I've taken so many steroids. It's unbelievable. He told me two things. The first thing he told me is like, this is life altering. It's not just your hearing. It's your whole vestibular system on your left side. It's your balance. And what the cardboard diet did for me was heal all of that. And so I have to eat this way. And I enjoy eating this way because it keeps my inflammation down. Much, much healthier and happier than I have really ever been. I like to talk about it. Maybe it's autoimmune. We don't know. You're just born like this. We can't-- what can we do? Can't do anything. And it's very defeating to be told that over and over. I talk about cardboard diet all the time because if it could help someone and save someone from the misery that we went through, it's important. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm very happy to announce we have Ali with us today who's going to be sharing what I believe is a success story. Ali, if you don't mind, just maybe share a little bit about your background. DuPage, so I am 48 years old. So I was born in 1975, primarily raised in Indiana, which was a great place to be raised. Standard American diet. My mom was a nurse at a hospital for her whole career. She worked with kids, and my dad was an engineer. I'm a younger brother. We were a meat and potatoes kind of family. No veggies, really. No fruit. No health food kind of thing. And we did stay away from saturated fat and cholesterol because my dad's daddy had a fatal heart attack at a really young age. He was about 60, and everybody thought it was related to his dietary cholesterol, which it wasn't. But it's important to note that when I was 12 and 1/2, in 1988, my dad was diagnosed with manic depression. And at the time, nobody talked about this kind of thing. And it was a source of shame, a little bit in stigma, because my dad was a very unique person. He was really smart, and he was just unique. He was an engineer type person. So that was my first experience with how the health care system is very flawed, and it just chews you up and spits you out. So my dad did all of the treatments that you can possibly do for bipolar disorder. And two years ago, he had a fatal heart attack and died. And that led me into, it made me face my own mortality. And I was really unhealthy. I was about 45 pounds overweight. I had severe anxiety. My own battles with mental health. And I thought, me, I'm not going to get healthy. And I got to lose some weight. I gained about 40 pounds over the course of 10 years. I had four diagnosed autoimmune illnesses, and that were life-altering. And I thought, I got a few or something else. So I started Googling and researching and learning about intermittent fasting was my first thing. And then I had a flare-up of uveitis. And I had a reaction to something I was eating, trying to be healthy. And it was lots of nuts and seeds and spinach and smoothies and little protein, because I thought I was being so healthy. And I had an allergic reaction. And it finally dawned on me, like, oh, that, I ate that. I just had that, and it made me sick. And I thought I was going to have to get it up, eat pen, and that, but I didn't. So the next day-- that was a Sunday. The next day, I did an internet search on YouTube or on YouTube, and I put in detox diet, elimination diet. And I found Michaela Peterson in Kyle. And I thought, I can do lion diet. I can just do this. It's so weird and radical, extreme. I can do this for two weeks. Let's just try it. And immediately, I stopped thinking about drinking wine all the time. And within two or three or four days, I noticed my inflammation. I was starting to flush out the inflammation, because I was very inflamed. And after two weeks, I had found Dr. Barry, and I had found Kelly Hogan. And then I found you, one Joe Rubin. And it changed my life. I noticed two months in, I did dawned on me that I was not having the highest possible anxiety, and that my racing thoughts had eased. I would have three to four intrusive thoughts every moment, three to four, an hour. It was just constant. It was everything. And I was-- it was starting to be debilitating, and that had eased so much. So I thought, I'm going to keep doing this. Do this for 60 days, 90 days, and I cut going. I thought, I'll just do a bit of making eggs, because I reacted to a lot of food, and I couldn't even handle pork in the beginning. And I thought, I just kept doing it every day, and learning more about the myths surrounding what a healthy diet is. And it just-- it addressed and healed everything. So it changed my life. Well, that's good, obviously. It's a lot of things going on. What you said you noticed affects fairly quickly, like intrusive thoughts, and let up, and it had to have been. Was that shocking to you at some point? Did you-- was it something that was like, this is totally unexpected to me or something? Absolutely. I had no idea. We've always been taught that all of the-- our health is-- these problems are partitioned off, and it's mental health is this, and it's genetic, and it's based on chemical imbalances. That's what we were told almost my entire life about my dad. And this is this, and I couldn't believe that it-- the carnivore diet healed all of those things. I have diagnosis of Meniere's disease. I got that diagnosis when I was 23. It changed my life. It altered my life. I was treatment-resistant. I did every treatment that I was the event. So in the beginning, it's a diuretic. And then it's, OK, if you get into a cycle of