Okay, friends:

Time for a carnivore update.

I have been a bad NEQUALSMANY participant, because I quit tracking sometime in late September. There have been many things that have happened since then (#NoRestForTheWicked), most of them good, some of them frustrating, but all of them lifechanging — a new dawn is upon us and I AM SO EXCITED.

The good news is that I’m still 100% zero carb. No vegetables (save coffee, I’m back on coffee, I can’t quit coffee for more than a month I love it so) since May — that’s five months, for those of you counting at home — and only animal products have gone through my digestive system. My diet has done from a variety of steaks, hamburgers, fish, shrimp, pulled pork and bacon to…ground beef bricks. Usually flavored with some ground pork and usually with a side of raw-milk cheese, but ground beef bricks just the same. This is partly a byproduct of being busy, but also because I’ve started to tweak the meat part of my diet.

I do best on mostly ruminant — beef is my favorite — rather than pork or chicken. Sometimes when I forget to pack a lunch, I’ll use the salad bar at work to stock up on grilled chicken, and I am reliably bloated at the end of the day, without fail. Crazy, right?

That doesn’t happen with beef, so beef it is.

The other thing I’ve done is switched to mostly raw-milk cheddar cheese as far as my dairy goes. To be a good NEQUALSMANY participant, I should have given up dairy completely, but too bad I noticed that the right amount of cheese makes my stool quality jump up an entire notch on the Bristol Stool Scale.

As in, from December 2016 until October 2017, I was a solid 7 on the scale. That’s the worst score, for those of you keeping track at home. Carnivory and raw-milk cheese has boosted me to a solid 5. This week, when I’ve been full of stress/not sleeping well with the receipts to show for it in the form of psoriasis, I have still managed to have multiple days IN A ROW with only Bristol 5 stools, which would have been completely inconceivable even two months ago.

IN. A. ROW.

For someone who’s been struggling with days upon days of horrible poops, having multiple days in a row showing PROGRESS toward PERFECTION in DEFECATION is a dream come true. No, actually, it’s better than that — because nobody ever visualizes perfect poops. Maybe that’s part of the problem.

Nevertheless: eat yer meat, kids.

Dairy can stay too, as far as I’m concerned.