Batfort

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Category: Carnivory and other off-road health choices (page 7 of 9)

100% Carnivore Meatloaf Recipe

2017-11-07 / / 3 Comments

Ok friends. This is the food that I’ve been subsisting on for most of the last month.

It’s not ribeye steaks or even beef roasts, although many carnivores will tell you that they subsist mainly on these things. I’ve found that my own personal leaky, scarred-up, overly bacteria infested gut likes ground meat much more than whole cuts.

Ground beef certainly isn’t as sexy as a good NY strip steak, but I’m more interested in “healing” than in sexy at this point.

Anyway, I finally hit on a good balance of fat/lean and beef/non-beef that doesn’t make my ankles swell and that’s versatile enough to eat for lunch and dinner and sometimes breakfast.

This meatloaf is good both hot and cold, and it’s also delicious if you shingle bacon over the top of it before you cook it. When I’m in a permanent dwelling, I’ll cook up a few batches in 11×13″ pans. When I’m in an Airbnb, I’ll grab some disposable aluminum roasting pans and line them with foil (so they can be reused).

Carnivore Meatloaf

Serves 1, usually a day’s worth of eating

Ingredients

2 pounds 80/20 ground beef

1 pound 80/20 ground pork

Salt to taste (I like Hawaiian red sea salt the best because it brings out the pork flavor, but use whatever you have on hand)

Method

Preheat the oven to 425.

Put ground beef into your baking dish. Sprinkle with salt. I usually use about a tablespoon of “large grain” salt and half that of fine grain salt, but use however much you like. Some people don’t even use salt. I am not one of those people.

Knead your beef and salt together. Then, add the pork and knead into the beef so the whole thing becomes “berk” or “poef.”

Smash your mixture into the bottom of the pan so that the meat wad fills all the corners and is relatively flat.

Place in the oven. Cook for ~30 minutes or until the juices run clear out of the center. There will be a swimming pool of fat and juices around the meat. It will also shrink out of the corners.

When you take it out of the oven, use a knife to cut into pieces to make meatloaf bars. These are super-easy to travel with.

Let your meatloaf cool in its own fat. It’ll soak up some of it, which will make a richer and more filling eating experience later.

Chow down cold or hot.

Enjoy!

“It’s like being friends with a werewolf”

2017-10-26 / / 0 Comments

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.

Image of the week: Eat Your Meat edition

2017-10-20 / / 0 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about carnivory. (Mostly because I don’t want to wax poetic about poop on this blog but that’s another story for another day.)

One of the lines of argument that carnivores use against the constant cries that “you simply HAVE to eat vegetables!” is the anatomy argument. Where ruminants have 27 thousand different stomachs to digest all that grass, humans have one. Much like carnivores, we also have sharp teeth and high acid content in our stomachs.

There are lots of studies and arguments and graphs that show why humans are built more like carnivores than they are like herbivores. There’s plenty of anecdotal data (if you’ve ever read a vegan forum) of people’s digestive systems getting completely wrecked by a vegan diet. Again, statistics and numbers and arguments.

Then, there’s this:

A succinct argument in meme form. Boom, done. QED.

I can’t stop laughing.

 

On the personal front, switching to an all animal product diet has been one of the best decisions that I’ve made in recent years. I haven’t eaten a plant-based product for five months, and while healing is slow, it’s been fairly steady.

As I’ve searched for “natural” methods to control my autoimmune illness, I’ve focused (perhaps overly so) on diet. After a while, I felt like I could blame everything on what I ate. Taking a whole host of variables out of my diet has revealed how much variability in symptoms has absolutely nothing to do with what I eat. In fact, the lack of margin with food highlights just how much stress or lack of sleep impacts my health. I’m still terrible at exercising regularly, but I’m seeing a few glimmers of how exercise could provide some immediate, direct impacts.

My only diet-related issue is that I keep eating cheese. I have found that raw-milk cheddar is the best option, and eaten only in conjunction with meat. Otherwise, it doesn’t provide enough “matter” for my digestive system to tackle seriously.

Overall, though, no regrets. I may just be able to make it work without drugs. And that, my friends, I never thought that I could say.

A scalp observation

2017-10-17 / / 0 Comments

Two months into my no-shampoo adventure, my scalp started feeling pretty healthy. (Especially after I started using a great hairbrush.) Rather than feeling like there was a bunch of grime building up on my hair, my hair started to feel smooth and soft. My scalp has felt more healthy, without weird scaly bits or random sores that used to pop up now and again. It’s been pretty cool feeling my scalp normalize and heal over the course of time.

Sure my hair still looked a bit greasy at the end of the day, but that’s nothing I can’t handle.

But then I decided to get a haircut.

Haircuts typically come with a shampoo, and this was no exception.

Now I’m dealing with a couple different scratchy scaly sore patches on my scalp.

Coincidence?

I doubt it.

No-Poo for fine hair (secrets revealed!)

2017-10-02 / / 0 Comments

I’ve finally figured out the key to a no-shampoo lifestyle with fine hair.

