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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. 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.

Mikhaila began this diet due to her experience of having rheumatoid arthritis since the age of 2. The arthritis eventually destroyed her hip and ankle joint. She had chronic fatigue starting at age 14, and was put on around a dozen strong medications to control her symptoms. To find out more about Mikhaila’s journey click here.

How It Works

The Lion Diet is the ultimate elimination diet. It reduces your food to the most restrictive, yet least inflammatory foods it can whilst keeping you in the best health. 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. The Lion Diet consists of only ruminant meat, salt, and water. This diet has been used periodically to heal people, but the mainstream medical system periodically forgets it exists. The Lion Diet is mainly 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.

Tips for Success

  1. Read the entire FAQ.
  2. 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.

Side Effects

In the first few days you may notice some flu-like symptoms. This is completely normal and happens to around 70% of people. This is commonly due to a phenomenon named ‘Candida Die-Off’ where dying yeast and bacteria that feed off sugar began to die and release toxins. Symptoms can take up to 2 weeks max to pass completely.

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.

  • Other concerns: please read/search through the FAQ

How To Re-Introduce

After 6 weeks, the time has come for you to review how far you’ve come and how you’re feeling. Maybe your joint inflammation, chronic fatigue, autoimmune disorders, and gut issues are starting to clear up. Please keep with the diet for at least 3 months. Improvement continues. I improved for 2 years really. If you’re asymptomatic you can start considering the prospect of adding in new foods.

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, and honey. 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. 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, or legumes. These foods continuously cause a wide range of problems for people.
The Lion Diet For Better Health

NAILED IT!

You have nailed the Lion Diet! By this point (6 weeks since you started) you’ll likely be feeling much healthier, and ideally looking healthier too. (If you’re still experiencing any gastrointestinal symptoms switch to UNAGED meat. 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).