A lot of people start the Lion Diet, do it for two or three weeks, hit a social event or a vacation or a hard week at work, fall off, and conclude "the diet didn't work." This chapter is the practical wisdom for staying on it long enough to find out whether it works for you. Most of it is mistakes I made and watched other people make.
The most common reason people fail: contamination
This is by far the number-one cause of "the diet isn't working." You think you're on the Lion Diet, but you're actually getting trace amounts of triggers all day long.
The usual suspects:
- Restaurant meat — almost always cooked in seed oils, often marinated with soy or sugar, often served on a surface that's been used for breading or sauces.
- Pre-seasoned cuts — the rotisserie chicken from the deli, the marinated tri-tip, the "smoked" anything. Read the ingredient list. If there's more than meat and salt, skip it.
- Spice blends and "all-purpose seasoning" — even ones that look pure often contain corn starch, soy lecithin, anti-caking agents, or "natural flavor."
- Bone broth from the store — often has onions, garlic, celery, vinegar, or natural flavors. Make your own with bones, water, and salt.
- Bone-in steaks with rub residue — if you can taste anything beyond salt, there's something on it.
- Cooking oil residue from a shared pan — if your partner cooks vegetables in your cast iron, scrub it before your steak.
- Supplements with fillers — vitamins, electrolyte powders, even "pure" salt with anti-caking agents.
- Toothpaste, mouthwash, lip balm — flavored or sweetened versions can be a hidden source. If you're highly reactive, switch to plain or fluoride-only.
- Medications and supplements with colored coatings or sweeteners — if you're on long-term meds, check the inactive ingredients.
The rule: if you can't recite every ingredient in something you're about to eat, don't eat it. This sounds extreme. It is extreme. But contamination is the difference between "the diet didn't work" and "I never actually did the diet."
Eating out — the realistic options
The clean answer is: don't eat out for the first three weeks. After that:
- Steakhouses — almost always workable. Order a ribeye or NY strip, plain, salt only, no butter (most restaurant butter is mixed with seed oils or "natural flavor"). Ask them to cook it in a clean pan with no oil. If the server looks confused, ask for the kitchen manager.
- Brazilian churrascaria — usually safe. Salt and meat is literally their thing.
- Most chain steakhouses (Outback, LongHorn, Ruth's Chris) will accommodate plain meat if you ask clearly. Have the server check that the meat hasn't been pre-marinated.
- Burger places — workable if you can get a patty with no bun, no condiments, no spice blend. McDonald's plain patties are surprisingly clean (just beef and salt), but the prep surfaces aren't.
- Asian restaurants, Mexican restaurants, most casual dining — extremely hard to do cleanly. The whole kitchen runs on seed oils and seasoning blends. Skip.
- Hotels and airports — bring jerky (the right brand) or hard-boiled steak in a Ziploc. Yes, this looks weird. Yes, it works.
I wrote about the broader "this diet is too hard / too expensive / too inconvenient" pushback in "I'm too busy to eat like this, it's too expensive," and other excuses. The short version: any of these things is true of any therapeutic intervention. The question is whether the symptoms you're trying to fix are worse than the inconvenience.
Travel
Travel is the single biggest threat to a strict Lion Diet. The strategies that work for me:
- Pre-cook and pack. A few pounds of cooked steak in a Ziploc, salted, in a cooler bag. Lasts 24–48 hours easily. Eat it cold or warm it briefly in a hotel kitchen.
- Book accommodations with a kitchen. Airbnb, residence-style hotels, family stays — anywhere you can buy meat and cook it yourself. Travel restaurants in unfamiliar countries are the highest-risk eating you'll do.
- Research the steakhouses in advance. A 15-minute Google search for "best steakhouse in [city]" plus a phone call to the restaurant to confirm they can do plain meat — saves a lot of scrambling.
- Carry a backup. A bag of low-additive jerky, a jar of beef tallow, or even just salt. Worst case, you can survive on these for a day.
- Accept that one off-plan meal won't ruin you. If the only option is a meal that's not perfect, eat it. The diagnostic clarity loss is real but it's recoverable. The bigger risk is associating the diet with deprivation and giving up entirely.
Social situations
Family dinners, holidays, work events, weddings. These are where most people fall off.
What works:
- Eat before you go. Show up satiated. You can decline food gracefully when you're not hungry; it's much harder when you're starving.
- Tell the host in advance. Don't surprise them at the table. Most hosts are happy to set aside a plain steak if they know it's medical, not picky.
- Don't make it the topic. "I'm doing a medical elimination diet" once at the start of the night, then change the subject. Don't relitigate the choice every time someone offers you bread.
- Bring something for yourself if you can. A small portion of pre-cooked meat in a container is much less awkward than picking around a meal that has nothing for you.
- For drinking: hold a sparkling water with lime. People stop asking what you're drinking once they see a glass in your hand.
Family — partners and kids
If your partner doesn't do the diet with you, that's fine and normal. What matters:
- Separate cooking surfaces or thorough cleaning. Cross-contamination from a shared pan with seed oils can be enough to flare highly reactive people.
- Clear agreement on what's in shared spaces. Decide together what's stored where, what's in the pantry, what's in the fridge.
- Don't proselytize. Other people make their own dietary choices. Save the explanations for people who ask.
For kids — I have written a little about feeding kids on the diet in Baby. Kids who grow up on whole foods and minimal sugar generally do well. I'm not running a strict Lion Diet for my own kid — my approach is meat and select low-reactivity foods, watching for the same kind of food-sensitivity patterns I had as a child.
Bloodwork worth doing
If you can get bloodwork at the start, three months in, and six months in, the data is genuinely useful. The panel I'd recommend asking your doctor for:
- CBC with differential
- Comprehensive metabolic panel
- Full lipid panel (cholesterol almost always shifts on this diet — usually total goes up, often HDL goes up, sometimes LDL goes up. The implications are debated; just know it happens)
- Full thyroid: TSH, free T3, free T4, reverse T3, TPO and TG antibodies
- Vitamin D, B12, ferritin, iron, transferrin saturation
- HbA1c and fasting insulin (these often dramatically improve)
- CRP and ESR (inflammation markers — usually drop)
- Hormone panel if menstrual or fertility issues
- IgG food sensitivity panel (separately, not through your standard doctor) if you want to know which foods trigger you for reintroduction planning
I have a longer note about IgG testing specifically in the reintroduction chapter.
What I'd do differently if I were starting today
Looking back at the 8+ years:
- I'd take psych med tapering more seriously. My 2-week Cipralex taper was the single most damaging health decision of my adult life. If you're on psych meds, read Chapter 8 carefully.
- I'd investigate my home environment for mold earlier. The May 2023 flare that took me down for months was mold-driven. I lost a long time to it. Chapter 9.
- I'd be less afraid of fat early on. I came into this with internalized "low-fat is healthier" beliefs, and I undereat fat for a long time, which made the diet harder than it needed to be. Eat the fat.
- I'd be more public about the lived experience earlier. Telling the truth about what worked and what didn't — without polish — is what helps other people more than any specific protocol.
Chapter 8 is the safety chapter. If you're on any psychiatric medication, please read it before doing anything to your meds.