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Introduction

The Lion Diet is basically the closest thing you can get to a whole food elimination diet. It allows the gut to heal the leakiness that can be caused by years of accidental abuse. Leaky gut is classically caused by a standard American diet, medications, or a dysbiotic microbiome which occurs if you’re born through a c-section or you take antibiotics. It can also be caused by living in water damaged houses. I mean that. You had a leak in your kitchen that you fixed with a fan and you think that fixed it? You’re probably wrong if you’re here. This diet should be able to help your symptoms and should be started as soon as you can, and you should also check your environment to make sure that’s not also contributing to your health issues.

Either way, the Lion Diet is a healing elimination diet.

Surprisingly, you can get all the nutrients you need from ruminant meat, and the diet doesn’t irritate the gut. Meat is mainly absorbed in the small intestine and because there are no tiny little plant pesticides (like lectins) that naturally occur in plants, it’s not irritating to an immune system that can be easily triggered, and the meat doesn’t continue gut damage. Once you heal the physical gut damage that people with autoimmune and mood disorders can suffer from, you can begin to reintroduce food slowly and carefully, identifying what your body likes, and doesn’t like. While doing this, you need to make sure your environment is clean from mold/biotoxins that grow in water damaged buildings. The diet won’t fix you 100% and reintroductions will be impossible if you don’t look at your environment, and fix it. But while you’re doing that, the diet can help alleviate your current symptoms.

You can read a brief background about my health insanity here, see if you identify with it at all.

How It Works

The Lion Diet is the ultimate elimination diet. It reduces your food to the most restrictive, and least inflammatory foods it can. When you reduce your intake of food to one variable, you can control for any dietary variable this way. You can heal, and then reintroduce foods to understand what’s bugging your body. Again, you can’t just look at diet, you also need to make sure you’re not being exposed to mold/biotoxins through the air you breathe. That needs to be fixed at the same time if it’s an issue and a good place to start to just clean your environment is linked here.

The Lion Diet consists of only ruminant meat, salt, and water. An all meat diet has been used throughout history to heal people, but the mainstream medical system periodically forgets it ever existed. The Lion Diet is ideal for people who are sick, or medicated. By the point a person has an autoimmune disease, their body is so aggravated and inflamed it’s destroying its own tissue. By the time someone has psychiatric symptoms, rashes or chronic fatigue, there’s quite a bit of inflammation causing symptoms that you need to get a handle on. Now.

Tips for Success

  1. Read the entire FAQ.
  2. Start the diet. Get the food you don’t want to eat out of your house. Cravings can and will get REALLY bad.
  3. Don’t worry about overeating, it’s a lot trickier than you think on this diet.
  4. Buy or make electrolytes. You’ll probably need extra sodium and potassium and magnesium at the beginning of this diet. Buy pure powders on Amazon and mix them. Recipe here!
  5. Avoid eating out for at least the first 3 weeks so you know exactly what is and isn’t in your food. When you begin eating out again, opt for steakhouses and ask for nothing else but meat. Here’s how to order. Here’s our restaurant finder to find safe restaurants. 
  6. A lot of people with gut damage suffer from histamine intolerance. This enzyme is recommended to purchase while doing the diet to help your body breakdown histamine in foods. Take 1-2 15 minutes before meals. Also making the switch to unaged, fresh meat is massively beneficial. Making sure your environment isn’t water damaged can also treat histamine intolerance.
  7. After you start the diet and ideally feel some relief – Scour your house for water damage/mold to ensure you’re not being made sick because of the air you breathe! I would do an environmental clean of your house and buy air filters just to mitigate this possibility – and either way it’s a healthier way to live. Info here on cleaning and air purifiers. You can also test for chronic inflammatory response syndrome although I’d get on the diet first and do an environmental clean anyway first before getting sidetracked by the possibility of CIRS. If you do have CIRS, treat CIRS but use the diet simultaneously – it massively helps. If you confirm through blood work that you do not have CIRS, the diet may be enough to heal your gut alone.
  8. Monitor symptoms daily with a diary, and wait until you feel better to reintroduce slowly.