dizziness, it's steroid packs. I've taken so many steroids, it's unbelievable. I would cycle, and I'd have different times of the year. I would have more trouble with it. And then once I had kids and got really stressed, I kind of think I could not balance that out and ended up doing gin-- ginamycin treatments. Didn't work. And so I was desperate. I was really low, and I went, and I found-- I fabricated for myself, and I searched the internet. What can I do? Because I couldn't. I was almost disabled with the Meniere's disease, because I was always hyper alert, and hyper-- am I going to get dizzy? Is it going to happen this time? My kids were really young, four and seven. And I found an otolaryngologist. And I said, listen, I want you to do a labyrinthectomy. I can't even hear out of this ear anyway. I had already gone pretty much. My hearing was trashed. And he's like, I can't just drill out your inner ear without doing a lot of tests, the battery of tests. So we did all those tests, and he told me two things. The first thing he told me is that this is life-altering. It's not just your hearing. It's your whole vestibular system on your left side. It's your balance. You're going to wake up with my stagnus, and I said, I've already got some of that. But it's going to take your brain a while to be able to process the signals that it's getting. And there's a 10% chance that you might develop many years in your other ear, because I was really young when I presented, and all that. So I had lived through that, and I just-- I couldn't believe what I had lived through. And then, 10 years later, now I'm 40 pounds overweight. And I'm struggling with this high anxiety that's changing my life again. Now I'm presenting with UVitis. Then I have UVitis. And why is all this happening? What the cardboard eye it did for me was it called-- heal all of that. Now, my manir's disease was treated, and that is not going to come back. I had the surgery 10 years ago. That's a Dylan. I also have Graves' disease. I got diagnosed with Graves' disease when I was 30. Yeah, I have no ear. My thyroid doesn't function at all. I had rosacea, which in the schema thing is rosacea was nothing. But then I'm starting to have problems with my eye. And it's my left side. It's always my left side. And I thought, I can't hear on this side. I can't lose my sight. I cannot lose my brain. And that's one of the reasons what I continue to eat carnivore diet, because the inflammation is gone. It's just it's gone. It stays gone. And the other part of it is, we were told about manic depression bipolar is considered genetic. I'm not taking any chances. I've never had problems with bipolar type issues. I did have anxiety, but I think that was lifestyle. Nenuse, you know what I was eating. And I didn't have it. Lifestyle habits. And so I have to eat this way. And I enjoy eating this way, because it keeps my inflammation down. I'm much, much healthier and happier than I have really ever been. And I like to talk about it. Yeah, it's quite a story. Yeah, so you've got obviously you've got the monerosysities, which many people don't even know what that is. And maybe you could maybe we'll have you share what that is. People, UBI is affecting your eye and engraiseries, which is kind of hyperthyroidism. This is something most people are familiar with. Hashimoto's, which is kind of almost not open away the opposite. And let me ask you about the grays, because there's a medication that some people will be put on. Has that resolved as well? I presented with problems in 2005. So I was married, and we were wanting to start a family. So something was off. My cycle was off. I went to my gynecologist, and she did some labs. And she was-- and I also was having these weird symptoms of a racing heart in my hands. I was having hot flashes. And my hands in my feet would get really hot. Like, I couldn't stand it. So she's what's your cycle doing? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. And I was like, oh, I guess it's been only 35 days between cycles. And she's less test your thyroid. I said, OK. And she told me what thyroid did, master gland, warm on blah, blah, blah. So she sent me to an endocrinologist who told me, you have graves disease. And it's autoimmune. It's hyperthyroid. And she explained to me what was going on. And she ordered an ultrasound to make sure it wasn't nodules or anything like that. And it's just-- it is what it is. And I said, what do I have to do so I can have a baby? I want to have a baby. I was 30. She said, you do radioactive iodine treatment and wait at least-- absolutely have to wait at least six months before you try to get pregnant. And she said, I'm likely to wait nine months. So I went to nuclear mud. And a man in a bunny suit came out with a face shield on. He has a test tube. And he hands it to me with tongs, metal tongs. I'm just sitting there. And he's, OK, here is this pill. It's radiated iodine. It's going to go in there and kill your thyroid. I'm like, OK. And I just don't let it touch your lips. Don't let-- do it like a shot. I'm like, oh, OK. I've got that experience. So I did that. And they said, OK, stay away from animals and your family for about three days. Because I was recreating some low levels of radiation. I don't know why I didn't think, hm, are there any other interventions that we could try? So I've been on replacement hormone for thyroid, which I'll be on the first of my life. And that's been 18 years. So I can't-- there is no other mitigation that I can do for that. And