And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized:

This is where every diet eventually intersects.

Vegan. Vegetarian. Mediterranean. Keto. Carnivore. Low-fat. Low-carb. Whatever label you want to put on it.

Everybody gets so fucking busy arguing terminology, mechanisms, definitions, and which camp is technically correct that we forget one fairly important detail:

There is a human being who has to actually live inside the body while doing this.

And that matters.

Yes, a calorie deficit matters.

I have never argued that it doesn’t.

If somebody loses stored body fat over time, energy balance is part of that equation. You cannot manufacture energy out of nowhere.

Fine.

But saying:

“Fat loss ultimately requires a net energy deficit.”

is not the same statement as:

“Just eat fewer calories. Nothing else matters.”

Those are wildly different claims.

The first is essentially accounting.

Think about your bank account.

If I tell you:

Your bank balance went down because more money left the account than entered it.

Technically correct.

Have I told you anything useful?

No.

Did your rent go up?

Did your income drop?

Did you stop shopping?

Did you get hit with a giant bill?

Did three subscriptions renew?

Did somebody hand you $500?

The balance tells me what happened.

It does not explain all the conditions that caused it to happen.

Energy balance works the same way.

Even obesity researchers don’t study weight regulation as if calories exist in some biological vacuum. They study appetite, satiety, diet composition, food intake, nutrient partitioning, hormones, energy expenditure, thermogenesis, physical activity, feeding behavior, sleep, metabolic signaling and the gut-brain system because those things affect the conditions under which energy balance occurs.

Calories are the accounting.

They are not the entire story.

Now let’s talk about my jailer.

In This Is Not About Weight Loss, I use an analogy of a jailer standing outside the fat cell.

That analogy still stands.

The point of the analogy is not that insulin creates a magical steel vault where literally not one molecule of stored fat can ever escape.

It’s an analogy.

It’s meant to explain a regulatory signal in language normal people can actually understand.

After we eat and insulin rises, insulin suppresses lipolysis, which is the process of releasing stored fatty acids from fat tissue. During fasting, when insulin falls, the hormonal environment becomes more favorable to lipolysis and using stored energy.

So picture the jailer.

When insulin is elevated, the message is much more:

We’ve got incoming fuel. Keep stored energy stored.

When insulin falls, access to that stored energy becomes easier.

That’s the point.

I’m not drawing a molecular diagram.

I’m explaining the direction of the traffic.

And this is where people become so obsessed with semantics that they completely miss the usefulness of the concept.

You can scream:

“WELL TECHNICALLY FAT CAN STILL BE RELEASED...”

Okay.

Congratulations.

You won the Hall Monitor Award.

Did that explanation help the woman who has spent forty years wondering why she can white-knuckle 1,600 calories while thinking about food every waking minute and still feel like her body is fighting her every step of the way?

Probably not.

Two calorie deficits can be completely different human experiences.

This is the part that gets erased in these arguments.

Imagine two people ultimately consuming less energy than their bodies are using.

Person one is:

Hungry.

Irritable.

Thinking about food constantly.

Counting the hours until the next meal.

Negotiating with herself over snacks.

Craving sugar.

White-knuckling every restaurant.

Thinking she “cheated” because she ate something off-plan.

Starting over Monday.

Falling off again.

Feeling ashamed.

Thinking she’s weak.

Getting back on.

Doing it all over again.

Technically?

She may be in a calorie deficit.

She is also fucking miserable.

Now imagine another person.

She eats.

She’s satisfied.

She isn’t thinking about food two hours later.

The constant food noise begins getting quieter.

She naturally goes longer between meals.

She’s not measuring twelve almonds and trying to convince herself that’s a snack.

She isn’t lying in bed fantasizing about everything she’s “not allowed” to eat.

She has energy.

Her appetite changes.

Food stops occupying so much mental real estate.

And over time, she is also consuming less energy than her body is using.

Same accounting outcome.

Completely different route.

And that route fucking matters.

Appetite is not simply a personality trait or evidence of willpower. Human food intake is regulated by interconnected neurological, hormonal and metabolic systems governing hunger, satiety and energy expenditure. We even know that weight loss itself can trigger compensatory increases in appetite and reductions in energy expenditure that push against continued loss.

So when somebody says:

“Well, you just ate fewer calories.”

My next question is:

WHY?

Why was I suddenly able to?

Why did decades of deliberately trying to eat less feel like fucking warfare, while another way of eating dramatically changed my experience of hunger and food?

That’s the interesting question.

Carnivore didn’t repeal thermodynamics.

It changed the conditions under which I had to live.

That’s the distinction.

I have spent most of my life in a larger body.

I have done the diets.

I have eaten vegetarian.

I have eaten plant-based.

I have done low-fat.

I have cooked everything from scratch.

I have exercised.

I have counted calories.

I have intentionally eaten what conventional diet culture would call “healthy food.”

And there were periods when I absolutely lost weight.

But holy shit was I miserable.

Food noise.

Cravings.

Restriction.

White-knuckling.

Anxiety.

Feeling deprived.

“Cheating.”

Feeling like I failed.

Climbing back onto the wagon.

Falling back off.

Starting Monday.

Again.

Again.

Again.

At 330 pounds, I could deliberately restrict my food and watch the scale move painfully slowly. I remember eating around 1,600 calories, losing about eleven pounds over roughly two months, and then watching that weight come roaring back when I stopped restricting the way I had been.

And somebody can stand there and tell me:

“Well, technically...”

I don’t care.

I lived inside that body.

Then I changed the way I ate.

And my experience changed.

Not merely the number on the scale.

My experience of FOOD changed.

My hunger changed.

My satiation changed.

My cravings changed.

My food noise changed.

My ability to go hours without thinking about food changed.

My energy changed.

My relationship with eating changed.

Eventually, yes, I was obviously consuming less energy than my body was using.

But I wasn’t spending every waking hour trying to force that deficit into existence.

That’s the fucking difference.

There is scientific interest in this exact question because ketogenic states and ketogenic dietary patterns may alter appetite and satiety for some people. The relationship is complicated and certainly isn’t identical for everyone, but hunger and food-intake regulation involve nutrients, ketones, hormones, brain signaling and gastrointestinal signals, not simply conscious willpower.

And this is where every diet intersects.

Some people thrive eating Mediterranean.

Some people thrive vegetarian.

Some thrive vegan.

Some thrive keto.

Some thrive carnivore.

Some thrive somewhere that doesn’t have a neat fucking label at all.

And yes, people can lose body fat eating carbohydrates.

People can lose body fat eating fat.

People can lose body fat eating plants.

People can lose body fat eating meat.

That fact alone should tell us that arguing over whose label possesses the One True Diet is missing the bigger question.

The useful question is:

What happens to this particular human being when they eat this way?

What happens to their hunger?

Their satiety?

Their energy?

Their food noise?

Their cravings?

Their metabolic health?

Their ability to maintain the behavior?

Their quality of life?

Their obsession with food?

Their relationship with themselves?

Because if Diet A technically creates a deficit but requires somebody to spend every fucking day fighting herself, while Diet B creates conditions where she naturally eats less because she is satisfied and no longer obsessed with food...

I’m interested in Diet B.

Not because calories suddenly stopped existing.

Because the human being stopped suffering.

“Healthy choices” doesn’t solve this either.

People love saying:

“You can lose weight by eating healthier foods.”

Okay.

Define healthy.

Healthy for whom?

Healthy according to which dietary philosophy?

Healthy for which outcome?

Healthy for someone with which metabolic state?

Healthy according to the American Heart Association?

A vegan?

A carnivore?

A Mediterranean-diet researcher?

Somebody eating ancestral?

Somebody managing blood sugar?

Somebody whose biggest problem is binge eating?

Somebody who cannot stop thinking about food?

“Healthy” sounds objective until five people try to define it.

Then suddenly we’re right back in semantics.

And semantics are not what feed people.

You can be technically correct and practically fucking useless.

That’s really what bothers me about these conversations.

If a woman tells you:

“I have struggled with my weight and food for forty years.”

and your answer is:

“Calories in, calories out.”

you may have given her an accurate accounting equation.

You have given her almost nothing about how to live there.

How does she manage hunger?

How does she quiet the constant food noise?

What makes her feel satisfied?

What way of eating gives her stable energy?

What stops the restrict-binge-repent-repeat cycle?

What is sustainable in her actual life?

What makes feeding herself easier rather than turning every meal into another fucking moral decision?

Those are the questions I’m interested in.

Because human beings are not bomb calorimeters.

We have brains.

Hormones.

Memories.

Habits.

Reward systems.

Stress.

Families.

Budgets.

Jobs.

Trauma.

Preferences.

Cravings.

Culture.

Schedules.

Executive-function limits.

And lives.

So here’s where I land.

Calories describe the outcome.

Hormones and metabolism influence the conditions under which that outcome happens.

And the human being has to live inside the method.

That last sentence is the part I refuse to throw away.

I don’t care which dietary tribe gets the trophy.

I don’t care who wins the semantic argument about whether carnivore is a “diet,” a “way of eating,” a “dietary pattern,” or whatever phrase somebody wants to fight about today.

I care whether the woman standing in her kitchen can feed herself without feeling like a fucking failure.

I care whether she’s satisfied.

I care whether food gets quieter.

I care whether she can sustain what she’s doing.

I care whether she feels good enough to actually live her life instead of spending it thinking about the next thing she’s allowed to eat.

That’s where all these arguments intersect for me.

And it’s also why my work has increasingly become about removing food friction.

Because the goal isn’t to create the world’s most perfectly compliant eater.

The goal is to make feeding yourself easier.

The goal is to find something that works in the body you actually live in.

And if the method gets you the physiological outcome you’re looking for without making you fucking miserable in the process?

That matters.

A lot.

Progress Beats Purity • Shelli

👑 Creator of Girl, Come Eat | Queen of Carni

Metabolic coach for women 35+ · Food noise · Real-life meals · Mindset · Movement

Thank you for being part of this community. We are rebuilding our bodies, minds, and lives one decision at a time—and that matters more than perfection ever will.

📖 Explore Girl, Come Eat

👩‍🍳 Choose Lifetime Kitchen Access

📖 Author of This Is Not About Weight Loss

🌐 queenofcarni.com

📧 queenofcarni@outlook.com

Not even close.

There are things I want. Things I’m working toward. More money would absolutely make parts of my life easier.

But tonight I looked around my apartment and had one of those moments where I thought:

Holy shit. I am so fucking blessed.

I’m sitting here with electricity.

My air conditioning is running. I have a ceiling fan above me and another fan blowing on me.

