Recovering From Major Depression | Brett Lloyd

hey everybody it's uh dr anthony chafee here i'm here with a special guest brett lloyd who is a long time carnivore and carnivore coach he's now over 1300 days carnivore and has a very interesting story to tell about his own personal progress with health and the carnivore diet brett thank you so much for coming on well doctor it's a privilege to speak with you i love what you're doing out there in the community and uh it's great to be a part of spreading the word about this wonderful way of living and eating with you well thank you very much um so brett why don't you tell us a bit about yourself uh what what brought you onto the carnivore diet what was going on before that and what sort of changes did you see uh well i was quote unquote fortunate to grow up in a home that was a standard american diet private book kind of a household my mom and dad had an enormous vegetable garden we had fresh vegetables year round we also had plenty of meat uh but it looked like the food pyramid you know you got your grains got your cereals you got all this other stuff and out of the four of us uh my dad passed away last year i'm sorry after suffering from thank you suffering from uh type 2 diabetes for over 20 years of his life his last five years were a nightmare because dementia got a hold of him and this was all before i learned what i know about type 2 diabetes being completely reversible etc my sister my little baby six foot tall sister suffers from ibs ulcerative colitis uh still to this day and my uh my mother's had a number of of if you can call them minor skin autoimmune issues and other ailments throughout the years uh and i suffered from severe chronic depression anxiety and insomnia for over 40 years of my life and that's from following the standard american diet i think i would have gotten sick sooner than the age 15 if i hadn't been an athlete i was able to exercise my way just a little bit ahead of things but i started experiencing sleep problems and mood issues around the age of 15. during that era in schools at least here in america there were no professionals roaming the halls looking for those kinds of things so i was just labeled an angry kid and dealt with accordingly um [Music] voted class grouch you know people ask me what's depression like for you was it like for you and i was a very angry depressed person i i was extremely dissatisfied with everything in my life nothing was good enough i wasn't good enough this could always be better why isn't this better why why did why wasn't it it's best to start with and then it got delusional as time went on you know you know dr chafee if my family just helped me get this cup everything in my life would be so much better i mean at great expense and aggravation they get the cop and i would have it for 10 minutes and find a hundred things that were wrong with it and why it was a piece of crap and so was i that's what depression was like for me i also described as if you will imagine what it's like to have a 50 pound handle on your head every moment of the day you wake up with it it's weighing you down it makes everything more difficult you can't hear things correctly because you've got this thing on your head that never lets up and you go to bed that night knowing it's going to be there waiting on you in the morning that's a lot what depression was like for me um i had a promising career in psychology in my early 20s which i self-sabotaged that was something else i found interesting here i was working with all these phd level credentialed folks psychiatrists you know authors and going to staff meetings etc and nobody noticed that there was something wrong with me and i just still to this day find that rather interesting uh but i sabotaged that career thanks to mental illness i'd still have to bear the responsibility for those things uh i was [Music] i my life became unmanageable by the time just before i turned 30 or just after i turned 30 and i uh checked myself into river park psychiatric hospital in huntington west virginia where i was formally diagnosed with major depression yeah and spent 16 days in there came out they gave me a prozac prescription and a whole bunch of samples prozac was very expensive like 1990 very expensive back then and i didn't have the insurance that was going to cover it i took it for a few weeks never really felt much better or different made some behavioral adjustments that improved my quality of life a little bit made me a little more socially appropriate um but then fast forward to a few years after that i'm living in newport tennessee and the doctor tells me listen if you don't go on medication soon your life's going to become very uncomfortable because i started having panic attacks my mood was starting to crater inexplicably um got wrecked a marriage got got divorced met my current and final wife um life got better for a couple of years but still i was taking the pros act but inexplicably at times my mood would get worse and that just started happening with greater and greater frequency um in 2007 i had a textbook nervous breakdown uh due to a familial event i don't get specific about uh i went for two months only sleeping an hour or two a night and when you do that bad things start to happen uh my diagnosis got changed to major depression with psychotic features because when you hear children playing in the yard and you're the only one at home that's not good uh my anxiety just got exponentially worse uh i insomnia was a horrible problem that we just couldn't shake finally they put me on the drug rimmer on i'll never forget this i got to sleep for two weeks it was great and i gained 25 pounds or more in that two weeks because rimron is such a notorious weight gaining drug and my diet then was pure you know garbage lots of arms i had always had meat lots of carbs lots of cakes lots of ice cream you know because i was told hey you're gonna eat what we serve growing up when you're out on your own you can eat whatever you want so that's what i did when i grew up i ate whatever i wanted and boy did i pay a heavy price for that um they got me to sleep for two weeks and then i went on another six week run of only an hour to sleep and then they finally put me on this combination medicine of an antipsychotic with prozac called symbiax and that stopped the free fall but it came with its own problems because i would sleep 10 or 12 hours a night on that stuff and then need to take one or two two hour naps during the day so it wasn't much of a life it was just mainly an existence yeah um the uh the december of 2008 i'm like i've had enough of this i've got to make okay i've got to start thinking differently i can't fix what happened with the familial thing and life has to go on so i kind of talked to myself that i was going to be better and was able to get off the sembiax and just do the prozac i was on anagan by this time i took adivan for eight and a half years as prescribed and they put me on tracidome trazadone did help me sleep but i woke up with a drug hangover every single morning from it uh so that was life for a while and i i gained a bunch of weight throughout this process and i was complaining to my wife and she said well you ought to check out this adkins diet i'm reading and hearing a lot of good things about it and being mentally ill i i kind of read every other sentence and i gathered you know okay give up uh potatoes and and bread and eat a lot of meat you can still have fruit you can still have other things we should never have had cereal whatnot and i lost like 35 pounds and my mood did get better but at no time did me my wife or my doctor equate the improvement in mood to the change in eating i thought it was because i'd made some mental adjustments and and life was going on much better i uh wrote a wrote a faith-based album wrote wrote a couple of secular albums i got to i'm a musician um i got to go to my 30-year high school class reunion had a wonderful time uh although when i see those pictures now i see how how big my belly was that that's not real appealing to me these days um and and life was better but i was still not well i was nowhere near optimal i mean you know i i still had far too many bad days um fast forward to uh may of 2010 i decided dr jacoby that i wanted i missed ice cream and i missed coconut cake and i missed coconut cream pie i i missed all