I have had some issues getting it stabilized over the last 18 months. It's been exactly 18 months since I started eating a carnivore diet. And I've tried to monitor that pretty closely. But I didn't even understand how important my-- getting my dose, what that meant, and what I needed to do. Because no-- honestly, no doctors really followed up with me. Like, OK, every six months, let's do a blood test. See where your levels are. OK, your dose is what your dose is. And I went for six, seven years with this huge high-both thyroid phase, because my dose, I think, because my dose is off. And so that's my raised disease experience. I just got to be so really going there and they're walking with a radio ad. You're on here. Take this, don't let it touch the list. Don't go around animals for a couple of days. It'd be like a movie scene almost. Yeah, but yeah. What's interesting is because you've seen a number of things resolve the UVI to some of the mirrors. The weight loss, all the other issues have gone away. And if you go to the endocrinologist, probably the ENT, the otolaryngologist, for the ear nose and throat stub, maybe the ophthalmologist, bro, I don't know, who's treating your uiitis. But none of them probably have any idea that nutrition can fix many of these. Is that-- was that your impression? Was there anything like diet has any role at all? Probably not. Not ever. Not ever. And the access to information was much different in 1998 when I had many years. And in 2005, still, it wasn't-- we just didn't know that even there was no social media. By the time-- the thing that I find very interesting is when the first time I had a UVIitis was in 2019, I was about 44. I was 40 pounds overweight. And I just-- my eye started-- it was really irritated. I thought I had pink eye, which I don't know. But that was the only thing I knew about eye stuff. So I went to just an optometrist. And she said, oh, you have UVIitis. And I can't remember if it was anterior or posterior. But she said, do you have any kind of autoimmune stuff? So I told her, I have these two things, but they're resolved. I don't have-- she's very diabetic. And I'm like, no. I've never had anybody tell me that, which they should have. But she's take these eye drops, steroid eye drops. And it'll just have to resolve on its own. No, it didn't resolve on its own. In fact, it got so bad it was-- I thought my eye was going to explode. And it was like-- there was like a nerve involvement. I could feel right under my skin. Felt like somebody had threaded a needle and was pulling up. I couldn't lay. I couldn't have anything touch my face on that side. And so I told them I couldn't see. It totally blurred out my vision. And it felt like my eye was going to explode onto my face. Like, it was going to pop out. And so I told my husband, like, something is wrong. We went to the emergency department, which I do not suggest going to an emergency department. So you should find an emergent eye specialist, because they didn't know what to do. But they did run a battery of tests on me. Blood tests, chest x-ray to make sure I didn't have tuberculosis, to rule out what's happening. And they said an ER got said, you have pain, UBI. It had gone throughout my whole eye. I'm like, I didn't do anything differently. So he said, if you have to take these steroid eye drops and an antiviral pill for whatever, and you have to do them around the clock. So every two hours, we had to wake up and do that. And it was horrible. And so at the time, it took eight weeks to heal. And I'm talking every four days I was in with the eye specialist. I got a referral to a great clinic, and they were great. And they checked all my blood tests. And I was familiar with blood tests. I worked in a lab when I was young. And so I knew all what these tests were and what they were ordering. And they checked for lupus and lime and all the autoimmune and inflammation and inflammatory markers. And she said, your markers came back fine. I went and checked my records because this was five years ago. And I was pre-diabetic. My A1C was six at the time. So I was at least pre-diabetic, which not surprised at all. But they never said anything about anything. They didn't even indicate. But I was really sick. And it was almost to the point where I was going to have injections into my eye. So she was more triage. Let's just get this home down. But no one-- and there are a lot of people that go to that eye clinic that are older and diabetic than they're having issues. It was like it's a retina institute where I was going. And I sit there, and I am not exaggerating. And there are 50 people waiting to see these doctors. And it is-- I waited four to six hours for every appointment because it's just there are not enough people to take care of the amount of people coming in. It's just like an epidemic level. And that was five years ago. It was sad. Yeah, I was. There's a lot of issues with our health care system. There's-- but it's interesting because-- and maybe you know this now-- that if you have one autoimmune disease, the likelihood of you getting multiple autoimmune disease goes up significantly. And it's probably because in my view, they probably have kind of the same root cause in their ways. Maybe a gut issue at least is a decent literature that suggests that, have you been back to any of these specialists since you've been on the diet and said, look, my stuff is better now? Is that something you've done yet? No, the only specialist that I would be able to go back