My last post on this blog was called “Two and a half years of eating only meat,” and it went up just after Christmas 2024. Since then almost two more years have gone by, and when I count it today, on October 11, 2026, it’s four years, four months and five days since Monday, June 6, 2022, the first day I ate nothing but meat. So I thought it was about time to write down where I am now, because a lot has changed, and some of it I didn’t expect at all.
Where I am today
I’m convinced I beat my Crohn’s disease, and I’m healed. I know the medical reports from 2022 to 2024 use the word “remission,” and that’s their word, but for me it’s clear: I stopped eating the food that was hurting me, and my body stopped fighting it.
I sleep better than I did in my “superhuman” years, I train five times a week, and I walk about 8,000 steps a day, which for a guy who spent a good part of 2022 on the toilet is pretty much a miracle. I’ve been back in the gym since November 2024, and I’m sure not all of the last few kilos are muscle.
My first day on meat only, a week before the colonoscopy
The diagnosis: Crohn’s disease of the terminal ileum
My lowest weight: 77.6 kg (171 lb)
The hospital report says “clinical, laboratory and morphological remission”
Ultrasound: a significant regression of the changes in my small intestine
My last lab tests; calprotectin, the gut inflammation marker, is normal
I finish my last pack of budesonide and don’t start another
“Two and a half years of eating only meat”
Back to three meals a day
The rice and bread experiment
Four years and four months on meat
It isn’t perfect, and I don’t want to pretend it is. About once every three weeks I still get a sudden diarrhea, and my main suspect is the occasional sip of coffee from a colleague’s mug, but that’s my guess, not a fact. The hemorrhoids that started this whole story came back once more, in August 2025, and since then I take two vein supplements every day and haven’t had a clot.
What I eat now
The biggest change since my last post is that I don’t eat one meal a day anymore. Since about early 2025 I eat three meals a day again, each one roughly 420 g (15 oz), and everything goes into one pan, because I’m lazy and it works.
- Ground beef, mostly 20% fat750 g
- Pork rinds60 g
- Pork belly50 g
- Sardines45 g
- Parmesan30 g
- Lard20 g
On top of that I eat 16 whole eggs a day and 100 g (3.5 oz) of beef liver once a week. Parmesan is the only dairy I still eat. I drink only water, about 2.3 liters (78 oz) a day, with electrolytes and salt in it, and I take a multivitamin every other day.
What I added
- Three meals a day instead of one
- Electrolytes and salt in my water
- A multivitamin every other day
- Two vein supplements, since August 2025
What I dropped
- Butter, sour cream and cream, once my weight came back
- Every spice except salt
- Coffee, apart from the odd sip
- Organ capsules: I’m finishing the last pack
So when people ask whether I still eat “only meat,” the honest answer is this:
Only what used to walk, swim or lay an egg, plus a little parmesan.
The bread experiment
At the beginning of 2026 I got curious, or maybe just cocky, and wanted to know whether my gut could handle a little normal, everyday food again.
- About a week
Some rice with my meals.
- About two weeks
One small slice of bread with each meal.
- The next six months
The symptoms came back, and it took about half a year for them to calm down again.
I’m not writing this to scare anybody, it’s simply what happened to me, and for me it was the clearest answer I could have gotten.
Doctors, tests and what I don’t know
I don’t go to check-ups anymore, and I’m not planning new tests, so everything I know about my gut from the inside is a few years old.
I took budesonide, a local steroid, from 2022, and sometime during 2024 I finished the last pack and didn’t start another one. That was my own decision. Honestly, I don’t know whether the steroid, the meat or both calmed things down in those first two years. What I do know is that I was told at the start that a local steroid is usually only temporary and that systemic steroids follow, and that never happened.
What I’ve learned
- It took time
Not seven days, not thirty. For me it was one to two years before I could really say my gut had calmed down.
- Fat matters more than I thought
Lean meat without enough fat made me feel awful; for me, a meat diet is a fat diet with a little protein.
- My mistakes were the “just in case” things
The salads I thought were healthy, and the supplements I took to be safe, which sent my vitamin D far above the range.
- The head matters too
Going back to work, to people and to the gym helped me as much as anything on my plate.
The whole story
All of this, from the first symptoms to this October, with the lab results, the mistakes and the things I still don’t know, is going into my book, Healed by Meat, which I’m writing right now. If you’d like to know when it’s out, you can leave your email right here:
