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?

You are not hungry because you lack willpower. You are hungry because insulin is high, leptin is not being heard, and ghrelin is running the show. Fix the hormones. The hunger resolves. A meal that keeps you full for six hours is not a trick. It is protein and fat doing exactly what they are supposed to do. A meal that leaves you hungry two hours later is also not a trick. It is your biology telling you something went wrong.

I’m ready for another “unhealthy” meal high in saturated fat and cholesterol. But apparently I’m doing it all wrong so don’t do what I do. You should follow the “experts”

You do not have a fiber deficiency. You have a processed food excess. The answer to poor digestion is not more roughage. It is less damage. Fiber feeds gut bacteria. So does resistant starch. So does collagen. So does eating real food. The idea that a bran muffin is your microbiome’s best friend is marketing dressed as science.

“Statins turn soft plaque into hard plaque.” Serious question… If soft plaque is potentially the more reversible form of plaque, why are we celebrating turning it into something that is much harder to reverse? This is where the conversation gets interesting. Soft plaque is often described as unstable. Hard plaque is often described as stable. So the argument is that a hardened plaque is less likely to rupture. Fair enough. But the plaque is still there. It hasn’t left the artery. It has changed form. The question nobody seems to ask is this: If soft plaque can sometimes regress when the underlying conditions improve, shouldn’t that at least be part of the conversation? Why aren’t we talking more about what caused the plaque to form in the first place? Insulin resistance. Blood pressure. Blood sugar. Smoking. Inflammation. Metabolic health. Sleep. Stress. Instead, the conversation often begins and ends with LDL. I’m not interested in winning an argument. I’m interested in understanding why the plaque formed in the first place. What do you think is the better goal: Stabilise the plaque? Or address the conditions that allowed it to develop?

Vegetable oil is not made from vegetables. It is an industrial extract, processed at high heat with chemical solvents, that did not exist in the human diet until the twentieth century. We were told it was heart healthy. We got sicker. Your body cannot use linoleic acid the way it uses saturated fat. It oxidises easily, drives inflammation, and embeds itself into your cell membranes for years..

So this week it’s gone from insults to death wishes. People are literally wishing cancer on me. Who does that? Over food. Take a second and look at yourself. Wishing someone gets cancer “because they deserve it” Because you don’t like what they eat… And you call yourself a human? Nah. No amount of name calling is ever going to bother me. You’re not in my real life. You’re just a troll with internet fingers. Now excuse me while I go and eat another ribeye.

I use red light therapy for one reason. Energy… Cellular energy. It works on the mitochondria, the part of your cells that makes energy. Certain wavelengths help them produce more ATP, which is basically your body’s fuel. More fuel, better recovery, better skin, better output. Simple. So I do that first. Then steak and eggs.

Every gram of sugar you eat binds to proteins in your body. That process is called glycation. It ages your tissues, stiffens your arteries, and clouds the lens of your eye. Your cereal did not mention that on the box. High blood sugar is not just a diabetic problem. It is a slow, consistent form of tissue damage that most people are accumulating three times a day.

Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Nobody checks how much sugar is burning through your arteries. Glycation is what happens when glucose attaches to proteins and fats in your body and damages them. It is the same process that browns and stiffens food when you cook it at high heat. It is happening inside your blood vessels every time your blood sugar spikes. The damage is cumulative. Every spike leaves a mark. Over years, those marks stiffen arterial walls, accelerate plaque formation, and drive chronic inflammation in the cardiovascular system. HbA1c measures this. It tells you how much glycation has occurred on your red blood cells over the past three months. Your doctor may have ordered it. Most people are never told what it means or why it matters more than their LDL number. The foods that spike blood sugar fastest are the ones we were told to eat more of. Bread. Pasta. Cereal. Low-fat everything. Saturated fat does not glycate. Protein does not glycate. Glucose does. I have eaten no grains, no sugar, and minimal carbohydrates for years. My HbA1c sits at the low end of optimal. My arteries are not caramelising. Yours do not have to be either. What does your HbA1c say?

Humans have been eating red meat for two million years. Processed seed oil foods have existed for about eighty. We are blaming the wrong food. The most nutrient-dense food on the planet has no ingredient list. It has no health claims on the packaging. It does not need them.

