carnivore diet is such a distant dream

when i first encountered the carnivore diet, my reaction was what any sensible person raised in the shadow of the great food pyramid lie would have: this is madness. this is dangerous. this is, quite frankly, the sort of thing that kills a man at fifty with his arteries looking like the sabah road network after monsoon season.

because, you see, i am gen X—not some soft millennial descendant but an actual survivor of that glorious generation taught that red meat was essentially edible arsenic, that fat would stop your heart faster than a politician stops mid-sentence when asked about actual policy, and that the only path to righteousness was through whole grains and suspicious amounts of orange juice. we were the guinea pigs of dietary fashion, the lab rats of nutritional pseudoscience, and we have the metabolic wreckage and trust issues to prove it.

red meat, they said, causes gout. heart problems. high blood pressure. cancer. probably also causes your Wi-Fi to drop and your husband to leave his socks on the floor, though the science on that remains unclear.

and yet, and here is where the plot thickens like a good bone broth, when i learned about carnivore, something stirred. not my conscience, mind you, but something far more primal. because i bloody well love meat. and i have never, in all my years of dutiful vegetable-pushing-around-the-plate, actually enjoyed a single green bean. who among us, if we are being honest in the dark quiet of our kitchens, wouldn’t leap at an excuse to never again pretend that steamed broccoli is “actually quite nice once you get used to it”?

the theoretical appeal of not eating plants

the carnivore diet held out a promise as old as temptation itself: eat what you want, lose what you don’t want, and never again suffer through a limp salad pretending it’s a meal. it was permission. it was liberation. it was everything the food scolds—those same people who lied to us about fat and cholesterol and told us margarine was healthier than butter—had told us was impossible.

i discovered carnivore over a year ago. more than a year, actually. time enough to have lost those thirty-five kilograms that have taken up residence on my person like unwelcome relatives who arrived for a weekend in 2011 and never quite left. thirty-five kilograms distributed with cruel democracy across my rear, my arms, my belly, my face—everywhere except the places where extra padding might actually prove useful, like my patience or my bank account.

i was hot once, you understand. not in a vain way; well, perhaps a little vain, but in the way that comes from simply existing in a body that hasn’t yet discovered the joys of retaining every carbohydrate it encounters for potential famine conditions that will never bloody well arrive because we live in the twenty-first century and food is literally everywhere.

and here is the infuriating bit: i eat rice. two, sometimes three times a day. but this is our food. this is what asians do. we are a rice people. it is in our blood, our bones, our cultural DNA stretching back millennia. and yet somehow—somehow—not everyone who eats rice looks like they’re smuggling rice sacks under their clothes. what cosmic injustice is this? what genetic lottery did i lose? did i miss the meeting where they were handing out functional metabolisms?

the brief carnivorous interlude

i did try it, you know. two, perhaps three weeks of what they call “dirty carnivore”—which is to say, meat-focused eating without the religious fervour of the ribeye-only zealots who treat their instagram feeds like cathedrals to bovine perfection. and lo, my husband noticed. weight loss! actual, visible, commented-upon weight loss! the sort of physical change that gets remarked upon without prompting, which is the gold standard of “this is actually working.”

one would think this would spur continued effort. one would think that evidence of success would breed more success, that momentum would build, that the path forward would become blindingly obvious.

one would be catastrophically wrong.

because what did i do with this encouragement? did i press forward with discipline and determination? did i view this as confirmation that the path worked and commit myself to the journey ahead? no. i thought, in that moment of dangerous optimism that has sabotaged more diets than all the buffets in christendom: “well, surely a little rice wouldn’t hurt, eh?”

reader, it hurt.

or rather, it didn’t hurt enough to stop me eating it. the rice came back. not sneaking in through the back door like a guilty pleasure, tentatively testing whether it would be welcomed, but marching through the front like it owned the bloody place. because at public gatherings, at meetings, at every social function designed by some cruel deity who specifically hates dieters—there is rice. and nasi lemak. and kuih. and someone’s auntie’s special rendang that would be genuinely, socially, possibly morally rude not to eat because she made it especially and is watching you with those eyes that can detect disrespect from across a crowded room.