to because I lived in Indianapolis with my many years of my graves. Then we moved down here into Tennessee eight years ago. Would be my eye specialist, Dr. Haynes, who was wonderful. She was very compassionate and wonderful. And I ended up having another flare up in December of 2022. No, 2021. And I did have to go see her. And it healed a little bit faster. It didn't get nearly to the extent that I had the first time. It healed in about six weeks. Honestly, I wouldn't-- unless I had trouble and I needed to see her, I wouldn't go back to her because I would have to wait hours. I would just have to sit there. They had vending machines and lunch tables in their waiting room. And I probably just wouldn't go through that experience. But I did see another eye doctor closer to where I am. And I told him that I could feel-- this is like last year. I had been eating carnivore about four months. And I ate a whole bunch of shrimp. And I'm not allergic to shrimp, because I had that toasted. I could tell that I was having a little bit of problem inflammation. And so I went to an eye doctor in my area. And I told him, I said, I'm eating this way. And he was very receptive. He was very receptive. He was young. And he was fit. He had-- so he did these interventions on his own-- in his own life. And so he was on board. And I said, I think all of this is connected. I think it all is connected. And that's why I talk about it so much. Because I'm not saying it might not have-- I might not have developed any autoimmune issues. But I absolutely believe 100% that it would have completely improved my life. And maybe I wouldn't be deaf. Maybe I could have mitigated years of dealing with menirce disease. It became debilitating for me. The menirce disease was terrible. And I do talk about it a lot, because it's so important. And it seems so easy for someone to say a health care professional that you're seeing, whatever kind it is, and say, hey, let's check your metabolic health. Let's just see what your metabolic health is doing. Do you have any markers? I'm sure I had insulin resistance from the time I was in my 20s. And why can't we just start doing these tests? Was there ever-- at some point, you had to say, why is this happening to me? Why do I have this disease, that disease? And you never ask the physician most of the time. I don't know if you get a good answer. Did you ever ask that of your physician, hey, why do I have menirce? Why do I have gray disease? Those sort of things. And what kind of answer did you get? Yes, I asked that every time. Well, what causes this? And we were like, what's idiopapic? Maybe it's autoimmune. We don't know. You're just born like this. Especially when I was 23. When you're 23, you don't think about life the way you do when you're in your 40s. So they-- no, they never had any idea. Oh, it's just one of those things. And then, gray disease, same kind of thing. The uveitis, they never-- they just said, we don't really know what's happening. The theory was, because my face was swollen. It was so painful. The theory is, it was a shingles episode in my eye. And I've never got anything like that. But they never-- they just did those tests to rule out everything else. And she said, maybe it's shingles. Maybe, I don't know. We can't-- what? Can't we do? Can't do anything. And it's very defeating to be told that over and over. I had meningitis when I was-- like, how am I getting all these weird things? I had meningitis when I was about 26. It was viral meningitis. And I've had a lot of weird medical things. And I'm like, why does this keep happening to me? What is wrong? Now I think, what's wrong with my mitochondria? It's affected. Yeah, no answers. I had to figure it out myself. I had to advocate and learn and unlearn a lot. And I had to do it myself. Nobody's going to do it for me. And you just have to-- I was determined to find a better quality of life. Because I thought, I can't lose my sight. And I cannot lose my brain. I don't want my brain. I don't want to develop any of these issues when I'm older kept searching. I'm just determined. Yeah, one of the things-- it's very disempowering when you have a condition. And people say, well, we don't know what causes it. And then the treatment options are not particularly good. And then you're also dependent. Because you feel like there's nothing you can do. You've got to wait in an ophthalmologist's office for six hours. And maybe you get drugs. Maybe you don't-- it's very disempowering away and probably depressing at the same time. Yeah. Now that you've found out, look, I can do something. I can just change my diet. And gosh, I get better. It's got to be-- obviously, I'm sure you're glad you found that out. But you're like, man, I wish I had known this 10 years ago. Is there some level of frustration in the health care system that's, look, if somebody would have put me on to this, maybe I could have avoided having my thyroid nuked. I could have avoided having a laboratory effect to me. I could have avoided all these procedures and things. Does that ever cross your mind? Oh, yeah. Everyday, watching my dad live with bipolar for my whole life and knowing that just the mental health piece of it for myself, I think, gosh, why couldn't I have figured this out just like three years ago? It could have improved my dad's quality of life tremendously. It could have improved my life. So that's always a bitter, well, to swallow. But I am a person that thinks that I know things happen for a reason. And yeah, so I'm