that very much and i decided i could eat that and if i gained a bunch of weight back like just go back on atkins what could go wrong you know what could go wrong so in july of 2010 i'm at mass i'm a thankful catholic convert mass is very important to me and we're on our knees praying on a sunday evening and i get hit with this overwhelming notion no idea where it came from but it was if you don't get out of here right now something really bad is going to happen and it was just overwhelming and i did something very atypical i literally ran out of that church 15 minutes later i'm home curled up on the couch balling like a baby and don't have a clue why and from then to january of 2015 was just an absolute horror show they started throwing meds at me left and right uh seizure meds uh lamactyl you know here take this we'll see what happens uh you know every combination of other antidepressants that wouldn't kill you with prozac and the same thing would happen i would feel a little maybe a little better or at least not worse for a few days a couple of weeks and then it would just all go to hell again um [Music] my wife got my wife's job got transfer uh got moved to florida i had to come find a doc we didn't know anybody here we didn't have any family we knew nothing so i had to go fishing for doctors which was a ton of fun and uh yeah one doctor almost killed me with thyroid meds um [Music] then then i found a nurse practitioner and she understood me i at this point in time i was having extreme difficulties accurately perceiving my environment my wife would say it looks like it's going to be a beautiful day dr chaffee but what i heard with my ears was filtered and twisted by my illness to where it came to me as you know it looks like it's going to be another beautiful day great i love my wife i would hear that you know honey what's wrong and she would look at me like the crazy guy i was and said well what do you mean what's wrong i just told you it looks like it's gonna be a beautiful day my environment was always altered and never in my favor so what i was seeing and hearing was not very real most of the time too much of the time let's say uh fast forward to january of 2015 i wait i'm only six feet tall and i weighed 289 pounds i was on six or seven different meds at that time my psychiatrist the last one i'll ever have not named georgia eat or chris palmer said you should seriously consider electroshock therapy and or a long-term hospitalization and i had seen ect patients 30 minutes after they'd had the procedure and no you're not turning me into an animated corpse that was not going to happen and i was very much afraid if i tried the long-term hospitalization i might go in and never come out um yeah in comes a friend i i'm i i write songs i i release very very seldom heard albums i was working on a blues project with the lady a really talented singer his name's kimmy wade and she gets mentioned in every talk i do because without her you and i aren't speaking none of this happens she's watching me disintegrate and she finally says one day [Music] have you ever thought of medical marijuana i was like well as a musician it was always around but i had a bad experience with it when i was young and beer was legal what do i need that for that was kind of my attitude you know i was the guy at band practice or it breaks at the gigs you know i'm just not no thank you i don't need that but so i did a little anecdotal research did a little research and found anecdotal evidence that you know that's when certain states in america were legalizing medical marijuana programs and things like that and there was anecdotal evidence similar to what we see in a carnivore community on in many ways that people were experiencing symptom relief and my wife and i were like at this point what do we have to lose because i took my meds as prescribed i didn't want to be one of those chronic people who kept coming back to the hospital because they wouldn't take their meds i knew the titration schedules i knew the side effect i knew i i looked in i was a active participating patient i did not want to be crazy so we secured four grams of flour my wife made can of butter and she made these little cookies dr chaffee and i i broke the first one in half because those things scared me to death i ate it ten minutes after i took it i felt like a thousand suns had lifted off of me i wasn't high just for the first time and god knows how long i didn't feel like crap anymore and then the high kicked in about 45 minutes later [Music] and i discovered much to my surprise that cannabis treated my symptoms beautifully many orders of magnitude better than any psychiatric medication i ever did my anxiety came way down my mood came way up and not in a euphoric way i could sleep at night i'm so much better my wife comes home the first day and i have a smile and a giggle on my uh you know i feel good i feel good in years and she comes in going who are you so that became a thing i i medical marijuana literally made all this possible uh 10 days after that i'm sitting on the edge of the bed dr chafee put my shoes on and i realized my belly's in the way and i have a moment of clarity and i go and see myself in the mirror accurately for the first time and god knows when and i look like something from the walking dead pasty gray a heart attack or a stroke looked imminent i mean it just i looked horrible and i told my wife that night i said back on atkins nope you know got to there's no option that has to happen and so we i went back on atkins imperfectly we didn't know you weren't supposed supposed to pour the fat off the meat or i might have gotten better a lot sooner but over the next three years i started walking and i took my time because i knew i was at great risk for injury figured out you know walking the dog half a block here block there then into two blocks four blocks well how how far am i actually walking and then i figured out how far it was a half mile from my house so that i could do a mile walk really easy that went into two mile walks and into four mile walks and over the next three years i walked off 94 pounds by the end of 2015 i was off the antipsychotics and antidepressants into 2016 i was off the ativan that was troublesome the day after i took my last eighth of a milligram i woke up with vertigo which i had to deal with for three months you know thanks benzodiazepine withdrawal and by the end of 2017 i was off the tracido and sleeping drug-free since 2017 i've not had any pharmaceuticals of any kind except for one run of antibiotics when i had an upper respiratory infection in the fall of 2019 i have been completely pharmaceutical free at age 61 since then but i'm still you know medical marijuana made life better but it didn't heal or fix anything right uh then this same friend who suggested i look into cannabis messages messages me in may of 2018 going you've got to see every video by this guy named dr jordan peterson i'm like okay and i've become an instant fan you know back then when you first did a search for him you got the jordan peterson destroys collection yeah yeah where he just renders people mute with logic and common sense i could watch that thing he did with that lady in in the uk over and over again and never stopped laughing i mean it's just it was brilliant and i loved what he had to say about personal responsibility and telling the truth or at least not lying i believe him to be somebody of great integrity and part of my 420 regiment was eat a cooking go watch jordan peterson video [Laughter] and i came across a 30 minute cut out of him on rogan joe rhoden and he starts talking about how his daughter figured out that she only ate beef salt and water that her chronic arthritis and depression symptoms would go into remission now this is anybody but jordan peterson telling me this that's crazy i would have changed the channel in a heartbeat that's nuts me just me are you cr no some doctor would have said something to me some medical professional over these last 40 years would have surely told me about this but it was jordan peterson and he's a man of great integrity who i owe so much to i'm sorry i came i got to meet him sunday and i'm still processing all of that it's a very emotional thing that's amazing and so i had my wife watch the video with me to make sure i was really hearing what i was hearing oh yeah he's really saying