I didn’t cut sugar because of “calories”. I cut it because I went carnivore. I noticed how much so called healthy food is just sugar with fancy packaging. The yogurts, the sauces, the snack bars, the drinks, all of it. Slap “high protein” or “low fat” on the front and people act like it belongs in a health shop instead of a bin. People are still obsessing over calorie numbers while the food industry is busy making ultra processed rubbish look normal. Carnivore was the real switch for me. No bloating, with a flatter stomach. I am full for longer without hunger. I have more energy, and a clearer head. So when people turn it into a calories argument, I already know we’re not talking about the same thing. A lot of people are not eating because they’re hungry. They’re eating because food companies got better at marketing than people got at thinking. Do you still think it’s about calories?

Your LDL went up on a low carb diet. Your doctor panicked. Nobody asked why your triglycerides dropped, your HDL rose, and your blood pressure normalised. The number went up. The picture got better. Those are not the same thing. LDL is not a disease. It is a transport molecule. Treating it like a problem to be eliminated is like blaming the ambulance for the accident.

Statins lower LDL. They do not remove plaque. Arterial calcification is not a cholesterol problem. It is a metabolic signalling problem. Calcium ends up in the arterial lining because something drove it there. Lowering a number on a blood panel does not address what caused the calcium to deposit in the first place. The real drivers are almost never discussed in a standard consultation. Chronic insulin resistance creating ongoing arterial inflammation. Vitamin K2 deficiency, the nutrient responsible for directing calcium into bones and away from soft tissue. Magnesium deficiency, which impairs over 300 enzymatic processes including those that regulate vascular tone. Poor nitric oxide production, which means arteries cannot dilate properly and inflammation cannot resolve. None of these show up on a standard lipid panel. That panel measures total cholesterol, LDL, HDL, and triglycerides. It tells you almost nothing about the conditions that drive calcification. What reverses this process is fixing what caused it. Not a statin. Removing the foods that drive blood sugar spikes and insulin resistance. Restoring K2 and magnesium. Reducing the inflammatory load. Building the metabolic flexibility that allows the body to heal. The body does not calcify arteries randomly. It does so in response to chronic injury and metabolic dysfunction. Remove the injury and the dysfunction and further deposition stops. The conditions that drove the damage are gone. The body can begin to stabilise and heal. That is not an alternative theory. That is the physiology. What did your doctor tell you when they found calcification or high cholesterol? Did they explain what caused it?

This was me before I changed my food choices. People love to criticise them now, but they did not see me before. The gut issues, the pain, the weakness, the constant infections, planning my life around toilets, barely being able to leave the house, and wondering why I was always sick while eating the way I was told was “healthy.” In and out of hospital, and still being given the same advice. Low fat. More fibre. More fruit and vegetables. I tried vegetarian. I tried vegan. I ate more plants, more fibre, more pulses, more green juice, less fat, and I got worse. Not better. So when people tell me I need fibre or that I need vegetables, I just laugh, because they are repeating the same script that made my life hell. The more of that food I ate, the more pain I had. The more I followed the advice, the sicker I became. I know I still have healing to do. I still deal with joint and tendon pain. And I fast because I know years of damage do not disappear overnight. So unless you have lived in my body and gone through what I went through, you do not get to tell me what I need to eat. The carnivore diet was the turning point for me. Share if you think this can help others

Your mitochondria are failing faster than they should. Not because of age. Because of insulin. Every cell in your body runs on ATP. Mitochondria make it. When they break down, everything breaks down. Energy. Brain. Heart. Hormones. All of it. Chronic high insulin activates mTOR. mTOR switches off autophagy. Autophagy is the system that clears damaged mitochondria. Switch it off long enough and damaged mitochondria accumulate. Energy production falls. Oxidative stress rises. Inflammation follows. This is documented cell biology. Not fringe. Not debate. Standard bloodwork does not measure this. Your thyroid panel will not catch it. Neither will your cholesterol numbers. You can have every test come back normal and still be running on a fraction of the cellular energy you should have. The fix is not a drug. It is not a supplement stack. Lower the carbohydrate load. Lower insulin. Let mTOR release. Let mitophagy run. Feed your mitochondria fat and ketones, which produce fewer reactive oxygen species than glucose does. That is the mechanism. The dietary guidelines leave it completely intact. Your fatigue is not normal. Your brain fog is not ageing. Your body is telling you the fuel is wrong. Change the fuel.