standing with those feelings of bitterness and resentment a lot. I know that the reason I really took a really good, hard look at my health was because my dad died. I was faced with it like, I've got to make changes. I've got to lose weight, which led me into finding Michael Peterson, the autoimmune and weight loss. And I think, man, if only I had known this, maybe I could still hear. Maybe I wouldn't have had all of these issues. Maybe I wouldn't have to take a replacement thyroid for the rest of my life. I was 30. I'd like to live into my 90s. That's a long time. And I am, to a degree, I'm going to be dependent on someone giving me a prescription for thyroid replacement for the rest of my life. And I don't like that feeling anymore. But it took me a while to get there when I started to realize that eating just beef butter bacon eggs or whatever, that this is a powerful intervention and how much it can improve your overall health overall, obviously. But if I had just got this information sooner, my life would be completely different. My dad's life could have been improved. I've been really struggling with the part with the mental illness lately. And I talk about cardboard all the time because if it could help someone and save someone from the misery that we went through, it's important. Sorry. So but I do think things happen for a reason. It had to happen this way so that I would be so passionate about it and learn about it. And I could save myself, and I could teach my family. And now my brother does it. My brother eats carnivore. My mom started eating carnivore. My sister-in-law has started eating carnivore. And that makes me happy. I was going to ask you what, like, the people around you when you first say, hey, I'm going to eat an all-meat diet. Most people think this is crazy. This is bad. Why are you doing this? Did you have a lot of pushback with the people around you that maybe didn't want you to do it for whatever reason? Yeah, nobody was really surprised because I'm like a weird extreme person. I'm very old or nothing, and I determined. And so they're like, oh, here she goes again off some hair-varying idea. So nobody was really that surprised. And I had a pretty small support system. I'm a small family, and I'm very open about it. So I was like, hey, I'm going to do this weird thing, and I'm only going to eat meat. And they were like, OK, my husband, after he started seeing some of the changes within days that I was experiencing, because I could feel it. Nobody could see it. My husband was like, oh, I'll try this. And he likes to eat me. And so he was like, oh, I'll do this. And so he started like a month after me. And my husband's very healthy and has never had any kind of a food addiction or any kind of that-- which tendencies, which I did have. And so he started losing my real fast. It took about nine months for people in my family to start doing nine to 12 months. They did think, oh, I don't know. This is weird, because we had always been told not to eat eggs and fatty red meat and bacon and eggs, what's going to make your cholesterol go crazy. And I had looked into the research about coronary artery heart disease and that kind of thing. Because my dad had a heart attack. And his dad had a heart attack. And my dad didn't have heart disease. He had none. He had so many diagnoses being on medication, tons of heavy medication for 35 years. He had developed all of these things, except heart disease. And so I'm like, no, let's get these tests run. And I started doing lab tests on myself to have baseline. And I had coronary artery scan. It was zero. And so they just started seeing my-- and they were like, maybe there's something to this. And I would send them videos and I would send them books. And I'm like, read this. So I didn't get a lot of pushback. I did feel like a weirdo. I really did an extreme weirdo. And I just had to unlearn everything. And thank goodness I did. So-- one of the, I guess, great criticism, just to make low-carb diets in general, ketogenic diets, carnivore diets is no one can do it. It's unsustainable. What do you even thought on that? Because obviously, it keeps your diseases in remission. How hard is it for you to sustain this? It's not hard at all for me. And interestingly, my mom did say that to me. She had done keto successfully, I don't know, in 2019. And she was very successful, but she said, it's not sustainable. Runboard diet was sustainable for me because I'm an abstainer. And I realized that pretty quickly into it. I knew that I had food addiction, sugar addiction. And I knew it was so much easier for me to not have those options and to not even think about it. Just not to take up space. And if I had five things to eat and just get over the idea of food variety, and I didn't never like to cook, so it wasn't-- I was happy with that. And it became easier every day. And I built up that discipline, built up, and strengthened the skill over day after day. In the beginning, it was the hardest. Of course, I was afraid I would start mindlessly eating. And oh my goodness, eating something and being like, oh, I didn't mean to do that. Just like a habit or not realizing. And I didn't buy a lot of junk or buy a lot of triggering foods in the beginning. And I just would have a plan for the day. And I would be-- I just got to get through this day. I just got to get through this meal and built on it and built on it. And now, 18 months later, I've been through a whole season of all the holidays and all kinds of evanes. And I feel