RED MEAT AND BLACK COFFEE
Once again, I have engaged in some nutritional experimentation and wanted to share my approach and outcomes with you.
BACKGROUND INFO
On 6 Jan 2026, I returned from a New Year’s Disney Cruise vacation. Leading up to this vacation, I was in a gaining phase of training (my birthday is late October, and with Thanksgiving and Christmas soon after that, I leverage that timeframe for gaining/feasting), and the morning after my travels home I weighed in at 89.1kg: a gain of 6kg in 15 weeks. Now it was January, which is an excellent time to lose weight, because the WHOLE WORLD is doing it, so no one is going to question/judge you for doing so. But along with that, I had a strongman competition on 21 Feb to prep for, and the kind of training I do for that is the kind of training that DOESN’T require the excess food that gaining training requires, so I knew I was going to reduce my food intake.
It’s 29 Jan as I write this, and I weighed in this morning at 81.4kg. Now, already I’ll cop to the huckstering going on here: the 89.1kg weigh in is a post travel weigh in, and we all know that traveling bloats us and this morning’s weigh in was after a 90 minute ruck, so there’s a sweat element involved. HOWEVER, if my goal was to make weight for a weight class, none of that would matter, as all that counts is what the scale shows. But, along with that, my performance in training hasn’t suffered (and, in fact, I’ve continued to make steady progress) and I’ve achieved “non-scale victories” as well, primarily that latching the lever on my lifting belt is no longer a workout in and of itself and my clothes are fitting better. So with that, allow me to document the approach I employed, which I am referring to as “Red Meat and Black Coffee”…primarily because I love how well that syncs up.
PRINCIPLES
· Don’t get hungry. This isn’t white knuckling.
· When you eat, eat carnivore/animal. You’re going to need to maximize opportunities to get in protein, and being ketogenic/fat adapted will limit hunger.
· When you DON’T eat, allow yourself black coffee. Don’t add sweeteners/cream/butter/etc. This is fasting with an aid.
· Eat after lifting weights. Don’t eat after conditioning.
· 2 meals a day on non-fasting days, 1 meal a day on fasting days.
THE METHOD
Put very simple: twice per week, instead of breakfast, I have black coffee. And all my meals are carnivore.
But now let’s expand.
Prior to this, I’d settled into a pattern of eating 2 meals per day: a breakfast and a dinner. I still like that approach, so it’s the framework I operate within. Understanding that, it seemed logical that, if I did NOT eat one of those 2 meals, I’d be taking in less food, and the outcome would be weight loss.
Shocking, I know, but I’ll continue.
One of the things I like about a carnivore approach to nutrition is how satiating it is. When you eat ONLY animal products, you have limited opportunities to spike your blood sugar. This means you don’t experience the compensatory crash that coincides with the spike, which means you never get “hangry”. Hunger does eventually show up, but it’s a slow burn, in the background, easy to ignore unless it becomes dire. It sounds like how people describe GLP-1 agonists shutting off “food noise”. It makes any manner of fasting pretty easy, which is something I noticed on my travels during long flights.
Along with that, there is something of an “opening the floodgates” when it comes to eating. Once we START eating, we get a taste for it (pun unintended but whatever) and want to KEEP doing it. If we never really start the process, we just remain at baseline.
And then, along with all that, black coffee is a known appetite suppressant. Part of that is the caffeine content, but even decaf can have the effect. And since it’s winter, a warm beverage is honestly a treat, and can go very far to satisfy cravings for comfort that can be misinterpreted for needs for food. And much like pain medication, I don’t drink coffee when I feel hungry: I drink coffee before I feel hunger.
All this having been said, I want to make it ABSOLUTELY clear that at no point am I actually HUNGRY during this process. This is NOT about white knuckling my way through hunger to achieve a fast. I feel like that’s an unsustainable AND problematic approach to fat loss. This “works” because I’m able to reduce food intake WITHOUT actually ever being hungry. That’s the ideal fat loss solution.
THE HOW AND WHY
I’ve paired this nutritional approach with the Tactical Barbell Operator program, which, without going into too much detail, is 3 days per week of lifting. I train first thing in the morning, fasted. After the lifting workouts, I’ll have a post training breakfast, and then, about 10-12 hours after that, I’ll have a dinner. I’ll also have some protein before bed (more on that later).
During a standard workweek, this means I have 2 days where I DON’T lift weights first thing in the morning. On those days, I do conditioning workouts (a 90 minute ruck on Thursdays, and a fast/short high intensity conditioning workouts [HIC] on Tuesdays). On these days, I don’t have breakfast: I just have a black coffee (usually mixed with unflavored electrolytes).
