I agree. I am repeating myself "I agree" because the software at this site says I cannot practice the art of brevity in less than 10 characters. <sigh>

That's one thing FB has going for it. Maybe we could use a "like" button and have done with it.

Oh, I don't know about that, bluesinger. I rather like life without a "like" button. All software has its kinks, but mostly I like how the software here in ALCF works. In FB, unless I feel inspired to add to the Comments, I try to avoid that "like" button. "Like" essentially says zip. An emoticon says more to those who speak mostly emoticon. Life without a "like" button appeals to me. But then I'm odd & know it.

Day 1 without coffee or tea. Going totally ZC. If you don't find me here in a few days, look under the software.

Hello ZC's I'm not quite there yet but at 30 net carbs/day am in awe and will continue to visit and dip my toes in the water

Wished to bring up the subject of shiratake noodles. They have zero carbs and zero calories being made of the soluble fibre from yams. Anyway I ordered a case from Jet.com and they are v exotic and delish.

Thanks for the glimpse into hard core zc.
Lowcarber16

Hard core ZC, heh? Never thought of it that way, Locarber16. I'm just your normal everyday carnivore. If it comes from an animal, I eat it. If it doesn't, I don't. Simple.

Tried to go "no coffee" yesterday but back on coffee this morning after watching my head fall off & roll under the desk. Yes, just kidding. It only felt like it'd fallen off my shoulders. I simply woke up amid a great mental fog & found after an hour of consciousness, it was actually a deeper fog than at first. No, nope, nada! Can't live without books & thinking & reading & mentally digesting facts from others' research on LC/ZC living!

It only sounds like an excuse. Worded bluntly, I'm a coffee addict. Like it only black but strong & burning hot. Even in desert summer. Switch to Lipton iced tea (I brew it myself from bags) after a few hours. Drink that tea cold from the fridge with nothing added. Nirvana ...

Sometimes I can go over the edge into extremism, wanting to be perfect in all ways. Not going to happen. I think I might go to the grave having one last cup of coffee before I climb into my casket. (Actually I'm going to be cremated, so make that one last cup of coffee before I climb into the oven.)

Wow, that was a bit grim, wasn't it? Sorry about that. But I think coffee & I are married "until death do us part." That's all I was saying.

I don't think coffee is bad on ZC/LC. I think coffee is just a matter of matter over mind. I've got no mind without the matter of coffee. That's all I was saying.

What's more important to me right now is that I stay 100% on my carnivore way of life. I mean, consuming nothing solid in the form of food but animal flesh & what comes of animal life. I eat meat -- mostly beef & chicken -- & also some eggs.

Bacon still hasn't captured my taste buds. I bought a package of already cooked bacon on Tuesday. This is Thursday. Still haven't tried it. Probably will be the last I buy since it isn't cheap.

Next trip to Walmart, I'll probably pick up a small package of Real Bacon Bits to add the taste of bacon to an omelette, the only real interest I have in bacon being to act as a taste sub for cheese. I do love cheese & cheese do love me, as some of you know who've been reading my journal awhile.

For now, for about a week, I'm eating mostly eggs & ground beef, having latched onto some that's 27% fat at Walmart. Now that the two cups of strong black coffee are percolating through my brain, I can remember the late 1950s when my mother would send me out to the market with a dollar bill to buy 4 pounds of ground beef while it was on sale. Oh, the times they are a-changin' ... Food was cheaper in the past, but wages were also a lot lower, the two seeming to go up or down together.

I've been told that eating meat only -- that is, living as a modern carnivore -- is too expensive. Not true. It's about $10 a week cheaper for me than it was when I was LC, eating only the carbs in green salads a la Atkins. But I'm only buying fresh meat & eggs in their shells. No processed meat. No eggs in the liquid form. Nothing processed. The only plant-based food I knowingly consume is coffee or tea. Both of those come from trees or bushes ... not animals. Okay, so that's okay for me now. I require a certain amount of conscious awareness & that's what plain coffee & tea give me.

If I can be true to anything right now, I can be true to ZC living as defined in ZIOH (Facebook group of Charles Washington, Zeroing in on Health) as eating nothing but animal flesh or products, as in eggs from chickens. Other than plain coffee or tea, I drink only water.