better than I've ever felt. And I don't have cravings now. I don't have cravings. Sometimes I'll have a fleeting thought. Oh, I wish I could have this. And it's usually a situation. But then it goes away. It goes away so fast. And I'd never had that kind of food freedom. I died when I was in my 30s. But I was always consumed by thoughts of food. And I never think about foods like that. I'm not. So how could it not be sustainable for me? But that's what I said to people now. Like, it is sustainable because you do get over those cravings and things like that. And I figured out what works for me. And I figured out what I can tolerate. And I know it's going to affect me. And this is how I do it. And this is the best diet for me. Yeah, fair enough. And that is something I commonly hear about the-- you mentioned food freedom because people are so restrictive but it's actually fairly liberating in many ways. Do you-- what about another criticism would be-- let me ask you this guy. I try to remember to ask this every time I interview somebody. What about downsides? Have there been any negatives up to this point? I don't think so. There's something I wish I had done differently. And that is I wish I had monitored more closely my thyroid levels because I unwittingly let them for six months last year. I switched the supplement that I was taking with the help of my nurse practitioner. And I went six months hypo thyroid. And it was a not a good time. Like I should a lot of hair. I had no energy. But my TSH was 14. And I just didn't realize, oh, I need to go back in and get my test. I need my dose increase. So really, that was-- I can't think of any downsides, honestly. I really can't. I just improved my life so much that I can't think of anything. What about cost-wise? Do you find this to be a more expensive death? Nothing about your own previously? Or is it a wash or a liquid to a church to answer that? It is much cheaper. And I'll tell you, in the three months before I started cardboard, I did a subscription, online subscription. And I bought 66 items. We're talking different kinds of nuts and seeds and powders and all this stuff. And I don't buy that kind of food by 66 of anything anymore. And you can do it pretty cheap. I'll tell you that I do not like grass-fed, grass-finished. I just don't like the taste of it. And so I do buy cheaper. Some things are cheaper than others. But we don't buy the amount of food that we used to have, like, tens and tens and tens, 50 different items in the pantry. And now we have, like, maybe 12. Maybe. It always looks like we're the opposite of preppers now because we eat what we buy. We don't have food waste. You can buy. We did invest in a half cow. And that has been fantastic. Next year, we're going to have to do a whole cow. That was very economical. And we're not eating steak every single day. There are ways to do it. But we consume less. We don't mindlessly eat and snack. And we just do it that way to save money. So it doesn't appear-- we don't buy grass food all the time. And it is cheaper. It doesn't feel expensive to us. Now, it hurts the pocketbook a little bit when you're paying today's prices. But we just don't buy as much. And we don't throw away food. We would buy food. I would buy fruits and vegetables and throw them away because they just sit in the fridge. So we don't have that problem anymore. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting what you see. I can't tell you how many expensive organic fruits and vegetables that ended up in my trash came over the year. And I just-- they're not that appealing. And then you'd sit for something. They're all moldy or soggy or something. I can't eat this. So apparently, you've got a household. Sounds like most of the people in the household are eating more or less this way. If that's true, how has it affected the whole household? So I have two teenage daughters. And they're pretty pushback resistant. They said, no, this is so weird. Other kids get to have lots of snacks. And I said, we just don't buy them. And they are much more fatty red meat focused and that kind of thing. But they're 14 and 17, almost 18. So it's a little different with older kids. I can't really control as much their lives because they're older. And I don't think that's the best approach for my kids anyway. But they don't believe the things that I believed growing up. They know that eating fat doesn't make you fat. And I talk about it and I'm an example to this all the time. So kids learn more from example than from me beating it over their heads. And we have some guidelines. I don't want you to have sugar bombs in the morning. We don't buy a lot of junk food, like I said. And start your day out with bacon, eggs, meat, whatever. There's no such thing as breakfast food. That's meth. You can eat whatever you want. You don't have to have a lot of variety. I will get you variety if you want it. And if they want me to buy them fruit and vegetables, I will. But they don't really eat that stuff a lot. So my husband, like I said, he's a moderator. He can eat things. But he is keto-vore. He can handle stuff. Because of my-- I think because of my autoimmune, I cannot tolerate spices even. I can't tolerate natural flavors very well. I don't need a lot of dairy. I just have to watch it because it will give me a little bit of flair. Nothing like what I used to deal with. But it might bring up my rosacea if I have a lot of dairy. That kind of thing. So everybody has really focused more on to a spectrum of, like, the