Trying the Carnivore diet from my own farm

So for two weeks now, straight, I've eliminated all carbs from my diet. That's something I never thought I would be able to do. I love sourdough bread, I like beer sometimes. I really enjoyed carbs all my life. I've had good grains all my life, but I never thought I'd be able to do without them. And for the last two weeks I've just eaten meat, fat and salt and I feel fantastic. So why am I doing that? Well, I thought I'd share a little bit about that. I'm not going to go into too much details. I feel like this is such a space for, you know, people discussing their limited points of view. And I don't think it's important what I am choosing to do. It's just something that it surprises myself that I am doing. And I thought I'd say a little bit about it. I just feel like we've been fed such a lot of nonsense about diet. I've known that since I was a kid and I was brought up on homemade organic food. I didn't eat any processed food until my teenage years when I left home. And I value that immensely now. My children are both brought up in that same way. I hated it at the time because I wanted to be like all the other kids and et cetera. You know, I had hand me down clothes and took walks in the country rather than having a tv. We didn't have media in my house and we had extremely good food. My mother baked and cooked everything that we ate. And what a tremendous gift, what a blessing to, you know, at the time I really wasn't down with it, but my brain worked fast. I could see that diet and media affected people's brain outputs. And I knew that since I was, you know, seven, eight years old very clearly now, I've always eaten a whole food balanced diet. I like to think in terms of what would our ancestors have done. You know, they would have found a clutch of eggs somewhere in spring, they'd have eaten all of them. They'd have killed an animal. They'd have eaten the organ meat and the fat. And then afterwards they would have dealt with the meat as a sort of by product. They would have eaten some berries and they would have eaten some seeds, but not so many. And things like cultivated vegetables are very relatively new in our diet. Eating lots of lean meat is very new in our diet. If we look at anthropology and, you know, anthropological focus on diets around the world, people always ate very healthy diets based on meats and fats. And organ meat and they ate fermented grains, they ate some vegetables, etc. There's so many opinions out there on this and I'm not here to give advice. I think it's down to each and their own to look at what's going on for them. I've known instinctively that it's good to eat diversity. It's good to eat a lot more fat and salt than we're told we're allowed. It's good to limit protein and it's definitely good to eliminate all sugars and processed carbohydrates. Now I didn't even believe it was possible to live without carbohydrates. I just couldn't. My brain wouldn't allow me to think that because I've just love sourdough toast with like fresh grass fed butter. It's just. But for the last two weeks I've had zero carbs. I've been eating. So what have I been eating? I've been eating beef, I've been eating blood sausage, I've been eating liver and liver pate, I've been eating heart from beef, I've had a couple of eggs, I've had a little bit of dairy, a little bit of cheese and a little bit of cream. But insignificant, mostly meat and fat with plenty of salt. I've always known we can eat more salt. And it's obvious that our body tells us when we want salt. You know if you put salt on food, you know if it's too much salt and likewise if food isn't salty enough, you know you need salt. Now your body knows it needs salt from minerals just like it knows it needs water when your cells need replenishing with water. Now I'm not out here to spark a massive debate and I'm not going to engage in debates on here. I know a lot of people have become aware of this so called carnivore diet through the notoriety of people like Jordan Peterson and his daughter who probably that's where most people come into contact with that with. A lot of people have been interested in paleo and keto and all this stuff and it's probably all good in some way. It's like there's no way you could prescribe a diet for anyone. I'm not gonna eat purely meat and fat for the rest of my life. It's A, just a little bit boring and B, I don't think that that's necessarily an optimal diet. I'm just doing it mainly because of my back. Now when I was about 14 I was a very strong athlete. I used to run for England youth team and I was extremely fast runner. I could run a five minute mile and I was competing on people fully grown who were several years older than me and I was extremely fit. I was running cross country doing 10k every day after school and sprint training with pull car tyres in long grass at lunch break at school. I was physically in my prime in a way, at 14, 15 years old, competing at a high level. Now I leant backwards one day into a crab where you arch over and my back went and I was paralyzed for several days. I lay in bed with my legs up with my head on a book and I couldn't even move my arms, I couldn't move my head and basically I messed up a disc in my lower back. And every six months to a year that would, it would just go at some point with a twisting motion or something and I would be bedridden for a few days. I remember living on my own in a small town in my late teens where I literally couldn't get out of bed and I had no heating, I had no money, so I had no electricity on one of these little keys and there was ice in my glass next to my bed and I just couldn't move. I was paralyzed, I had to wet myself and it was pretty traumatic. Now that was quite a long time ago and it's got progressively better with different things. I've done tai chi and different stretching trainings and all that sort of stuff for many years. And I've had chiropractic activity that's helped. This definitely feels like it helped a lot, but it's quite expensive and it's a temporary relief of a symptom, it's not a cure. I've tried stretching in all kinds of ways. I've got an upside down table, whatever they're called, inversion table. None of that does anything but relieve symptoms. I mean, it's