I’ve mostly come to hold in disdain what has become of what was once a great and cool gig.

Harken back to the latter 2010s. For me, it was 2007/8, when I discovered this new dietary approach. People were calling it “Paleo.” Or, “Evolutionary Fitness” in the parlance of the late Art De Vany.

There is a prerequisite post here: Making Full-Fat Ground Beef Your Diet Foundation. I also did a short video intro, which may turn you on to the post, or dissuade you. Do as you like.

The Paleo Devolution

Back in those days, I was excited as hell because I’d stumbled onto something that actually worked—people were genuinely enthusiastic about it. The whole idea was dead simple: we evolved eating certain foods, so let’s just keep eating those foods. But that’s not how a typical day in my life turned out. Even though I knew exactly what to source and what ingredients to use, I was still locked into this notion of elaborate food preparation.

Then there were all the people. Paleo was a big tent, and it included ancestral types, low-carbers, pastoralists, the preserving crowd, nose-to-tail enthusiasts, and all the rest. Each group brought something worthwhile to the table. But over time it just devolved into more and more complexity—obsessing over sourcing, nitpicking tiny details that don’t mean squat in the big picture.

Contrast that with where I am today. I’ve settled on a staple food after years of trying shit, and it’s solid. It’s not grains, rice, bread, pasta, beans, or potatoes. It’s full-fat ground beef—20 percent fat minimum, your basic 80/20, though 70/30 works fine too. You’re basically replicating the fat content of ribs, which are nice and fatty, and I can tell you the fat makes a real feel-good difference.

My thesis after all these years is straightforward: one reason I started losing interest is that I got tired of the increasing complexity, the mounting time investment, and the general obsession with every last variable. You ought to be able to get up, eat what you eat, and get on with your day. If the theory is fun, elegant, sound, and simple, then the practice damn well ought to be too.

When I look back on it all from 2026 to 2007 and 2008, I recall that I wasn’t looking for something simple so much as I was looking for something that worked. In terms of the Paleo thing, it just made real, simple sense in theory. I was smart enough to understand that the obesity problem was never a thing—never a problem—until the last few decades, so it cannot be because of any particular food you find in nature. It just can’t be. And I think most of the Paleo people had a good bead on that. It made sense to them, and they were pretty smart about it.

But then something different happened. All of a sudden, as the popularity of Paleo grew and you had these people come in—influencers or whatever—and then all of a sudden there were superfoods, there were adaptogens, there were twelve-dollar-a-pound ribeye steaks, grass-fed and finished. There were complicated elimination protocols. There was a ton of expensive testing—go get yourself blood-tested for this and that and everything. And then there were the endless recipe books. Because I was an influencer, I was getting recipe books almost daily by post, to the point where I just stopped. I loaded up my car and took them all to a used bookstore. It was hundreds of books. I don’t think I read any of them. Maybe one or two—I did a review on one or two of them—but everyone was doing recipe books for Paleo.

Then there were the conferences, the supplements, and the meal kits where you could order “Paleo stuff” and have it delivered. Don’t forget the Paleo brownies and cookies. And this was in the context of influencers pushing perfection. You know, you gotta watch everything so your diet, what you eat, is like your entire life. You get up in the morning, right? Maybe you have a job. All you can think about is “What do I have to eat today and how do I eat it? What do I have to avoid as toxic and poison?” It wasn’t about eating real food, like evolutionary food anymore and thriving on that basis. It became more of a play-the-game status thing, endless complication: check this, check that, optimize this, optimize that—in short, a hamster wheel.

This happens to every diet movement. And when I got involved with this new approach I’m talking about now, I said, “Finally—something that is so grounded.” We don’t have to deal; we will not have to deal with that because it’s just evolutionary food, like food out in nature, like eating them.

But nope, no—gotta make big profits.

No.

Radical Simplicity

We’re here; we exist as human beings. But life was hard going back many thousands—even millions—of years, if you count our primate ancestors. What you needed was basic. Depending on what you were equipped with in terms of natural tools—claws, teeth, cunning, and later hominid tool-making like spears—you always knew what you needed. That part was simple. The hard part was getting it.

Now, in our current state, that’s been reversed. We still know what’s simple, and we even have the means to make acquiring what we need straightforward. But is that what we do? No. We complicate the fucking shit out of everything. We obsess over every detail.

There are a million examples, especially in the Paleo world, and I’m sorry to say it, but it’s particularly bad among the women. Their hypochondria level is off the scale. When I had hundreds of comments pouring in on this blog, it was typically women agonizing over every fucking little thing. It was amazing, and it eventually killed my enthusiasm and spirit for the whole thing—almost as much as all the opportunists trying to make a buck off everything that was going on.

Human bodies are remarkably adaptive. We thrived on whatever seasonal food was available, eating the same damn things repetitively for millennia. You might think that’s monotony, but it isn’t boredom. Monotony is stability.