practicum and diet in my house. Yeah. Yeah. Since your husband is more-- has it changed their health in any way? Oh. With the kids, I'm not sure. But I think they are healthier, for sure. But my husband-- he lost 20 pounds. He'd never had any kind of food addiction or any troubles like that. But he's always been really healthy. He was in the army. And he's very vital. And he's very active. So it has improved his energy. He's always been high energy, though. But he's improved his sleep and improved my sleep tremendously. And like I said, he's 20 pounds lighter. He wasn't really on any kind of medication before. He had a period of time where he was on a low level of hyperbought high blood pressure pill and a cholesterol pill. But this was, like, 12 years ago. And thank goodness the nurse practitioner said, you don't need any of these. So he has improved overall, for sure, just metabolically. And he's 56. We started CrossFit about six weeks ago. All of us, all four of us. And that-- I have never been a person that has done that. So I see people, and I'm like, I want to see if I can do that. And so when I watch your shorts of jumping up, they're like, oh, maybe I could do that. Not yet. I'm going to try it. But I'm doing CrossFit. Good thing. Let's get to set the exams. You want them to be alluded to kids, for those that kids, and how kids respond to what you do, not to what you say. So they see constantly staring at your phone, eating junk food, staying up too late, not engaging in an activity, being sedentary. That's their example. And they see that 100% of the time. And if that's what you do all day, that's what your kids are likely going to do. The other thing that's important about kids your age is this is where their adult patterns are going to lay down. And so we know that adolescence, early adulthood, is whatever you do then is often what you do the rest of your life. And you just get in this routine. If you eat junk food, conversely, if you're active and you focus on your food, you're likely that happens to stay with you the rest of your life, which many ways would prevent all of these awful consequences of what we're doing there. But over the years, when you've been dealing with the various conditions you've had, had you tried other diets as just an attempt to-- I got to do something like what was harder than the first thing to try. Let's see. So when I was about 17, my mom struggled with her weight my whole life all growing up. And it was a lot of fat dieting. It could never be too skinny or too rich was the kind of the idea. And I didn't have trouble being overweight or anything when I was a kid. There was a lot of dieting, restricting. So I have been on all kinds of different diets, just growing up, just off and on. And then when I put to weight watchers when I was 17, with my mom-- because that was the idea. It was healthy eating. When I was in my 30s, after I had kids and starting some, I really was only ever trying to lose weight. And it was restriction, calorie restriction. I never made-- I never thought, oh, I'm going to do vegetarian or any kind of these kinds of diets. Or I did try whole 30 in 2016. And I made it 11 days. And it was-- I just couldn't-- there were too many options. And I was getting ready to go on vacation. It was always an end goal diet. I'm going to diet. I'm going to restrict. And for this specific goal, this vacation, this wedding, or whatever. And there was no dieting when I was doing-- had manures and suffering with that. Because my brain just couldn't-- my brain didn't work really well during the manures. It's like having a seizure almost. I knew everything that was happening around me. And I could have a conversation. But it was like my brain was doing everything it could just to figure out what's going on. So I didn't think anything about food. I wish I had when I was dealing with the manures. But the idea around what is healthy food, and that has changed and shifted in the last 15 years. This big concentration on smoothie bowls and overnight oats and a lot of rice cakes when I was in my 20s. And low fat-- oh my goodness. So everything was low fat. But I never got into any kind of, oh, I'm going to try vegetarian. I never did any of that kind of thing. And I was unwittingly vegetarian. I did eat a cake. I would eat lean chicken breasts. But I didn't eat that much, red meat at all. I didn't even eat hamburgers anymore. I didn't like the taste of meat because I was addicted to carbs, I think. Yeah, and if you look at it, that's the diet that they want us to eat is lean meat. Very little of it, by the way. And then they say carbohydrate-based diet. And ultra-processed that. That's the direction that the world is being dragged to be all in that direction or in some way. Did you find that-- how did you turn around your lack of enjoyment of meat? How did that-- when you first started doing this, I don't even really like meat. And then I got a portion of it. How did that work? Yeah, I started out with hamburger patties and eggs because I've always liked eggs, thank goodness. But hamburger patties and lean cuts of meat. So New York, I did not like ribeye. I did not like the fat. But strangely, Dale, my husband had always liked ribeye's the most. And I was like, gross, you can't eat that. So I just took it day to day. I did have a little bit in the beginning of the first three months, occasions of like food, meat aversion. And so on those days, I would focus on high fat and do eggs and butter and just-- and it did get