Healthy Mindset Miracles
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Healthy Mindset Miracles
Ep.012 - Our Family's Radical Return to Health Embracing the Carnivore WOE
Episode_012
Glenn and I never expected that a desperate quest for health would lead us to the carnivore diet, but here we are, healthier than ever. Buckle up as we share the details of our unconventional journey, from the trials of veganism to our current meat-centric lifestyle that defied our health issues. We'll uncover the remarkable transformations we've experienced, including Glenn's escape from the grip of sky-high blood pressure without conventional medication, and delve into the impact of our diet on social situations, travel, and the discipline it requires to thrive.
This conversation extends beyond our own health revelations. We're thrilled to discuss how our loyal canine companion, Ziggy, found a new lease on life through the same dietary principles. As our kitchen simplified and our shopping trips dwindled, we found unexpected harmony in our marriage and daily living. This episode also pours into the clear skin benefits our daughter witnessed, shedding light on the ripple effects of our dietary choices. We are excited to share the resources and communities that have guided us through this journey, hoping to inspire you to explore the profound relationship between what you eat and how you feel.
We wrap up with heartfelt success stories from our circle of friends and family, revealing how it's never too late to reinvent yourself or your health. Whether it's a friend's surprising pivot to stand-up comedy or dramatic health recoveries from chronic diseases, these narratives underscore the remarkable potential of nutrition as medicine. Stay tuned as I plan to bring on guests who've turned their lives around through food, aiming to spread the word on the transformative power of a well-considered diet. We're grateful for the chance to share our stories and are eager to hear yours as we continue to navigate the fascinating intersection of diet, health, and fulfillment.
Thank you for tuning in to this empowering episode of Healthy Mindset Miracles." We hope you found inspiration and insight into the journey of redefining your mindset.
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Stay tuned for more episodes where we continue to explore the path to healing and well-being. Until we meet again, may you discover a healthy mindset in your life. 🌟
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All right, welcome to Healthy Mindset Miracles. This is our episode on a carnivore diet. We have had a major life change in the way that we eat back in August of 2023. And I'm going to have Glenn tell you the main reason why we decided to do this change in our diet. It was because of just health issues, things that Glenn was going through Mainly. We believe that you know us making this change had saved his life. Ultimately, for me, it was a lot of gut issues, a lot of challenges with my gut.
Speaker 1:Now, prior to this, we did try to do vegan and, you know, eat appropriately. What we thought was appropriate were, you know, just vegetables, fruits and try to be healthy with the herbal routes. We did a lot of that stuff and we just still ended up with a lot of problems. In fact, I ended up with more problems than I had before and we just couldn't figure it out. And, of course, in our last podcast, you heard us say how we traveled a lot and we had gone to various different places. So when you're traveling, you really have to be careful about what you eat and where you eat, because things are just different in various different places. You know they season your food different. They, you know, culture their food differently. You know, things are just different. So anyways, hi, how?
Speaker 2:are you now?
Speaker 1:And welcome.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me on this fabulous podcast.
Speaker 1:This is your favorite subject, right?
Speaker 2:Carnivore.
Speaker 1:Talking about carnivore.
Speaker 2:There's many favorite subjects. I couldn't say I have a favorite one, but my favorite one has always been eating meat. I wasn't never a vegetable buff in any sense of the word whatsoever.
Speaker 1:You weren't, I was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I fully agree with the different natures of the preparation of foods in different restaurants and being on on vacation and traveling and such kind of let your guard down, just kind of eat what, what, what's available, easiestly available in the moments, and such kind of let your guard down, just kind of eat what's available, easiestly available in the moments, here and there, kind of also eat of the environment, of what others are eating at the time too. But it can really get out of hand. I'd like to go on a cruise at some point and I am going to soon, so I'm going to have to have really great discipline because my health is definitely more important. So she spoke of carnivore and that crossing our path. At a certain point and thankfully it did my BP was 244 over 155. Most of the time it was around those numbers and it wasn't coming down at all.
Speaker 1:So what are you experiencing when it was really high like that?
Speaker 2:What were your symptoms? The things that you were going through so headaches, debilitating, less energy, much less brain fog, major blurry eyes, runny eyes, arthritis, tingling in my feet more so having the back pain um inflamed, more so than than now at all. You're back in your neck ever before. Yeah, yeah, your, your skin was swollen. You were, how much did you weigh?
Speaker 1:um up to 219, maybe a little more yeah, your eyes were always red, your face was swollen, your skin was red. Um, you know, you just had a lot of challenges, right, and so did you like lose motivation at times where you just wanted to sleep during the day because you just didn't feel good.