this is the trap, you see. the carnivore diet works brilliantly in isolation, in the theoretical world where you control every meal and every social interaction. but we do not live in that world. we live in the world of obligations and gatherings and the basic human need not to be that person who brings their own food to everything and lectures everyone about seed oils.

the economic reality of ribeye dreams

and then there is the small, inconvenient matter of cost.

the carnivore influencers—and yes, we live in an age where “carnivore influencer” is an actual category of human employment, which tells you everything you need to know about late-stage capitalism—post videos of themselves consuming ribeyes the size of small children. beautiful, marbled, perfectly cooked ribeyes that probably cost more per kilogram than my monthly water bill. they eat these magnificent specimens of beef with the casual ease of people who have never had to choose between quality meat and paying for homeschool materials.

do you know what ribeyes cost in sabah? i am not flush with cash. i am, in fact, the opposite of flush. i am whatever the financial equivalent of dehydrated is. desiccated, perhaps. my budget is tighter than my jeans after a week of eating rice at every meal, and that is saying something.

i learned, in my extensive research—because i research everything; it’s the gen X way, that chicken isn’t quite as good as beef for this particular dietary adventure. that one should focus on ruminant meat. that organ meats are ideal but require a level of adventurousness i haven’t yet cultivated. that eggs are acceptable. that ribeyes are king. that grass-fed is better. that grain-fed is acceptable. that—good lord, the list goes on, each item more expensive and more specific than the last, until you’re standing in the meat section doing mental arithmetic and wondering if financial stress burns enough calories to offset the carbohydrates.

sometimes i manage to get good beef. sometimes. other times i make do with what i can afford, which is less instagram-worthy but presumably still contains protein and doesn’t require me to take out a second mortgage.

the cycle of resolve and rice

so i return, again and again, to normal asian eating. rice and meat and glorious, delicious, complex spices—because malaysian food is genuinely spectacular and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or has never actually tasted proper ayam masak cili api and therefore cannot be trusted on any culinary matter whatsoever.

sometimes vegetables appear on my plate, though i maintain my constitutional right to view them with suspicion and treat them like garnish rather than food.

but the carnivore dream persists. it haunts me like a promise i made to myself and keep breaking with the regularity of a new year’s resolution. i want to eat carnivore. i think about eating carnivore. i plan for it with the intensity of someone planning a military campaign. i read about it, watch videos about it, join groups where people discuss the perfect doneness of their steaks with theological seriousness.

i even, in a fit of optimistic purchasing that i now recognise as temporary madness, bought enough meat for an entire month once. chicken, beef, lamb, eggs every week. a freezer full of intention and protein and the absolute certainty that this time would be different. this time i would commit. this time i would follow through.

and yet.

and yet.

i still cannot maintain the discipline required to avoid eating out. to resist the siren call of double dragon rice—which is objectively, scientifically, demonstrably the most fragrant rice known to humanity and pairs with ayam masak cili api in a way that makes the angels weep with joy and envy. how does one say no to this? how does one choose bland, unseasoned ribeye over the complex, perfectly balanced, utterly delicious cuisine we’ve spent centuries perfecting? how does one look at a plate of nasi goreng and say, “no thank you, i’ll just have this plain chicken breast instead” without feeling like you’re betraying your ancestors?

one doesn’t, apparently. at least, i don’t.

the problem, you see, is not lack of knowledge. i know carnivore works. i’ve seen it work. i’ve felt it work in those brief weeks of compliance when the weight started coming off and i started feeling less like a walking carbohydrate storage unit. the problem is the gap between knowing what works and actually doing what works when reality intervenes with its meetings and its social obligations and its double dragon rice calling to you like the one ring calling to gollum.

tomorrow’s promise, today’s reality

but today—TODAY—i resolve. once and for all, for real this time, no takesies-backsies, hand on heart, cross my heart hope to die: from tomorrow onwards, i will eat only meat. only beef. only eggs. only chicken. only lamb. only fish. pure carnivore. strict carnivore. the kind of carnivore that makes other carnivores nod with respect and perhaps a touch of fear.

