Maxine Pye

I do the opposite of almost everything the “experts” tell me. I eat eggs every day. I eat fatty red meat and bacon. I cook with real butter. I salt my food. I eat liver. I avoid seed oils. I don’t buy low fat products. I don’t count calories. I eat until I’m full. I don’t snack. And yes, my LDL cholesterol is high. Apparently that alone is supposed to terrify me. Never mind that my triglycerides are low. Or that my HDL is high. And my blood sugar is better than when I followed the “balanced diet” advice. One number goes up and suddenly I’m treated like a ticking time bomb. That logic makes less sense to me the deeper I look into cholesterol. LDL is not “bad cholesterol.” Your body literally makes cholesterol on purpose. It uses LDL to transport energy, hormones, fat soluble nutrients and repair materials around the body. When you eat low carb and burn more fat for fuel, lipid transport changes. Of course it does. But instead of asking why LDL changed, the entire conversation becomes fear. Statin. Low fat diet. Eat the carbs. Avoid the red meat. Meanwhile people following the official advice are more overweight, more diabetic, more inflamed and more medicated than ever before. That should raise more questions than my LDL number. I genuinely think the cholesterol story people were given is one of the biggest health scares ever sold to the public. Have you had your LDL and triglycerides checked lately?

“Aren’t you hungry all the time if you only eat one meal a day?” No. Because I eat real food. Enough protein. Enough fat. Enough nutrients. That is why I’m not thinking about snacks all day. People eat cereal, toast, fruit, smoothies, and then wonder why they are hungry again two hours later. Because that food does not satisfy you. It keeps you coming back for more. When I eat steak, eggs, liver, butter, ground beef, bacon, I am full. You say boring. I say simple. I do not spend the whole day fighting cravings. I do not need to graze every five minutes. I eat, and then I get on with my life. That is what happens when your meal actually feeds you. Who else eats this way and stays full for hours?”

Your body can make glucose. Your body can make cholesterol. Your body can make fat. Your body cannot make protein. Yet protein gets blamed the most.

@Jaywestco Mostly water when thirsty and one decaf coffee.

@LiveAncestral Curious what do you drink in an average day?

I think the whole calories in, calories out idea is a scam created by the diet food industry. I don’t know how many calories are in this meal because it doesn’t have a label, a barcode, or a list of 100 ingredients. It’s just beef, fat, salt and gelatin. My body knows when it has enough nutrients. It doesn’t need to count anything. If I’m hungry still hungry, I’ll eat. If I’m not, I won’t. And with calories out, I’m not trying to count how many calories I’m burning either. We should just be moving more. Walking, stretching, lifting heavy things. That’s it. Humans somehow managed that for a very long time before food turned into maths homework.

Pasture raised eggs are the original convenient food. Real food. Nutrient dense. People are scared of them because they've been told cholesterol is dangerous. Meanwhile the same people eat ultra-processed rubbish without questioning it.

Apparently my one meal a day on carnivore is “a boring existence.” You know what is actually boring? Sitting in the emergency room for 12 hours in pain. Not being able to leave the house because of gut issues. Planning your day around where the nearest toilet is. Feeling good is not boring. It’s freedom. If you need food for excitement, your life must be very dull.

If red meat causes heart disease… Why did heart disease explode after we replaced butter with industrial oils, started eating all day, and filled supermarkets with ultra processed food?

There is no such thing as a healthy carbohydrate. There is only carbohydrate your body has to manage. Oats. Brown rice. Sweet potato. Wholegrain bread. These are held up as the foundation of a healthy diet. Slow release. High fibre. Good for your gut. Essential for energy. Yet every single one breaks down into glucose. Some raise blood sugar faster than others. Some come packaged with more fibre and nutrients. But the body still has to deal with the glucose. Your body does not have a healthy carb pathway and an unhealthy carb pathway. Glucose enters the blood. Insulin rises. The body moves that glucose somewhere. Do that all day, every day, for years, and eventually a lot of people stop handling it well. That is the bit everyone wants to skip. The glycaemic index made people think slower meant harmless. It does not. Slow release carbohydrate still means a longer insulin demand. And no, carbohydrates are not essential. Your liver produces the glucose your body needs from protein and fat. No dietary carbohydrate required. So maybe the better question is not, “Is this a healthy carb?” Maybe it is, “How much glucose am I asking my body to manage today?” What healthy carbohydrates were you told to eat more of?

I was told eating eggs every day would destroy my health. I’ve been hearing that for decades. Still waiting.

Calories are a funny thing. A calorie is a unit of heat. Humans are not ovens. Calories are a funny thing. A calorie is a unit of heat. Humans are not ovens. If calories were all that mattered, 500 calories of steak and 500 calories of donuts would produce identical results. Do you believe they do?

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Eggs are one of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet. Yet people still remove the yolk because they’re worried about cholesterol. Imagine throwing away the most nutritious part of the food because of a headline from the 1980s. Do you eat the whole egg or just the whites?