Speaker 2:For certain, Also because I felt that I needed to sleep off these ailments that were taking place, but really I needed to change the way. What I consumed into my mouth is what I needed to change.
Speaker 1:So you really weren't much of a sweet person, other than you liked chocolate dark chocolate to be exact but you didn't eat a whole lot of that, but you mainly liked what like mashed potatoes, gravy Chips biscuits.
Speaker 2:Started drinking Coke again at one point, but that was just several weeks um at all at once, and then gave that up again and I already knew that that wasn't the greatest way to go, having the great amount of intake of sugar and such. But yeah, I mean, I would just um noodles, spaghettis, um, just anything that was easily accessible, even microwave dinners and things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so for me it was my stomach issues. So I'd always, my stomach would always hurt after I'd eat. I remember one time we I had just ate pizza and we had come back home and my stomach was hurting so bad, so bad like the worst that you could possibly think of. And I remember laying across the bed, you know, with my stomach across the bed, hoping that would relieve the pain that I was going through. And then I had passed the worst gas and it probably shook the whole place. That was so bad and it was just like I was extremely gassy all the time and for a lady that's embarrassing. Like the first couple months we were together I would not refuse to pass gas, I would hold it in, but then I finally let it loose, because you can't hold it in for so long. And yeah, it was just really, really bad.
Speaker 1:I would always just feel nauseous after I'd eat. I wouldn't go to the bathroom, and then when I would go to the bathroom, it wasn't pretty, and so it's just like. You know so many challenges like that. So back in August, a friend of ours had told us about carnivore and told us you know so many challenges like that. So back in august, a prince of ours had told us about carnivore and told us you know, you, you might want to try doing that, because he was taking um medication for the bp, trying to get it to come down. It wasn't working, um, you know, it would come down and then go right back up and it was just always challenges and it got to a point where it got very, very scary, scary right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when you say medication, she's talking about herbal type stuff like turmeric and garlic.
Speaker 1:Well, you take an amlodipine. An amlodipine?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's a medication, right, but I hadn't been prescribed that since 2020. So whatever I had was old as it was and I might have taken one every once in a while, but really I don't trust that stuff because it leads to other things. So if I wasn't going to at least feather, I guess, is I'm looking for a word, but feather the, the BP being off the charts with with something synthetic or not, I know I knew I needed to get it under control with letting my food be my medicine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly so we started. You started first. I didn't start it right away with you, but you started first doing carnivore. So what does carnivore consist of? For those of you that are listening don't know what carnivore is, what does carnivore consist of? Like what kind of foods is that?
Speaker 2:Really there's an acronym VVVE. So bacon, beef, butter, eggs, so it really consists of animal products, so grease rather than oils, so the fat of animals, butter, you know, cheese. Yeah, there's some ingredients.
Speaker 1:What kind of butter, though? Because there's different butters.
Speaker 2:Butter, real butter. So if it has any type of oil in it, even like mayonnaise, if there's any type of oil in it, it's not considered carnivore. It's really easy to make one's own mayonnaise, but we won't get into that right now.
Speaker 1:We'll talk about that later, though actually We'll talk about some of the recipes that you've been able to do lately because of this way of eating. So grill butter is really consists of cream and salt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the cream off the top of raw unmolested milk.
Speaker 1:So for a while there we were getting like Amish butter, until you figured out recently how to make your own butter, which we'll talk about that a little bit later. So so you started changing your diet, for you were eating nothing but bacon, beef, eggs, butter, and these are things that you were really focusing on, just those meats, so that you can bring down the inflammation in your body, because, ultimately, the blood pressure challenges was because of the inflammation in your body. So as you started to go down this route of changing the way that you eat, what was your body going through? What kind transitions were you were you seeing?
Speaker 2:well, my gut was changing for sure, um, even my um attitude, honestly. So those are great byproducts of doing so, so I'm no longer as frustrated. I started noticing that right away. The blood pressure started to come down. It's come down to being under still above 140 over 120. It hasn't come below 140 over 120, but it's not high anymore.
Speaker 1:Well, there was one point, it was like 140 over 98.
Speaker 2:or um, I don't maybe, yeah, actually 120. Yeah, yeah, you're right, it was down there. Yeah, I'm getting the numbers mixed up, but yeah, 148 over 98, I think, was the lowest that I've had since starting carnival. But that's way better.
Speaker 1:Very dry, much drastically better yeah so other benefits so you've lost weight. How much weight have you lost?
Speaker 2:I fluctuate between 175 and 178 now without really having or trying to lose weight. Um, I still.
