Dear friends,
I want you to take a moment to pause your music, close your eyes, and think back to the earliest memory you have involving food…particularly what food you were told was the most healthy as a kid.
For the vast majority of us, that will be something along the lines of “fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.”
I remember when I was in 1st grade—which would make me around 7 years old at the time—every wall of the lunch cafeteria at my school was covered in pictures of cartoon plant characters dancing around with big smiles and googly eyes.
A breakdancing loaf of bread, a piece of broccoli riding a skateboard, a pineapple wearing sunglasses and lounging in a hammock between 2 palm trees…As us students made our way through the lunch line, there wasn’t much to do, so naturally, we’d just stare at these pictures on the wall until it was finally our turn to fill our tray with a rectangular pizza slice, a pile of iceberg lettuce from the salad bar, and a plastic container of orange juice.
10 years later, in my final year of high school, the routine remained practically unchanged. Every day a tray of bread, fruits, vegetables, juices, and other plant derivatives for lunch, except this time, rather than staring at plant cartoons on the wall, we’d be sitting in our health class an hour before, filling out a worksheet about how good all of these things were for us.
Fast forward another 10 years, to 2022.
I was living in Austin Texas at the time, and as a 27 year-old, obviously was much more independent than the previous two time periods…but guess what stayed the same?
I started every morning with a big bowl of fruit & honey (plants)
I had a big bean & rice burrito, or peanut butter sandwich for lunch (plants wrapped in more plants)
Aaand I ended the day with a weekly-rotating roster of either: whole-grain pasta, potstickers, chili, quesadillas, caesar salad, or once in a very long while…a few slices of pizza with a big bowl of spinach and carrots on the side to feel less bad about what even then I knew wasn’t the healthiest meal.
TO REVIEW: plants, plants, plants, more plants, side of plants, and SOMETIMES a little bit of (LEAN) meat (usually ham or chicken breast) tossed into the mix for lunch and dinner.
Like most people, I thought this was pretty healthy! I was eating a textbook “balanced diet” of fruits, vegetables, grains, and a little bit of meat, every day, with VERY little processed crap.
But I now know in hindsight, that while all of my previous years of conditioning told me that I was doing the right thing…my body was giving me plenty of signs it wasn’t getting what it wanted.
I wasn’t FAT per se…but I was definitely soft.
My skin wasn’t great, my energy was OK, sleep, focus, sex drive all DECENT…
But my reference point was skewed. I had no idea there was a whole different level right within arm’s reach…
I probably would’ve kept going along on this path straight into my thirties and beyond, like most people do, if I hadn’t stumbled into…
THE RABBIT HOLE 🐇🕳
It all started with stumbling across some contrary health opinions in my Instagram feed, and my interest was piqued…
I decided to throw out the seed oils.
Noticed I wasn’t sunburning as much.
Cut out the grains next.
Felt even better.
Nonstick pans out. Plastic utensils out, microwaving out, polyester clothing out…
One by one, out of pure curiosity and just enough trust that these weird internet people may be onto something…I cut out the things that for my whole life prior, I’d been told were either fine, or even GOOD for me, just to see what happened.
Lo and behold, with every single step I made, I gradually felt and looked better. And better. And better.
Not even 2 years later now in 2024, I am a completely different man.
For a detailed post on the transformation I experienced through each dietary change—i.e. eating less and less plants, more and more meat over time—check out my “My Carnivore Diet Journey – 1 Year Later” post.
Spoiler alert: from both my own experience and an obsessive amount of research over the last few years…I found that everything I, and 99.99% of the population believe they know about diet (namely fruits & vegetables good, meat & fat bad), is utterly, completely, mind-bogglingly BACKWARDS.
Fruits, vegetables, and grains?
Literally all unhealthy for human beings.
Did you know that all of these things, and every other carbohydrate on earth:
a) Are completely inessential
b) Were not in the human diet practically AT ALL pre-agricultural revolution ~12,000 years ago
c) Turn into straight sugar in your bloodstream right after you eat it. Every single one of them.
It’s true, it’s shocking, and it’s a total paradigm-shifter once discovered, for each and every one of us who grew up in a modern world where the government, and all of its bought-and-paid-for regulatory arms rule everything we are told from the day we’re born, to the day we die.
Once this epiphany moment is reached, either through reading the right book, hearing the right podcast, or looking in the mirror after those first few weeks on the carnivore diet, one thing is clear.
There’s never been a more important time to throw government authority and old-school regulation out the window, and FIGURE SHIT OUT YOURSELF.
And that’s not a knock at doctors…it’s a knock at the system they’ve been brought up in, and a strong encouragement for THEM to start thinking further outside the box as well.
The Big Pharma/Big Food/Big Government system has taken its plant-based hold, we clearly see the results taking place worldwide, and we now all have a big decision to make at an individual, and a societal level:
What do we do now?
I say we begin asking more questions, scrutinizing everything we’ve grown up so confidently in believing through a first principles lens, and make as much noise as we possibly can to encourage our awakened brothers and sisters to use every modern tool available to spread the word as far and wide as possible.
We are going to change this world. I fully believe it, and every day I meet more who share this optimistic view for the future.
I hope you will join us.
-Ben