This new approach I’m on is quite different from anything I’ve tried before. It never occurred to me that steaks, ribeye, fillets, and short ribs could serve as staple foods. Those cuts are simply too different from one another to function like real staples, plus they are expensive and require a lot of care for good preparation. Staples are things like bread, potatoes, grains, and rice—foods you can actually eat every single day as part of nearly every meal. Making an animal product work that way seemed impossible way back when—in fact, I didn’t even think about it. Turns out it works very well.

I’m getting a daily delivery of consistent fat and protein in a practical ratio. It’s affordable, highly satiating, and functions exactly like a staple food you eat every day. I never get tired of the ground beef burgers—20% fat, cooked in a pan so I capture and use all that fat. I’m not a big advocate of adding fat to things, but this is different. I’m using the whole protein and the whole fat, and it’s been an epiphany for me over these last weeks.

I don’t tire of it the way I do with steaks. I eat the burgers roughly half-and-half with eggs cooked various ways or beans, always with plain yogurt dusted with cayenne pepper. That’s a separate matter. The core point is that it’s highly nutritious, packed with micronutrients. Remember, this isn’t steak—it’s ground, so you’re getting all the connective tissue and everything else that comes with it. Digestion is excellent. I have zero issues with the minimal additions like eggs, yogurt, and beans.

Just go buy some and try it. There’s a video below showing exactly how I put a full meal together. I don’t keep my refrigerator stocked because I don’t need to. I buy the meat, move it from freezer to fridge to room temperature, and cook it. More importantly, there’s a strong psychological benefit here. I know what I’m going to eat, I know it sits well, and I’m not merely fine—I’m better for it. I don’t agonize over food. I keep it simple, and there are no endless worries or even thoughts anymore. I’m not here to drown you in reams of nutritional data, but I’ve looked into it, and I’m getting everything I need.

The Practicalities

OK, so now let’s dive into the practical side of eating. It’s important to keep in mind that almost all human populations and cultures have what are called staple foods. These are the things that form the base of their diets—the foods they eat every single day, often with every meal. We’re talking about bread, rice, beans, and the like. You never hear someone ask, “Don’t you get tired of bread?” or “Don’t you get tired of rice?” or “Don’t you get tired of beans?” People just eat them and never really get tired of them. But nutritionally, they’re awful—pretty poor stuff.

I was lucky in that sense. Bread might have been something of a staple, but almost every morning—six or seven times a week—breakfast was bacon and eggs and toast (and milk). Every once in a while my mom would declare it a cereal day or an oatmeal day, but that was rare. Sometimes she’d also fry up some potatoes to go with the bacon and eggs. That’s what I grew up on. But plenty of people eat boxed cereal or oatmeal, or in the case of the Swiss, muesli—which I happen to like because it has nuts and dried fruit in it, so it’s not bad.

What I’m getting at is this: wrap your mind around making something immensely more nutritious your dietary staple, and things pretty much take care of themselves. You’ll be satisfied, you’ll be getting solid nutrition, and it has to be something you can eat every day without whining that it’s boring or monotonous. A lot of carnivore types fall into this trap. If you’re eating steaks every day, it gets old fast. You’re typically just eating muscle meat, trimming off the fat, and ignoring the connective tissue. That’s why ground beef is beautiful—it puts all of that in the same package in a very palatable, tasty way.

None of this means you can’t enjoy a nice steak now and then, or a steak and lobster, or a big fillet of salmon or tuna or other seafood. I do that too. But the real question is, what’s your daily go-to? What do you put on your plate every single day?

OK, so let’s get into a demonstration. I put together a short seven-minute video that takes you from start to finish cooking these burgers, and I covered most of this already in the vid. Right now I’m running two variations. Every meal includes two 150-gram patties for a total of 300 grams. Sometimes I do one meal a day, sometimes two—it just depends on how hungry I am.

The burgers come with either eggs or baked beans. One day it’s typically scrambled eggs or an omelette, occasionally fried, though I’m liking the scrambled or omelette versions best these days. The other option is baked beans (I’m going to try other beans too). The yogurt selection is pretty limited here in Thailand, so I grab a plain, creamy, low-fat version that’s higher in protein. It’s tasty, nice and sour, and I always dust it with cayenne pepper. That’s my little kick for everything.

So it’s the two patties plus either eggs or baked beans. I’ll usually go with two or three eggs. And here’s the important part: I want to use all the fat. I don’t do the neat little grill thing where the fat runs off and flames up and makes everything pretty. I get it—that’s tasty—but I want to actually utilize the fat that’s in the meat. For the last few weeks, I’ve been heating up the beans right in that fat and mixing it in, or doing the same with the eggs. Either one works great. Having that fat incorporated in a palatable way has made a huge difference in how I feel. And it’s not like I’m adding extra fat—I’m just using what’s already in the ground beef, which is right in line with something like ribs. Nothing crazy.