Speaker 1:I eat three times a day, sometimes more yeah, and so you have no more swelling in your body? No, you have. Your eyes are clear now. Yeah, what about your mental capacity? Like, do you feel like you can think clearer now?
Speaker 2:Definitely, without a doubt.
Speaker 1:And retain information better.
Speaker 2:Yep, I can speak better. I can formulate my sentences better. It's crazy what you start to realize is out of control once you start getting things back into control.
Speaker 1:So what do you think you know these last several months of doing carnivore? What do you think was the biggest benefit overall that you've noticed, that you're excited about?
Speaker 2:The energy clarity I mean it all goes together, it couldn't be one whatsoever. The joints, the joint pain. I no longer have pain in my hands and in my feet. My back becomes sore every once in a while. I put a beating on that thing over the course of my life and it would be frozen up several times in a year and that hasn't happened in a while. Yeah, so for me happened in a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so for me, I've lost about 25 pounds. I have. I have no longer have gut issues at all. In fact, there's a lot of things that I wasn't able to tolerate before that I can tolerate now, which was actually beef, and so I can tolerate those things much better beef, and so I can tolerate those things much better. One thing that I love about doing this is that eating butter by itself now has become like a candy to me. I really enjoy it, especially since he's figured out how to make it. We have figured out some various different recipes, so some of the recipes that you've learned how to do are carnivore pizza and so a carnivore pizza. Normally, a pizza has a bread crust. What is the crust that you use on your carnivore pizza?
Speaker 2:So you can take either ground beef or chicken, ground chicken and put some egg in it and cheese, and then you just roll it out onto a pizza plate and you cook it up until it's done or close to it. Take it out and put your plate and you cook it up until it's done or close to it, take it out and put your toppings on it and put it back in there and it stays together just as well as a regular pizza crust.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and some of the other things that we have made are ice cream yes, so that's just heavy whipping cream and then, um, one can put glycine in it and derived from animal which is a sweetener, some vanilla, some vanilla extract, and really I mean you can put butter in it and mix it in before it gets too cold. That way it's current throughout or equal Salt we'll put in it. We eat a lot of salt now, lots of it, and Celtic salt has been the main salt, but also proper Himalayan and Redmond salt as well. But you can pretty much put anything into your ice cream that you want. If you're going to go with fruits.
Speaker 2:Still, I would try to very wild um berries, whether they're blueberries, blackberries or raspberries, would be something that I would.
Speaker 2:I would choose, but not much else yeah and so, and then recently, um, you have learned to make butter, and I've learned that it's best to let it come to the temperature of about 65 degrees and it's with the cream line up on the top as you let milk settle real unmolested milk and then you just put it in the whipper for 20-25 minutes until you see the butter, and then you salt it and then you drain out the buttermilk for use in something else and then you just kind of piddle pad it around in your bowl there and rinse it off if you like, and then you put it in the fridge or on the side of the counter and it's ready to go it's so good.
Speaker 1:He just made some today and he gave me a spoonful of it and it was really really good. I was like, wow, this is awesome, so we don't have to buy butter anymore. He knows how to make it now, which is really, really cool. So it's been amazing. Do you portion your food at all?
Speaker 2:No, what's that? No, I buy large portions of beef and I slice it up and I put some in the coldest part of the fridge and some in the door, ready to cook Really.
Speaker 1:Some people say oh, you're on a diet so you've got to push how much you eat. Not on this. You can eat as much as you need to until you're full and satiated and happy Lions. They're out in the wilderness and they eat and eat, and eat until they take a nap. And that's pretty much what we do is we eat and eat, and eat until we're ready to take a nap. And then there's days where you um, you do, uh, fasting, you know, and so in the beginning you did a lot of fasting just to help with the inflammation and stuff. Do you really think that that was beneficial to you?
Speaker 2:It's definitely beneficial, especially if you can get through, say, two to three days um, just drinking. I would prefer distilled water, or even recommend distilled water with salt in it as a electrolyte, or you can get trace minerals from a health food store, but again, I like this, the Celtic salt, the most, and, yes, it dissolves in there very well, and lemon is good for that too.
Speaker 2:It doesn't break the ketosis as well, and you know if you really can't make it to three days, then boiled eggs are okay, and one meal a day can be considered fasting too, because you can, you know, go the 22 hours while you sleep. You're fasting, right. And then you break fast when you eat something after that, at any point and at any day. But one meal a day, oh man, you can eat that one hour and then be fasting for 23. And it's super, highly beneficial. There is some false research to that, if one just uses Google, but there's many, many benefits to fasting. But before one begins to do that and then goes into carnivore as well, there's such a thing called priming that kind of gets the body ready Because a lot of people they don't eat even three meals a day.
