Calories in vs Calories Out on a Meat-Based Diet: Why the Logic of Calorie Counting Works but the Reality Doesn’t
“What’s often overlooked in finance is that something can be technically true but contextually nonsense…The reasonable investors who love their technically imperfect strategies have an edge, because they’re more likely to stick with those strategies. There are few financial variables more correlated to performance than commitment to a strategy during its lean years—both the amount of performance and the odds of capturing it over a given period of time.”
Don’t minimize your tab just yet. This is a post about nutrition. In his fantastic book, The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel describes the ways in which human emotion inflicts a barrage of seemingly irrational decisions amongst even the most rational, logically-minded investors. He describes a situation where there are numerous investment strategies that look so good on paper — and yet, in the real world, when human emotion is factored in, fall down hard.
Often, it’s the imperfect strategies that, on paper and spreadsheet don’t make too much sense, but in the real world work, because the implementor sticks to them. I can’t help but draw many similarities to the world of finance and health in this context. Thinking that you can count your way out of your calories for the rest of your life is a delusional paradigm to live in.
The Context of Calories In vs Calories Out on a Meat-Based Keto Diet
I’m no doctor, scientist or nutritional therapist. I don’t care much for percentages or stats on a screen or the molecular makeup of a fatty acid profile and how it relates to the endothelial receptors in my brain — I care about the person behind it: the primordial emotion that drives wellbeing through innate bodily wisdom.
I’m obsessed with the practical ideas that I can take with me to the real world — the same world that shits on paper-perfect plans that have zero, in the most Taleb sense of the phrase, Skin In the Game.
The traditional narrative that most fitness influencers and naturally aesthetic bodybuilders have is that in order to lose fat you simply have to not care about what you eat: it’s all about how much you eat: calories in vs calories out. That is, the calories you put in your body must be equal to or less than the calories you exert. Simple thermodynamics, right?
Wrong.
These bodybuilding influencers often forget the context and the illusory human emotion behind it. From someone who has lost over 90lbs without counting calories, I can tell you that what matters more is what you eat as opposed to how much of it you do.
Prior to 2014 — let’s call this guy Fat Josh — I was a chubby inactive teenager that played video games and watched porn all day long and lived off of sausage rolls and Woolworth’s chocolate milkshakes. Food was a means of getting out of the difficult emotions I was experiencing at the time. Food was my safe place. Food made me feel loved. It’s no different to an alcoholic or a drug addict — only my drug of choice was the dopamine-rushing thrill of drinking five chocolate milkshakes and ending it off with a wank.
I recently saw a fitness influencer mention a Carnivore Meat-Based Diet is not optimal for humans. This happened while unwillingly scrolling and getting sucked into the vortex of Instagram’s explore the feature. What bothered me most is, like the Paul Saladino’s and Carnivore Aurelius’ of the world — people that have built up a large following on social media — that promote tons of fruit on a Carnivore Diet (and have financial incentives behind their promotion which is a story for another day): context is so important.
If you have that many followers you are playing an important role in educating people. You can’t just assume that everyone is coming to this diet to look good. Some genuinely need to heal at the most spiritual/physical level due to health issues that are considered unsolvable in the modern medical narrative. Many people are coming to this way of eating that have (and still are) suffered.
If you are coming to this diet — or any diet for that matter — from a place of healing, I think it’s important to stick it out as long as possible without the added carbs or fruit. Humans can undoubtedly survive — and thrive — on little to no carbs. And most importantly that means not counting calories.
I recommend reading Carnivore Cure by Judy Cho, whom I had on my podcast. She has tons of on-the-ground experience with a meat-based elimination diet and its capacity to heal our guts.
If you are a bodybuilder with a great pancreas and well-built frame, the context you’re living in is a bodybuilding one: you are counting calories because you want to LOOK good — this does not always mean you feel good or are healthy. Hate to break it to you, it’s sometimes common to put on weight when starting a meat-based carnivore diet as fat is an important organ that helps many functions within the body like hormone control. Another bit of important context is the fact that, for many, like myself, food has been a way of getting out of difficult emotions.
Eating a Meat-Based Keto Diet Helps With Food Addiction
These “bros” that are shelling out advice that has worked for them onto the Fat Josh’s of the world forget that food addiction is real and that for the most part, carbohydrates in any shape or form — in the context of losing fat sustainably — cause problems.