I have a comfortable bed to sleep in tonight. I have pajamas on my body and slippers on my feet.

There’s food in my refrigerator. Food in my freezer. More than enough food to eat tomorrow, and the day after that.

If I’m thirsty, I turn on a faucet and clean water comes out.

I have a washer and dryer that clean my clothes. A dishwasher that washes my dishes. A stove, microwave and air fryer that cook my food.

I’m holding a cell phone in my hand. I have a computer that allows me to work and build something of my own. I have Wi-Fi connecting me to people all over the world.

I have everything I need to sustain my life.

I am not lacking.

And damn, I forget that sometimes.

I think we all do.

We spend so much time looking at the next thing.

The bigger bank account.
The nicer house.
The better car.
The trip we want to take.
The thing we haven’t accomplished yet.

And wanting those things isn’t wrong. I still want things. I still have goals. I still want to build a bigger life.

But wanting more and recognizing that I already have enough can exist at the same time.

There are people in this world tonight living through war, displacement, hunger and circumstances I cannot begin to imagine. There are people who would consider some of the things I barely notice anymore unimaginable luxuries.

That doesn’t mean my problems aren’t real.

It means my blessings are real, too.

And maybe I need to notice them more often.

The strangest part is that in some ways, I have less than I did five years ago.

But I feel richer.

Not bank-account rich.

Life rich.

I have peace I didn’t have before. I have gratitude I didn’t have before. I have a deeper appreciation for ordinary things that aren’t ordinary at all when you really stop and look at them.

Tonight I’m not going to focus on what’s missing.

I’m going to look around at what is already here.

A safe place to sleep.

Food to eat.

Water to drink.

Cool air on my skin.

Work that matters to me.

People I love.

Another day to build whatever comes next.

That is a hell of a lot.

So maybe tonight, wherever you are, look around.

Not at what’s wrong. Not at what you still need to fix. Not at everything you haven’t gotten yet.

Just look at what you have.

You might realize you’re a little richer than you thought.

I know I just did. ❤

️

Progress Beats Purity • Shelli

👑 Creator of Girl, Come Eat | Queen of Carni

Metabolic coach for women 35+ · Food noise · Real-life meals · Mindset · Movement

Thank you for being part of this community. We are rebuilding our bodies, minds, and lives one decision at a time—and that matters more than perfection ever will.

📖 Explore Girl, Come Eat

👩‍🍳 Choose Lifetime Kitchen Access

📖 Author of This Is Not About Weight Loss

🌐 queenofcarni.com

📧 queenofcarni@outlook.com

May, June, and July each knocked something loose in me, but July was especially brutal. It was one of the hardest months I’ve experienced as an adult in a very long time.

In May, I quit my job to build Queen of Carni full-time.

I have no regrets about leaving. It was an incredibly toxic workplace, with what I experienced as serious labor abuse, and I was miserable. I knew leaving was the right decision.

So I quit.

And then I got to work.

I started building, writing, creating, testing ideas, helping people, and trying to turn Queen of Carni into a real, sustainable business.

Then June came, and my baby girl moved out with her boyfriend.

I knew it would be an adjustment. I did not realize how badly it was going to tear my heart out.

For the past eight years, it had been the two of us. She was—and still is—my ride or die and one of my best friends. We went everywhere together. We did everything together. We were that mother-and-daughter duo.

And suddenly, the apartment was quiet.

She was beginning a new part of her life, which is exactly what she is supposed to do. I was happy for her. I am happy for her.

But I was also heartbroken.

Both things can be true.

After she moved, I started losing my footing. I became depressed. I was trying to hold everything together financially and emotionally, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, I lost my way a little.

The food noise came back

I did not completely change the way I ate. I did not go back to bread, pasta, fast food, or everything I used to eat.

But I started drinking far too many sugary Starbucks coffees.

Then the chocolate chips came back.

And every time, I found a reason.

“I need this while I’m working.”

“I’m writing the cookbook.”

“I’m exhausted.”

“I just need something to help me get through today.”

Meanwhile, I was spending eight fucking dollars on coffee while having no idea how I was going to pay my rent.

That is the insanity of food noise. It does not always look logical from the outside because it is not coming from the logical part of your brain.

By July, I was in survival mode.

Nothing existed except figuring out how to keep going and finishing the thing that had been growing inside my head.

The thing you kept asking me to make

For months, people had been saying things like:

“When is the cookbook coming?”

“You make food feel so much easier.”

“You simplify everything.”

“I never know what to eat until I see what you make.”

I kept hearing the same need underneath all of those comments:

I want to eat this way, but what the fuck do I actually eat?

So I started making a cookbook.

At least, I thought I was making a cookbook.

But as I built it, the idea kept expanding.

I would think:

“What if you could click this ingredient and go directly to the recipe?”

“What if you could browse complete plates of food like a menu?”

“What if someone forgot to defrost anything?”

“What if they were sick of eggs?”

“What if they had almost no mental energy and just needed to feed themselves?”

“What if the book told them what the meal cost?”

“What if keto readers could see exactly how to adapt it?”

“What if they never had to hit the big, scary back button seventeen times and lose their place?”

Every time I answered one question, I found another way to remove friction.

Eventually, the book turned into something much bigger.

It became a map of my food brain.

It became Girl, Come Eat

.

The day before launch, I had $17

I am not saying that for drama.

The day before I launched, I had approximately seventeen dollars in my bank account, and I did not know how I was going to pay my rent.

But I believed in what I had built.

I believed the people asking for it were not just being nice. I believed they genuinely needed it.

And I knew this thing in my head needed to exist in the real world.

So for roughly two weeks, I worked ten to twelve hours a day.

I sat in front of my computer writing recipes, testing food, taking photographs, building pages, creating links, checking links, fixing links, reorganizing everything, and trying to turn this enormous idea into something another person could actually use.

That is also why I disappeared from Substack.

It was not intentional.

I became so hyperfocused—and so desperate to finish—that almost everything outside the cookbook stopped existing.

Then I launched it

And the response completely blew me away.

Saying it exceeded my expectations does not begin to cover it.

You showed up for me in a way I will never forget.

You bought the book. You bought Lifetime Kitchen Access. You sent messages. You shared it. You told your friends. You started exploring it.

And now people are beginning to cook from it.

That may be the most exciting part of all.

People are posting pictures of the food they made, and I feel like a proud mama hen.

I am looking at these pictures thinking:

“YES. Look at you. You fed yourself. You made the thing.”

That is the entire reason I built it.

Not so anyone could become a perfect carnivore.

Not so anyone could perform dietary purity for the internet.

I built it because feeding yourself should not feel like solving a complicated mathematical equation every single day.

One of my wonderful paid subscribers commented on X that she followed me here but had never heard anything about the cookbook.

That stopped me in my tracks.

I thought:

Holy shit. I completely neglected my Substack people.

And I felt terrible.

You were here supporting me, and I had vanished into Canva without explaining where I went.

This is me finally coming up for air and telling you what happened.

So what exactly is Girl, Come Eat?

It is a fully interactive digital cookbook designed to reduce decision fatigue and make food easier.

You can browse recipes, ingredients, real-life food problems, and complete plates.

You can click through the book instead of endlessly scrolling.

Recipes link to the components they use. If something requires a sauce, bun, chip, or other recipe, you can go directly to it.

It includes:

• carnivore recipes;

• keto add-ons and adaptations;

• nutritional information;

• cost breakdowns;

• reheating and storage information;

• complete plate ideas;

• low-spoon options;

• practical solutions for the days when you forgot to thaw something, are sick of eggs, or simply cannot decide what to eat.

Several people have already told me they opened the book and thought:

“Wait—I can eat things like this?”

Yes, girl.

Come eat.

Why I created Lifetime Kitchen Access

Lifetime Kitchen Access came together near the end of development because I realized something:

There was no possible way I could fit everything I wanted into the first release.

I kept thinking of more recipes, more tools, better navigation, more teaching, and more ways to help.

But I did not want to write Girl, Come Eat 2, then Girl, Come Eat 3, and ask people to buy an entirely new cookbook every time I had more to add.

I wanted to build one kitchen that could keep growing.

So Lifetime Kitchen Access means you pay once and receive the future updates I continue adding to this kitchen.

I am already planning things such as:

• an interactive ingredient index;

• more recipes;

• additional problem-solving sections;

• navigation improvements;

• deeper tutorials;

• links to my YouTube teaching videos;

• my homemade beef-tallow guide;

• future seasonal additions.

The version available now is the foundation.

Lifetime Kitchen Access is the kitchen as I continue building it.

And this really is only the beginning.

Where I am now

The launch gave me room to breathe.

It helped me pay my rent, cover my car, buy groceries, replace household things I had been going without, help my daughter, and create a little bit of safety around myself.

I am profoundly grateful.

But I also want to be honest: I am coming down from several months of survival mode, grief, fear, hyperfocus, and adrenaline.

My brain still feels a little scrambled.

I am tired.

I am finding my footing again.

And part of finding my footing means returning to the things I know help me feel like myself.

I am cutting the sugary coffees and chocolate back out. I am returning to the food that made me feel strong and quieted the food noise. I am getting back to moving my body, stretching, lifting kettlebells, and using my rebounder.

I am not coming back as someone standing at the finish line.

I am coming back as someone who has already walked this road, wandered away from it a little, and knows how to find it again.

I have still lost 140 pounds.

I have still changed my life.

And I am going to document this next part honestly, just like I did before.

The food.

The food noise.

The mindset.

The metabolism.

The victories.

The difficult days.

The rebuilding.

And, of course, everything I continue adding to this strange, beautiful little digital kitchen I somehow pulled out of my brain.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for supporting me while I build this.

And thank you for reminding me that I had people waiting for me here, too.

I’m back.

Girl, come eat.

Progress Beats Purity • Shelli

👑 Creator of Girl, Come Eat | Queen of Carni

Metabolic coach for women 35+ · Food noise · Real-life meals · Mindset · Movement

Thank you for being part of this community. We are rebuilding our bodies, minds, and lives one decision at a time—and that matters more than perfection ever will.

📖 Explore Girl, Come Eat

👩‍🍳 Choose Lifetime Kitchen Access

📖 Author of This Is Not About Weight Loss

🌐 queenofcarni.com

📧 queenofcarni@outlook.com

You eat clean. You stay in your window. You hit your protein every single day. You cut the carbs, cut the sugar, cut the late-night snacking. You are not cheating. You are not lying to yourself about a handful of this and a bite of that. You are genuinely doing the work.

And the scale will not move. Or worse, it is creeping up while you eat less than you have eaten in your entire life.

Before you blame the food, let’s talk about cortisol.

What cortisol actually is

Cortisol is the hormone your adrenal glands release in response to stress. And here is the first thing almost nobody explains. Your body does not have separate categories for stress. It does not file “a lion is chasing me” in one folder and “I have a work deadline” in another and “my teenager just slammed a door” in a third. To your nervous system, stress is stress. A real threat and a perceived threat produce the same chemical response.

Cortisol itself is not the villain. You need it. It wakes you up in the morning. It carries you through a genuine emergency. The problem was never cortisol doing its job for a few minutes and then switching back off.

The problem is cortisol that never turns off.

Here is the part that will change how you think about your body

Cortisol raises your blood sugar. It does this even when you have not eaten a single carbohydrate. It does this even when you have not eaten anything at all.

When cortisol goes up, it tells your liver to dump glucose into your bloodstream, because in a real emergency your muscles would need fast fuel to run or fight. That is brilliant survival design. But your blood sugar does not know the difference between running from danger and lying awake at 3am worrying about money. The glucose goes up either way.

And here is the chain that matters. When your blood sugar goes up, insulin has to come up to deal with it. So chronically elevated cortisol means chronically elevated insulin. And as long as insulin is up, the door to your fat stores stays locked. It does not matter how clean your plate is. The door is held shut from a completely different direction.

This is why stress management is not a soft, optional, nice-to-have part of metabolic healing. It is physiology. When I tell women this, I watch their shoulders drop, because for the first time the math finally makes sense.

This is the part I really need you to sit with.

You can be calm. You can think you are handling everything beautifully. And your cortisol can still be running high all day, because stress to your body is not just the emotional kind.

Blood sugar swings trigger cortisol surges. Inflammation triggers cortisol surges. Undereating triggers cortisol surges. Poor sleep triggers cortisol surges. Over-exercising triggers cortisol surges.

So the woman who feels totally in control of her stress can still have a body that is chemically convinced it is in danger around the clock. And every one of those surges raises her blood sugar, raises her insulin, and moves her one more step away from the healing she is working so hard for.

The dieting trap nobody warns you about

Let me describe a woman I have talked to a hundred times in different bodies with different names.

She drops her calories to 1,200 a day. She adds an hour of cardio. She has been dieting on and off for twenty years. She is undersleeping. She is stressed. And she cannot understand why she is gaining weight while eating almost nothing.

Here is what is actually happening. Her cortisol is running high from the restriction, high from the cardio, high from the stress, high from the broken sleep. Her fasting blood sugar is elevated even though she ate nothing. Her insulin is elevated even though she ate nothing. Her body has interpreted the calorie deficit and the punishing workouts as one more emergency, and it is responding exactly the way it is built to.

This is why restriction-based dieting so often works for a few weeks and then stalls hard. You are not weak. You did not fall off. You added a cortisol trigger on top of all the cortisol triggers you already had, and your body did the only thing it knows how to do under threat. It held on.

Why you wake up at 3am

If you wake up around 3am with your heart going, or your mind racing, or a strange wired feeling, that is not random and it is not just insomnia.

Cortisol naturally rises in the early morning hours to wake you up. That is supposed to happen gently. But if your blood sugar crashed overnight, your body releases an extra surge of cortisol as an emergency signal to push your blood sugar back up. That surge is what is waking you.

And it costs you more than sleep. Your deepest, most restorative sleep requires cortisol to be low. That overnight window is when your body does its real repair work and quietly burns fat while insulin is at its lowest. When cortisol keeps spiking through the night, that repair window never fully opens. You wake up tired, you wake up with higher blood sugar than when you went to bed, and the most metabolically valuable hours of your day got wasted.

Where cortisol sits in the hierarchy

If you have been following this series, you already know how this fits.

At the very top is the safety signal your nervous system sends. That is Video 1. Underneath it is oxytocin, the all-clear, the hormone almost nobody talks about. That was Video 2. And cortisol is the alarm.

Here is the whole thing in one sentence. Cortisol is the emergency alarm. Oxytocin is the all-clear. When the all-clear never comes, the alarm never stops.

That is the real picture. You do not fix cortisol by white-knuckling your way into being less stressed. You fix it by giving your body real, repeated, physical evidence that it is safe.

What actually lowers cortisol

This is where my three pillars do the work. Meat. Movement. Mindset. Not as slogans. As the actual mechanism.

Meat. Start your day with a protein-rich, fat-forward meal instead of coffee on an empty stomach. Protein and fat give your blood sugar something steady to stand on, so it stops crashing and spiking and dragging cortisol along with it. A stable blood sugar is one of the most powerful cortisol-lowering tools you own, and you control it three times a day.

Movement. This is where so many women go wrong, because they think more is better and they punish themselves with cardio. Your body reads excessive exercise as another emergency. Walking does the opposite. A gentle walk, especially after you eat, helps clear glucose out of your blood without adding stress. A post-meal walk is one of the simplest, most underrated things you can do for your metabolism. Save the hard effort for when your body actually feels safe enough to handle it.

Mindset. This is the foundation, not the afterthought. Consistent sleep and wake times. Morning light in your eyes early in the day to set your rhythm. Pulling caffeine back so it is not stacking on top of your own cortisol all afternoon. Magnesium, which so many of us are low in. And the harder, deeper work of letting your nervous system feel connected and safe, because that is the all-clear signal that tells the whole system to stand down.

None of this is about doing it perfectly. You know how I feel about that. Progress beats purity, every single time. You do not need a flawless stress-free life. You need a body that gets enough small, repeated signals of safety that it finally believes the emergency is over.

You were never broken

I lost about 140 pounds, and the longer I am in this work, the more convinced I am that the food was almost never the whole story for the women I talk to. So many of you have been white-knuckling a perfect diet on top of a body that has been stuck in alarm mode for years. Of course it was not working. You were treating the wrong problem with everything you had.

Cortisol is not the enemy. A body stuck in danger is just a body trying to protect you. Your job is not to fight it. Your job is to convince it, slowly and patiently, that it is finally safe to let go.

Next in the series, we go to insulin. The hormone everyone blames, explained in plain language, and why it is far more of a follower than a leader.

Progress Beats Purity • Shelli

👑 Queen of Carni Founder of Reset & Reign | Metabolic Healing for Women 35+

Rebuild Your Metabolism. Reclaim Your Life. 🥩 Meat • Mindset • Movement

Thank you for being part of this community. We are rebuilding our bodies, minds, and lives one decision at a time. And that matters more than perfection ever will.

📖 Author of This Is Not About Weight Loss

🌐 queenofcarni.com

📧 queenofcarni@outlook.com

If this is the first piece of mine you have read, this is the kind of real talk I send out regularly. Come find the rest of the Hormone Hierarchy Series, and if you want it in your inbox, you know where to subscribe.

Most women have heard oxytocin called “the love hormone.”

That is technically true, but it is also painfully incomplete.

Oxytocin is involved in bonding, affection, childbirth, breastfeeding, connection, and emotional closeness. But stopping there misses the deeper story, especially for women trying to heal their metabolism after years of stress, dieting, inflammation, food addiction, trauma, burnout, and survival mode.

Oxytocin is not just about love.

It is about safety.

And safety is one of the most overlooked pieces of female metabolic healing.

When your body feels safe, it can digest better. Sleep better. Regulate blood sugar better. Recover better. Trust hunger and fullness signals better. Lower the constant need for comfort-seeking and emergency energy.

But when your body feels unsafe, everything changes.

The body does not care that you want to lose weight. It does not care that you downloaded a meal plan. It does not care that you are trying to be disciplined.

If your nervous system is bracing for threat, your body is going to prioritize survival over repair.

That is where so many women get stuck.

They are trying to heal their metabolism while living inside a nervous system that still feels like it is under attack.

The Female Body Does Not Heal Well Under Constant Threat

Modern women are expected to carry an absurd amount.

Work. Family. Money. Kids. Aging parents. Relationships. Hormones. Perimenopause. Menopause. Body changes. Food noise. Emotional labor. Chronic stress. Social pressure. Trauma history. Diet culture. The constant feeling that they are never doing enough.

Then when the body starts showing signs of distress, we blame the woman.

She is told she lacks willpower.

She needs more discipline.

She needs to eat less.

She needs to move more.

She needs to try harder.

But what if the issue is not that her body is failing her?

What if her body has been adapting to a life that has not felt safe for years?

That is not an excuse. It is physiology.

The nervous system and metabolism are not separate systems. They are in constant conversation.

When stress stays high long enough, the body starts adjusting everything around survival. Cortisol rises. Sleep gets lighter. Blood sugar becomes less stable. Cravings increase. Inflammation can rise. Digestion changes. Hunger signals get louder or quieter. The body starts storing, bracing, conserving, protecting.

And then women wonder why their body will not respond the way it used to.

Read more

One million Americans die every year from diseases directly caused by what they eat.

Let that land for a moment. One million people. Every year. From conditions that are, in many cases, preventable and in some cases reversible through dietary change.

And the physicians responsible for treating those conditions graduated from medical school having received, on average, less than two hours of nutrition training across four years of education.

Two hours.

I am not going to pretend that number does not make me angry. It should make all of us angry.

The Numbers the Medical System Would Rather You Did Not Think About Too Hard

Let me give you the actual data because the scale of this matters.

The United States spends more than 4.4 trillion dollars annually on chronic disease and mental health care. The majority of that chronic disease, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome, is directly and documentably tied to diet.

Research published in 2024 found that 75 percent of US medical schools have no required clinical nutrition classes. None. Zero. Required.

Only 14 percent of residency programs have a required nutrition curriculum. Meaning even the medical students who received some nutrition education in school are entering practice with no required follow-up training in the field most relevant to the conditions they will spend their careers treating.

The majority of medical students report receiving fewer than two hours of nutrition instruction total. In four years of medical education, two hours is dedicated to the primary driver of the leading causes of death and chronic disease in this country.

This is not a gap in the curriculum. It is an indictment of the entire model.

The MAHA Moment: Progress That Is Real But Not Enough

Something shifted in March 2026.

RFK Jr. and the Department of Health and Human Services announced that 53 medical schools across 31 states had committed to requiring at least 40 hours of nutrition education for students starting in fall 2026. It was framed as a transformative breakthrough for the Make America Healthy Again agenda, and in some ways it is. The conversation about nutrition in medical training is now happening at a federal level with institutional commitments attached to it. That is genuinely different from where things were five years ago.

But let us be clear about what 53 schools out of approximately 160 accredited medical schools actually means. It is roughly a third. Voluntary. Starting in 2026. With 40 hours as the target, which is better than two but is still a fraction of the training devoted to pharmaceutical intervention.