Speaker 2:Most people I talk to don't eat even breakfast. And it's actually necessary to prime the body with eating three regular meals a day for approximately two, three weeks tops, and then go into a carnivore way of eating and fasting. And also, if one eats lots of vegetables, it's not smart to just stop cold turkey, because there's a such of a thing is called oxalate dumping, which are crystals that make up kidney stones and crystals in the joints and inflammation and stuff, and that stuff will come out anywhere. It can find its way out, even through your skin, as in acne, and inflammation through the skin through the head, through anywhere. I've seen all kinds of different cases, so kind of got to ease your way into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So for me. I actually took my time and I never ended up having any of those oxalate dumping symptoms or challenges With me. It was, oh my gosh, I haven't been able to go poop for five days or six days, something like that.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I come to find out the reasoning for that is because your body, when you're giving it the nutrients that it needs, it's absorbing it from your food and you have less waste. And so I thought at first something was wrong, until I was listening to Dr Ken Berry and he was explaining. Your body has less waste now, so it's not going to want to go to the bathroom every single day. And it's so interesting because if I do have a day where I eat something that I'm not supposed to like let's say it's a friend's birthday and I eat a piece of cake the very next day I'm going Because my body is literally immediately eliminating that toxic waste and it wants to get rid of it.
Speaker 1:It's like no, no, no, no, I don't like this, I don't want it, and it gets rid of it taste buds are like it in the moment oh, I know, unfortunately, um, but you know, we find creative ways to, you know, help us with those sweet cravings, things like that, because when you first start out, it's so imperative that you, you know, focus on the healing of your body and the directions. Once you're healed, then you can have moments where you can have a slice of cake with your friend for their birthday or whatever yeah, you can loosen up and reintroduce certain things yeah, and just don't go overboard and don't make it a consistent thing, like it used to be, which got you in a position in the first place.
Speaker 1:That's where a lot of those challenges are.
Speaker 2:So for cravings, though, real quick since we're on that subject of sweets, cream cheese, melted cheese I like fried cheese I'll throw it on the griddle and just cook it up and eat it with pork, just like that Browning butter, and then putting salt in it, extra salt, or even bacon bits into it. But there's creative ways to curb those cravings, and I've found also that if I take that moment that I am craving and I fill it with something that I know that's good for me, eventually that taste of that particular craving does subside.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and you just got to really it's mind over matter, right, you know, think about your mindset directions that you're headed with it. Why are you doing this? You know for him it was saving his life. He, you know it's hard to trust doctors nowadays, it's. You know you definitely don't like pharmaceuticals, and so for him he had to find a way to lower that blood pressure in a natural manner. Right now it's still a little high, it's not perfect, but it's also been years and years of your body, you know, having an issue, and so it's going to take at least a couple years for it to fully get to a normal rate. Right, yeah, but it's 10 000 times better than it was before and you have a better quality of life. I feel like, excuse me, I got a little puppy, oops, a little puppy that wanted to be up here. I scared her. I know this is Ziggy.
Speaker 2:And she's carnivore.
Speaker 1:I was about to say so. She's 13 years old and we started to feed our dog natural chicken.
Speaker 2:You give them chicken and steak and eggs and different things in their food, so she used to be, and you can see her.
Speaker 1:She's very little now, but she used to be very overweight.
Speaker 2:She's like 11 pounds and now she's 8 or something.
Speaker 1:She used to be 9 pounds, she's now 7 pounds. Okay, she used to be nine pounds, she's now seven pounds, and she used to be like having breathing problems and she would have problems going to the bathroom and she was just. There was days where I wasn't even sure she was going to make it much longer because she's older and because of the challenge.
Speaker 2:Now it's been six months since we put them on carn carnivore and she runs around here like she's a new puppy. She pounces and plays bones and cartilage and bone marrow and eggs and um some cheese, um yogurt for the gut biome and um big grease and butter. And they eat all kinds of good stuff now, just um nothing processed whatsoever and a lot of times it's raw, especially the bones.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and her like she used to, like if you would pet her like this, she would try to bite your hand off, but she doesn't do that like she used to. Yeah, way different personality, way different attitude. She's just, she's just, she's awesome. So, um, so, yeah, so we just really focused on making some changes on our health and, you know, I believe it's really helped us in our marriage, you know, because we both have our our like emotions and attitudes, and things have changed dramatically there's a lot of benefits even less trips to the store.
Speaker 2:We don't have as much stuff in our in our kitchen, in our fridge anymore we don't have no fruits and vegetables dying in my everything is anymore anymore like I used to everything is in the animal product that we actually need and when I.