that so i start investigating and my next the next video i come across is sean baker on joe wrote and i watched to watch the dietary component of that interview 50 times because now i'm thinking there's got to be a flaw in the logic here because i did not want to get psyched up about something that was invalid yeah but i couldn't find any flaws in anything there were no logical errors there whatsoever and then i heard the talk by from ambro hearn that she gave a keto fest in 2017. it's still up i looked for it the other day uh where she explained in a way this guitar player could understand how as a species we literally came down out of the trees eating meat how we grew these energy demanding brains how our skeletal structure developed into what we see it today and i was like i can i can't not try this yeah i did a little more research and how to do it successfully which i found that the zeroing in on health facebook group with that's where kelly hogan and charles washington all those 10-year plus carnivores hang out and i learned only eat when you're hungry when you're hungry only eat meat until you're not another bite full only eat the meat you crave and can't afford and under no circumstance do you put a sweet taste into your mouth i could follow those directions in my sleep all day every day it's not it's going to keep me from being crazy that's easy because i looked at keto and like my my head just started spinning you got to measure this you can macro that oh yeah no that was not me i couldn't process that so july 16 2018 was day one eating meat and drinking water and today is my 135th day eating meat and drinking water and i haven't missed a day in that time zero cheat days none on the tenth day i woke up without joint pain for the first time as an adult now i was never diagnosed as arthritic but you know i'm falling down and gone boom a few times over the first 57 years of my life you know thing kind of you know i was ambulatory but i had places that hurt a lot my shoulder my knees i woke up without joint pain i felt like a little boy again i'm my morning walk i'm skipping and giggling for half of it because it feels good and it doesn't hurt wow who knew that was going to happen and then on the 24th day and i always get emotional about this i can't not do it i'm taking a walk it's not even light out yet and it's like somebody flipped the switch dr tafey and all that rage and all that anger and frustration shadowy darkness what all the things that kept me from becoming the human i always wanted to be it all just went away it's gone and it was replaced by a waterfall of joy that has not left me not for one stinking moment since and that's why i do these talks because people need to know you're not broken mom and dad didn't make a mistake you're not a genetic error or an outlier you were just like the rest of us taught to eat things we never should have eaten we should have never put those things into our mouth under the false premise it's healthy it's healthy to eat all that fiber let's push fiber through at all costs people need to know you don't have to suffer from chronic illness forever you don't have to be a prisoner to medication for the rest of your life and that's why i do these and i thank you very much for the chance to share that my experience well thank you and thank you for sharing that that's you know it's you know people when we talk about these sorts of things they don't they don't you know they don't understand just just how huge of an impact you can have on people's lives or maybe they just don't don't think it's possible to like you said you thought you made some you know positive inroads and and uh and you know mental changes on how you're approaching things which is all very very healthy and very very good and so people say well that's probably what it was well maybe you know something else happened how could it possibly affect their lives that much but you know it's it is true and we see so many people and you know that you know your story there is you know such a dramatic case of serious depression and you know there are a lot of people that suffer with depression unfortunately that number is growing but major depression is is its own thing entirely um my mother was very depressed during my early childhood she got postpartum depression after she had me and was you know basically just checked out and for you know my entire childhood it was uh you know it was you know dealing with that and she was she was very upset she sort of let let a couple hints you know you know past the radar that you know something was wrong but you know she really kept it to herself and and and since then she's he basically says she was actually put on prozac in the late 80s and she said if prozac hadn't come out when it did she probably you know would have taken her own life it she said it literally saved her life and so thankfully she did get some benefit from that but it's you know it's it's a devastating uh illness and you know to be able to get rid of it like that and actually you know rediscover your happiness you know it's absolutely fantastic i thank you very much for sharing that and i'm really happy that that happened for you well thank you thank you yeah it's been an incredible experience and [Music] it hasn't stopped getting better every day is better than the day before and i can't explain that in any you it's something that has to be experienced i it's something i can't put words to in a way that does it justice and i i i experience every day what i call effortless daily happiness every day i wake up in a fabulous mood i'm excited about what the day holds for me i know i'm going to get to play my guitar for five or six hours i know i'm going to get to take a walk in the floor to sunshine and suck in i'm now a sunshine junkie i i can't get enough of it yeah uh because i feel so good while i'm in the sun um i've learned about grounding through this way of eating and then that's another thing that i want people to know about it's a natural inexpensive way to reduce inflammation go take a walk in the grass or sit in a chair with your feet in the dirt for 30 minutes every day and you're done and inflammation will come down i'm sleeping so much better since i started doing that i go to bed at night and i wake up in the same position in the morning i lay down in where i used to wrestle all night i could get wrapped up in the bottom sheet drove my wife nuts speaking of my wife if there was ever somebody who's earned their place in heaven it's her because she had to put up with me when i was very hard to live with and i'm always grateful and i always mentioned that because i even told dr peterson madison she's earned her spot in heaven because she put up with me and he said well i can imagine it's just transformed our lives my wife uh is a month behind me in carnivore i joke about she waited 30 days to see if it was going to kill me or not just sent you in first yeah in the coal mine kind of like when kind of like when the male deer sends the the female across the road to see if she makes it um and but she noticed the wrinkles in my face were starting to smooth out and then suddenly i she wasn't the skinniest one in the house anymore and she had osteoarthritis in both her shoulders and in both her hands and in 30 days it was gone yeah just gone and what it's done for us our marriage i mean good grief it's it's at times it's like we live in a in a fairy tale now yeah everything is so good she's 63 i'm 61. when you only eat meat and drink water you come into hormonal balance and all of your plumbing works as designed yeah so it's like we feel like we're 20 without the stupidity and ignorance of being 20. [Laughter] and our private life is just beyond words wonderful great it's just i i haven't experienced a moment of downside living this way dr chavey not one moment fantastic so you wouldn't you wouldn't be uh in that in that camp that recent conversion that says that if you're carnival for too long you don't eat carbs or honey for too long that you'll eventually get detrimental health reverberations and diet yeah yeah and low testosterone i i get so frustrated i i i coach for reverend health formerly meteor x i i've been doing that and i facilitate two mental health meetings here every week um and i have had too many clients come to me saying but so-and-so said honey you know what do you think