Two really important rules for cooking these burgers. Number one: create a little well in the middle of each patty before you cook it. Just press your thumb down to make an indentation so it doesn’t plump up like a meatball. Number two, and this is even more critical: never, ever squeeze the burger with a spatula, a weight, or anything else. That just pushes all the juice and fat right out. It’s the worst thing you can do. The stupidest fucking thing you can do. Restaurants do it all the time, and I’ve had to tell cooks straight up—don’t fucking squeeze the burger with your spatula, you fucking idiot.

Now let’s get into the demonstration.

Here’s an example of what the “with eggs” version looks like.

More Lessons?

Have I stumbled onto something here that has much broader implications than just a simplifying diet? The simple theory and the simple practice ought to remain just that—simple—rather than an exercise in ever-increasing complication. Let’s face it, the increasing complication exists for one reason only: so people can market it to you and make more money. That’s it. One hundred percent. It’s about making money off you when it ought to be dead simple.

Let’s think about some other examples. The first thing that came to mind was running and running shoes. Cast your mind back, if you’re as old as I am and grew up in the ’60s and ’70s. Back then, until the mid-’70s or so, if you wanted to go running or jogging you just put on what we called sneakers or tennis shoes. There wasn’t much variety, and you know what? You could run. You could jog. You could get it done just fine if that was what you wanted to do.

Then Nike came along with their waffle sole thing and said, “Hey, let’s put this on the bottom of shoes.” At first even that was fine, but then it was, “Okay, well let’s add this gimmick and that gimmick and this gimmick. Oh, and let’s pump air in them.” Every last bit of it tacked another twenty bucks onto the price until a ten-dollar shoe became a hundred-dollar shoe. Who’s making that money? Do you see what I’m getting at? Complexity is driven by entrepreneurs and marketers, and most of it is complete bullshit.

The whole corporate world is the same game. Everything is “new and improved.” Fuck that. Give me a detergent that dissolves in water and actually washes my clothes. I don’t give a damn about your endless loop of “new and improved, new and improved” that rolls on forever. Same with audio equipment back in the day. Plenty of guys blew thousands—even back then—on stereo components and speakers that didn’t deliver any real, discernible improvement in sound quality. It was just more and better for the sake of selling more and better.

Women get the same treatment when they shop: constantly upsold with “this is better, it’s only five dollars more, only ten dollars more, only twenty dollars more,” and at the end of the day it amounts to fucking nothing. What you need is functional, simple shit. Let the marketers go hungry. I’d like to see a society where people just laugh at these fucks, then go about their simple business, get on with their lives, and stop giving a damn.

Finally…

It’s time to wrap this up. The main thrust of everything I’ve been saying is pretty straightforward, even if it seems novel at first glance. On the one hand, none of this is breaking new ground if you’ve already been playing around with carnivore-style eating. But it is different, because I don’t see most carnivore folks taking the next logical step. They don’t treat a single animal-based food as a true staple—the everyday foundation that bread, rice, or beans serve for so many people. A staple you reach for daily, mix with other things, and don’t overthink. That’s the beauty of it: massive savings in time, money, and mental effort. I’m sure that some do…but then again, they’re just eating muscle meat.

What I’m offering is exactly that simplicity, but with ground beef—80/20—as your foundation. Eat it every single day, just as you would bread, rice, or beans, and you get magnitudes more nutrition in return. There’s no comparison. That’s the message I’m driving home.

This all goes back to the simple theory of evolutionary eating that’s been sidetracked and hijacked by marketers who want to complicate everything. Now you’ve got people obsessing daily over toxins, this antinutrient, that antinutrient, blah blah blah. Fuck that. Just get some ground beef and eat it, you idiots. We’re simplifying here. Radically. But don’t take my word for it—try it yourself. Make that 80/20 ground beef your staple the same way you’d use bread. Incorporate it with whatever you like. I mostly go with eggs and beans to soak up the fat that oozes out of the ground beef; figure out what works for you. Just make sure you get the fat in; otherwise, there’s no point in skimping and adding other fats on the side.

I’ve been happier and more steady with this approach. Even after that electrolyte crash a few weeks back, I feel better than ever. I pound the ground beef every day, but only when I’m actually hungry. I keep enough on hand for up to 600 grams if I need it—that’s more than a pound—but most days it’s 300 to 450 grams in those 150-gram patties. Some days I skip it entirely and eat other things, just not much of them.

This is what Free the Animal has always been about, at least since I started writing on diet years ago. I like making money as much as the next guy—I’ve run a member blog for a while now—but I refuse to go the route of sponsorships, advertising, and affiliate deals. If you want to pay for something here, pay for it directly. But look around the world, whether it’s diet, politics, or anything else: everyone’s trying to complicate shit to capture your attention and keep you hooked. It’s utter bullshit.