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.
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.
To help ease these side effects:
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.
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).