about honey and this when do we get to eat honey and i'm just like oh because people need to understand you know in my experience and as i understand things from getting to study from people like georgia eade and amy berger yourself and others dr baker uh so many it's about inflammation in your brain and sugar is inflammatory it's never not inflammatory what what kind of game are you playing with yourself people like me if i if a spoonful of honey i'd be in the psych ward before the sun went down it's like rat poison to me yeah i can't risk that there's no taste no texture no social setting worth me risking my sanity for period why would you tell people i think i know why that person is saying these things because they have a sugar addiction and they like making money and they found out they can make more money and enjoy their sugar addiction by saying these things now i could be wrong i don't know that to a certainty but that's my feeling eat meat drink water heal and once you heal yeah you might be able to add things back excuse me but if it was inflammatory yesterday it's going to be inflammatory today and you might be able to tolera tolerate it for a while tomorrow but eventually you're going to be right back where you just crawled out of yeah and the thing is too is that you know the the argument is is that not not that you can have some sugar or or honey or fruit sometimes but that you should and that you you can't possibly thrive or survive without it that this is this is a detriment to your health and that you have to have you know certain amount of carbohydrates every single day and so and uh you know the best way of getting that is through honey or fruit somehow um but you know i mean you're living proof i'm living proof dr baker's living proof certainly charles washington and kelly hogan who've been doing this stuff way longer than any of us have and certainly certainly these other proponents of uh carnivore-ish way of eating you know they haven't had these problems you know they simply haven't and so when you when you look at that and you look at the huge abundance of populations both now and historically that don't eat any plants don't eat any sugar don't eat any honey like the maasai but you know more specifically like the inuits they don't have any honey to begin with they don't have any fruit to begin with and all our ancestors throughout the ice ages you know where was their honey and fruit you know they didn't have it and so if if you couldn't survive if if you couldn't you know thrive you know without and your hormonal health would have been damaged your testosterone would have been down your thyroid would have been down you don't survive on low thyroid generationally you can't it's not it's not possible you know your children will get cretinism even if you survive your kids your kids will be severely damaged by this and they won't be able to procreate so yeah i i don't know what's going on there but i'm glad that uh you know that that you're not uh dying of hormonal uh of hormonal damage and you know in in your in your coaching experience you know have you you know have you seen this have you seen people be long-term carnivore and then all of a sudden start getting hormonal issues and uh and damaging themselves no i haven't seen that out of anybody i mean i'm sure there's probably you know one percent or half of one percent of folks who try this way of eating and get so far along and then they discover some underlying thing uh i mean because anything's possible so i i've learned you know there are no total absolutes in any of this and it's always specific to the individual so it is possible i just haven't seen it i haven't heard about it i've not you know run into anyone you know oh i was six years carnivore and then then my kidneys started to crap out i haven't i you know i've heard all the warnings all your kidneys your kidneys give out on you that's going to be what takes you down man no yeah and yet you know here i am yeah how do you that's the thing that always gets me whether it's it's plant-based people the dietitians protecting the revenue stream whoever you can't destroy yourself while feeling this good how do you make that work yeah i feel amazing i don't i don't supplement i don't take anything i got an l5 that's pushed out a little far it's not quite bulging it's just an annoyance once in a while and every now and then you know i'm a musician i i i carry a chunk of wood around my neck for four hours and like having fun playing but my lower back starts complaining after about the third hour you know i might have to take a motoring once in a while but that's it yeah there's nothing diet related that is harming me at all and my quality of life is insanely good i mean it's through the roof yeah and i'm harming myself come on laughable well you know and that's the thing you know we have i think you know dr baker said once you know the uh you know the plural of anecdote is data and so we say you know people just say oh well yeah you do that but that that's your anecdotal uh you know that's just an anecdotal reference i i don't really care you know like the only thing i'm honestly the only thing i'm worried about is my anecdotal experience that's it i really don't i don't really don't give a crap you know how many studies say what if i do that and that makes me feel like garbage and i do this that makes me you know healthy and strong and you know veril that's what i'm going to do like oh but it's anecdotal you better better look at that study i'm like get out you know like even you know even einstein you know he said that you know everyone tries to just prove things you know and it's just like oh well i have this proof i have this proof look at this study and this proves this and it's like well it doesn't prove a damn thing actually and even einstein when he would prove something mathematically and then go out into the real world and look at it anecdotally and see like oh does this work no it doesn't throw it out you know and because you know he was actually smart enough to realize like you know richard feynman said one of his colleagues in the manhattan project was it doesn't matter how brilliant your theory is and it doesn't matter how smart you are if it doesn't agree with experiment it's wrong and so they proved all sorts of nonsense and yet it's wrong so you know um that's that's the only thing i worry about and the fact of the matter is is that you know you're healthy you're thriving you're feeling better than you ever have so you know who cares what they have to say really you know like they can they can you know poo poo your your anecdotal experience but your anecdotal experience is your life and so i think that actually trumps uh whatever little nutritional epidemiology study that they put out there you know um that's one of the things i think with the dietitians i think a lot of them i think some of them are simply just trying to justify you know wasting you know years of their life studying things that are just just wrong and so they just they really don't want to have to admit that to themselves and then you know they they just go no no no but it has to be true and they and they really push the line um but you know i've had dietitians that i've you know debated with and gotten to the end of it as a friend of mine she was actually finishing her phd in nutritional sciences and you know she's a phd candidate and so she's been doing this for a very long time and she was a whole food vegan really pushed that angle for years and years and years eventually we just went point for point study for study and at the end of it i finally sort of you know got through to her and she just sort of sat there and like stunned silence and went my entire education was a lie i was like i know it was a lie like you've proven it's a lie like you know that this can't be true this can't be what it is have you you've proven it you know and and um you know you show me the studies like i've seen them like this is it's wrong it's just wrong and like they they had a you know real real dilemma on their hands because they were about to go into you know practice as a hospital dietitian and they're like i you know but you as a dietitian you have to push what's in the textbook and she's like i know the textbook's wrong like i can't then say that it's right you know because this is going to hurt people