I wish I knew at 18 what I know now. Back then I genuinely thought I was being “healthy”. Low fat yoghurt. Orange juice with vodka. Five portions of veg because that’s what you’re told to do. Avoiding saturated fat like it was dangerous. Thinking sugar was “quick energy”. No one tells you to question any of it. You just copy what everyone else is doing Years later you realise something strange. The foods we were told to fear were the foods humans ate for most of history. Red meat. Animal fat. Simple meals. And the things sold as modern “healthy choices” were mostly packaged food with good marketing. If I could sit down with my 18 year old self for five minutes, we’d be having a very different conversation about food. What food advice do you wish you had questioned sooner?

Day 2. CGM update. At 11:40 I had coffee with cream and collagen peptides. Nothing else. I had not eaten since the day before. My glucose dropped to 3.1 mmol/L. I did not eat. I did not panic. I simply watched what happened next. By 12:22 it was back up to 5.9 mmol/L without any food. No shakiness. No brain fog. No hunger. No symptoms throughout. Most people spike after coffee. Caffeine triggers cortisol, cortisol signals the liver to release glucose, and blood sugar rises. Mine went the other way first. That initial dip is what happens when insulin is chronically low and your body is already running on fat. No glucose flood waiting to be released. Just a quiet drop as the body settled into its fasted state. Then came the correction. Whether the rise back to 5.9 was the liver responding to the low glucose or a delayed cortisol response to the caffeine, my body handled it completely on its own. No food. No intervention. This is gluconeogenesis. The liver producing glucose from protein and fat and releasing it when the body needs it. Automatically. Intelligently. No breakfast required. Many people never get to see this happen because they are eating every few hours. Their body never gets the opportunity to self regulate. If your body can regulate blood sugar without food, without carbohydrates, without breakfast, what exactly has the last 40 years of dietary advice been protecting you from?

There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There are essential fats. There are essential amino acids. There is no essential carbohydrate. Your body can make glucose when it needs it. That is why people can survive for months eating almost no carbohydrate at all. The argument was settled by physiology decades ago. You can choose to eat carbohydrates. You can enjoy carbohydrates. You can thrive with carbohydrates. But essential and optional are not the same thing. If carbohydrates were essential, low-carb populations would have disappeared a very long time ago. Why do you think this fact still upsets so many people?

@Andrew_Smales Looks good I don’t drink any oat milk it’s my son. But now he’s gonna get milk

@LiveAncestral People are nuts. THIS is milk. THAT is UPF crap. Tastes like it too. Preferably non homogenised

I always find it interesting when a product is sold as being made from oats, but then needs oil added to make it feel more like milk. This organic Oatly now contains: Water. Oats. Rapeseed oil. Sea salt. The rapeseed oil wasn’t added because oats naturally contain it. It was added because oat drink on its own is thin and watery. The oil helps create the creamy texture people expect from milk. Meanwhile, whole milk is still just… milk. No added oils. No ingredient list to improve the texture. No need to engineer it into something it isn’t. If you prefer oat drink, that’s your choice. I just find it strange that we’ve reached a point where a food made from one ingredient is criticised for being “processed”, while a product made from oats and added oil is marketed as the healthier option. Which would you choose? Whole milk or oat drink?

Your body makes cholesterol. Every single day. Even if you never eat an egg again. Even if you never touch red meat. Even if you live on salad. The human body does not manufacture dangerous substances by accident. Cholesterol is used to build hormones. Cell membranes. Vitamin D. Bile acids. Your brain is packed with it. Yet somehow people have been convinced that a substance their body works hard to make is the enemy. That never sounded right to me. What changed your view on cholesterol, if anything?

People get strangely angry when I question the calorie model. I’ve spent years studying nutrition and functional medicine, so this is coming from education, not ignorance. Energy matters. Nobody is denying that. But you do not eat calories. You eat food. You do not literally burn calories. Your body processes food. That is why 2000 calories of steak, eggs, and butter eaten once or twice a day does not act the same as 2000 calories of cereal, toast, muffins, and biscuits eaten six times a day. Every time you eat, insulin goes up. Six meals, six insulin spikes. One or two meals, far fewer. That matters. Protein also takes more energy to digest. It fills you up more. You eat less without fighting yourself all day. Human biology is regulated by hormones, appetite signals, digestion, and food quality, not just arithmetic. So calorie counting “works” because you are eating less food. That is it. You are attaching a number to food and using that number to control how much food you eat. The number did not do anything. The food did. Then people stop counting, eat more food again, and put the weight back on. If calories were all that mattered, six sugary meals would do the same thing as one or two meals of eggs and steak. They do not. That is the part people do not want to admit.

LDL gets all the attention. Triglycerides quietly tell a much bigger story. High triglycerides often mean your body is struggling to deal with excess energy. Low triglycerides often mean the opposite. Yet millions of people know their LDL and have never even looked at their triglycerides. That is like judging a football match by one player. One number. One snapshot. One tiny piece of a much bigger picture. When was the last time you checked your triglycerides?