to a zero-fiber carnivore diet. Some people suggest that you need to default to shifting back to fiber, but Dr. Shawn Baker, who love him or hate him, has more clinical experience with carnivore diets than any person alive, made a different recommendation to Eddie to help deal with his carnivore shits that appeared to work. Shawn suggested to focus on solid fats, as in ribeye or butter, versus liquid fats, as in olive oil. Truthfully, I followed up with Shawn on this to dissect the basis for his hypothesis, based on things he's seen clinically. And he explained it like this, that it has to do with the rates at which solid versus liquid fats empty out of the stomach and pass through into the small intestine, duodenum, en route to the colon. And long story short, he thinks liquid fats move more quickly, leading to relative fat malabsorption and loose stools. Now, this is actually quite testable. So I decided to do a little experiment on myself, eating a fixed ketogenic carnivore diet myself for 5 days with melted butter versus 5 days followed by solid butter, thus controlling for fatty acid composition. The fats were the same, the butter was just melted versus solid. And then I self-rated my stool firmness based on a Bristol stool chart, and I'll return to my results later if you stick around. But I think this is pretty interesting, and, well, you'll just stick around and find out. But before we get to those results, you need to earn them by listening to some physiology. Which has to do with keto adaptation. What are the best ways to measure keto adaptation? And this question arose because Eddie, in his YouTube videos, was using a Lumen device. Inhale deeply through the Lumen. Which tells you what relative fat versus carb burning your body is doing. And he'd wake up burning mostly fat and then find, apparently to his surprise, that after workouts he was burning more carbs, which he interpreted as him still being carb-dependent and not yet fully fat-adapted, or not fat-adapted enough to really be burning fat during those workouts. But that's not exactly the case, and I wanna use this as a teaching moment. You see, devices like Lumen rely on something called a respiratory exchange ratio, which is the ratio between the amount of carbon dioxide, CO2, being produced by the body as you exhale versus oxygen being consumed by the body when you inhale. And higher respiratory exchange ratios closer to 1 mean your body is burning more carbs, and lower respiratory exchange ratios closer to 0.7 mean your body is burning more fat. And the reason for this has to do with the redox statuses of dietary carbs versus fat, which I won't bore you with, but I'll leave notes below for the uber nerds out there. However, this measure is very, very state dependent since carbs are always quick-burning fuel, whether you eat carbs or not. And this is because the cellular process of glycolysis, which breaks down glucose into smaller 3-carbon molecules called pyruvate, can make energy incredibly quickly, much, much faster than fats can be burned through beta oxidation in the Krebs cycle. And I know I'm losing you, so I'm gonna zoom back out. Basically, this just means that after hard workouts focusing on power maneuvers, With the sorts of workouts Eddie presumably engages in, being a strongman, his body will be tapping into muscle carbohydrate stores, and he will be burning through carbs, especially and including those that his body synthesizes itself through the process of gluconeogenesis from protein and other sources like glycerol, which is the backbone of stored fat. So yes, you can turn the backbone of fat into carbohydrates which you can store in your muscles. High level, the point I'm trying to make here is that even in a fully fat-adapted and zero-carb athlete, you can still burn carbs. In fact, you should still burn carbs because the body adapts to spare carbohydrates for the moments when they're needed for explosive glycolytic activities like an Eddie Hall workout. But what differs in a fat-adapted athlete is the maximum capacity to burn fat in the background, thus increasing the threshold of energy you can extract from fat alone and in so doing actually spare carbs that the body makes itself for storage for later use, as in, again, an Eddie Hall workout. Therefore, while I think a tool like a Lumen does have utility, it needs to be taken into context. It's important to always compare measurements taken at the same time, as in the same time every morning when you wake up, rather than comparing apples to oranges by comparing between times in the day. Like after waking versus after meals versus after workouts, because the Lumen measure, the respiratory exchange ratio, is gonna depend on much more than just what fuel you're burning in the background. Hopefully that makes sense. And now, there are other ways to think about and "measure" keto or fat adaptation, but I think the most practical way in my opinion is to actually just focus on performance and behavior metrics. They're super subjective, but practically, they're the most useful tool you have. So muscles adapt over months, even a year plus, in terms of their ability to spare, resynthesize, and strategically use carbs. Therefore, when your athletic performance starts to recover or improve even above baseline on low-carb diets, I think it's fair to assume your muscles are fat adapted. And as for behavior, the brain can rewire and your microbiome can shift depending on the foods you're eating., and this takes time. Extrapolating from animal models, this can take several months, but when it occurs, you can have a different emotional and reward response to different patterns of eating. For example, your sugar cravings can dissipate, entirely disappear, and you can learn to enjoy fasting, and you may even find yourself developing an appetite for food you once found abhorrent. Granted, in humans, there are many more social and psychological inputs here than just metabolic adaptations,. But the point is that while we can operationalize, to use scientific jargon, fat adaptation in many different ways— basically we can measure fat adaptation in many different ways using scientific tools— I think the best and most practical way for an individual, be that Eddie Hall, me, or you, to measure keto adaptation isn't a breath meter or finger stick, but by reflecting on their, our subjective state of being. And this is also the most actionable. Since if something is amiss after weeks to months of adaptation in terms of your symptomatology, how you're feeling, it means there's something you probably should tweak. Now, returning to the solid versus liquid butter experiment, lo and behold, ah shit, nothing. So for me, it actually didn't work. With liquid butter or solid butter, I pass bowel movements with consistent consistency. Without any diarrhea brought on by liquid fat. Honestly though, I don't make too much of this. I'm 5 years into a ketogenic diet and my body is rather used to using liquid fat sources given all the macadamia oil and extra virgin olive oil I drink. So actually I'm not going to make any claims as to mechanisms or myths debunked. I still think Dr. Baker's hypothesis is quite interesting. And scaling up the experiment I just did I actually think would be fascinating and I'd be interested to hear if anybody in the community has tried something similar with different or similar results. And on the topic of data, maybe we can do some legit tests on Eddie Hall and other human carnivores if they would be so willing. I would love to take a peek into their microbiomes, their metabolomes, and more to see what makes them tick and gain insight into that provocative question: Can a carnivore diet Be healthy. In truth, this was just a teaser. Stay tuned for more because we're going to have a lot of fun.

I think probably the main factor is the inflammation. I can just sit here and I eat my food, I'm not sore from training. That's what I've noticed, I just don't get as sore. Like I could train legs, I can kick, I can come out everywhere else, I can— I could still just feel good, you know. I could go for a walk, go for a run. I want to do things while play with my kids, you see. Yeah, you're not as bloated either before weight training either. No way, I was bloated. Yeah.