so you know she she had that you know uh introspection and um you know i think when you it's scary though because when you come to that realization you know you really only have one honest choice which is to just get out of the whole field and uh or at least you know try to try to revamp it and show people what what's going on like you know like like people are you know like there's you know nutrition with judy you know she's she's a nutritionist and she absolutely you know is a proponent of carnivore diet which is great but you know it's going to be very difficult to get you know an industry job or job in the hospital as a nutritionist when you when you don't push what the hospital wants you to because they have they have nutritional guidelines they have nutritional practices that are just horrendous and like i've written letters to the hospital services i mean guess how many of those i've gotten returned how many you know like i just no one's ever like i've had someone's like oh yes we happily you know send this on and we'll get back to you i haven't heard a word from these people you know but you know i see all the time in the hospital these people having you know trays put up in front of them that it's just it's just sugary carbs like that's it and i was looking at that i'm like like that they're feeding you what you know brought you in here in the first place exactly it survives logic and they sell you the garbage they get you addicted to it through marketing and scientific research i mean people need to look up what a bliss point is with regards to uh carbs and whatnot you know and these products that are being made you know the almond milk and all that garbage it's all designed to hit your bliss point in your brain to get you addicted and keep you addicted yeah when i realized that i mean all sorts of dominoes started falling in my head seeing just this is not an accident there are the this is deliberate willful misinformation a false testimony that this is healthy for you when the exact opposite is actually the case yeah and one of the wonderful things about this i'm a musician i'm not a scientist i don't talk science i only speak from my experience but i can read and i can learn and i can do a little math this way of eating gives you the clarity of thought to be able to see through the bs in a way that you never could before and i think that's something else that baffles those who can't understand why we won't capitulate to their wisdom because they're credentialed you know i've got 65 initials after my name now from all these heart look at all these phds and these master theses and these books etc pay attention to me i know what i'm talking about but yeah you can't explain me away none of them can explain me i challenge every one of those people if what you're saying is true why am i thriving why am i not dead yet why am i not having you know i was warned you're gonna hope you like going to the emergency room to unclog your arteries get real my lipids my lab work it gets better every time i have somebody pay for it i get new lab work every couple of years and it my lipids are better than when i was a kid yeah i mean and you're telling me that i'm destroying myself the cognitive dissonance here is just it's frightening it really is because we're bombarded constantly with the marketing you know how many drug commercials do you see do you ever see a drug commercial that talks about eliminating your symptoms and healing you no you never will yeah because we got to manage your symptoms so that we can keep making money every day every month from you and then your family and then we'll sell you the food products which are more garbage under the notion that it'll help fix what the original garbage we sold you did to you and it's just crazy and all we need to do is learn to separate ourselves from that take control of our health eating meat drinking water or at least following a ketogenic lifestyle which you can do with keto without being just meat and water like i am and take control of your health and separate yourself from the disease management system we don't have to participate in it if we're taking care of ourselves now if you have an injury you know i i have an accident and break a leg or something well yeah i need medical care then to set the leg then i'll heal yeah but outside of that i don't need to be a part of that system anymore and you don't have to do so you don't have to see a doctor three times a year how are you feeling that's how i judge my health is how i feel what do i need to donate a fee every year just to find out oh brett you feel great well i knew that i know that now it's just so disordered when you stop and look at it yeah how do we get how we got here is just amazing to me yeah well that's the thing you know we used to just uh you know treat you know major accidents uh you know infectious disease and that was that was the main part of the world it was just dealing with with infections and plagues and uh and and then injuries wars birth childhood uh diseases yeah you know pregnancy and childbirth that was a major major danger as well and then you know poisonings you know you get you get bitten by something or you get you eat some some plant that would was harmful or get stuck by something that was poisonous and you're dealing with that and now it's all chronic disease and you know the history of humanity we have not had these chronic diseases in the numbers that we have them now not not even close nothing nothing resembling what we have now and we're coming up with new ones all the time like oh wow look at this crazy thing that we've just never seen before you know doctors would make their name by discovering a new disease or a new you know anatomical variant or you know doing uh you know uh dissections on cadavers and finding out something different something new something we haven't seen before that's how you made your name and and in fact that's how you immortalize your name because a lot of these things are named after those doctors and you know you know we have a colleague's fracture it's a certain way of falling and breaking your wrist in a certain in a certain way and you fix it in a certain way and you you treat it in a certain way that was named after a guy in the 1800s who came up with this you know and i was his name is there forever so people really wanted to do this and people still want to do this and they are finding things and you know we're you know we deal with this uh the hubris of uh you know the current generation that says oh we just probably wouldn't didn't notice it before um but that's i mean of course they of course we would have you know and some of these people are you know some of it's you know people that just just think that you know anyone who's who's you know over 25 is an idiot and um you know well you you weren't born with an iphone in your handle okay i was like okay well they they actually invented iphones so what have you done for the world you know you know how to use an iphone great that's awesome i'm happy for you you can you can access all the information in the world but you didn't create any of it you didn't discover any of it and the people that came before us did and so you know it's funny too because some of these people some of these these people saying oh we probably just didn't notice it are like the researchers and the doctors who lived through this and was like you're saying that you just noticed this now you just started paying attention really you know so yeah it's um it's a bit shocking and um you know chris rock i think you know called it out in the 90s about what you were saying with you know the the different companies just trying to manage diseases as opposed to curing diseases uh and he said that uh you know that's not what they want to do they just want to you know manage your symptoms they just they want your disease to keep going but they don't want to cure it they said you know the the drug companies are still pissed they cured polio you know that could have been a you know money maker forever just treating polio so they want to treat diseases not cure diseases whereas you know obviously the the point is to cure diseases and to and to just prevent them from even happening you know our genetics did not change in such a way that these diseases you know came up came about that way and this is just there's just