My hair is not especially fine, but it’s very delicate and there’s a deceptive amount of it. This fact is what has led me to a low-maintenance hair lifestyle, because when I start to calculate the effort/impact effects of 40 – 60 minutes curling my hair (only to have it fall flat an hour later no matter what products I use), it’s not worth it.

That delightful feature has also presented a problem in my determination to go absolutely shampoo-free (and everything-free), since my hair shows every single last living drop of oil that’s been spilt on it.

Naturally, there’s an adjustment period for your scalp to rebalance and stop over-producing sebum to compensate from the stripping that happens with modern shampoos. I countered for that by wearing my hair up in tiny buns, and braids, and cute hairstyles like that.

But there comes a time when a girl just wants to let her hair fly free.

After a few weeks, I started wearing my hair down again. On any given day, it might look pretty good after its morning rinse, but by about 3 o’clock it started looking pretty ragged and oily again. Not a cute look.

Then I realized that I needed to be doing more to distribute the sebum down the shaft of my hair. If I’m not going to remove it (with shampoo), I need to disburse it. And where else is it going to go but down my hair?

Last week I bought this boar-bristle hairbrush to do just that. So far it’s been the best investment I’ve made in my hair for years.

  1. The extra nylon bristles scratch lightly against my scalp when I brush my hair, loosening dandruff flakes (that get whisked away by the boar bristles) and stimulating bloodflow to my scalp. It feels incredibly good. You don’t need one of those stupid looking scalp stimulators when you just brush your hair.
  2. The boar bristles really do help to distribute the sebum and oils down the length of my hair. For a few days it looked pretty gross, but after about a week I’ve done enough brushing that the sebum rinses off easily in the shower. Today is the first day that my hair feels lightweight again, and this is day 6 of brushing.
  3. My hairbrush came with a brush cleaner to help remove hair that gets caught in the bristles, and a cute little bag to keep it clean on trips. Already used both of them, both of them are Batfort approved.

Plus, haircare is now a pleasurable activity. I keep my brush handy in my room and brush my hair while watching a Korean drama or reading an article online.

The only downside I’ve seen so far is that my hair is a little frizzier than normal. Hopefully that will calm down as brushing becomes the routine and the sebum settles into a new equilibrium, but we’ll have to wait and see.

As for now, I see myself continuing this no-poo journey into the future.

The Bitcoin Carnivores

2017-09-29 / / 0 Comments

For those of us who have “taken the red pill,” we know that one area of skepticism leads to another, which leads to another, which…

Jordan Pearson of Vice’s Motherboard is just now learning that lesson. He wrote an article on the circle of Carnivores within the Bitcoin sphere, which is significantly large enough to attract attention.

For the Bitcoin carnivore, there is a kind of metaphysical parallel between decentralized digital ledgers and an imagined idea of what our ancestors ate, and by extension, how they lived. Politics, food, and money—it’s all connected.

“The 20th century was disastrous for human health and wealth, and the rise of central banking and industrial food was clearly a major reason why,” Michael Goldstein, founder of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute and a vocal Bitcoin carnivore, wrote me in an email. “Bitcoin is a revolt against fiat money, and an all-meat diet is a revolt against fiat food.”

The implication of “fiat” is that modern money and modern foods are both artificial, and Bitcoin carnivorism supposedly solves this problem. Goldstein has been a dedicated carnivore since 2015, he told me, and eats “only from the animal kingdom, and mostly fat.” When I asked him to spell out the apparent Bitcoin-carnivory-libertarianism trifecta at play, Goldstein responded, “Once you put on the They Live glasses, you can’t take them off,” referring to the 1988 film in which a drifter finds a pair of sunglasses that when worn reveal the world is controlled by evil aliens.

It seems self-evident to me now, but yes — of course — everything is connected. Parallels systems exist in many different aspects of human activity. And yes, the people who self-select to think outside the system, and even live outside the system, are generally intelligent enough to apply their insights to multiple domains.

I love the reference to They Live, seeing how there’s a screenshot from the movie as one of my header images.

Speaking of self-selection, the author unwittingly reinforces the whole point of off-road thinking with this snide aside from the mainstream nutrition community:

(I reached out to a couple of well-known nutritionists for this article. One responded in an email, saying that the diet is “too ridiculous to be covered.” Another wrote, “Yet another extreme diet. Sigh.”)

“Health care professionals” with the RD or RDN credentialed had their education bought and paid for by the USDA and big-Ag. The people who self-select for the dietetics credentialling process tend to be compliant and incurious; perfect mouthpieces for the establishment’s current system of “fiat food.”

And you can’t expect people of the system to be able to comprehend, let alone have a valid opinion on, a new way of doing things. Especially when their livelihoods depend on people being confused about what to eat — which carnivores are decidedly not.

Actually, a Bitcoin-level carnivore getting trapped in the same room as a dietitian could be the start of a really great comedy sketch. The IQ differential between the two would be so astronomical that communication would be nearly impossible, and there’d be plenty of predator/prey punnage to draw on.

