Your questions pour in from all platforms, but I answer them best in our 21-Day Metabolic Kick (21DMK) class—held twice a year. The February class was our best yet, with students transforming their metabolisms in just three weeks. These emails come from the questions asked inside the class.

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This Week’s Question: How much protein should I eat a day? 

This week’s question comes from a 54-year-old carnivore who took the 21-day class because he had stalled out in his weight loss. He enjoyed eating steak, eggs, bacon, pork, and chicken wings for over a year and had even whittled down his consumption to one meal a day. Yet he had not lost any further weight in over six months.

His question came about in the second week of the class when he finally began losing weight again. How much protein should I eat a day?

The short answer: it depends.

The long answer centers around studying your own metabolism. I get asked this question a lot on social media, but never answer it because of this dilemma. The answer to this question lies within this gentleman’s mitochondria. He enjoyed the success of weight loss when first shifting to a carnivore diet. I would never want to discourage somebody if they were in that season of weight loss by being too specific in this answer.

But because I was face-to-face with this patient, I was able to tailor the question to his situation, and indeed he had 40 more pounds to lose after a year of carnivore to meet his goal.

He had been following my good friend, Dr. Shawn Baker, who often eats buttered steak on his Instagram while enjoying the satire on vegans.

Although Shawn may have been insulin resistant in his distant past, he is no longer insulin resistant, but my patient was. (If you read my previous email, you already know plenty about this. If you missed it, I recommend checking it out here.)

How do I know he’s insulin resistant?

We studied his metabolism over the previous 10 days. We could see that his morning fasting sugars remained in the triple digits. A healthy morning blood sugar would be 65-85. He rarely saw blood sugar levels of less than 100, and his keto production was nominal.

This left him with a Dr. Boz ratio (DBR) north of 100. You are going to have difficulty losing weight if you have a DBR of over 80.  Our student was definitely in a weight loss stall.

Over the previous 10 days, he kept his total carbohydrates at zero, but due to his high protein intake later in the evening, his metabolism was turning those molecules of protein into glucose. The cause of this centers around his history of insulin resistance.

There’s a LOT of science I could go into, but no one cares! Here is my advice for him to correct his metabolism.

1) Adjust your menu from buttered steak, chicken, and pork chops to higher nutrient-dense, fatty meat like oxtail or sardines.

His body responded gloriously when we pushed him to do this during a sardine challenge. His ketones after 72 hours shot up to over 4.6 and his morning fasting glucose finally, for the first time in a year, was less than 100.

2) Move your last bite of food before sunset. This gentleman consumed all his protein in one hour late in the evening. Because of his insulin resistance, this was the worst time for him to be eating.

Instead, we recommended that he have these nutrient-dense servings of meat for breakfast and early afternoon. This left him fasting after 2:00 pm for the remainder of the class.

At first, this was difficult because his temptations were most significant in the evening. But because he entered this challenging time with a tsunami of ketones, he was able to persist. He was able to resist the temptations and begin this new habit.

By the end of the class, this rhythm of eating was showing him the success of having abundant ketones and lowered glucose, and indeed he lost 13 pounds of fat by the end of the 21 days.

As he wondered about losing muscle mass, we reassured him that the weight loss was actual fat loss. How do I know? When ketones are that high, fat is what is moving around in your system. We also know that circulating ketones protect your body from breaking down protein and muscles.

So instead of looking at how many grams of protein he ate daily, I insisted he focus on, “Did your pattern and volume of eating yesterday result in fat loss?” You’ll know the answer by looking at your morning fasting numbers.

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