I believe what I've read by others that ZC living is, first of all, for health ... not weight loss. I've lost no weight as of yet via ZC but my clothes are looser. My body is a-changin' even if the scale stays the same. I believe the same can happen for many living LC. It just didn't happen for me over 8-9 months, so now you know why I went ZC as in carnivore, not just pseudo-foods with the carbs stripped out of them. I eat real food from real animals. Nothing processed except the coffee or tea I drink.

Am I trying to persuade others to go ZC this way? No. I am here just to talk about my own experience. I've no idea what's best for anyone else, but for me, ZC carnivore style seems best.

I feel better eating this way. I experience little to no hunger. I eat to live, not live to eat. I stick with a few basic foods since having more than a few makes me think more often of food, planning food, designing recipes, all the other kinds of food obsession that go with a varied menu. I eat plain meat, usually some form of beef or chicken, plus eggs daily. The only variety I add is I cook the eggs in butter. This is what works for me. Keeping it simple. Keeping it plain. The only seasoning I use is sea salt, the unadulterated sea salt that comes in a grinder.

My life before LC, which came before ZC for me, was a life with almost a constant thought about food. Living mostly on carbs as a vegan or vegetarian for the previous ten years, I had to think about food often. It wasn't an obsession with food so much as hunger that kept me thinking of food. I had to eat every couple hours due to hunger. Okay, I mostly made good choices of carb foods during that decade & earlier since I came of age before America got into the fast-food obsession of instant meals from the freezer or nearby fast-food outlet. So most of what I ate was unprocessed whole grains, unprocessed vegetables, & fresh fruits.

Carbs cause hunger. Atkins said it. I believe it. If you want to be hungry all the time, eat carbs. For me, due to my past with food, the situation was particularly dire. I found in LC that the only way I could quell hunger was to take carbs down to nearly nothing, 1-6 grams daily. That means eating nothing with carbs in it but the little that's in eggs plus a small green salad. I lost 10 pounds that year, then stopped. That's when I started ZC. I've started & stopped ZC several times since last November. But each time I've gone off ZC back to LC, I've not needed long to realize it was for me a mistake. I'm impulsive at times, too impulsive, but knowing & accepting me as I am, I've learned to be a more careful carnivore. I don't think changing one's way of eating necessarily changes one in other ways other than health & weight loss. I'm the same person. I'm just a carnivore by choice today.

Thank you for sharing your experience, Mo. I'm not sure I could do ZC but ya got me thinking. When I was losing I had to keep carbs pretty low (20g) to get results and wonder if my progress would have been faster if I had gone ZC back then. I think a # of people have that experience, including, shall we say "women of a certain age".

I'm 71 on the outside & 23 on the inside, Janjfree. On Atkins last year, I had to drop my carbs under 10g to lose most of the 10 lbs I lost last year on Atkins VLC.

ZC is primarily for health & some lose weight from the get-go on it but others don't lose until their bodies have "recovered" from the extremes of dieting, especially calorie counting & limitations, earlier in life.

This is not from my experience, I've not been ZC long enough to know that kind of thing from extensive experience, but I'm a member of a group called Zeroing in on Health (ZIOH) on Facebook, where there are many successful ZC veterans who share their experience there.

So when I say health comes first, that's the consensus of experience there by the veterans. ZC isn't primarily for losing weight, they say, but many do lose the extra pounds they are carrying once they have been ZC for awhile.

I use it as a simple way of living life with food, since ZC fairly much ends hunger for 6-8 hours at a time. I like it because I can eat once in the morning, again in the late afternoon or evening, & since all I eat is meat+eggs, I also shave about $10 off my weekly grocery bill, down from what I was spending on average on Atkins LC.

Carbs create hunger & for some of us, encourage bingeing, overeating, cravings. The woman who started this thread years ago used ZC to cure herself of bingeing. I was a longterm vegan/vegetarian before Atkins last year as well as lifetime member of Weight Watchers. I had a horrible problem with hunger every couple hours due to eating almost exclusively whole grains, vegs, fruit. I think that has something to do with my needing to cut carbs to 10g or less to lose even 10 pounds. But what happened is that on Atkins I lost 10 pounds fairly quickly, then the scale froze. I think that's common for "women of a certain age."