I will take the progress. I am glad it is happening. I just want us to be honest about how far we still have to go.

What This Looks Like for Women

Women make up more than half the US population. We are also the primary healthcare consumers in this country. We seek medical care more often, manage the healthcare decisions for our households more often, and carry the burden of conditions that are disproportionately tied to metabolic dysfunction.

PCOS affects up to 15 percent of women of reproductive age and is fundamentally a condition of insulin resistance. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, the most common autoimmune condition in the country, affects women at a rate seven to ten times higher than men. Endometriosis affects an estimated one in ten women. Perimenopause and menopause create hormonal shifts that directly alter insulin sensitivity, fat storage, and metabolic function.

And yet women are consistently undertreated, underdiagnosed, and dismissed in medical settings.

I have sat in exam rooms and been told that my bloodwork was borderline, something to watch, come back next year. For fifteen years my A1c climbed from 5.9 to 6.3 while that language stayed exactly the same. Nobody explained to me what was actually happening in my cells. Nobody told me there was a dietary intervention that could change the trajectory. I was handed pamphlets about portion control and sent home.

That is not care. That is management. And the difference between those two words represents millions of women who are living smaller, sicker lives than they have to.

The questions women are told to stop asking. Has a doctor ever told you that your symptoms are just stress? Just your hormones? Just part of getting older? And then written a prescription and moved to the next patient without ever investigating what was actually driving the problem?

This is the lived experience of women in American healthcare. And it is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of a training system that does not prioritize the connection between what we eat and how we feel, and an appointment structure that does not give physicians the time to have meaningful conversations even if they wanted to.

The Inconvenient Reality of the Medical Business Model

I want to be careful here because I do not want to paint every physician with the same brush. There are brilliant, caring doctors who are fighting against this system from inside it. There are physicians who have discovered metabolic medicine and functional approaches and are genuinely trying to change how care is delivered.

But the system they are operating inside rewards the wrong things.

A billing structure that compensates procedures and prescriptions at dramatically higher rates than lifestyle counseling creates a predictable incentive. An appointment model built around ten minute increments does not leave room for the kind of patient education that might reduce the need for repeat visits. A continuing education system with deep pharmaceutical industry involvement shapes what information physicians are most repeatedly exposed to after they graduate.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a structural problem with a long and well-documented history. And the result is a medical culture that reaches for the prescription pad significantly faster than it reaches for the dietary conversation.

I reversed type 2 diabetes. I reversed insulin resistance that had been building for fifteen years. I eliminated the 3am wake-ups, the brain fog, the chronic joint pain, the depression symptoms, and the metabolic dysfunction that was quietly killing me. I did it with food. Not with a drug. With food.

And not one physician during fifteen years of borderline bloodwork ever told me that was possible. Not once.

What You Can Do Right Now

The system is changing slowly. The MAHA push for nutrition education in medical schools is a real step even if it is an incomplete one. More physicians are discovering metabolic medicine. The conversation about food as intervention is getting louder.

But in the meantime you are the patient who exists right now, not in the 2026 graduating class of a medical school that committed to 40 hours. And that means you have to advocate for yourself in ways that you should not have to but do.

Ask your doctor specifically for a fasting insulin test. Not just fasting glucose. Fasting insulin. Most doctors do not order it automatically. It tells you how hard your pancreas is working and gives you a baseline before metabolic dysfunction shows up in standard labs.

Ask for a full lipid panel with particle size rather than just total cholesterol. Ask what lifestyle interventions have been studied for your specific condition before you accept that a prescription is the only path.

And find sources of metabolic education that go beyond what happens in a ten minute appointment. Not to replace your physician but to walk into that appointment informed enough to have a real conversation.

Your health is yours. The information that should have been in the exam room has to come from somewhere. That is exactly why this space exists.

If this resonated with you, the paid version of Notes from a Former Food Addict goes deep on every mechanism behind metabolic healing, the hormonal picture, the research, and the practical framework for healing your body in a system that was not designed to do it for you. Subscribe below.

Subscribe

Progress Beats Purity • Shelli

👑 Queen of Carni
Founder of Reset & Reign
Metabolic Healing for Women 35+

Rebuild Your Metabolism. Reclaim Your Life.

🥩 Meat • Mindset • Movement

📖 Author of This Is Not About Weight Loss
👑 Download the Free Queen’s Starter Kit

✨ Notes From a Former Food Addict is a reader-supported publication.
The deeper conversations on metabolic healing, identity change, hormones, mindset, and rebuilding your life happen inside the paid subscription.

🌐queenofcarni.com
📧 queenofcarni@outlook.com

If you just found this publication, this is the first thing I want you to read.

I created this space in October 2025 as a personal journal. I needed somewhere to put the truth of a journey that had already changed everything about my body and my life. Not the polished version. The real one.

What I did not expect was how much it would evolve.

Because as I kept writing and kept healing and kept learning, I realized my story was not just mine. The exhaustion, the decades of failed diets, the shame, the doctor visits that went nowhere, the feeling that your body is working against you no matter what you do — that is the story of millions of women who have never had anyone explain to them what is actually happening.

So this publication became something bigger than a journal. It became the education I never got and the framework I had to build myself.

Here is where to start:

She Was Still In There — the post about finally letting myself be proud after 140 pounds lost.

Why Women 35+ Are the Most Underserved Group in Nutrition — the research piece that explains why the diet industry was never built for your body.

This Isn’t a New Me. It’s the Real One — on identity, transformation, and the woman who was in there the whole time.

Get the free Queen’s Starter Kit here

Free subscribers get the personal essays and education posts. Paid subscribers get the full frameworks, the Hormone Hierarchy Series companion posts, and the deep dives.

Welcome. I am glad you are here.

Progress Beats Purity • Shelli

👑 Queen of Carni
Founder of Reset & Reign
Metabolic Healing for Women 35+

Rebuild Your Metabolism. Reclaim Your Life.

🥩 Meat • Mindset • Movement

📖 Author of This Is Not About Weight Loss
👑 Download the Free Queen’s Starter Kit

✨ Notes From a Former Food Addict is a reader-supported publication.
The deeper conversations on metabolic healing, identity change, hormones, mindset, and rebuilding your life happen inside the paid subscription.

🌐 queenofcarni.com
📧 queenofcarni@outlook.com

If you watched the first video in the Hormone Hierarchy Series, you already know the core idea: your hormones are not a list of separate problems. They are a communication system. And that system runs on a hierarchy, meaning some hormones have authority over others.

But I want to go deeper here than I could in the video. Because once you understand the full mechanism, it does not just explain why you have struggled. It explains everything. The failed diets. The weight that came back. The cravings that felt biological because they were biological. The exhaustion that did not respond to sleep. All of it.

Let me take you through it piece by piece.

The Hierarchy Is Not What Anyone Told You

When most people talk about metabolic hormones, they start at the obvious ones. Insulin is too high. Cortisol is too high. Thyroid is underperforming. Leptin is not signaling correctly. And yes, all of those things are true for many of us. But treating them like separate problems to fix one at a time is why so many women spend years in a loop of improvement and relapse.

The hierarchy matters because fixing a downstream hormone while the upstream signal is still disrupted is like mopping the floor while the pipe is still leaking. You can mop all day. The floor stays wet.

Here is the hierarchy in plain language:

At the very top sits your nervous system’s safety assessment. Not insulin. Not cortisol. Not even estrogen, though estrogen plays a massive role that we will get into in a later video. The top signal is whether your nervous system has determined that you are safe.

Below that sits cortisol, your primary stress hormone. Cortisol’s job is to respond to the safety signal. When safety is present, cortisol stays regulated. When danger is perceived, cortisol rises and stays elevated until the threat resolves.

Below cortisol sits insulin. Cortisol directly raises blood glucose, which requires insulin to respond. Chronically elevated cortisol means chronically elevated insulin. Chronically elevated insulin means fat storage is prioritized over fat release. This is not a character flaw. This is the system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Below insulin sits leptin, the hormone that tells you that you are full and that your body has enough stored energy to function normally. When insulin is chronically elevated, leptin signaling becomes disrupted. You can have significant stored body fat and still receive hunger signals because your leptin is not getting through.

Below leptin sits ghrelin, your hunger hormone. Dysregulated leptin means dysregulated ghrelin. The hunger you have felt your whole life that seemed out of control was not weakness. It was a disrupted hormonal conversation happening in a body that was trying to protect you.

None of these hormones are broken. They are all responding correctly to the signal above them. That is the whole point. And that is why changing the signal at the top changes everything downstream.

Read more

The other night I was digging through old folders in my Google Drive looking for blog ideas and outlines I had written months ago, and I came across one titled:

“The Day I Finally Let Myself Be Proud.”

I think I wrote it around seven or eight months ago. Back then I had already lost a lot of weight. I was somewhere around 114 pounds down. At the time, that number felt absolutely impossible. Unreal. Like something that happened to other people, not me.

But reading that outline now hit differently, because I realized something almost immediately: I have changed even more since I wrote it.

Not just physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Spiritually.

And honestly, I think that deserves to be acknowledged.

I was sitting at my computer scrolling through old photos of myself before I started this journey. Pictures of me sick, inflamed, exhausted, miserable, swollen, and hopeless. I looked absolutely miserable because I was absolutely miserable.

Then I looked down at myself sitting there, over 100 pounds lighter, and I just froze.

Holy shit. I actually did it.

This was something I had wanted my entire life. Not for vanity. Not because I wanted to be skinny enough to fit into some arbitrary beauty standard. I wanted freedom. I wanted relief. I wanted peace inside my own body.

I had tried so many times before. I could lose a few pounds. Maybe 20. Maybe 30. I think the most I ever lost before this was around 60 pounds. And every single time, eventually, I failed. At least that is what I thought back then.

But this time was different.

Sitting there looking at those pictures, I realized just how much of me had changed along with my body.

I felt proud. Deeply proud.

And honestly? That was unfamiliar territory for me.

For so many years, I hated myself. Not “I had low self-esteem.” I mean I genuinely hated myself.

I had completely resigned myself to being fat and dying. That sounds harsh, but it is the truth. I thought my future was just going to be more weight, more inflammation, more pain, more exhaustion, more medications, more isolation, and eventually an early grave. That was the life I believed I deserved.

Back then my world had become incredibly small. I worked little odd jobs from home and barely survived financially. Every extra dollar I had went into food.

I would buy family-sized bags of chips and candy bars and binge until I physically felt sick. Cheddar sour cream Ruffles. Snickers bars. Tortilla chips dipped into queso and salsa. Then more candy. Then weed. Then more food. Every day revolved around trying to feel better for five minutes.

