I lift 4 days a week and have never experienced such an explosion in strength, growth of muscle mass, energy, and overall health until I switched up my diet, adding in more fats, keeping protein high, and much less carbs. I eat very little carbs now, and when I do it’s typically just a couple slices of lower carb bread, fruit, or honey.

My diet primarily consists of ribeye (or NY Strip) steaks, lamb burgers, bison burgers, pasture raised eggs, cheese (goat cheese is amazing), dairy, grass fed butter, grass fed ghee, fruit, honey, mushrooms, MCT oil, and once in awhile potatoes. I get almost everything from local farmers markets.

But if grandma makes one of them delicious pies for a special occasion, you can bet your ass I’m eating it.

No bonk on carnivore. Glucogenisis from protein keeps your liver stoked. Get a look at Dr. Shawn Baker. Studly in his 50s.

TL;DR: There are gives and takes, but a zero carb diet that is done properly still has all the tools available that they need. It's not necessarily the best, but a lot of people see incredible results. But you can also achieve incredible results with carb cycling or timing. Ignore below if uninterested.

On a zero carb diet, e.g. keto which is what Atkin's is (Atkin's is basically a beginner friendly, less focused keto diet that is formulated to make it easy for people to understand without having to macro) you generate glucose for your brain via gluconeogenesis.

Carbs can help for bulking and, also importantly healing but aren't necessary.

Bodybuilders have been building off of a balanced diet from fats, proteins and carbs for decades. It's fine. We get carbs from almost every food we eat naturally unless we specifically try to avoid them.

However, you can be smart with timing your carbs (e.g. a slower metabolizing more complex carbohydrate 30 minutes before a workout, or a fast metabolizing carbohydrate like refined sugar just before) to achieve great bulking and faster healing.

Carbohydrates release insulin which helps guide all the good shit to your cells. If you do it right, more of that good shit goes into repairing (and therefore strengthening) your muscles instead of fat.

Too many carbs can cause too much of a release of insulin, which plays havoc on your body and is well known to increase inflammation, which can worsen underlying -- or even known -- conditions.

This is why people with back pain have reported much more manageable pain and freedom when switching to a keto focused diet. It has also helped women with a certain kind of inflammation disorder that I am apparently too tired to remember as I am not a woman.

Edit: Endometriosis. Keto reduces insulin and estrogen, which aids in helping to control this disorder.

Additional benefits of a keto diet is the explosion of energy once you get into ketosis. You're burning fat directly for energy and this is huge. I almost literally bounced off the walls for 3 days straight the first time I went zero carb. I couldn't sleep or channel enough of my energy.

On the flip side, our metabolism is a furnace.

You can turn your metabolism into overdrive by carb cycling intelligently. You can go high protein, low carb one day, mid both another day, then high protein some carbs the next, and after that blast your metabolism with a high carb low protein day.

TL;DR for those who skimmed past the TL;DR at the top

So ultimately, there are a lot of ways you can harness your body for big bulking and big fat burning. The carbs don't really matter -- if you use them right -- unless you are specifically aiming for ketosis, at which point you want to get as close to 0g net carbs as you can. But in ketosis, you synthesize everything you need from protein too. Inflammation is consistently lower in ketosis for most people, which can improve your motivation and physical ability to work out, which yields great results.

Additional edit: Don't take anything I say at face value. Do your own research. Experiment. Ask questions. You'll come away with a lot more information and knowledge than you did before and you might find some balance or approach that really suits your genetics.

Damn I hope I covered everything. I'm tired.

I recently lost 27lbs by reducing carb intake

I wake up more alert too.

Check out what Jordan Peterson has to say.

Expensive diet though. All beef.

Tune in Dr Anthony Chaffee on YT. He will be your answer.

It’s easy to disprove.

Go look at what tribal people eat. There’s plenty of vegetables in their diet. The only tribal people that subsist on near pure protein diets are eskimos, and even they eat seaweed.

Now, where they have a point is the mass cultivation of vegetables that don’t exist in nature. Could be something there - maybe those are not as nutritious as wild varieties, or perhaps are even harmful (eg cause inflammation) in some way.

Or perhaps genetic differences in how people absorb food and metabolize nutrients play a role in the effects of certain foods on your body. There is no absolute best, just a best for you.

I would agree that people eat too many carbs though, you can do away with almost all carbs in your diet and be just fine.

It’s certainly complicated, there’s no universal answer.

About three months into carnivore. More strict about it as the weeks go by. At present not eating any veggies and no carbohydrates. The more pure my diet the better I feel. I'm 80 and the things that were bothering me are all going into remission. Many carnivores have been into it for over a decade and their condition speaks for itself. Dr. Anthony Chaffee (neuro surgeon) is a good example but there are many men and many women.