What a more perfect time is there to reflect on what an ideal carnivore future might look like.

The typical carnivore line is “eat steaks!” and, let’s be real, steaks don’t have much complexity to them. Steak is delicious, but it’s simple. Cooking steak is a craft that can be honed, but it’s not the same as taking 3 days to prep for a feast. And so, with eating mostly meat, my kitchen skills have been put on the back burner.

Enter Tara at @slowdownfarmstead. She’s mostly carnivore, lives on a farm, and raises, hunts, or grows all her own food. Her freezers are full of grassfed, organic beef and lamb, venison and pork, ghee and all sorts of good things.

Tara has shown me that it is possible to be both a strict carnivore AND a good cook. Her diet is varied in a way that I’d like mine to be: fowl and swine and cow, juicy steak and pate and raw-milk cheese, homemade charcuterie and cultured buttermilk and stock.

I present lunch, hubby’s plate, mostly from our farm: grass fed and finished lamb chops cooked in homemade ghee and topped with a foraged and dehydrated wild mushroom salt, braunschweiger made with rabbit livers and heart, bacon and duck liver paté topped with ghee, dried mushrooms used as crackers, prosciutto, raw sheep cheese, a couple of cured egg yolks, and a cuppa’ lamb bone broth from yesterday’s lamb shank supper. @slowdownfarmstead

I mean…look at that plate. Look at it. Such a range of flavors and textures, of mildly processed foods (braunschweiger!) and straight-up meat.

I’m in love.

Tara also advocates fasting, based on the writings of Thomas Seyfried. She was not the only influence into my recent forays into fasting, but she certainly showed me that one can fast, still eat well in between, and heal from deep-seated chronic ailments.

It’s easy to romanticize the homestead life, Tara reminds us that life is still life, and that life on a farm is not as glamourous as we like to think.

It’s not all Martha Stewart sipping chai while she braids bacon over a terrine. It’s Tara, with goose poop in her hair, reminding herself to be a little more grateful than frantic. A little injection of reality lest my pretty IG pictures suggest I’ve got it all together.

Most of all, I’m inspired to dig out my copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I and Nourishing Traditions. Before I started weeding plants out of my diet, I loved cooking. For a long time, baking made me happy—but even after cutting grains and sugars out of my diet, I found joy in trying new dishes and inventing new, interesting ways to eat food.

Now, I mostly cook burgers and the occasional tuna steak (#currentfave). I had kind of given up on being a “cook” again, with the idea that once I fine-tuned how to cook a perfect steak, I’d have reached the end of what one can cook as a carnivore.

Oh, how wrong I was. And I’m happy to be wrong.

Now, I’m re-inspired to cure egg yolks, make my own sausage, and try frying up some pig’s ears. Experimenting with organ meats and offal. Cultivating relationships with local ranchers.

It’s gonna be a delicious year.

I was way liberal with my diet in December. Between the tropical vacation, the death of a family member, and the holidays, I rediscovered that I am an emotional eater.

Instead of holding to the straight and narrow path, I ate delicious goodies. Cheese, dark chocolate, gin & mineral water, a spoonful of guacamole, and coffee coffee coffee.

Nothing too horrible (God forbid I eat a blueberry!) but definitely a lot o things on the “no” list.

Everything was delicious. I regret nothing.

I will say, however, that on the other side of things I can feel the inflammation creeping back into my brain.

• My bowels hurt, when they didn’t before.
• My brain is foggy, when before it was fine.
• My mood is down, my sleep less efficient.
• Overall no bueno.

Time to return to the path.

January is World Carnivore Month. That’s cool.

To me, it is January.

I’ll go back to my life after a season of indulging in treats like cheese and dark chocolate and gin. Time to eat clean and healthy for a spell. (And spend some time trying out my new Cuisinart Griddler, which is replacing my beat-up ol’ Foreman grill.)

Many positive things entered my life when I decided to try eating only meat and other animal products.