I had gotten myself up to 330 pounds. At 5’5”, carrying that kind of weight felt brutal. I waddled when I walked because my stomach was so heavy it pulled on my back. Sometimes I had to hold my hand against my lower back just to support myself. I bought walking sticks because it hurt too badly to move without them.

Showering exhausted me. I am not exaggerating. Sometimes I only showered once or twice a week because I was so depressed and physically depleted that it felt like too much. I would stand there trying to wash my hair while my heart raced and I felt like I might pass out.

That was my life.

I was isolated. Completely isolated. My daughter was usually gone at work or with friends or her boyfriend. I spent most of my time alone in my apartment eating, watching TV, scrolling on my phone, crocheting, and trying not to think too hard about how deeply unhappy I was.

I had no energy. No confidence. No self-worth. No hope.

And maybe the worst part was this: I truly believed people thought I chose it.

That is one of the biggest things people misunderstand about severe obesity. People think you just stop caring. They think you are lazy. They think you are secretly eating six pizzas a day while refusing to move.

But what most people never see is how many women are trying desperately, every single day. Tracking calories. Trying diets. Walking through pain. Forcing themselves to exercise. Fighting cravings constantly. Feeling ashamed constantly.

“Just eat less. Just go to the gym. Just stop.”

As if we have not spent our entire lives trying.

What people do not understand is that when you have been severely overweight since childhood, it changes the way you experience the world. You are always on the outside of everything. You do not fit in booths. You do not fit comfortably on airplanes. You need seatbelt extenders while people stare. You avoid photos. You avoid mirrors. You avoid events. You start avoiding yourself.

That was old me.

And I grieve for her sometimes. Because she deserved compassion too.

One of the strangest parts of losing weight was not recognizing myself anymore.

That part genuinely shocked me. I would look in the mirror and just stare. I had no idea what size I wore. I would hold clothes up in thrift stores thinking, there is no way this fits me, and then it would. I still sometimes look at my clothes and think they belong to somebody else because they look so small.

And yes, the loose skin is hard sometimes. Nobody really prepares you for the emotional complexity of that. When you spend your whole life imagining that if you ever lose the weight you will suddenly look like all the women you compared yourself to, it is a different kind of grief realizing your body tells a different story.

My face changed. The extra fat that once filled everything out disappeared, and suddenly I had wrinkles I did not know existed. A saggy neck. Changes I was not emotionally prepared for.

And somewhere along the way I stopped trying to punish her and finally started listening to her. That changed everything.

I think the first time I realized this might actually work was around 40 pounds down. For the first time in my life, my progress was consistent. I was learning about metabolic healing, fat adaptation, watching my glucose improve, watching my ketones improve. And I remember thinking:

Wait. My body is not broken.

Nobody had ever told me that before.

Nobody explained insulin resistance. Nobody explained hormonal dysfunction. Nobody explained why women struggle differently. Nobody explained why my hunger had felt completely out of control for decades. All I had ever been told was eat less, move more, try harder. And when it did not work, I blamed myself.

Now I understand my body was fighting to survive.

And healing it changed more than just my weight. My anxiety improved. My depression improved. My skin tags started disappearing. My sleep apnea disappeared. My energy returned. My periods became manageable. My skin changed.

That part almost broke me emotionally, because underneath all the exhaustion and self-hatred and isolation, I was still in there. The confident girl. The funny girl. The loud girl. The passionate girl. The woman with the huge heart. The teacher. The creator. The fighter.

I had forgotten her. For decades.

And now she is back.

Old me needed constant reassurance because she believed she was worthless. New me reassures herself.

Old me said: you are disgusting, you are a pig, you are never going to change. New me says: you messed up, okay, move forward. You know how to recover. You are still healing. You are still worthy.

That shift matters more than the weight loss ever will.

Because now when I start spiraling, I stop. I look around. I ground myself. I remind myself what I am grateful for. I remind myself who I am.

I do not abandon myself anymore.

And maybe that is what finally letting myself be proud really means.

It means I no longer minimize what I have done. I do not say “well yeah I lost 140 pounds but.” No.

I lost 140 pounds. I reversed my type 2 diabetes. I healed my metabolism. I got rid of my sleep apnea. I transformed my mental health. I rebuilt my life. And now I help other women do the same.

I am proud of that.

I am no longer apologizing for my energy, my loud voice, my passion, my presence, my opinions, my joy, my ambition. And I will never again apologize for taking up space.

I deserve to take up every inch of space that I do.

I spent too many years shrinking myself to make other people comfortable. Never again.

I want every woman reading this to understand something.

You are worthy of loving yourself now. Not 50 pounds from now. Not after perfection. Not after fixing every flaw. Now.

And healing is not just physical. Sometimes healing is finally telling yourself the truth after decades of self-hatred. Sometimes healing is catching your spiral before it becomes self-destruction. Sometimes healing is looking in the mirror and deciding: I am done abandoning you.

I still have bad days. I still have fear. I still have self-doubt sometimes.

But old Shelli never believed in herself.

New Shelli does. Fully.

I believe I am powerful. I believe I am valuable. I believe I am worthy. I believe I was meant to help people. I believe I was meant to serve and teach and show up and tell the truth.

And from now on I will never shrink myself to fit places that were too small for me.

From now on I will be as loud and bright and unapologetic as the sun.

From now on I will fully live as the queen that I am.

Shelli Queen of Carni | queenofcarni.com | @QueenOfCarni Reset and Reign: Metabolic Coaching for Women 35+ Rebuild your Metabolism. Reclaim your Body.

Notes from a Former Food Addict is published on Substack. This is a free subscriber post. Share it with a woman who needs to hear it.

This is the free preview of a longer paid piece I published this week. If any of this lands for you, the full version goes much deeper. Link at the bottom.

I did Weight Watchers. Nutrisystem. Jenny Craig. The Cambridge Diet. Slim-Fast. Dexatrim. Vegan. Plant-based. Mediterranean. Phentermine. Ionamin. I did the Six Week Body Makeover. I did everything the industry told me to do.

And for most of my adult life, I failed. Over and over. In every direction.

It took me until I was well into my forties to understand why. And the answer was not that I lacked discipline. The answer was that I was following a model that was never designed for my body. And almost certainly, it was not designed for yours either.

Here is what I mean.

A review of 704 nutrition studies found that females made up less than one third of participants in trials that included women at all. In exercise physiology specifically, only 6 percent of research studies include female-only participant groups. The dietary guidelines most of us have been handed our entire lives, the timelines, the calorie targets, the macro ratios, the expected results windows, were derived primarily from data on younger male subjects. They were then applied to women as though our biology was identical.

It is not identical. Not even close.

Women over 35 do not arrive at a dietary protocol with a neutral metabolic baseline. They arrive with twenty to thirty years of restriction and regain cycles that have trained the metabolism to protect its fat stores. Cortisol chronically elevated from years of dieting pressure and food guilt. Protein-depleted muscle from decades of low-fat eating. And a hormonal environment that is actively shifting in ways the standard guidelines never accounted for.

Every time you dieted, your metabolism adapted downward. Every time you regained, the lowered metabolic rate persisted. Clinical research on weight cycling confirms that each successive diet produces smaller losses over longer periods while regain happens more quickly. Your body was not betraying you. It was learning from its environment. The problem is that the environment was wrong from the start.

Then add estrogen.

Estrogen directly enhances insulin sensitivity. When estrogen declines during perimenopause and menopause, glucose handling slows, circulating insulin rises, and fat redistributes toward the abdomen. This is documented in peer-reviewed research. Research published in the American Journal of Pathology confirmed that menopause is an independent risk factor for insulin resistance, meaning it is the estrogen loss specifically, not just aging, that drives the metabolic shift.

The same foods, the same exercise, the same calorie targets that produced results in your thirties will produce different results in your forties and fifties. Not because you are doing something wrong. Because the hormonal rules changed and nobody told you.

I spent fifteen years with an A1c hovering between 5.9 and 6.3. Every year my doctor told me it was borderline. Something to watch. Come back next year. During those fifteen years I experienced fatigue that did not respond to sleep, brain fog worst in the morning, depression that medication blunted but never resolved, and a 3 AM wake-up so reliable I stopped questioning it. All of it had a single metabolic root that was sitting in my annual bloodwork the entire time. Nobody connected the dots for me.

Pre-diabetes is not a waiting room. At an A1c of 6.3, insulin resistance is already active and has been for years. The threshold is an administrative line. The damage does not wait for you to cross it.

When I finally found carnivore I still floundered for four months, because thirty years of diet culture had made me genuinely afraid of fat. I was eating lean cuts of meat and wondering why nothing was shifting. It was not until month four, when I stopped being afraid and started flooding my meals with fat, that I understood what fat adaptation actually felt like from the inside. The food noise went quiet. The hunger became predictable. The energy stabilized. For the first time in my adult life, food was not running me.

Four months. Not two weeks.

For women with decades of diet cycling, thyroid involvement, prediabetes, or perimenopause in the picture, the standard carnivore adaptation timelines were not built for your biology. Slow progress is not failure. It is evidence of how much your body has to repair. That is a different thing entirely.

The full paid piece this week covers every mechanism in detail. Why the research model failed women specifically. How decades of dieting physically altered your metabolism. The full hormonal picture including perimenopause, menopause, thyroid, PCOS, and Hashimoto’s. Why chronic insulin resistance is largely invisible and almost always underexplained. Why the psychological damage from decades of diet culture has real metabolic consequences. A realistic honest adaptation timeline built for women with a metabolic history. And why I built Queen of Carni.

It is the piece I wish someone had handed me fifteen years ago.

Full access is $8 per month.

If this landed for you, the rest of it will too.

Shelli Queen of Carni | queenofcarni.com | @QueenOfCarni Reset and Reign: Metabolic Coaching for Women 35+ Rebuild your Metabolism. Reclaim your Body.

I did Weight Watchers. Nutrisystem. Jenny Craig. The Cambridge Diet. The Scarsdale Diet. Slim-Fast. Dexatrim. Vegan. Vegetarian. Plant-based. Mediterranean. The Six Week Body Makeover. Phentermine. Ionamin.

I did everything the industry told me to do. And for most of my adult life, I failed. Over and over. In every direction.

It took me until I was well into my fifties to understand why. And the answer was not that I lacked discipline. The answer was that I was following a model that was never designed for my body.

This piece is for every woman who has blamed herself for the failure of a system that was never built for her.

It is long. Read the whole thing. You have been waiting for an explanation this honest for a long time.

