- You should not try this diet. Just so you can’t say we didn’t warn you.
Some creatures like to munch on leaves, while others consume nothing but meat. Humans, meanwhile, are omnivores. We have the natural ability and need to eat meat and plants.
Don’t tell that to this Florida man with a bizarre diet, though.
The man had decided to lose weight and get healthier by becoming carnivorous. He wasn’t going to half-ass things, though, and went straight to hypercarnivorism.
Essentially, the man consumed nothing but several pounds of meat and fat every day. Yet, as unhealthy as that sounds, he said his health improved significantly.
That was until he noticed strange, yellow… Stuff building up on his body. It began around his eyes, but soon spread to hands, feet, and arms.
Concerned, the man went to see a doctor. They found that the stuff oozing out of his skin pores was nothing other than pure cholesterol.
The man’s cholesterol levels were five times higher than the regular human baseline. There was simply so much fat in his system that it started seeping out through his skin.
Unfortunately, the medical report of the man’s case doesn’t say what treatment he received and how his situation developed. We can bet they may have advised him to make minor alterations to his diet, though.
Fat to the Max
The questionable hero of our story is a Florida man in his 40s. It seems he wanted to become healthier, so he decided to change his diet.
However, he didn’t choose the path most people might. Instead of starting to eat more vegetables, he tripled down on meat and fat by starting a carnivore diet.
Now, some high-fat/carnivorous diets (like the keto diet) can help people lose initial weight quickly. However, they’re not really maintainable in the long term and can become unhealthy.
In typical Florida man fashion, however, our guy didn’t just go regular keto. Oh no, he went to the absolute max.
The man was eating between six and nine pounds of cheese and butter every single day. He supplemented that with daily hamburgers — with extra fat worked into them.
We can feel our arteries clogging just from writing that description. Yet, the man said he was feeling great.
According to him, he lost weight and was much more energetic. Not just that, be he also claimed his “mental clarity” improved.
The Mystery Gunk
It seemed all was going well for the man and his new hypercarnivore diet. Eight months on, however, something strange happened.
The man first noticed it around his eyes. Bizarre, yellowish lumps were forming on the corners of his eyelids.
They weren’t painful or anything, so he didn’t initially think much about it. But then the condition began to spread.
He soon found the yellow gunk appearing on his hands, feet, and the crooks of his elbows. Obviously, things weren’t right, so he decided to seek medical attention.
The man went to a hospital in Tampa. After analyzing the lumps, the doctors quickly made their diagnosis.
The yellow stuff was cholesterol oozing through the man’s skin.
A cholesterol test showed the man had a cholesterol level higher than 1,000 mg/dL. For a reference point, the average healthy cholesterol level is 200 mg/dL.
Chock-full of Fat
The cardiologists at the Tampa hospital diagnosed the man with xanthelasma. This is a rare condition in which excess blood lipids seep from the veins and travel through the skin to form localized fat deposits.
Usually, if you have such high cholesterol the lipids ooze out of your blood vessels, they don’t reach the surface of your skin. That’s because your white blood cells typically gobble the fat up before that.
Xanthelasma typically appears in people with a family history of high cholesterol or poor immune system function. They may simply not have enough white blood cells to consume the excess fat.
In the Florida man’s case, however, the situation was the opposite. He had a perfectly normal number of white blood cells.
His system was just so full of fat that there was no way his white blood cells could consume it all.
Strangely, the medical report doesn’t state what recommendations the doctors made or how the man’s condition developed. However, the paper does state that his case “highlights … the importance of managing hypercholesterolemia to prevent complications.”
We’re reading between the lines that he got told to cut down on fat before his heart explodes.