Big Food wants you to believe that you can safely consume its products. The buzzword that gets thrown around (and out of context) is moderation. It’s all about moderation. As long as you eat everything in moderation you will be fine…I now eat nearly 1kg of meat per day and I don’t count calories and I’m the strongest/leanest I’ve ever been. There is no such thing as moderation in my diet. My idea of moderation, as Id imagine it was for our hunter-gather ancestors, is feeling full AF after eating a ton of red meat. It’s like our body has this wisdom inside of it when we eat species-appropriate food that it had enough.
I must confess my trigger when hearing the moderation myth. I’ve been hearing it my entire life. It just doesn’t fucking work. Nobody tells a recovering alcoholic to just moderate their consumption of alcohol. You abstain completely for a long period of time (if not all your time). Sugar has been shown to be more addictive than cocaine. Humans are hardwired to overeat carbs — it’s not our fault, it bypasses our body’s innate wisdom. Therefore, from a place of healing, it makes sense to give something a shot and stick it out as long as possible before assuming that it’s the lack of honey or God forbid, organs, that are causing you to not heal.
Healing takes time. It took you 30 or 50 years to fuck your gut up through a modern lifestyle; give yourself permission to take it a day at a time. Give yourself permission to be kind to yourself — you will have bad days, but those days in the grand scheme of compounding will mean very little.
One day you will look back at yourself and be astonished at the effect of your consistency.
You Do Not Have to Be The Perfect Carnivore to Heal
The Good Diet You Follow Is Better Than The Perfect Diet You Quit
Similar to the investors who have imperfect strategies but they feel confident because it’s theirs and they trust it, you need to develop your own strategies for making eating healthy a long-term endeavour that is bulletproof. For myself, I have found a meat-based keto diet — one prodonimently centred around animal-based protein/fat sources — is a sustainable, long-term strategy that works for keeping me satiated.
A bulletproof eating strategy first and foremost begins with including animal protein and fat at every meal. I often like to say that self-discipline is overrated. If you are eating the right amount of protein/fat it will be hard for you to crave any processed junk that you find in the supermarket. I’m certainly no more disciplined than the person at the supermarket who is drolling over gooey chocolate brownies in the isle as she waits for the teller to call her; I’m just more full and therefore less likely to crave processed packaged bullshit.
I’ve been on this journey for over 9 years now. I’ve been through it all. From my experience, you don’t need as many carbs as you think you do and it’s better to stick to a meat-based ketovore way of eating where meat makes up most of your calories, about 90%, and the rest is for you to play around with. Carbs must be earned. If you are overweight and don’t exercise much, you probably don’t need that many carbs. However, you are like me, and train CrossFit 6x per week with relatively high intensity, it makes sense to strategically introduce carbs to restore glycogen after intense training.
Eventually, when you are fat-adapted and you feel like you could use some extra fuel for gruelling CrossFit WODs or 80km cycles, use carbs as a supplement — not the main course.
Find the minimum amount of carbs to maximize your performance.
I enjoy saving my carbs for dessert these days as the slight bump in insulin at night calms the nervous system and puts me to bed like a baby (something you don’t want to happen in the morning or midday when you need your focus).
Meat | Movement | Mindfulness
Calories do play a role in weight loss and weight gain, don’t get me wrong — but they are just that: calories. What matters more, in my humbly unscientific opinion, is the quality of calories you are consuming.
The quality will determine the quantity.
It’s virtually impossible to overeat a big piece of fatty steak. Your body has the wisdom built in to let your brain know you are full — that that piece of high-fat meat will keep you full for the next 18-24 hours so you can do human things like think, be creative, have sex, contemplate and move, without thinking about food all the time.
Animal-based protein and fat is by far the most bioavailable source of nutrition for humans. We are not ruminating animals that need to be constantly grazing all the time. We have large brains for the very reason we have one of the shortest digestive tracts and acidic stomachs: we can go days and weeks without food. Our endogenous fat stores are powerful.
But, a meat-based diet is just one modality to healing. Movement and Mindfulness are equally as important. If you’d like to learn more or be kept in the loop, join my members-only weekly newsletter that goes out each Monday.