Section 1: The Research Problem Nobody Talks About

Most nutrition research, the studies that form the basis of dietary guidelines, the timelines used in popular diet programs, the benchmarks against which results are measured, was built on a specific type of subject.

Younger. Male. Without the hormonal complexity that defines female physiology. Without thyroid fluctuations, reproductive hormone cycles, or the menopause transition. Without decades of dieting history layered on top of a metabolism that has already been through the wars.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented.

A review of 704 nutrition studies found that females made up less than one third of participants in trials that included women at all. In exercise physiology specifically, only 6 percent of research studies include female-only participant groups. The guidelines that govern what we are told to eat, how we are told to exercise, and how long results are supposed to take are derived primarily from data that does not include us.

The problem compounds when you consider what gets measured. Most nutrition research measures outcomes over short windows, on subjects with no significant dieting history, who have never been on prescription diet medications, who do not have autoimmune thyroid conditions, and who are not navigating perimenopausal hormonal shifts. The populations most likely to be using dietary interventions for metabolic healing are exactly the populations least represented in the research that informs those interventions.

Women over 35 are not failing the diet. The diet was never designed for women over 35.

Here is what the gap actually looks like. The research model was built on faster glycogen turnover, higher baseline muscle mass, fewer hormonal fluctuations, minimal dieting history, no thyroid disruption, and stable reproductive hormones. Women 35+ arrive with slower glycogen depletion, progressive muscle loss from sarcopenia and estrogen decline, perimenopause and menopause and thyroid disruption, decades of restriction and regain cycles, Hashimoto’s and hypothyroidism at disproportionate rates, progesterone decline and estrogen variability, blunted calorie deficit responses from metabolic adaptation, and extended fat adaptation windows from insulin resistance and hormonal disruption.

When you hand a woman over 35 a timeline built on that research model and tell her she should see results in two weeks, energy in four, and fat adaptation in six, you are setting her up to conclude that something is wrong with her. There is nothing wrong with her. The model is wrong.

Read more

Every time I talk about protein-to-fat ratios in carnivore, they show up. The bro brigade. The textbook police. The men who have never had a hot flash, never dealt with insulin resistance, never watched their metabolism grind to a halt in their forties — ready to explain to me why I’m wrong.

The most recent version of this was a comment on my gluconeogenesis post. I said eating too much protein can keep insulin elevated and stall fat loss in insulin-resistant women. And within minutes:

“That’s not how gluconeogenesis works. It’s demand-driven. The body doesn’t just automatically convert excess protein to glucose.”

Technically? Not wrong.

Practically? Completely missing the point.

Let me explain why — and why this distinction matters enormously for women who are insulin resistant, perimenopausal, or metabolically stuck.

First, Let’s Give Credit Where It’s Due

Yes. Gluconeogenesis is demand-driven. The body does not automatically take all dietary protein and convert it to glucose. It produces glucose from non-glucose sources — including amino acids from protein — in response to the body’s need for glucose.

In a metabolically healthy person with good insulin sensitivity and efficient fat-burning machinery, that demand is relatively low. The body is running well on fat. It doesn’t need to raid the protein stores to make glucose. Extra dietary protein doesn’t create a major problem.

That is a true and accurate statement.

It is also completely irrelevant to the women I work with.

Now Let’s Talk About Who Actually Has High Demand

When your body needs glucose and fat isn’t efficiently available as fuel — either because you’re insulin resistant, not yet fat-adapted, or both — the demand for glucose stays elevated. And your body will make it from whatever substrate is available.

Including dietary protein.

Here’s who has chronically elevated glucose demand:

• Women with insulin resistance whose cells aren’t efficiently responding to insulin signals

• Women who are not yet fat-adapted and whose metabolism is still running primarily on glucose

• Women with elevated cortisol — cortisol raises blood glucose independently, which keeps demand running

• Women in perimenopause whose estrogen decline has worsened insulin sensitivity

• Women with suboptimal thyroid function, which slows fat oxidation and keeps glucose dependency higher

Does any of that sound like a metabolically healthy 25-year-old man?

No. It sounds like exactly the women who come to me after months of carnivore with zero fat loss, wondering what they’re doing wrong.

Same mechanism. Completely different context. The textbook is technically correct. The textbook is also written for someone who is not you.

And That’s Before We Even Get to the Insulin Response

Here’s the part that gets left out of the gluconeogenesis debate entirely: protein triggers an insulin response on its own. Separate mechanism. Separate problem.

When you eat protein, your pancreas releases insulin. This is normal and expected. The issue is that for a woman with insulin resistance, that insulin response is already dysregulated. Her cells don’t respond to insulin efficiently, so the pancreas compensates by producing more. Chronically elevated insulin keeps the fat-burning door closed regardless of what else is happening.

So even if we set gluconeogenesis aside entirely, a high-protein meal in an insulin-resistant woman still:

• Triggers an insulin response

• Elevates insulin above what a metabolically healthy person would produce

• Keeps fat release suppressed for longer

• Prevents the sustained fat-burning state required for fat adaptation to occur

You can eat zero carbohydrates and still keep insulin elevated enough to block fat loss. I did it. A lot of women I work with did it. High protein on a zero-carb diet is how it happens.

The fix is not fewer calories. It is better ratios.

The Calories In, Calories Out Problem Is the Same Argument in Different Clothes

I want to connect this to the other comment section I live in, because it’s the same logical error in a different disguise.

The calories-in-calories-out crowd will tell you that thermodynamics is thermodynamics and if you’re not losing weight you’re eating too much. Full stop. No exceptions.

The gluconeogenesis crowd will tell you that demand-driven means non-issue. Extra protein isn’t a problem. Eat all the chicken breast you want.

Both groups are applying a model that was developed in controlled laboratory conditions to a biological system that is significantly more complex than a controlled laboratory.

Your body is not a furnace. It is a hormone system. And hormones do not care about your spreadsheet.

Insulin resistance means the energy equation is distorted at the cellular level — food can be coming in and fat cells can be locked in storage mode simultaneously. Thermodynamics doesn’t account for that.

Gluconeogenesis being demand-driven doesn’t account for a body where demand is chronically elevated because fat adaptation hasn’t happened and insulin resistance is running the show.

The textbook is not wrong. The textbook just wasn’t written for a 50-year-old woman with insulin resistance, a cortisol baseline through the roof, estrogen dropping, and a thyroid running slow. That woman has different rules.

What the Right Ratio Actually Looks Like

I am not anti-protein. Protein is essential. Adequate protein protects muscle mass, supports hormones, feeds neurotransmitters, and is the foundation of the carnivore approach. The issue is not protein. The issue is ratio.

Most women starting carnivore are accidentally eating a high-protein, low-fat diet because that’s what every diet culture message for the last forty years has trained them to do. Low fat. Lean protein. Watch your calories.

Carnivore without intentional fat emphasis is just that pattern with the carbs removed. And it doesn’t work. Not for fat adaptation. Not for insulin resistance.

Here is how I increase fat without pushing protein higher:

• More egg yolks, fewer whites. The yolk is where the fat and the nutrition live.

• Fattier cuts. Chuck roast, short ribs, 80/20 ground beef. The fat is the point, not a problem to trim away.

• Butter, ghee, or tallow added after cooking. Not as a condiment. As a fuel source.

• Burger, eggs, bacon — everything gets butter. Every meal.

• Broth with a tablespoon of tallow or butter added. Warm, filling, keeps insulin flat.

• Watch the cheese. Dairy can become a protein source that crowds out fat if you’re not paying attention.

Fat adaptation happens when fat becomes the dominant incoming fuel. Not when protein is high and carbs are low. When fat is primary.

This Is What Tracking Showed Me

I can tell you all of this from research and from working with women going through it. But the thing that made it undeniable for me personally was watching it on a meter.

When I started checking my glucose and ketones consistently, I could see in real time what different meals were doing to my metabolism. A fat-forward meal kept glucose stable and ketones rising. A protein-heavy meal — same total food, different ratio — would flatten the ketones and bump the glucose. Not dramatically. But consistently.

The data didn’t care about the argument. It just showed me what was working.

That feedback loop was one of the biggest reasons I stayed consistent. You stop guessing. You stop second-guessing every comment section. You just look at your numbers and you know.

If you are stalled on carnivore and you haven’t been tracking glucose and ketones, that is the next thing I would do. Not change your food. Not restrict harder. Get a meter and start learning what your body is actually doing.

The Bottom Line

Gluconeogenesis is demand-driven. True.

In a body where demand is chronically elevated because insulin resistance hasn’t resolved and fat adaptation hasn’t happened, the body will use available protein to meet that demand. Also true.

Protein is insulinogenic regardless of gluconeogenesis. Also true.

The textbook rebuttal is technically correct and practically irrelevant for the specific metabolic context of an insulin-resistant woman who is not yet fat-adapted.

Most people in this situation don’t need more discipline. They don’t need fewer calories. They need better ratios.

More fat. Adequate protein. And enough patience to let the system shift.

Progress beats purity. Results beat being right.

---

About the Author

Shelli is the founder of Reset and Reign, a non-clinical metabolic health coaching brand for women 35+ navigating carnivore, insulin resistance, hormonal change, and stubborn weight loss after years of dieting that didn’t work.

After rebuilding her own metabolism through a carnivore approach, she now teaches a practical framework built on meat, mindset and movement, to help women stabilize energy, reduce food noise, and move forward with confidence.

Her philosophy: Progress beats purity.

queenofcarni.com | @QueenOfCarni | Substack: Notes from a Former Food Addict

Not medical advice. Always consult your physician before making dietary changes.

Let me go ahead and say it: they’re right.

Carbs don’t make you fat.

There. I said it. Are we done?

No. We are not done. Because that statement is about as useful as saying “a flooded basement isn’t a problem as long as the water stays below the outlets.” Technically true. Completely useless.

Here’s what’s actually happening when you eat carbs, why chronic overconsumption breaks your metabolism from the inside out, and why you can be thin and completely broken at the same time. Let’s do this.

What Your Body Actually Does With Carbs

When you eat carbohydrates, your body converts them into glucose. That glucose enters your bloodstream. Your brain uses it. Your muscles use it. Your organs use it. Your body is genuinely good at burning glucose when it needs to.

This is where the “carbs are fine” crowd stops the story.

But that’s not the whole story.

What Happens When You Eat Too Many Carbs, Too Often

Your body can only use so much glucose at once. When glucose enters your bloodstream, your pancreas releases insulin to manage it. Insulin’s job is to shuttle glucose into your cells to be used as fuel.