nothing we can do about it something happened in our environment you know these these so-called diseases you know triple quadruple quintupled or more in a span of of 20 years that doesn't happen uh except in except for environmental exposure and so this is an exposure this is a poisoning this is something that you know if it can if it can expose you to this and cause these problems you can take it away take away that exposure and those problems will go away now maybe there's damage done that can happen but at least it will stop the ongoing torment on your body i i tell all my coaching clients and i say this in every mental health meeting that i facilitate the objective here is to not get better but to become well for you for all of us to be able to live our life optimally for to have our brains most most people my brain never functioned optimally until i was 57 years old and it's improved every day since that day i lost my depression symptoms and you know five minutes later i lost the anxiety and ten months later i lost the insomnia and and it's never come back none of it has ever come back so this is in my mind and you know my wife's symptoms have never come back no and we're just eating we're not we're not taking any medicines we're not you know no need to supplement we're not doing some kind of weird voodoo dance at three and three a.m every night around a campfire we're just doing what ancestral man did what did our ancestors 100 000 years ago go do they ate meat that was it there was no seasonal vegetables i mean seriously you know people don't understand all these these vegetables that we have today they've been genetically modified to be what they are and so that they're more easily marketed and they more sweetness in them so hey we can hook you that way it's just so crazy to think hundred thousand years ago we slept on the ground we ate on the ground we were always grounded we were always in touch and then synthetic footwear came out and everybody got insulated and then if you stop and look i think you'll find some correlation between when the disease started to pick up the further and further we move away from these ancestral truths the worse off we become it's just so much has been repressed dr chafee we need to keep getting the word out because as uh dr baker always says we're gonna win this war from the ground yeah not from up top down no not going to happen that way no now the top the top's too comfortable being at the top yeah too much power yeah yeah and you know if they were they were smart they'd start you know looking around and saying oh how can we you know how can we you know change the you know the the the healthcare model to facilitate this and actually help people but i'll actually turn a profit i mean that would be great you know dr baker is is looking at at you know uh expanding rivero which i think is fantastic because you know it's it's a it's a it's a model that that people are going to get behind because once they find out that that you can actually get well and you don't need to suffer with with chronic diseases and just take medications and get surgeries for the rest of your life of course people are going to want to do that you know and so maybe it's not the same profit model as all these interventions and all these horrifically expensive drugs but you're also not putting in 2 billion dollars on r d either you know and you can you can put those big brains to use doing something useful and doing something that's actually going to benefit society and benefit humanity and and make money on it and i'm all for that i you know i'm all for the you know the the incentive model of of you earning something but you know do it the right way you know do it do it doing something that that's profitable that's profitable for people as opposed to just snake oil you know you don't have to sell a con in order to get rich you know look at rockefeller i know some people have problems with rockefeller but look at how he got he made money he you know became vastly wealthy by making kerosene cheaper you know he said he wanted to get the price of kerosene down so low by all these different tricks in manufacturing and refining that everyone in america every household in america could afford kerosene that was very important to him and he was able to do it and because he was able to do that every house in america was buying kerosene from him so he became fabulously wealthy and he did it the right way the people that have been you know the wealthiest have provided the most benefit for people you know and and then maybe they just go crazy at the end of it you know like like you know bill gates trying to you know black out the sun with you know with uh you know like jesus like what are you doing like that you know that's literally like every every extinction episode in the history of the earth happened you know some volcano or or asteroid hits the earth and just pops up a cloud of dust and shuts off the energy from the sun as everything dies off like why would you want to replicate that bill gates is so disturbingly disordered it's just beyond words like and and then you know what rational person is going to look at him and think i need to take dietary advice from this man yeah and and you know the thing is too for all the all the talk about fake meat and and everything like that i happen i happen to grow up near where bill gates lives and i actually know for a fact he goes to ruth chris steakhouse in bellevue all the time all the time he's not eating that synthetic beef no he's not eating that nonsense you know he's like that's for you like he's keeping the steaks for him you know yeah i mean he's the largest you know uh owner of farmland in america now you know a single person so you know i'm sure he'll have a ranch for his own cattle oh no doubt he's probably got three or four already yeah it's so ridiculous and the scary thing to me dr chaffee is how easily [Music] and how much younger people are swayed to believe these things because they are so inflamed all the time and i don't know about how it is for you but i have a harder time talking to people with what i call sugar brain because they they're not they're not always really logical and you've got to really listen closely to figure out what what they mean when they say things that you're like on the surface like well that's kind of nuts and at first i thought it was just my hubris at play but no it's really not that you know and it kind of my wife and i figured out all those years before cell phones why would people sit at a green light and not step on the gas we figured it out it's brain fog yeah people are in a fog how would they know i i mean i was guilty of it and this is before cell phones you know now everybody wants to blame everything except on what is really going on because geez we then we'd have to hold people responsible uh it's it's it's and it has gotten so much worse and you know earlier mental illness used to be so rare that if somebody came down with something you know schizophrenic might show up in a village somewhere they were treated as if they were holy because it was so rare and special and they were considered to be touched and in a lot of societies it and now you know who do we know that hasn't had about a mental illness or doesn't have three or four or five relatives who are dealing with mental illness every day yeah it used to be all this alzheimer's used to be [Music] rare because who could afford to eat all that sugar uh you know yeah so so so now you're saying you're just meat and water is that right absolutely absolutely i have only consumed meat and water for 355 straight days and i have had no inclination to ever deviate from that any any particular cuts or or animals that you that you prefer i started out eating a variety of meats but i always had bacon because when i was researching this i discovered the biggest number one complaint for people who failed at the beginning is i got tired of just eating meat and bacon had never been my favorite meat but i realized there was never a meal with that bacon was on the plate that i didn't enjoy so i made sure i would always have two meats and one of them would always be bacon bacon goes great with everything with shrimp with fish with short pork shoulder roast uh i had my wife would get these big chunks of london broil and cut those up into steaks in the beginning uh i