Because you’ll (almost) never find a dietitan with this mindset:

“If someone is willing to say, ‘Oh hey, I’m into this thing that 90 percent of everyone says is dead wrong,’ then you’ve probably got yourself both a cryptocurrency fan and an all-meat dieter”

Personally, I haven’t stepped into the Bitcoin world yet, but I’m hoping to do so in the near future.

The Architecture of Chronic Illness

2017-09-25 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes I underestimate the amount of impact that chronic illness has had on my life.

Some people live their lives untethered, flitting from one activity to the other. Or, conversely but just as freely, they live driven toward a single goal. In both cases, nothing gets in their way. They aim themselves at what they want, and go for it.

I envy them, in a way.

My path has been much less clear. My river is full of snarls, backeddys and boulders — to navigate well, I must always have my eyes open. I scope out the river in front, the depth underneath, and feel the the wind’s speed and direction. In order to live my life, I have to plan ahead, outsmart my own guts, and make changes on the fly when my own body decides not to cooperate with me.

Does this always have to happen? No. I can go back on high-octane pharmaceuticals and live a relatively normal life for a while (that is, until the side effects catch up to me again). I’ve chosen this life, to live without drugs but with a treacherous body.

Sometimes I wonder if this envy is a byproduct of looking at other people’s lives from the outside in and missing all the hairy, awful details that a person chooses not to share with the world. There are certainly lots that I refrain from sharing. But I’ve also had conversations with people, and interacted with friends, where they talk about a lack of common ground with people like me who have to fight through chronic illness to get where we want to go.

I have a doctor friend, for instance, who doesn’t know how to work though sickness. To his credit, he’ll admit that he becomes a big baby when he’s ill. But because he’s always been so healthy, he has no framework for unhealth.

Dissimilarly, I made friends with a guy who was one of the bangers, who took advantage of his cool, clear river to swim from shore to shore, and explore every rock and branch that came along, as he took a passing fancy.

It was very difficult making plans with this person, because everything I do has to be planned out, but most everything that he does is spontaneous.

It’s in those moments, when the incompatibility between my life and another’s shines bright — so bright that it prevents us from connecting — when I feel my disease most keenly.

It’s not the physical discomfort that the problem — that’s easy to live through — but the utter disconnect with people whose bodies are the vehicles for their souls and nothing more.

My body shapes my life.

I hate that I love WORTH IT

2017-09-20 / / 0 Comments

It’s Buzzfeed.

I hate that I love something produced by Buzzfeed.

But if we’re talking about interesting content, delightful comedic timing, and camerawork that is becoming quite beautiful…

…this is worth it.

(Shut up.)

Andrew is the perfect carmudgeonly foil to Steven’s enthusiasm, and Adam’s rare interjections provide both structure to the video (they tend to signal the end of a segment) and some additional heft. The contrast between Andrew’s knowledge (or his facade of knowledge) and Steven’s newbie energy can sometimes make it hard to tell what the actual outcome of a tasting is — especially with an over-the-top truffle-related or gold-plated food — so Adam’s verdict helps ground all the funny comments in reality.

In this episode, we can see production values getting better. There’s foreshadowing (cows and their ambient mooing) for the next video, a joke with a early-timestamp setup and mid-timestamp payoff, and some truly gorgeous cinematography. Good work, Adam.

Some of the expensive foods make me cringe, because they so clearly focus on price and ostentation instead of quality food. For example, in the NYC pizza episode, the mid-priced pizza was handmade by Mario Batali, who spoke about the history and metaphysics of why truly good food is so delicious. Meanwhile, the high-priced pizza looked like a flea market of flashy ingredients, designed as a honeypot to trick investment bankers out of their money.

Truly, this show demonstrates that quality is not always tied to price.

Quality is tied to love, to care, to skin in the game.

I miss coffee

2017-09-07 / / 0 Comments

Aside from my occasional dreams of layer cakes, the only plant-based food I really miss is coffee.

Not because I crave it, or need the zing of caffeine running through my veins, but because I love the smell, the taste, the body of it.

Trying out different roasts, different regions, different roasters, brewing methods, coffee shops. All those little details so satisfying to my little nerd heart.

That small morning ritual, the pungent smell of ground coffee beans wafting “good morning” into the air.

The ease of saying “let’s meet for coffee” and then actually ordering coffee.

Wrapping my fingers around a mug, feeling its weight in my hands.

Saying hello to my coffee dragon after the first few sips each morning.

No really, I have a coffee dragon.

Coffee dragon, I miss you too.

N=Many is go!

2017-08-16 / / 0 Comments

It’s Day 2 of the NEqualsMany 90-day carnivore study. All across the world, nascent carnivores are weighing, eating, and logging their meat consumption. (I’m at 2.28 pounds for the day.)

The best part about a real-time web data collector is that there’s already data to share!

I quit dairy for this study, which is probably a good thing for my health in the long run, but it’s making me sad. Cheese is delicious, and so is butter.

Nevertheless, dairy is a confounding factor so we are supposed to minimize our consumption. Every little thing counts at this point.

This study is important!

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