Give Me 7 Minutes, I’ll Save You 11 Years Of Carnivore Mistakes

I'm Dr. Elizabeth Bright and I've been on the carnivore diet for 11 years, going on 12, and helped thousands of patients along the way because it's one of my main healing modalities. And during this time, I've learned lessons that most people take years to figure out on their own. And today, I'm going to share them all with you. The first thing you need to understand is that fat is not optional. It's absolutely a requisite. The human body became the human body, our big brain developed when we started eating animal fat. That's what makes us different. That's what makes us human. The animal fat is our preferred way of burning energy. We figured out how to eat carbs thousands and thousands of years later, okay? So, we have two ways of making energy, ketosis or glycolysis. Now, the preferred way is ketosis. So, if you eat fat, you are in a state of ketosis. If you're eating both fat and carbs, your metabolism is very confused and that's when you have insulin issues, cardiovascular issues. The best way to make energy is always going to be from fat. And it's also the way that we make our hormones, our steroid hormones and the stress response. So, if you have any issues with stress, any kind of hormonal issues, that's something that you've been missing is you've been avoiding fat. Women have been told to avoid fat for a long time, since the 1800s, really, because fat is supposedly making you fat. It doesn't make you fat. It makes you burn ketones. So, you'll actually burn extra fat, but you'll also use it to make energy. All right, so here's a few things that you have to absolutely consider and take on board when you're eating carnivore. Eating too much lean protein. Protein doesn't turn into energy. Your body really doesn't like to turn protein into energy because protein becomes muscle, peptides, enzymes, but it never really becomes energy. Your body does not want to cannibalize itself. It doesn't want to eat liver tissue. It doesn't want to eat break down organs. It wants only to break down fat in the form of ketones and it can break down glucose because your liver makes it. So, eating a lot of lean protein will just turn it into sugar. That lean protein, your body will only use some of that protein to make muscle. You have to work out, obviously, to make the muscle. The extra that your body can't use is just going to turn into sugar, which will cause all kinds of blood sugar issues. Another thing I don't recommend is over-exercising, especially cardio. What does cardio do? We became obsessed with cardio because of the fact that it supposedly burns more calories. Carbohydrate is 4 calories per gram and protein is 4 calories per gram and fat has 9 calories per gram. So, if you're doing cardio, you're supposedly burning more calories, which, supposedly, according to the calories in, calories out hypothesis, makes you burn more energy. It doesn't work that way. You'll go into a stress state. I love to exercise. I'm a paddle boarder, I'm a martial artist, but I had to stop exercising for a couple of years because I over-exercised. I messed up my adrenals. So, when you're healing, you have to think that you're in a healing state. You're in a recovery state. Your body has to rest and restore itself. So, if you're over-exercising, you're not going to be able to heal because your body will always think you're in a stress state. 10 minutes of exercise raises cortisol. You don't want to be raising cortisol when you're healing. You want to tamp that down. People often rely on stimulants for energy. That's the worst kind of energy. Stimulants [snorts] raise cortisol. That's what they do. So, when you're getting that hit of coffee in the morning, you're trying to make energy when you should be making healthy energy out of fat, out of ketones. You're trying to fake it. Fake it till you make it doesn't work. Drugs are the same. Snorting cocaine is a stimulant. You want to stay up till 4:00 in the morning at a club, you're going to have to have coffee or other stimulants or a Red Bull, which is full of caffeine. All those put you in a stress state and you'll never be able to heal if that's what you're relying on for energy. Fear salt is very common. This comes from, again, the 1800s when they saw, "Oh, people with kidney disease can't metabolize salt." So, they put them on low-salt diets and people died. People actually died from low-salt diets. So, that's the worst thing they could do. You need salt. The adrenals need salt. The stress response needs salt. And if you're a carnivore, you need more salt because carbohydrates make you hold on to salt. They make you retain water. So, all that couple of pounds of water that goes away immediately when you go carnivore or high-fat carnivore is that retained water that's no longer being retained. And you need to make sure that you can hold on to water with salt. So, you need a minimum of 5 g of salt on a carnivore diet daily. You need more if you're stressed. Too many small meals, eating one meal a day, that's the worst thing you can do because that one meal a day, you're trying to make your body think that it's not hungry the rest of the day. That doesn't work. We did actually evolve to have more than one meal a day. If you're hungry, you're going to be stressed. You will mess up your hunger signals. If you're working overnight shifts or you're working like crazy or you're exercising like crazy, you will forestall hunger signals. But hunger signals are healthy. You have to address the hunger. If you're ignoring it, you're going to raise cortisol levels. So, under-eating goes under that category as well. Under-eating, you need a certain kind of nourishment for your height, for your build. You definitely need quantity of food. You need more if you have more stress. You need more, obviously, if you are taller. If you exercise more, you're going to need more food. I usually recommend 75/25 for men, fat to protein, and 80/20 for women, fat to protein. So, you also need to figure that out. You can do that with an app. I usually recommend FatSecret because it doesn't scream calories to work on how much you need for your energy level and your healing. You need more if you're healing more. If you got to heal more, you're going to need more energy. Comparing men's progress, comparing how men are losing weight to women, that doesn't work. You know, many men also have weight issues, but women make more hormones. Women are usually more hormonally imbalanced than men because they've been avoiding food since they were adolescents. More and more men are have had these issues recently. There's more anorexia in men than there used to be. It used to be mostly women, but under-eating is definitely something that can be an issue for both male and female. But remember, both need fat, but women need more fat because women make more steroid hormones. They need more hormones to build sexual characteristics during adolescence. They actually build more tissue. More tissue expands during female puberty. So, when you get to be 40 and you've been starving yourself since you were 12, it's going to be more of an issue for females, usually, than for men. All right, so I basically talk about all of these things and go into the nitty-gritty of why your symptoms can be caused by not enough fat, thyroid issues, or cortisol issues, why you could have had these issues since adolescence in my three books. Good Fat Is Good for Women, which basically explains to you why cortisol is crucial for hormonal balance, not just for menopause, actually all ages. Good Fat Is Good for Girls talks about what happened during puberty, why did things go wrong then cuz we often trace it back to issues during puberty. And The Power of Your Thyroid and Adrenals, I give you a lot of examples of all the health issues that you could have had that you didn't know were associated with low thyroid levels, low cortisol levels, or high cortisol levels and how I treat them. And I do all of this in the group. We talk about all of this in the group. I analyze people's labs. I look at their cortisol levels. If you're taking HRT, please don't. BHRT, please don't. You're going to have to wait a month before you can measure your cortisol levels because they raise cortisol and you won't get the proper measurement until after you've been off of them for a month. Thank you for watching this video. I hope you got a lot of good information from it and I look forward to seeing your comments.