When you consistently flood your system with more glucose than your body can use, insulin keeps getting released. Over and over. Meal after meal, day after day, year after year.

Your cells, bombarded constantly by insulin, start ignoring the signal. This is insulin resistance. Your pancreas responds by producing even more insulin to compensate. Now you’ve got chronically elevated insulin in your bloodstream.

Here’s what chronically high insulin does: it is a fat storage hormone. Its presence actively signals your body to store fat and to hold onto fat it’s already stored.

You are not just gaining weight. You are losing your ability to access stored energy.

The Prison Guard Problem

This is the part nobody explains clearly.

Once you are insulin resistant, your stored body fat is essentially locked up. Those fat cells are guarded. High circulating insulin tells your body the store is closed. You can not get in.

So what happens when you try to cut calories? Your body does not say “great, let’s burn some of that stored fat.” It panics. It thinks it is starving. It slows your metabolism, conserves energy, and ramps up hunger signals so you will eat more. Meanwhile, those fat stores? Still locked. Still guarded.

You are running on fumes. You are exhausted. You are craving carbs because your body needs quick fuel it can actually access. And the more you eat those carbs, the more insulin you release, and the more locked down those fat stores become.

This is why calorie restriction alone does not work for people who are metabolically broken. You are not dealing with a math problem. You are dealing with a hormonal one.

The Twinkie Study and What It Actually Proves

In 2010, Kansas State nutrition professor Mark Haub ate mostly junk food including Twinkies, Nutty Bars, and Oreos for 10 weeks while restricting himself to around 1,800 calories a day. He lost 27 pounds. His LDL dropped. His HDL went up. The internet lost its mind.

This study gets dragged out constantly as proof that calories are all that matter and that food quality is irrelevant.

Let’s talk about what that study actually measured.

It measured weight. It measured a few cholesterol markers. That is it. It did not measure insulin sensitivity. It did not measure mitochondrial function. It did not track inflammation markers. It did not follow him for five years to see what chronic nutrient deficiency does to a body. It did not measure his energy levels, cognitive function, gut health, or hormonal balance.

He lost weight. On Twinkies.

And I will give you that. You can lose weight eating garbage if you eat less of it. Weight loss and metabolic health are not the same thing. A smaller broken machine is still a broken machine.

The “But What About Asia” Argument

You have probably heard it. “If carbs made you fat, all the Chinese and Indian people eating rice would be obese.”

A few things.

First, traditional Asian diets are not the same as what most people eat when they say they “eat carbs.” White rice alongside vegetables and fish is a very different metabolic load than processed bread, sugar-sweetened beverages, snack foods, and seed oil-fried everything.

Second, guess what is happening right now. Obesity rates, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic disease are rising sharply across India, China, and other countries that historically had lower rates. As ultra-processed food has replaced traditional whole food eating, the metabolic picture has changed. This argument is getting less true every single year.

Third, you can also be normal weight and metabolically unwell. Thin does not mean healthy. “Skinny fat” is a real phenomenon. Normal BMI with insulin resistance, fatty liver, and pre-diabetes is not rare. It is incredibly common.

What They Are Actually Arguing For

Here is the real issue with the “carbs don’t make you fat” crowd.

They are optimizing for thinness. Not for health.

They are measuring success by the scale. By the mirror. By fitting into a certain clothing size. And if that is your only goal, sure, you can achieve it a lot of ways. Including Twinkies.

But if your goal is a body that works. A metabolism that is flexible. A brain that functions. Energy that is stable. Inflammation that is low. Hormones that are balanced. That is a completely different conversation.

You can be a thin person with a destroyed metabolism. You can have a normal BMI and pre-diabetic insulin resistance and have no idea. You can be “not fat” and still be on a path toward type 2 diabetes, chronic fatigue, brain fog, and joint pain.

Carnivore is not about being thin. It is about being functional. It is about removing the thing that was breaking you and giving your body a chance to actually heal.

So yeah. Carbs don’t make you fat. Technically.

They just destroy your ability to access stored fat, hijack your hunger hormones, drive insulin resistance, and set you up for a lifetime of metabolic dysfunction while keeping you just thin enough to think everything is fine.

But sure. Eat the Twinkies.

👑 Want more?

Everything I’m building lives at queenofcarni.com — my book, free resources, digital products, socials, and whatever else I’m cooking up. Come hang out.

Photo by Mark Patterson on Unsplash

There is a moment that changes everything. Not a dramatic one, necessarily. Sometimes it happens quietly, late at night, when a thought lands so hard and so clearly that you can’t unfeel it. That moment happened for me recently, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

Your body is not a fixed thing. It is not the permanent result of everything you’ve done wrong, everything you’ve eaten, every year you spent in survival mode. It is alive. It is dynamic. It is constantly, relentlessly rebuilding itself. And the body you are living in two years from now? You are constructing it right now, today, with every choice you make, every thought you think, every meal you eat, and every emotion you either process or suppress.

Most people in the health and wellness space are obsessed with the outside. The number on the scale. The size of their jeans. The before and after photo. And while there is nothing wrong with wanting to look and feel your best, the obsession with external results completely misses the truth about how transformation actually works. The body you see in the mirror today is not just the result of what you ate last week. It is the accumulated result of your old habits, your old stress patterns, your old emotional landscape, your old nervous system, and your old relationship with yourself. You are quite literally looking at your past. And if you want a different future, you have to start building it from the inside.

This is what nobody tells you. This is what I wish someone had told me years ago. And this is what I want to talk about today.

Section One: The Body Is Always Rebuilding Itself

Let’s start with the science, because this part is genuinely fascinating and I think it will shift something in the way you see yourself.

Your body is not static. Every single tissue, organ, and system in your body is in a constant state of renewal. Cells die and are replaced. Old structures break down and are rebuilt. The body you were living in five years ago is not the same body you are in right now, on a cellular level. The question is not whether your body is regenerating. It always is. The question is what it is regenerating into.

Here is a rough look at how fast some of your major systems renew:

Your gut lining, the layer of cells that lines your intestinal tract and serves as the frontline of your immune system and nutrient absorption, regenerates in just a few days. This is one of the reasons that dietary changes can produce noticeable results so quickly. You are not waiting years to see change in your gut. You are rebuilding it constantly.

Your skin completes a full cycle of renewal roughly every 28 to 30 days. The outermost layer of cells you can see right now will be completely replaced within a month. What those new cells look like, how they behave, whether they are inflamed or calm, dehydrated or nourished, depends entirely on the internal conditions you are creating for them.

Your red blood cells, which carry oxygen to every tissue in your body and are deeply tied to your energy levels, your brain function, and your overall vitality, renew on a cycle of about three to four months. This is why people who make significant dietary changes often report feeling dramatically different within a few months. Their blood is literally new.

The immune system is in a state of constant renewal, producing new white blood cells and immune cells on an ongoing basis. What you feed that system, how much you sleep, how chronically stressed you are, and how much inflammation you carry determines the quality and capability of every new immune cell your body builds.

Bone tissue, which most people think of as fixed and permanent, actually undergoes continuous remodeling. Old bone is broken down and new bone is formed in a process that takes roughly ten years to complete a full cycle. What you eat, whether you move your body, and the hormonal environment you live in directly determines the density and strength of the bone being built.

And when you average it all out across all your tissues and systems, the full cellular turnover of the human body takes approximately two years. Two years from today, you will be living in a body that has been almost entirely rebuilt from scratch.

That is either the most terrifying thing you have ever heard, or the most empowering. And I want to make sure it is the latter.

Subscribe to my paid Substack to read the full article.

👑 Want more?

Everything I’m building lives at queenofcarni.com — my book, free resources, digital products, socials, and whatever else I’m cooking up. Come hang out.

There is a moment that changes everything. Not a dramatic one, necessarily. Sometimes it happens quietly, late at night, when a thought lands so hard and so clearly that you can’t unfeel it. That moment happened for me recently, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

Your body is not a fixed thing. It is not the permanent result of ever…

Read more

I Was Always Hungry No Matter What I Ate

When I was eating the standard American diet, I never felt truly satisfied. I would eat a meal and before I even finished it, I was already thinking about the next thing I was going to eat. I was obsessed with food, not because I was weak or had no willpower, but because my body was never actually getting what it needed. I was a binge eater. I was always frantic, always hungry, always thinking I needed to eat as much as possible because I knew I’d be starving again in a couple of hours. And no matter how much I ate, that hunger always came back.

It turns out I was eating a ton of low fat food. And that is the problem.

Volume Eating Is Not a Flex

I see so many influencers doing what they call “volume eating” content, and I genuinely have to ask, what does that even mean? To me, it means you are never satiated. Eating has become your full time job. You watch their day of eating and it’s breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack. Six times a day. And if they miss one of those eating windows, suddenly they’re shaky, hangry, irritable, and convinced their blood sugar is crashing. I used to be that person. I get it. But I also now understand exactly why it was happening, because they’re eating food with no fat in it. All fiber, very little protein, and virtually no fat. And here’s something people don’t want to hear: protein alone does not keep you satisfied as long as you think it does. Fat is what your body is designed to use for long term, sustained energy. Fat is what actually satiates you.

What Fat Actually Does For Your Body

Carbohydrates give you a quick burst of energy. That’s exactly why athletes carb load before a workout. They burn through it fast. That’s the whole point. But fat keeps you going for hours. There are carnivores out there doing 72 hour fasts and hiking mountains because their body has become so efficient at burning stored fat for fuel. That is what fat adaptation looks like. And when you get there, everything changes.

The Overstuffed Feeling Is Not Normal and You Don’t Have to Live That Way

One of the most remarkable things about being fat adapted is that you stop getting that overstuffed, miserable, I-need-to-take-a-nap feeling after eating. You know the one. Thanksgiving dinner, so full you have to unbutton your pants and collapse into a chair while your body tries to process the mountain of carbs you just consumed. I never feel that way anymore.

Instead, something much more interesting happens. As I get toward the end of a meal, the food just stops tasting as good. And I used to think that meant I was bored with it, but that’s not what’s happening at all. When food stops tasting good, that’s your body telling you it has everything it needs. That’s satiety. That’s your biology working exactly the way it’s supposed to.

What Real Satiety Actually Feels Like

I’m sitting here finishing up my breakfast right now, three eggs with extra yolks, some ham, and some kielbasa because I was genuinely hungry this morning. And I’ve got a couple bites of kielbasa and a slice of ham left on my plate, and I just don’t want it. Not because it doesn’t taste good. But because my body is done. It has what it needs. And I’m going to listen to it.

When I was eating the standard American diet, every scrap of food on that plate would have been gone. I would have eaten past the point of comfort without even realizing it, chasing a satisfaction that never actually came.