gave up eggs after the second week because they stopped being satisfying i haven't had eggs since july of 2018. i also haven't had a headache since july of 2018. no no that's pretty crazy um but in december of 2018 i discovered i let my intuition leave me which is something else i encourage people to do spend less time up here trust your gut it will never mislead you and i discovered these rolls of 20 or excuse me 90 10 ground beef and they just jumped out at me [Music] picked me up look at me i did it and i told my wife i said i need to take one of these home and eat it yeah and i knew after the second bite is what i've been looking for all along this is satisfying i am not just full i don't just eat dissociation i am satisfied every meal is very satisfying i'm full i'm contented and then that's when my healing really kind of went into turbo mode after that nice because my body was finally getting what it had been looking for all along and that's what i encourage people to do you know you're not sure what kind of meat you crave or what your body is really wanting go to the biggest meat department in your area and look around turn your intellect off and listen to your body and see what jumps out at you and inevitably when people do that they end up finding a type of meat whether it's pork fish whatever i don't care we know red meat tends to heal people more but people have gotten better on fish people gotten better on pork you know whatever works for you whatever you can afford it's all like dr baker says it's always going to be better to eat pork or fish whatever than to eat ice cream yeah well that's you know that's what i tell people you know like what what sort of meat and what this is like well i like beef i prefer beef that's what makes me feel the best that's what gives me the best energy and you know i you know like yourself you know i've been sort of on the sharp end of this for for a number of years where i can i can tell the difference between different meats you know i feel better on beef than i do on you know eggs and bacon i just do and uh or lamb even and chicken certainly chicken and but like um you know but but then you know i talk to people and they say like well you know what should i eat what should i do it's like look it you know any any of these meats are good you just do like you know baker says you know the meat that you enjoy it makes you feel the best and you can afford because you know whatever meat you're eating that is going to be good for you and that and all plants every plant is bad for you all meat is good for you so it really doesn't matter so as long as you don't need don't eat plants and you avoid that so that's why i put the impetus on what not to eat as opposed to what to eat and you know if people want to eat you know little things here and there i know charles washington you know says that you know if you want to put some seasonings or or or sauces or whatever if that can keep you eating meat and and keep you interested then go for it i i don't have a problem with that um i talk about things in in respect to what i believe is optimal and what i believe is is the is the you know the best way of healing your body and living and then if you want to do something outside of that then do it i really don't care it's just you know this this is what i've found to be the best way you can do it and if that's something that you like if you like being awful then then go for it and i mean that's how i like to live you know so you know some you know um you know and to do with the like the the fruit and honey if you want to eat fruit and honey like go for it i just caution people because you know fruit and honey have sugar and and you know fructose is addictive it is a drug and it will be addictive to you and a little bit of honey fruit and honey can turn into a lot of fruit and honey real quick and then all of a sudden you just do your carb craving and you you start eating other things and you and you slip off the wagon i've spoken to so many people um about this you know the last time i was on with dr baker um it must have been a year or more ago and we were talking about that and you know he sort of asked me like you know is there anything anything going on you want to talk about i'm like yes actually there's there's a lot of people talking about you know how you should start eating you know you know fruit and honey and i think i think that's wild you know and we just went into it you know all the reasons why and just you know just all the the hard data behind it like we have we have very strong evidence it's probably one of the stronger pieces or bodies of evidence that we have in in the nutritional sciences but it's but it's actual biochemistry you know we have we have actual biochemical evidence behind this and you know and then you know your human models human studies with con you know controlled human tria studies that that actually meet the criteria for causation between fructose and metabolic syndrome okay so you know and maybe you say well well the the fructose from fruit and honey well that's good for you though like based on what like you know what hard evidence do you have to say that you know that's that's you know thomas soul is one of my favorite writers and thinkers of just all time i think he's just the most brilliant brilliant and well-developed thinker that america has ever produced certainly and and that's one of you know he has three sort of questions you know to check something against and one of those is what hard evidence do you have you know and then compared to what and at what cost you want to do this okay what's it gonna cost you well you know if it just saves one life then it's worth it well no actually because you've actually killed 500 000 other people by saving that one life from this thing that you're you're worried about but you don't look at those costs and you're comparing things to you're comparing apples to oranges and you have no hard evidence so you know you have to ask these things you have to test these ideas when someone puts something towards you even if you even if you want to agree with it you have to test these things you have to ask these things you have to try to disprove them that's what science really is people don't get that well trust the science that's a nonsense you know you don't trust the science you try to disprove your theory that is science and you try to you try to create studies and trials in order to disprove your idea because if you can't disprove it well well then you know you're in pretty good footing you know but they don't try to do that they try to they try to cherry pick and and lie and hide the truth so that whatever they're pushing can look good but what you have to do is you have to try to disprove it and so there is no trusting this i don't trust [ __ ] yeah i said absolutely yes i was listening you talk about that stuff and i i you know real science questions everything endlessly it never stops questioning yeah you know that's why that this follow the science except this is you know uh the science the science is certain no it's never certain there's only few things that are certain like one plus one is always going to equal two yeah that's a certainty that's a rare thing well unless unless you're a harvard uh harvard professor of mathematics and somehow and then the other thing is ken berry put out this thing a few years ago that just always just kills me when i think about it it's a picture of a fructose molecule next to a sucrose molecule and he said point out the difference show me which one is healthy yeah yeah yeah yeah identical they're identical yeah they did you know and you're going to say that fruit fructose is better for you are you serious if there's no way you can make that argument i'm not a medical anything and i can see the disordered thinking in that yeah well i think that was it was like here's the fructose molecule from fruit or honey and here's the one from high fructose corn syrup and it's like which one of these is good for you it's like yeah well that's it yeah well and then that's it you know you say uh that well well maybe in in you know honey it's good for you then okay well maybe but like you actually you actually have to prove that you know or or at least provide some semblance of of uh of evidence for it and um you know the body of evidence right now shows that it's not good