From there, I try to limit myself to only 2 cups of coffee on lifting days and 3 cups on non-lifting days, primarily because I have an addictive personality and things can quickly get out of hand, but I honestly see no issue with drinking however much black coffee one wants so long as it’s not having consequences (primarily sleep impacts, but also digestive any otherwise).
Weekends, I allot for having a breakfast and a dinner (primarily because my wife is an absolute saint and will make breakfast for the whole family on both days), but if an opportunity presents where I can fast through one of those breakfasts (we all slept in and the day is getting away from us), I’ll just go with the black coffee. As far as training goes, for this particular experiment, I was doing the Crossfit WOD “Grace” on Saturdays, while Sunday was a down day (at most, getting in a long walk).
So we end up with effectively a 2-3 meal deficit over the course of the week. COULD that same end result be achieved by keeping the meals the same and simply eating less at them? Yes, of course…but I find that this requires willpower to be able to accomplish. One has to actually STOP eating, even though they are STILL hungry for more food. And, ultimately, I believe that a nutritional protocol that is reliant upon willpower is one that will ultimately fail, as willpower is a finite resource. And then, along with that, ONCE willpower fails, there is a compensatory counter-binge that occurs as a means for the body to “correct” what has been done to it through willpower. This is how/why people end up going on junkfood benders after sustained periods of intense dieting.
Instead, I am able to eat to satiety at all meals: I simply have fewer meals. Mark Bell has a good quote that “after you fast, you have to pretend like it never happened”, which is a cautionary tale to avoid gorging after fasting under the premise that you get to “eat back” all those calories you didn’t eat. This IS good advice, because it’s very easy to undo the caloric deficit of one skipped meal with a binge, BUT, this is where the “red meat” portion of the approach is helpful.
As previously stated: animal foods tend to be more satiating than others. Dr. Ted Naiman has discussed the notion of a protein threshold that compels us to hunger and that, upon reaching it, hunger fades. Yet we ALSO are all familiar with the concept of a “dessert stomach”, wherein, no matter HOW satiated we are, we tend to find room for desserts at the end of the meal. So by eliminating sweet/carby sources of nutrition and focusing purely on animal foods, we put ourselves in a position wherein, even eating just ONE meal a day, we can reach satiety BEFORE we put ourselves at risk of overconsuming. But let’s dig even deeper.
One of the concerns regarding eating only one meal per day, for someone interested in physical pursuits, is not getting in adequate amounts of protein. Well here’s another 1-2 punch: by ONLY eating animal foods at our one meal, we allow for the possibility of taking in a significant enough amount of protein to have a sufficient amount to ward off muscle sparing AND there is evidence that ketones THEMSELVES are muscle sparing. And given the nature of this diet (fasting mimicking AND fasting legitimately), there is a fair chance we will BE in a state of ketosis. Plus, those 2 meal days give us ample opportunity to REALLY overload on protein, which can carry the water on those days where we’re only having one meal. And on top of all this, one those 1 meal days, we can find ourselves a little hungrier come dinner time compared to the 2 meal days, so we may end up taking in even MORE protein than usual. Yes: this means we’re not achieving a FULL “2-3 meal deficit” if we’re eating like a 1.5 meal at the end of those 1 meal days…but we’re STILL achieving a deficit, because it’s quite challenging to eat 2 meals worth of food in the span of 1 meal. Yes: I’ve done it before…but it’s not something I can do EVERY day.
But, aside from that, I DO have a protein feeding before sleep as well. Some could classify that as a meal, and feel free to do so if that helps you understand the system, but this was initially a scoop of Metabolic Drive protein powder mixed in water, and has now become the same scoop of powder but mixed with 170g of full fat Greek yogurt/skyr. Stan Efferding’s “Vertical Diet 3.0” book (recently reviewed) convinced me on the value of bringing this back into my nutrition. This gets in a little extra protein AND gives the body something slow absorbing to work on while we sleep.
QUICK SUMMARY
Monday/Wednesday/Friday: Lift weights and eat 2 carnivore meals per day (post training and one other) along with one pre-bed protein feeding.
Tuesday/Thursday: Train conditioning and eat 1 carnivore meal per day along with one pre-bed protein feeding.
Saturday/Sunday: Short high intensity workout on Saturday, allow up to 2 meals on each day, but free to skip 1 meal on one day, still include pre-bed protein feeding.
On all days: allow for black coffee as a beverage.