tomorrow.

always tomorrow, isn’t it? never today, because today there’s already rice in the rice cooker and it would be wasteful not to eat it—wasteful!—and wasting food is basically a sin where i come from. never today, because today there’s a meeting with food provided and showing up with your own packed meal is the sort of thing that requires explaining and i cannot be bothered with the explaining. never today, because today is wednesday and surely one starts these things on mondays, or the first of the month, or after chinese new year, or after that cousin’s wedding, or when mercury is no longer in retrograde and the moon is in the seventh house.

there is always a reason why today is not the right day. tomorrow is always more convenient, more sensible, better positioned for success.

i do wonder, though—on a scale of one to ten, what level of bitchiness will i achieve towards my husband when i’m three days into eating nothing but meat and my body is screaming for carbohydrates like a toddler screaming for sweets at the checkout? at what point does “dietary restriction” become “everyone else’s problem”? when does “i’m doing this for my health” translate to “i’m insufferable to be around because i’m hangry and self-righteous”?

because here’s the thing they don’t tell you about discipline in the instagram posts full of before-and-after photos and inspirational quotes: it makes you insufferable. righteousness is exhausting for everyone in the vicinity. martyrdom requires an audience, preferably one that’s eating what you can’t have so you can feel simultaneously superior and resentful. the carnivore diet works for the person doing it, but what does it do to the people who have to live with them?

my poor husband. he’s already dealing with enough—me, basically, which is no small undertaking—without adding “wife on restrictive diet who’s thinking about ribeyes while everyone else eats nasi lemak” to his list of daily trials.

the uncomfortable truth

so carnivore remains a distant dream. not because it doesn’t work—i know it works, i’ve seen it work, i’ve felt it work in those brief weeks of compliance. but because i am not, apparently, the kind of person who can sustain it in the real world. the world of limited budgets and social obligations and double dragon rice and husbands who eat whatever they want without gaining an ounce because the universe is fundamentally, cosmically, infuriatingly unjust.

i am gen X. not a child of gen X, not influenced by gen X, but the genuine article—raised on lies about nutrition, taught to trust authorities who were catastrophically wrong, told that fat makes you fat and that the food pyramid was science when it was really just agricultural lobbying dressed up in a lab coat. i am carrying thirty-five kilograms of poor life choices, excellent malaysian food, metabolic damage from decades of high-carb eating, and the accumulated frustration of knowing exactly what i should do while apparently lacking the capacity to actually do it consistently.

i am trying to undo decades of damage with a diet that costs more than my monthly water bill and requires more willpower than i can apparently muster on a tuesday when someone brings kuih to a meeting.

the dream persists, though. that vision of myself thirty-five kilograms lighter, eating ribeyes with casual confidence, fitting into clothes i haven’t worn since 2011, feeling like the hot version of myself that i know is trapped under these layers of carbohydrate storage. that person is in there somewhere. i know she is. i’ve caught glimpses of her during those brief carnivore interludes.

but she requires consistency i haven’t yet mastered. she requires saying no to things i don’t want to say no to. she requires choosing long-term results over immediate satisfaction, which is possibly the hardest thing any human can do, especially when the immediate satisfaction smells like ayam masak cili api and the long-term results are theoretical and far away.

the final accounting

but tomorrow, reader. tomorrow i start.

unless there’s rice.

or a meeting.

or my husband looks at me with those eyes that say he really doesn’t want to deal with carnivore wife today.

or the beef i bought isn’t quite as good as i hoped.

or it’s wednesday.

on a scale of 1-10, how likely is this to actually happen? i’m giving it a solid 3. the intention is there. the knowledge is there. the desire is there. the execution is… pending. filed under “things i will definitely do when conditions are perfect,” which is another way of saying “probably never.”

but hope springs eternal, doesn’t it? tomorrow is always full of possibility. tomorrow i might be disciplined. tomorrow i might finally be the person who chooses ribeye over rice.

tomorrow.

just not today.