for you and that that chemical is harmful you know there's you know cyanide is bad for you well maybe the cyanide in almonds is good for you well you don't know like i'm yeah maybe you know but like you're gonna have to you're gonna have to actually do some work and actually show that before you know you you you get me to eat a lethal dose of cyanide from those stupid almonds you know or or cassava melon you know well maybe you know people so many people eat salmonella yeah and they do it very carefully and if they don't they die okay so well but maybe yeah yeah maybe but you know prove it buddy you know it's on you um you know a lot of people say it's like oh it's very restrictive and i you know i get i get you know people saying uh well people who watch my videos by and large actually uh you know you know it seemed to seem you know quite positive in in my approach which is like you know just just give it a try you will actually feel so much better when you just get the last bits out of your system and so a lot of people have been encouraged to try that and then they all report back to me like wow actually i didn't realize it but it's actually made a huge difference and i you know i'm really happy when people can do that not everybody can that's fine you know but it's it's nice when people can and they can see how much benefit that is and then some people sort of see a bit of a bit of stuff or on someone else's show and they just go oh i don't like that it's too restrictive he's just gonna push people away from it i'm like well first of all i've never said that you have to do this or nothing i never said that you know it's it's my you know it's all all or nothing and like you have to everything's strict strict strict or you know you're you're not allowed to eat any meat at all you have to be a you know whole food vegetarian vegan you know don't say that i just tell people what i think is is a good way of doing it and and they can they can do whatever they want but a lot of people talk about how restricted it is um and you know i think that um you know it i you know i think that it actually allows you to i think it makes it so much simpler it just allows you to just be in this moment you're just eating me you're not like oh maybe i can have it maybe i can do this when you just you have these soft edges that that you can push and you can change and they're malleable i remember you um you know saying something on facebook you made the believe there's a video and you you you put it up talking about restriction and yeah i'm calling it's a restricted diet can you you tell us a bit about that because this way this way of eating is not restrictive depression is restrictive yeah something else is really restrictive anxiety is restrictive arthritis is restricted type 2 diabetes is restrictive insomnia is restrictive bipolar disorders restrict i mean we can just go down the list of those are restrictive illnesses yeah you can't do this you can't do that you can't do this you can't do that you can't go out in the sun you can't you know don't go out in the rain don't do this don't do that with all of those things they're extremely restrictive the carnivore way of eating is the most liberating thing in the world because you're free of all of that yeah there's nothing i cannot do if i have the desire to attempt it why not i mean i'm i get to perform live music again i had to take 15 years off from playing because i was too nobody would work with me i was too difficult to get along with and now i'm a professional i actually the people pay me money to do what i love the most and i'm able to do it at a much higher level than i ever could before this is not restriction kids this is liberation this is experiencing what you've always wanted to experience yeah and so that's that's what i think about restrictions it's just a bunch of huli i i think that's i think that's a great great uh way of looking at you and it's just you know it's how you approach it and you're looking at that i mean like you know it's it's a pessimistic sort of attitude you're looking at all the things that you can't do and how horrible it is instead of looking at all the benefits that you just said you know and and i think that's just it it's just you're looking at things right way uh right way around and you know what i think is restrictive is you know is is eating you know five times a day and still being hungry throughout the whole time and having to go to the bathroom 13 times i think that's restrictive you know running out of toilet paper during a pandemic that's restricted you know so yeah i don't i don't i don't find this restrictive at all i i agree i find it very liberating i eat once a day i have hours of my day that are back to me that i'm not thinking about preparing or eating food i just do things you know i'm not restricted to only my only social events are only revolving around food and drink i actually go and do things you know and yeah exactly and you know i i enjoy that i enjoy interpersonal uh you know connections and i enjoy doing things with people i enjoy being active i enjoy you know reading i enjoy you know the work that i do and it's good that i enjoy the work that i do because that's basically all that i do and so you know it's it provides me the energy and the ability and the time to actually focus on on what's important in my life and uh it sounds like you're doing the same thank you dr chafee i i really enjoyed this conversation immensely i have a feeling you and i could wax eloquent for hours and hours and hours uh it's been a real pleasure and uh i hope that you keep doing what you're doing because you're you're you're we need your young healthy strong force in the carnivore community preaching the gospel of meat as it were and we need more of that we need more professionals like yourself out there talking about how you can eliminate metabolic dis dysfunction just with the lifestyle change and you don't have to spend gazillions of dollars on medicines every month and [Music] yeah that's that's free yes yeah talk about liberating wow i've enjoyed this immensely but i need to go here in a second because i need to talk to my mother it's my it's my morning to talk to very good well i uh i think that's um yeah i think it's probably a good good place to stop as any uh brett i really enjoyed uh speaking with you i'm glad that we finally were able to do it thank you very much for coming on thank you very much for for sharing your story i hope that that people find that that helpful and inspiring so that you can can deal with their their issues and and and get well again so thank you well thank you so much dr chaki for this chance to share my story and people have any questions they they i answer all my private messages on instagram you can find me at thankful.carnivore and uh if you have questions want to know how to start this wave eating uh have concerns don't hesitate to reach out because that's why i do this i want people to know what is possible and you can be as liberated as you've ever been in your life by eating meat and drinking water good and and so yeah and what's the best place way to get ahold of you is it uh that website or what are all your yeah thankful.carnivore on instagram is the best place to get me you can also find me under my full name brett lloyd on facebook i do answer messages there as well um it's just i i seem to have a better access via instagram than i do with the other uh platforms and seriously don't hesitate to reach out because one of the most heartwarming messages i ever got after i started doing this was a young man sent me a voice message thanking me for an interview i did with scott meslinski on the carnivore cast that after he heard what i had to say he no longer wanted to kill himself no jeez yeah wow so after you get a message like that this becomes this becomes a permanent vocation you can't give out yeah all right well i'll put those uh in the description as well so people can can find you and um and and as far as coaching is concerned they get you through rivero health or they contact you through instagram uh rivera health go to rivero health and just look up brett lloyd in the coaches list i will come up i am the only brett there i think yeah and i'm happy to help you succeed at this wonderful way of you lovely great brett lloyd thank you so much it's been a pleasure thank you sir