better. It did get better. And that's how I realized that I did not like a really expensive, really clean grass-fed, grass-finished meat. I thought, if I'm going to sustain this, I'm not going to do it this way. It's going to have to be with the cheap, the cheaper. Maybe it's less quality. But this is what I have to do to sustain this, because I was feeling so good. I was feeling so much better than I had felt in ever that I thought this is the way to do it. I was able to start tolerating pork and bacon around six to eight weeks in. So thank goodness, because I'm bacon is delicious. And I just kept doing it. I just kept doing it. And it-- those passed. It passed-- and now I enjoy meat. Fatty red meat. I love rib eyes and I favor it. And I don't even like the leaner cuts anymore, that much. If my preference is always going to be rib eye. Yeah, a lot of people find that. And it is-- it's out how your preference changes, because you're almost like, I can remember like a big fatty primary of cut. And it looks good to me. I'm like, I was thinking about it makes me hungry. But in the past, if you'd see that, and you'd think, oh my god, satchel, in fact, cholesterol, just whatever, it was just all these things that you're beating over the head with. It's avoid these things. But the question is, if you're not consuming carbohydrates, is it really the issue? Because you need the energy from somewhere. And I think there's a lot of nuance that we just disregard. Because if we just have everybody in the standard of American diet, should cut back on their packed consumption and their calorie consumption, which is probably there's some validity to that. And then when we say, look, I want to do something completely different. How does that change our physiology? I think we're seeing what happens. In many ways, it turns out to be quite a good thing happens to you. We have a few minutes left. I want to ask you about social media. Because I know you said you're talking about this. I don't know. Where do you spend time in social media? And how has that been received? Has it been fairly positive? I know there's a lot of critical people out there. Maybe they're ideologically opposed to you. Me, or they just think that you need to be-- I always say this, I believe in a balanced diet. I often see that. And I just like, what does that even mean? Can you describe what a balanced diet means? Right. A sort of nebulous thing. And I'm like, how would most humans have eaten that diet 100, 200, 500 years ago? Impossible, in many ways. How's your experience in social media and where do you hang out in that? OK. I hang out a lot on Instagram. And more of that, back and forth, and the ideology of that on Instagram, I think. I also have a YouTube channel that I have been talking about. And I haven't gotten much pushback. Thank goodness. And I just don't care. I've been through the trenches, and I've looped through, and I've made it to the other side. And I know this is the healthiest thing for me. It doesn't bother me as much on YouTube. It's different. It's a little bit different when you get comments on Instagram. It stings a little bit. But I also have to remember, and I also think those people don't-- I don't care about them. I don't care what their opinions of my life are. That doesn't-- it's irrelevant. I started the YouTube channel because I wanted to get this message out there. I think there are a lot of women in my age group, in their late 40s, that in the 50s that have been-- we've been indoctrinated about the balanced diet and eating fat, that kind of thing. This is a great tool to get you to where you are. To where you want to be. To get you to where you want to be with your health. And don't sleep on this idea because we were conditioned to think all these myths. It's my purpose. It's become my purpose to talk about this and use my social media accounts. I created a social media account or an Instagram account for carnivore content about six to seven months after I'd been doing it. Because I did feel very self-conscious about it in real life. And now I don't feel a self-conscious. And I like to go in there and say, hey, I've got goals for when I'm going to be 50. So it's about a year. In about a year, I'll be 50. And I want to be really strong. And I want to be happy. So same on my demeanor. But I want to be stronger. And it's just-- I think it's really important. It was an analogy I was thinking about this other day. It's like looking through a kaleidoscope. It was something one way. You twist it just to hair, and it looks completely different. And that's how I feel about health care and nutrition. And I don't care about-- did anybody ever want to lose weight and say, oh, let me look at the randomized control studies before I try this way of eating. No, nobody-- you look at anecdotal personal experiences. I wanted to see how real people did this weird restrictive animal-cardboard eyes. So Laura Spath, she's a normal person. I can do it. She's doing it. I can do it. Other people-- normal people are doing it. And so I want to be an exec like that to other Gen X women. I'll tell you what, Ali, thanks for sharing your story. It's got a lot of interesting stuff. I'm sure it'll inspire other people. I appreciate what you're doing. You're working-- he's Fred Nord. This is how we get it out there. I think this is really a grassroots movement. And we all just got to get out there and share our stories. And it's very helpful. So thank you very much for doing this. Thank you for having me.
