In August, another gnarly “before and after” diet picture appeared on Instagram. A bearded man with a sparkle in his eye and a liberated smile is enjoying life after slimming down 270 pounds in 17 months.
It’s all too easy to contrast his new glow with the hopeless empty eyes, morbidly obese face, and oxygen tubes protruding from his former sick self, a picture of health and life next to imminent death.
He claims a diet of primal simplicity saved him.
“Carnivore Diet Transformations” is plastered across the page. As are piles of marbled red meat cuts on wooden chopping blocks, more before and after photos, and carnivorous memes poking fun at globalists and vegans.
After shedding 200 pounds, his walking returned while neither oxygen nor medication were needed any longer. The man in the photos, Todd Bockness, 41, from Bozeman, Montana, visited his doctor and explained what he was eating.
“If I hadn’t done carnivore, I would already be dead, I wouldn’t have made it this far,” he tells The Epoch Times, adding what his doctors’ response was: “You’re going to kill yourself; you’re going to get other people killed.”
The majority of them looked on with disapproval as meat became his only food. One mentioned he was “astounded” that Mr. Bockness’s eyesight, severely dimmed by insulin resistance, had miraculously returned.
Others were less enthusiastic.
“[My doctor] wasn’t happy. He wasn’t impressed. He just said, ‘Oh, I’m worried about your diet.’ That was the first time that guy had ever mentioned my diet when I was over 700 pounds on oxygen,” Mr. Bockness said. “I was breathing on my own and was able to walk again. He said he was worried about my diet.”
Mr. Bockness had lived off soda. His parents, who homeschooled him until high school and put him and his brothers to work as teenagers, were broke and poor. Often skipping breakfast and lunch to work, they drank soda as cheap fuel. At night they came home and had a big dinner consisting mostly of carbohydrates: breads, pizza, and cheap noodles.
“When you’re big your whole life, you kind of build the frame to carry it,” he said. “So I was always very strong, and I can always carry the weight, lift heavy things.”
In this sense, he was normal. What wasn’t normal was he “just broke everything,” he said, including chairs that collapsed under him, ladders he broke, two staircases that gave way on job sites, and two floors he fell through to the floor below.
Looking back, Mr. Bockness spots the culprit, not his parents but something more systemic: the Standard American Diet and Food Pyramid foisted on a blind public by elite institutions and industries. These lean toward starch- and carbohydrate-heavy diets while minimizing meat consumption.
Carnivore pretty much does away with said guidelines and surpasses keto, which mainly cuts carbs but keeps fruits and vegetables. The premise of carnivore is that humans have long-lived by hunting mastodons and tigers, for millions of years; it is the optimal human diet; plants contain defensive poisons that harm.
He tried keto. He tried willpower and Jenny Craig.
All failed.
None kept the weight off.
Diets, including keto, failed mainly because they never satiated the root problem; they helped shed two or three hundred pounds, but it returned with a vengeance after his inevitable fall off the wagon. His addiction to sugar remained. The real problem, he says, was his body was malnourished, screaming for the building block nutrients so easily absorbed from meat but not plants.
“My weight fluctuated up until I was about 38, and then my health started catching up on me,” he said. “I got pretty sick.”
Retracing the last weeks of his steadily declining health before utterly collapsing during the pandemic in 2021, Mr. Bockness points to his weight, swaying around 600 pounds, and chronic lung issues giving him fits.
“That’s when things really went south because then I gained 84 pounds of fluid in 3 weeks,” he said. “I ballooned to well over 700 pounds, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.”
As a last Hail Mary, primed by keto and prayer to God to go full carnivore, he took the leap in 2022. God, he says, steered him there.
“I only drink water or carbonated water. I only eat eggs, bacon, beef, lamb, butter, salt, and vinegar,” Mr. Bockness said, outlining the strictest carnivore diet. For 84 hours a week, he eats one to two meals a day. For the other 84 he fasts, burning his own fat stores as nutrition.
Getting on board carnivore wasn’t taken lightly. After six months he lost 205 pounds, mostly fluid from his inflamed state. All his symptoms soon vanished; his heart rate dropped from 107 to 68 beats per minute; his massively swollen calves healed. He shed 270 pounds and weighed about 450 when he spoke to the newspaper.
Above all, the cravings were gone.
He was free.
Yet the doctors eyed him with disapproval.
Mr. Bockness still ventures to champion carnivore. Despite studies from the World Health Organization (WHO), which claims red meat causes cancer, and other criticisms, Mr. Bockness points to doctors who placed their careers on the line to support eating meat, meat, and only meat.
“You can say, ‘This looks highly correlating, this looks like it causes that,’” Dr. Berry said, “but you can never prove that beyond a doubt with that kind of study—an observational study.”
He gave one example: Nicolas Cage movies.
Scientists have done hundreds of such disproving studies, he said.
“I have so much respect for these doctors,” Mr. Bockness told The Epoch Times. Now he wants to do his part championing carnivore by sharing his journey.
“I don’t think that my doctor is trying to kill me,” he said. “I think that the medical schools, that Vanguard, and all these companies that own all these drug companies paid for all the epidemiology studies.”
As Mr. Bockness extrapolated the details of the conspiracy on our food, the topic of body positivity arose—that so-called “fat shaming” makes one a bigot. He calls it “propaganda.”
While striving to reach 280 pounds, he laments what is being advertised to others still suffering, “that it’s their right and they should be proud that they’re big.”
“In Christian culture, we don’t hate people with cancer,” he said. “We hate the cancer because it’s killing our brothers and sisters.”
He adds, “And I hate obesity because it’s killing our brothers and sisters.”
