I want to discuss today something that happened over my weekend that made me grateful for following the Carnivore Diet. Too often we focus on the negatives, such as how to get around social awkwardness, feeling judged, feeling restricted and constantly combatting garbage food that gets thrown at us day after day. So today, we focus on one of the many benefits – simplicity.
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated”
Confucious
I was visiting a friend this weekend so our children could play together. While we were chatting, we were discussing the morning news program that was on; the current topic was interest rate rises. She was telling me that their grocery bill had increased quite a bit due to inflation (and her growing family) and they had been menu planning for the last few months to save money on their groceries.
Menu Planning Nightmares
We all know this to be true: make a menu plan, create the grocery list, go shopping. This means you can group meals with similar ingredients, resulting in less waste and you don’t buy what you don’t need. All well and good at this point.
But here is where it gets complicated. When I looked at the list of meals, oh my goodness. It was endless choice and variety. Here’s what I gathered from our conversation:
- 45 minutes of uninterrupted time is required to make a 6 week meal plan
- Every meal that’s written down needs to be marked with where to find the recipe
- Every recipe for the week needs to be checked to make sure we either have those ingredients or add them to the grocery list
I commended her on her effort of course, as she was clearly quite proud and enjoyed doing it. After all, you don’t keep friends if you criticize their efforts constantly. But I couldn’t help thinking how overly complicated this all seemed to be. And it was purely due to the sheer amount of choices available.
“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains”
Steve Jobs
She asked me if I meal plan and I said yes, but my family meal plan revolves around eating meat, because we buy meat in bulk, such as whole lambs and half cows. I plan the meat and then whatever vegetables are a good price, I will work those into side dishes, my family is a meat and 3-veg kind of family (I am the only Carnivore, she does not know this).
I then created a sample 6 week meal plan for my family in front of her and it took me less than 10 minutes. It was not for bragging purposes or to put her meal plan down, but rather I just pointed out that mine was simple.
And it was in that moment that I was so grateful for the simplicity of the carnivore diet. Seriously. By removing all the clutter of recipes and just simply cooking a steak, we can actually have time for living life.
| Carnivore Diet | Standard Diet |
| 10 minutes – 6 week meal plan | 45 minutes – 6 week meal plan |
| Locating/reading detailed recipes | |
| Order bulk beef online to be delivered | Creating/following detailed shopping lists |
| Sear a steak | Prepping/Cooking multi-ingredient meals |
| Clean 1 pan, 1 plate, fork and knife | Cleaning multiple cooking dishes/utensils |
This simplicity allows me to avoid decision fatigue. According to the American Medical Association: Decision fatigue is “the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more and more decisions over the course of a day becomes worse”
When you can simplify your life and remove unimportant decisions, you can make room and are better able to make the right decisions when it is important.
I know Tuesday night is lamb night in my house. All that’s required is to pull out a cut of lamb from the freezer in the morning (whatever is available and the easiest to grab), thaw, season with salt and pepper, cook and serve. This frees up my decision making capacity and allows me to focus that energy elsewhere, such as getting the creative juices going for writing the blog, prioritizing my work schedule, deciding which workout I’ll do.
I cannot emphasize enough how much of a benefit simplicity can be. The Carnivore Diet requires less time and less mental energy than the standard diet that generally requires additional planning, shopping, prepping, cooking, and cleaning.
Final Thoughts
Rethink normal: is it normal to have to spend so much time and energy obsessing over planning meals? Or is it just common? How good would it be to not have to worry about any of that? How good would normal be if normal was saving 75% of your time due to less prepping, cooking time, and cleaning?
If you change your perspective, the Carnivore diet is not restrictive at all. Rather, the simplicity of it actually provides great freedom.
