Some people Instagram all their meals. I dissect the play by play.

I just got back from a work conference, which meant that I was living out of a hotel in a strange city for a couple of days. Keeping myself well fed was a top priority, as I had no idea about the food “landscape” of Salt Lake City. Challenge accepted.

Some additional considerations:

• I absolutely refuse to check bags, which means that packing food is a big more difficult. It’s harder to get food through security, plus it’s heavy.
• The conference organizers tried to be “healthy” in their food choices this year. That meant nearly vegan, fiber everywhere, stuff that makes my gut cry just looking at it.
• Recently I quit drinking coffee and eating dairy, and I’ve seen some health gains from this. I was determined not to throw off my new pattern of eating.
• However, as a splurge, I planned on going to a distillery tour and tasting. (How could you not in Salt Lake City??) I knew this was a potential risk, but it’s calculated, and I wanted to save all my potential for cheating on this.
• I carry a little snuffbox of salt from Jacobson’s Sea Salt just in case. This way, I’m never out of seasoning that I know is quality and free of dextrose or other fillers.

So how did this all play out in real life? Pretty dang well. I didn’t succumb to coffee or cheese (although I was tempted a few times), navigated some dinners out with colleagues, and never went hungry (although occasionally I got hungrier than usual between meals because I had to deal with the conference schedule and not my own).

Here’s a play-by-play.

Day 1

After I checked in to my hotel, I ventured out to the nearest Whole Foods (which I had checked out online prior to the trip, of course, because I am a compulsive googler). At Whole Foods, home of delicious roast chicken and hands-down the best quality salad bar, I stocked up on some staples:

• A plain roast chicken
• Shredded chicken and 6 hard boiled eggs from the salad bar
• 2 cans of just-salt tuna with a pop top
• A shrimp cocktail pack

Now I had a portable meal that I could take somewhere if needed (the tuna) and some snacks to stash in the hotel fridge. This “fridge” ended up being more like a cooler, so I grabbed the liner from the ice bucket, filled it with ice, and used that to keep everything cool. I kept the chicken until Day 3 and wouldn’t have eaten it past that, given these conditions.

When I got back to the hotel that night, I ate the shrimp out of the shrimp cocktail pack and the dark meat of the chicken. And all of the skin, because it is delicious. And maybe a hard boiled egg, because I was hungry.

Day 2

Breakfast from a restaurant nearby, scrambled eggs and bacon. For lunch, I was in a rush so I grabbed a hard boiled egg and some of the shredded chicken from my fridge.

Dinner, though, was a “welcome reception” for the conference. I quick scout of the meal offerings detected some beef skewers with onions and peppers, with a lot of seasoning on. I ate a few of the skewers at the reception, scraping off the seasoning and avoiding the veggies, and then stole a bunch more to take up to my room afterward. There, I rinsed them off in the sink–which gives you slightly waterlogged meat, but I’d rather have that then the other consequences. For dessert, I finished off the shredded chicken.

Day 3

I ran out of time for breakfast, so I snarfed my last 2 hard boiled eggs. By the time lunch rolled around, I was so hungry that I bolted out of the session I was attending and headed straight to Apollo Burger, where I ordered a bunch of burger patties and a side of bacon, to go. I ate most of it there, but the remaining burger patty I took back to the hotel and stashed it in my fridge/cooler.

Dinner was with colleagues at Oyster Bar. I ordered a 1/2 pound broiled halibut steak, which was very tasty but also very expensive. After the meal, I went home and ate my remaining burger patty and the rest of the roast chicken with some butter I stole from our table at the restaurant. I am shameless about stealing butter these days.

Day 4

Bacon and eggs breakfast again, patties and bacon for lunch (although this time with a friend), and patties again for dinner after the distillery tour. However, the dude at the burger place by the distillery misunderstood my order so I got one lone patty and a side of bacon. A snack, but certainly not dinner. So I ordered more patties and bacon from the location near my hotel when I got back.

Day 5

Bacon and eggs breakfast again, because it is delicious and filling. Consequences from the distillery tasting were nonexistent (yay!). For lunch, I found a nice place outside to eat my cans of tuna. I hadn’t needed them during the conference, and didn’t want to risk them being thrown out at the airport.

For dinner, I was planning to check out a Brazilian steakhouse nearby, but I ran into a colleague and we ended up getting barbecue at a place he liked. It was great barbecue, but they put a rub on all of their meats. Even though I’ve historically had issues with seasonings, I went for it anyway. It was the last night, what did I have to lose?

(I can tell you that–I could definitely feel the next morning. Nothing horrible, but definitely a step in the wrong direction.)

So, my friends, that is how I fed myself during a conference in Salt Lake City. Could I have been more adventurous? Yes. Could I have also just stayed with the steakhouse in the hotel and spent a million dollars on food? Also yes.

I’m happy with my choices, and I’m more happy that I’m seeing continued positive gains in the gut department even though I did stressful things like travel and work conferences.

In this episode of “I’m a carnivore I do what I want,” I’ve decided to do all my cooking on a George Foreman grill.*

Mostly I don’t want to bother cleaning up multiple cooking surfaces, so when I break out the Foreman, I want to make as much use of it as possible. So far this has included

1. Burgers (obviously)
2. Shredded smoked pork that crisps up like carnitas (extra good with Hawaiian red sea salt)
3. Fried eggs (what!?)

Hear me out: it’s not all that different from frying eggs on the stove. The Foreman grill is a heated nonstick surface, much the same as your basic frying pan. Yes, there are the grill ridges but the surface is so nonstick those don’t seem to matter.

The biggest logistical challenge is the slope of the grill top. This is great when you’re trying to drain fat off of burgers, but problematic when you’re trying to keep runny eggs in place until they start to cook and solidify.

Fortunately this one is easy to solve. Simply prop the front feet of the Foreman grill up on the fat-catcher. It doesn’t make the surface of the grill completely flat (at least for my grill), but it’s enough of a change that it does the trick. I use a spatula as a backstop to catch the small amounts of runny egg white that try to escape down the slope.

Ask me how I figured this out — and I’ll show you the entire raw egg that plopped its way into the fat-catcher.

That’s all great, I can hear you saying, but what about the top of the egg? Are you going to flip it? The answer, my friend, is no. The egg stays in place. BUT, to cook the top quicker, I lower down the top hinge until it hovers over the egg. The grill can’t close all the way, because that would smash the egg yolk, but I can get a pretty good hover going by bending down and peeking in between.

By doing this, the top hotplate acts as a salamander to help the top of the egg whites cook a little quicker and the yolk get all velvety.

We all know the final verdict is how the eggs are cooked. Not bad, as it turns out. While they’re not the best fried eggs I’ve had in my life, they’re pretty good. Not rubbery at all (but that’s because I watched them like a hawk, like one must do with fried eggs). Just don’t expect a pretty round shape, because between the grill ridges and the anti-slope spatula backsplash, that ain’t happening.

Now that I’ve cooked eggs with a Foreman grill, I feel like I can cook anything.

What’s next?

*That’s a lie, I also make heavy use of my crock pot.

It has been a year since I ate a vegetable.

Carrots, if I remember correctly. They were the filling for Bò Cuốn, Vietnamese beef rolls, pickled and sauteed with onions. I spent way too much time picking off the onions and the sesame seeds, as they were on the “do not eat” list at the time.

Most vegetables were, at that point.

I have a lifelong, chronic autoimmune illness called Crohn’s disease. As with all autoimmune ailments, my body decided to pick a fight with itself, and the battleground that it chose is my digestive system.

This time last year, I was at my wit’s end. I had tried almost every diet recommended for Crohn’s, with the exception of veganism, and nothing was working. I was eating off a ketogenic diet plan, hoping that the ketones would somehow kickstart healing in my body. (Spoiler: they didn’t.)

Through another round of research, I reached a crossroads: in one timeline, I would be influenced by the movie Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead and The Wahl’s Protocol and would start juicing; in another, I listened to the advice of Ted Naiman and Shawn Baker (both MDs) and just ate meat.

I cannot tell you how glad I am that I chose the carnivorous life.

While it still sounds a little crazy, because from birth we are taught that food is both plants and animals, choosing to at only animal products was one of the most freeing decisions I ever made.

Once I decided to stop eating plants, I was elated. Giddy. I didn’t have to worry about vegetables anymore. Vegetables had been giving me anxiety – which ones to eat, how to cook them, which ones I could tolerate.

And then, suddenly, I didn’t have to think about them anymore. It was amazing.

Do I miss vegetables? Not a lot. Every once in a while I wish I could eat a little asparagus or endive or avocado, but those desires pass. I’ve found that I can’t even tolerate a squeeze of lemon on shrimp or a spice rub on BBQ, so I doubt I could tolerate an entire stalk of asparagus.

My guts need a lot of TLC, and this diet has been the first one to give it to them.

Nothing has healed overnight. There are no miracle cures. But my skin is a lot clearer and better (when I’m off dairy). My guts are under control enough that I can go on a long road trip without anxiety (which was not the case a year ago).

The biggest indicator that something had changed was not even a month later, I decided to post in this blog every day for a year. I have failed at every blog previously, but this time I have succeeded. Somehow I knew that this dietary change had given me the energy that I needed.

That energy has gotten me through a stressful living situation, public humiliation thanks to leaky guts, a big move to a new town and a new job, and a minor surgery, all without causing a flare up with my gut situation.

That is kind of a big deal.

Over this past year, I’ve gone through steak phases and meatloaf phases (I’m currently in a shredded crock-pot beef and frozen burger patties on the Foreman grill phase).

I’ve eaten eggs and dairy, or not. I’ve drank coffee, or not. (I’m currently sticking with meat and water to aid healing.)

I have so much more energy, my guts are much more cooperative (although there’s still a long road of healing ahead), and so much more confidence in myself since going full carnivore.

I don’t regret it for a minute.