Yes, being a carnivore has helped me stop craving sweets and binge-eating carbs. Yes, being a carnivore has given my body the environment it needs to heal from over two decades of autoimmune disease. Yes, being a carnivore has given me more energy than I’ve ever known, which has led to more travelling and more time in the gym (hello, muscles!).

It could be easy to paint the carnivore diet as a magic cure—the holy grail that you’ve been searching for that will cure all your aches and pains, make you feel younger and healthier, and cause the sun to shine on you even in the rain.

Some people on the carnivore forums spin those tales. They claim that their lifelong ailments were cured in a few days, or that they lost a bunch of weight without trying, or that their depression lifted or whatever. Maybe this was their experience.

In my experience, healing takes time even when you’re eating a strict diet. Change is difficult. Results take time, and optimizing requires lots of trial and error. Even under a new paradigm, you have to test and change your assumptions. Other people’s promises don’t always apply to you.

The thing about life as a carnivore, is that it’s just that: life.

I wake up, I go to sleep. This way of eating does not exempt me from needing rest. In fact, it has underscored how much I need a full night’s sleep. Without the “buffer” of carbs and the luxury of copious amounts of coffee, lack of sleep shows up quicker.

I pack my lunches and cook dinners after work. Carnivory does not supply me with hot meals on command (I wish!), nor does it mean that I never think about food. Sure, eating this way is a lot simpler, but I still have to figure out when prep meals for the week or what I’m going to eat if I’m going out somewhere. Now that I’m somewhat established, I’m finding that it’s time to become more adventuresome with eating—time to try out the organ meats and “off” cuts that I have been avoiding.

I struggle with stress. One thing eating like a carnivore taught me is that one does not simply solve all problems through a dietary intervention. Sure, diet can solve a lot of underlying problems, but it can’t solve everything. Moving forward, I need to learn to manage stress. If I don’t, no amount of clean eating can help me.

I still need to exercise. Abs or no abs, diet doesn’t provide the benefits of exercise. I still have to do the work, whether its with calisthenics on my living room floor or with free weights at the gym.

And I still monitor my portions. Despite what some people say, we don’t all need to eat 4lbs of ribeye every day. I didn’t start losing weight until I made peace with eating much less (and waaaay less fat than I thought). These days, I eat roughly 1 – 1.5 pounds of lean meat per day, plus a few extras (like beef sticks, coffee, and a little cheese).

For years, I searched for a “magic bullet” that would make all my health problems disappear. For a while, I hoped the carnivore diet would be that solution.

But the real solution—the real thing that being a carnivore has taught me—is that there is no magic pill. There’s no quick trick to getting what I want. No holy grail.

The real magic comes from doing the work—from learning what my body wants, and needs—from making the mistakes and recovering from them. The answers are in me—they always have been—I just need to stay on the straight and narrow path instead of straying looking for shiny magic answers.

My body has everything it needs to heal. I just need to stay out of the way.

If you’re trying out the carnivore diet this January, welcome! This is a great way of eating.

Ah, the human body.

It’s a wonderland, it’s a toxic waste dump.

Mine has gone through some major changes in the last few years. Fighting SIBO. Quitting all prescription drugs. Switching to an all-meat diet.

Everything that I know about biology I’ve learned ad hoc because it was functional information to me at the time.

I’ve cobbled together this incomplete constellation of biological knowledge—just enough to get me through but definitely not enough to help me solve some of the finer conundrums of my experience with excess bacteria.

Such as: if SIBO exists in the gut, why did so much of the bacteria (or remains of dead bacteria) get excreted through my skin?

The thing about dealing with a thing like SIBO is that there’s very little sanctioned scientific research about it. When it’s not even acknowledged by most medical providers, it’s not going to be on some scientist’s research bench.

Which means you have to observe what happens and come to conclusions on your own. And that process is much easier with the knowledge of biology.

I’m satisfied with the trajectory that my health has taken (UP!) but it still amuses me that I’ve done it all without the luxury of even a high school biology course.

Ima rectify that situation soon (though through reading, not a high school course) because I have some questions that Dr Google is not answering to my satisfaction.

Macrophages, yo.