This Is What Changes When You Become Fat Adapted

That’s the difference. Not willpower. Not discipline. Not eating less. Just finally giving your body the fuel it was actually designed to run on. And that is one of the most freeing things I have ever experienced.

👑 Want more?

Everything I’m building lives at queenofcarni.com — my book, free resources, digital products, socials, and whatever else I’m cooking up. Come hang out.

Photo by James Kern on Unsplash

For years, I believed that wanting food meant I was losing control.

If I enjoyed something too much, that was a red flag. If I thought about food when I wasn’t hungry, that meant I was slipping. If I wanted seconds, I was one bite away from a full-blown binge.

Now I’m learning that wanting food just means I’m human.

And that’s a completely different kind of freedom.

When Pleasure Feels Dangerous

If you’ve got binge eating in your history, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

At some point, pleasure and food got all tangled up with shame and loss of control. The cycle went like this: enjoy something, can’t stop, eat until you hate yourself, feel guilty, restrict harder, deprive yourself until you can’t take it anymore, then binge again.

Rinse and repeat for decades.

Eventually, your brain learns a really fucked up lesson: pleasure is dangerous.

Not just “too much food is dangerous.” The enjoyment itself becomes the threat. Because in your experience, enjoying food was always the first domino. The thing that started the avalanche.

So your nervous system starts throwing up warning signals the second you enjoy a meal. Even when you’re eating something completely safe. Even when there’s no binge in sight. Your brain is like, “Hey, remember what happened last time you liked something? Remember how that ended? RED ALERT.”

That’s not rational. It’s survival wiring. Your brain is trying to protect you from old patterns. It just doesn’t know the difference between “enjoying a bowl of cottage cheese” and “about to eat an entire pizza and a pint of ice cream while crying.”

And here’s the really insidious part: restriction starts to feel safer than balance.

Strict rules feel like control. And control feels like safety. “If I just never eat X, I’ll never lose control again.” “If I just stay strict carnivore forever, I don’t have to worry about slipping.”

But that’s not freedom. That’s a different kind of prison.

You traded one cage for another. The binge cage for the fear cage. And you’re still not free.

I went deeper than this.

Into how I started adding foods back in. What happened in my head when I did. And what it’s been like learning to trust myself again after decades of not trusting myself at all.

That part lives on the paid side. If you want to sit with the full story, it’s here.

Want more?

Everything I’m building lives at queenofcarni.com — my book, free resources, digital products, socials, and whatever else I’m cooking up. Come hang out. 👑

For years, I believed that wanting food meant I was losing control.

If I enjoyed something too much, that was a red flag. If I thought about food when I wasn’t hungry, that meant I was slipping. If I wanted seconds, I was one bite away from a full-blown binge.

Now I’m learning that wanting food just means I’m human.

And that’s a completely different kind o…

Read more

I’m going to say some things in this post that will make people uncomfortable.

Good.

Let me be clear upfront: this isn’t medical advice. I’m not a doctor. I’m not telling anyone what to eat, what to believe, or how to treat their disease. I’m not claiming to have all the answers.

What I am doing is sharing my lived experience, my observations, and what I’ve seen happen in my own body after decades of chronic inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and being fed absolute bullshit by the very systems that were supposed to help me.

Some people will get triggered by this. Some people will call it “oversimplified.” Some people will want to argue science with me in the comments.

Here’s the thing: I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything.

I’m documenting my reality. That’s it.

Why Lived Experience Matters More Than Theories

For decades, we’ve been told to ignore our own bodies.

Trust the experts. Trust the systems. Trust the food pyramid. Trust the people in lab coats who don’t even live the lifestyle they preach.

And where has that gotten us?

Sicker. Fatter. More medicated. More confused. More dependent on a healthcare system that profits when we stay broken.

Meanwhile, millions of people around the world are healing metabolic disease, autoimmune issues, gut disorders, hormonal problems — and yes, even cancer — by changing how they fuel their bodies.

They’re not “imagining” their results.

They’re living them.

I’m one of them.

Cancer: A Complicated Name for a Simple Phenomenon

People get really angry when you describe cancer simply. Like the complexity is sacred. Like if you don’t use enough big words, you’re disrespecting the disease.

But sometimes the truth is simple, and simple doesn’t mean wrong.

At its core, cancer is:

• A broken cell

• With broken mitochondria

• That replicates itself

• Faster than the body can regulate

That’s it.

People can throw around scientific jargon all day. They can bury the conversation in terminology that makes everyone feel stupid and keeps the “experts” in charge. But at the simplest level, cancer is a metabolic malfunction. A cell that forgot how to die when it was supposed to, and a body too overwhelmed to stop it.

I’m not saying it’s not serious. I’m not saying it’s easy to fix. I’m saying maybe we’ve made it more mysterious than it needs to be — and maybe that mystery serves certain interests more than it serves patients.

Why Cancer Became So Common

Cancer used to be rare. Now it’s everywhere.

What changed?

Let’s look at what exploded over the last century:

• Seed oils in everything

• Processed foods as the foundation of the American diet

• Sedentary lifestyles and desk jobs

• Sunscreen blocking our vitamin D

• Environmental toxins in our air, water, and food

• Chronic stress as a baseline state of existence

• Smoking, alcohol, and substance use normalized

Every single one of these things damages mitochondria.

Broken mitochondria = broken cells = disease.

It doesn’t matter if people don’t like that answer. It doesn’t matter if it’s “too simple.” It doesn’t matter if it threatens industries worth billions of dollars.

It’s still true.

Why “Diet Wars” Miss the Entire Point

Vegetarian. Vegan. Low-fat. Low-carb. High Carb.

Every food community wants to take credit for healing. Every tribe wants to claim they found the one true way.

But most of them are still missing it.

Because you can be vegan and live on processed garbage. You can be “low-carb” and drink sugar-free coffee creamer full of seed oils and chemicals. You can follow Weight Watchers and eat diet pudding cups loaded with dyes and artificial sweeteners. You can lose weight and still be inflamed, sick, and metabolically wrecked.

I see it all the time on TikTok — diet influencers drinking their sugar-free syrup water, eating their “healthy” packaged snacks, counting points while poisoning themselves with ingredients they can’t pronounce.

Yeah, they might lose some weight. But they’re not healing. They’re just getting smaller while staying sick.

Here’s what carnivore and keto actually get right — when done properly:

They eliminate the bullshit.

No seed oils. No sugar. No additives. No dyes. No ultra-processed food pretending to be health food.

When you remove that crap, the body finally gets a chance to repair itself.

It’s not magic. It’s not religion. It’s biology.

Your body wants to heal. It’s been trying to heal this whole time. It just couldn’t — because you kept poisoning it with things that aren’t food

.

Carnivore Works Because It Removes Everything That Keeps People Sick

I went strict carnivore in March of 2025.

In less than a year, I:

• Lost 132 pounds

• Reversed type 2 diabetes

• Normalized my blood pressure

• Reversed anxiety and depression

• Reversed Sleep Apnea

• Balanced my hormones

• Healed years of chronic inflammation

• Eliminated digestive problems I’d had for decades

• Stabilized my metabolism

• Got my energy back — energy I hadn’t felt since I was young

Did I do that with “belief”?

Did I manifest it?

Did I pray it into existence?

No.

I did it by removing everything my body couldn’t handle. I stopped eating the things that were keeping me sick. And my body did what it was designed to do all along — it healed.

Carnivore isn’t magic. It’s elimination. It’s getting out of your body’s way.

What About People Healing Cancer Outside the System?

Here’s where I’m going to really piss some people off.

There are people right now — real people, with real diagnoses — who are beating cancer outside of traditional protocols. Carnivore diets. Fasting. Metabolic therapies. And yes, ivermectin and other off-label treatments.

Is it peer-reviewed?

Is it approved?

Is it “scientifically allowed”?

No.

But people are doing it. People are sharing their results. People are living longer than their doctors told them they would.

And dismissing those outcomes — real human outcomes — just because they don’t fit the narrative? That’s not science.

That’s denial.

I’m not telling anyone to skip chemo. I’m not telling anyone to take ivermectin. I’m saying that when real people report real healing, maybe we should be curious instead of defensive. Maybe we should ask questions instead of shutting down the conversation.

Because the current system isn’t exactly batting a thousand.

I’m Not Here to Preach — I’m Here to Document

This is my story. My body. My rules. My healing.

You don’t have to agree with it.

You don’t have to follow it.

I’m not recruiting anyone into anything.

But I won’t silence myself just because someone else is uncomfortable with a perspective that doesn’t match their ideology. I’ve spent too many years being quiet, being small, being “appropriate.”

That’s over.

If You’re Here, You Already Know

You already know something is wrong with the way we’ve been told to eat.

You already know the system isn’t designed to heal you.

You already know your body has been trying to tell you something for years — and you’ve been taught to ignore it.

Food heals. Food harms.

Your mitochondria don’t lie.

And your body will always tell you the truth — if you finally give it the environment to speak.

I’m not here to convince you.

I’m just here to show you what’s possible when you stop waiting for permission and start listening to yourself.

👑 If you want to keep up with me:

I keep everything in one place at queenofcarni.com. Book, recipes, resources, socials, digital products — all of it. No hunting around. Just one link.

You don’t have to eat carnivore forever.
You don’t even have to eat carnivore at all.

The methods I teach in this book — how to stabilize glucose, lower insulin, track your data, and retrain your metabolism to burn fat — can work with keto or low-carb approaches too.

The difference is speed.

Carnivore is metabolic boot camp, not lifestyle prison.

When your body is inflamed, insulin resistant, and metabolically confused, the fastest way forward isn’t variety or balance. It’s elimination. Carnivore strips everything down to the studs and removes the guesswork. No sneaky carbs. No “healthy” foods quietly keeping insulin elevated. No wondering which ingredient caused what reaction.

It’s not gentle. It’s effective.

Think of carnivore as basic training. You’re breaking old habits, retraining your liver, and forcing your metabolism to adapt. It can feel uncomfortable at first, but the transformation is undeniable. Once your system stabilizes — once you’re fat adapted and understand your data — that’s when experimentation becomes possible.

Carnivore is a tool, not a religion.
It’s not about purity or superiority.
It’s about using the fastest reset available so your body can finally do what it was designed to do.

This is an excerpt adapted from Chapter 15: Carnivore as Boot Camp in my upcoming book, It’s Not About Weight Loss.

The paid version expands on this framework with deeper context, practical examples, and how carnivore functions as a metabolic reset when nothing else has worked.

Read the extended excerpt here.