Speaker 1:Every morning I'll drink what we call our salty lemonade. Um, it's where I take a teaspoon of Celtic salt and half a lemonade squeezed into 32 ounces of water. And it's amazing. There was a company called Element L-M-N-T. They sell electrolytes, which is potassium and sodium packets all different flavors, and we started out that way.
Speaker 2:I recommend the unflavored because it doesn't have a sweetener in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the other ones have sweeteners in it. Oh, I didn't know that. Well, I do recommend unflavored anyways, because you can actually add lemon juice or lime or whatever your own natural flavors to it. Like even if, like for me, it took me a while. I still eat berries. I love berries. I just don't eat as much as I used to Like.
Speaker 2:I used to eat them constantly they go to waste, yeah, before you get to them now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so occasionally, like we are fortunate enough where we have some wild berries around us so we can go pick some wild berries and we can put those in our water, and that's not carnivore and we can put those in our water, you know so, and that's not carnivore. But you know, again, we've gotten to a point where we can reintroduce some of these things back into our daily foods and they don't harm us. But you have to make sure that they're natural, wild, not processed, not any chemicals that were sprayed on them. You know, we try not to buy any of that stuff from the store, as far as the berries go, or anything. We do buy our lemons and our limes from the store, but we go for the organic ones, just because that's just where our mindset is. But you know, this is us, this is our decisions. We're not telling you guys, you have to do this, but I will tell you. You know, if you have any questions about it, we'll be more than happy to help you.
Speaker 1:We'll walk you through it because it really has helped us tremendously. We're part of a large group, several thousands and thousands of people who are coming into the ways of eating carnivore. There's a there's Facebook page called Carnivore Tribe that we're in. I'm in a carnivore for women, carnivore for beginners so there are several doctors that you started following on YouTube in the beginning of all this. Who are those doctors and tell us a little bit about them?
Speaker 2:You mentioned Dr Kinberry. He's over 20 years in the practice, and Dr Anthony Chafee.
Speaker 1:He's a physician. Dr Kinberry is a family physician.
Speaker 2:You can find them on YouTube and Dr Anthony Chafee. He's in Australia. Very great guy.
Speaker 1:So what kind of doctor?
Speaker 2:is he. I don't remember.
Speaker 1:He's a. He's. So Dr Anthony Chafee is a brain doctor, he's a brain surgeon. And who else do?
Speaker 2:you, I mean Steak and Butter Gal. So those are the three main that I check out. They pretty much cover everything the amount of time that they've been at it. Steak and Butter Gal is a doctor by no means, but she is on it. She has a group, she does 30-day challenges but her videos are wonderful and she also does recipes and things as well and her man is in on it with her. So it's a family, household thing that they've got going on and they are fantastic.
Speaker 1:So how hard was it to get our?
Speaker 2:15 year old daughter to start eating. It really wasn't that hard, essentially because of the influence that we had as far as what she saw and immediately her acne cleared up on her face. She gets every once in a while she gets something on her chin or maybe the forehead, and that's because she still enjoys her low carb tortillas and some Mexican spices and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so. Is there anybody else in your family who has started in this direction?
Speaker 2:Sister, dad, yeah, some other friends as well, some great friends. One of the friends started doing comedy as well. I never thought that he'd be on stage doing comedy, but he's at it as well. I never thought that he'd be on stage doing comedy, but he's at it, and that's just. I mean, there's any moment one can begin something. It's never too late, unless you don't start. And that goes for the way of eating, to control our diet. Let our food be our medicine.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so with that real quick. I've seen reversal of Alzheimer's and dementia and the whole gamut of neurological challenges as well, not to mention all of the inflammatory things that happen, and even diabetes cartilage rebuilding on people's joints and things. I've come across so much and I've reached out to these people and talked to them and read their comments and there's so many testimonies in all of these comment sections too, on these videos of these great people that are sharing their way of eating in their life.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to have a few of these people or try to get a few of these people to do a podcast interview to talk about their experience and how it's helped them. Talk about their experience and how it's helped them. And if you are going into any of these rooms to read about them, if you hit the search button and you can search anything like diabetes search, heart disease search, kidney failure, search anything that you want to search and you will see numerous people talking about how this has helped save them, how it's changed the way of their life, and they're actually teaching their own doctors, their own physicians, how this is saving people and helping people. So we're not doctors, we're just sharing our own personal experience of what we've been through and how this has changed our lives and we thank you guys for watching.
Speaker 2:Yes, you bet Be well.
Speaker 1:Have a good day.