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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Most people feel like a completely different person after 3 months on the diet. Even if you haven’t looked into mold causing you issues, people seem to feel way better quite quickly. 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).