Side Effects

In the first few days you may notice flu-like symptoms. This is completely normal and seems to occur in around 70% of people. This is theoretically due to a number of factors. I think it’s mainly due to ‘Candida Die-Off’ where dying yeast and bacteria that feed off sugar began to die and release toxins when they’re being excreted. Symptoms can take up to 2 weeks max to pass completely. Symptoms can also be caused because you’re adapting to a ketogenic diet and that’s commonly referred to as a “keto-flu”. If symptoms are too severe, restrict your diet more slowly and wean into the diet. Don’t just go cold turkey if your body can’t tolerate it.

To help ease these side effects: 

  • Loose stools
    • Try switching to lower fat content meats and ease in to fattier cuts. Switch to more lamb instead of more beef products. Lamb and bison are not aged like beef and some people don’t tolerate the aging of beef very well. If you’re suffering from loose stools or bloating and diarrhea after eating meat please switch to unaged, fresh meat and order these DAO enzymes to help your body breakdown histamine. You may be suffering from histamine intolerance.
  • Mental Fog, Muscle Cramps, Fatigue
    • Increase salt and electrolytes.
    • Check your environment for mold.
  • Other concerns: please read/search through the FAQ

How To Re-Introduce

After at least 6 weeks, or by the time you start to feel better you can reintroduce foods. The diet seems to be the most useful if it is used for at least 3 months. Improvement continues. I improved for 2 years really, although if I had monitored my environments for mold I would’ve healed faster. When you’re asymptomatic you can start adding in new foods. If you are not able to become completely asymptomatic please check your environment for even mild mold/bacteria exposure and make sure you’ve environmentally cleaned your living spaces.

How to reintroduce:

The foods that are the least likely to cause autoimmune or mood flare-ups on the diet include wild carnivorous fish like wild salmon, wild mackerel, fresh tuna, honey, and corn and soy free chicken. Make absolutely sure the fish is wild and not farmed (even organic farmed needs to be avoided), as well as fresh, not canned or smoked. These foods seem to be tolerated fairly easily for a first reintroduction. Make sure you give your body a few days to adapt once reintroducing in small amounts and monitor for new symptoms. If that goes well, pressure-cooking organic carrots and parsnips in broth and drinking the broth is a very slow and careful way of reintroducing vegetables. If that goes well, slowly ramp up the amount you’re eating each day. You can start with as little as half a teaspoon of  cooked vegetables each day and increase from there. Monitor your sleep, mood, skin, and digestion for symptoms. 

Some foods to start with include: peeled and cooked apples, pears, carrots, parsnips, beets, sweet potatoes, coconut, lettuces, duck, and chicken (pasture raised not fed corn or soy).
 
The GAPS diet is a good place to look to reintroduce although I don’t recommend reintroducing dairy for those with autoimmunity. And if you have histamine intolerance or an issue with aged meat then fermented food may also be an issue as well as high histamine foods. If you’ve been exposed to mold and are still healing, it’s better to avoid fermented foods as well. Start with introducing the above foods and if that goes well then further reintroductions should be much easier.
 
It’s not recommended to reintroduce grains, dairy, sugar, legumes or processed foods. These foods continuously cause a wide range of problems for people. Eat healthily and your future you will thank you.
The Lion Diet For Better Health

Nailed it!?

Most people feel like a completely different person after 3 months on the diet, regardless of what was causing their original food sensitivities. Even if you haven’t looked into mold causing you issues, and it is causing you issues, people seem to feel way better quite quickly regardless. If you’re still experiencing any gastrointestinal symptoms switch to unaged meat, and again check for mold causing histamine intolerance. Companies like BetterFed Beef produce unaged meat, and lamb and bison are not generally aged as much. I’d love to hear from you at this stage so send an email to info@liondiet.com with some information and we might get you on the transformations page to help other people (if you want). If you’re still suffering  and you’ve been on the diet for 3 months and haven’t cheated you should read biotoxin.com and do a serious deep dive into your environment to make sure you’ve tackled that. Keep your environment non-toxic and clean!! Don’t use scented products, there should be no smell in your house. However even if problems are caused by your environment, the lion diet can help fix symptoms while you tackle that problem.