when it goes, it's paralyzing now. I've even been considering getting stem cell therapy or something like that for €10,15,000 in Germany, they can reportedly heal this condition. I have. It's a severely bulged disc in my lower back. And farming is not an occupation where you can afford to have a bad back. And whilst that treatment is expensive, I've kind of reached a point of desperation where, well, that's not a lot of money for a useful back, so it's kind of worth it. But before I sort of jumped into that, I thought, well, hang on, I've heard about the carnivore diet being used as an elimination diet to bring down all inflammation in the body because it's so simple, there's nothing complex going on. And then you can start bringing back foods in and see if you can clear elimination, clear inflammation that way. And I thought, well, I'll give that a try because who am I to know? I'm a firm believer of you don't know nothing until you've tried it and experienced it. And that takes time, it takes several months to really feel what a change in diet produces. And I'm up for it. I'm not saying it's good, I'm not saying I'm going to continue doing it for any length of time. I'm just doing it right now and I feel great. And one immediate side effect I've had is at this time of year at the end of the season I typically get super exhausted. I've been managing a farm, managing cohorts of interns, running online business, running business outside the farm, basically doing two full time jobs and cramming that into trying to be a father, etc. And it's tough. I've always had a high schedule. I've had very low sleep. I sleep between four and six hours a day and I have done for many years. I'm not saying that's good. I'm not saying anything I do is good and mimic it. I don't believe that at all. You know, I'm not, that's not my role to be on this channel. I'm here to share factual things about farming. That's what I love to do, farming and business. But I'm sharing it because it's really interesting and it's surprising to me. As I said, it's not something I'd ever considered doing before but I'm really enjoying it because at the end of the season I will get this brain fog. I can't really remember names of people I'm sighting or memories of things where I put something like two or three months ago or little things that my brain is usually very sharp and I am acutely aware of what's going on. And that brain fog, I don't know how to describe it. I guess if you've had brain fog you'll know what I mean. But it's like a feeling in the top of your brain where you just. Something's not right. It's not headache but it's like a vague buzz like feeling where you know you just, your brain is not working right and that has Lifted within about four or five days. I feel on point. I feel super sharp. My brain is working extremely fast and yeah, that's interesting. And it's obvious to me that that's come about from the diet. I feel great with no carbs. I feel no problem with my digestion. I feel regular and perfect with that. I sometimes get thirsty, like thirstier than I would otherwise. I'm eating more salt than normal. I'm eating typically twice a day and I know a lot of people doing intermittent fasting will like wait until the evening or afternoon to eat. I'm eating breakfast and then I'm eating dinner and that's working for me. So whether that's not technically the way you're meant to do it, I don't care. I don't believe in any diet and I don't want to follow anyone's advice about diet. I just don't believe anyone, you know, nobody knows the whole picture and I'm up for testing it in my own experience. And it's been a really cool experience so far. I've been eating loads of bacon, loads of beef, loads of pork and really nourishing, beautiful meals. I think longer term I'd be more likely to eat a kind of keto diet. But I'm just gonna do this as long as I deem that it's good for me because I just can't believe I'm not eating carbs in any way in two weeks. It's pretty unreal. But I do feel great. And I think, you know, there's a lot of stuff online about this. There's a lot of bogus information, there's a lot of YouTubers who just talk crap, who have no scientific knowledge or experience really. But there are some really great people. So you have to sift through stuff, you know. But there are some fantastic resources online and it's worth checking out. You know, most of us eat very weird diets and it's worth looking into for optimal health. Most of the diseases that us Westerners die off are very likely diet dependent and slow deaths caused by eating carbohydrates and processed foods. Now I'm really lucky to have such wonderful food in my doorstep. I've never eaten processed foods. Probably less than half a percent of my entire diet throughout my whole life has been processed foods. And so yeah, in one way I'm lucky in another way, that's how I was brought up and how I continue. So, you know, everyone has that choice. But just eliminating carbs is wow, it's liberating and I feel like that's really worth a try. And. Yeah, just wanted to share that with you. However, now I think I'm gonna have to start eating my own words. This is a draft copy of Regenerative Agriculture that is sprouting mushrooms. Just look at that. Amazing. Anything that lived before can live again through saprophytic mushrooms. These are oysters that we inoculated in the video not so long ago. Pretty amazing. And there's a lot more mushrooms to come by, the little signs there. So if you're thinking of getting yourself a copy, you've just got a few days left. It's gonna cross €300,000 this evening or tonight, I expect. And if we cross the €350,000 mark, I'll make all books edible. Okay, so that's it for today, folks. Don't forget to get yourselves a copy of Regenerative Agriculture. This book is creating a storm online. I've got no doubt that it's gonna go over €300,000. I can't believe the support it's gained. It's. It's really incredible. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I'm looking forward to getting them out to you. I'm doing a lot of work in the background to make sure that that's all going to go smoothly and I look forward to seeing where that gets to in its final results. We look forward to seeing you in a video soon. Bye for now.