I like to share in detail on what is working for me primarily now for health, since more than a few seem to be reading this thread for information on ZC. AND there ARE a few successful ZC vets who drop by occasionally. I'm fairly much a newbie at ZC, but I yap a lot, probably as much as a huge group of people.

We are close in age - I'm 70 but, like you, feel 23 on the inside. I lost the weight on Atkins and have maintained since 2009 but the loss was a very slow process. I'm ok with my current weight, although there is some fat I'd like to rid myself of, but am more interested in ZC from a health perspective, both for myself and my husband. At our ages, I think we must be proactive regarding health b/c my experience is that the medical profession gives bad information. BTW, my husband was very impressed with the photos of Dr. Mabry.

I was searching online for the health benefits of ZC living and came across this (which doesn't actually answer my question, but is still interesting.)
Forging forward with my research.

Edited to add the link to the article quoted above.
Benefit of a Meat Only Diet

Dr. Mabry's life on meat only impresses me, too. He gives some good idea of exactly how he eats on the website I listed earlier.

I work at keeping the fat content of what I eat at 70% at lowest, closer to 80% when I can. The Bear, a lifelong carnivore with a journal here years ago, wrote elsewhere that when he was younger, he ate 80% fat but now that he was older (about our ages) he mostly ate 70% fat.

I always wondered how they did that, since I don't happen to think I'd like to eat so much fat. Then, I read more ... all of this good info is of course on the internet if one is willing to search for it ... & found figures on ordinary meats & eggs & cheese that blew my socks off.

I didn't even realize that ordinary butter is 100% fat. I can be thick-headed at times. That's what comes from spending most of my life only reading books from the fiction section of libraries.

So I'm right on the money as a fat-burnin' carnivore if I eat a few eggs (70% fat) cooked in some butter (100% fat) with a couple slices of bacon (77% fat). I thought it was a lot more complicated than that. Dr. Atkins was doing that with the foods he mentions eating in his 1972 book, Diet Revolution, but his choices have mostly been far above my pay grade.

The trick is to eat enough fat to get your fat-burner going a la Atkins, as best I can tell. But if one goes overboard on eating fat, say over 80%, I wonder if one's still burning body fat, or just the fat in what one eats? I guess the best thing to do on any way of eating is to keep it real, not so extreme as to be found only in Fantasyland.

I believe in the health benefits of ZC living, janjfree. I also believe in the good information I get on ZC living from those who've lived ZC for years that I continue to read in ZIOH, Charles Washington's ZC group on Facebook, "Zeroing in on Health."

What they share there daily is mostly from their own personal experience living ZC rather than just what they read. And there are members there who've been ZC awhile who are my age.

Also glad to know someone my age has been successful with Atkins. I lost all my weight on Atkins in 1973, but since 2014, it just hasn't worked well at all for me. That's what sent me, of course, into reading the older journals of those in ALCF who'd gone ZC. Suzannayea is one (she started this thread), Oregon Rose is another. I learned enough from their old journals here to get started last year with ZC.

Zeroing In On Health is still ignoring me.

Wow, bluesinger, you are indeed reading the real goodies on the healthy edge one gets from living ZC. I know I've read what you shared, but can't remember where it is online or who or what is the source quoted. Could you give that too? Impressed!

You are doing research the way I started doing ZC research last year after I read the old journals here of the Bear, Suzannayea, & Oregon Rose. I needed to know if the research supported their personal experience. Glad to see you are answering your own questions. Good luck! Please continue to share your findings here, if you will.

It can take awhile for an administrator of the group to accept you. Has nothing to do with their willingness to accept you, bluesinger. It's just that they get dozens & dozens of people wanting to join & they also have jobs & families so their time is limited. Notice the group on Facebook is a PUBLIC group. That means that even if you're not a member, you can read everything shared there. I started off there as just a lurker, reading as a nonmember.

At the top of the page, there's a tab marked FILES. There's a wealth of information shared there on living ZC collected over the years. I think you can access that, too, as a visitor to the page.