This is maintenance for me. Chronically high cortisol is as damaging to your metabolic health as bad food. It raises blood sugar, drives fat storage, and suppresses every repair process your body runs overnight. Most people clean up their plate and wreck everything else. Sun on skin drives vitamin D synthesis and sets your circadian rhythm. Hands working through muscle tissue lowers cortisol and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the state where your body actually heals. I eat well. I sleep. I get sun. I manage stress like the biological variable it is. Your nervous system does not know the difference between a work deadline and a predator. The hormonal response is identical. The difference is you can choose to interrupt it.

Cholesterol fear has turned a lot of people into lifelong customers. Now people hear one “high” number and start panicking. But no one tells you that your body makes cholesterol on purpose. Every day. Because it needs it. For hormones. For vitamin D. For bile. For building and repairing cells. So why are people talking about it like it is poison? Because fear is easier to sell than context. LDL and HDL are not “good cholesterol” and “bad cholesterol.” They are carriers. LDL carries cholesterol out to the body. HDL helps carry some back. That is it. But instead of explaining that simply, people get the fear version. Your cholesterol is high. Be worried. Take this. Meanwhile nobody asks what the rest of the picture looks like. What are your triglycerides? What is your insulin doing? What does your diet look like? Are you eating ultra processed food and sugar while blaming eggs? That is why so many people are confused. Not because cholesterol is too complicated. Because the message around it has been dumbed down so badly that people now fear something their body literally makes to keep them alive. Were you ever actually told what cholesterol does?

Every cut in that counter contains something a plant cannot give you. Animal protein delivers all nine essential amino acids in the exact ratio your body uses to build and repair tissue. Plant protein does not. The digestibility score is around 93% for animal protein versus 80% or lower for most plant sources. That gap matters when you are talking about muscle, immune function, and cellular repair. But protein is only part of it. Taurine, creatine, and carnosine are absent from plants entirely. Not low. Absent. These compounds support brain function, muscle energy, cardiovascular health, and antioxidant defence. Your body can synthesise small amounts of some of them, but dietary intake from animal food is how you actually maintain meaningful levels. Then there are the fat soluble vitamins. A, D, K2, and E require dietary fat to absorb. They are either absent from plants or present in forms the body cannot convert reliably. Retinol only exists in animal food. Beta carotene from plants converts to retinol poorly and inconsistently in most people. Zinc and iron from animal sources are absorbed at a significantly higher rate than from plant sources, where phytates block absorption. This is not ideology. This is basic nutritional biochemistry. This counter is not just food. It is the most nutrient dense thing you can put in a human body, in the forms that human biology was built to use. What cut do you eat most?

Cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease. It shows up where there’s damage. Like a firefighter at a fire. It’s responding, not causing. The real drivers are chronically high blood sugar, seed oils, refined carbohydrates, and inflammation. These damage the artery wall. Cholesterol arrives to repair it. We’ve been testing the wrong number for 70 years. A single LDL reading tells you almost nothing. What matters is your triglycerides, your fasting insulin, and whether you have actual arterial damage showing on a calcium score. Real food, stable blood sugar, and no seed oils will do more for your heart than worrying about a number on a blood test. What does your doctor actually test when you go in?

People are trained to fear LDL. Almost nobody is told to pay attention to triglycerides. LDL became the headline number. The scary one. The one everyone knows. The one linked to a prescription. But we are up against years of “trust the science” dogma. For some people, cholesterol has become almost like a religion, especially among vegans, because a vegan diet often lowers cholesterol. So they put that on a pedestal and say, “See, LDL is bad, but we found a way to fix it.” And the medical system wants you hyper focused on cholesterol. But the truth is that triglycerides are more reactive to oxygen than cholesterol. When people lower LDL with statins, they can still have residual cardiovascular risk. That raises an important question about whether triglycerides are being overlooked. High triglycerides are a much more important number. They can be a sign that too much fuel is being left in the blood. That is linked to fatty buildup in the arteries, a higher risk of heart attack and stroke, and if they get very high, even pancreatitis. Just like other animals, humans are mostly made up of saturated fats. And animal fats are optimal for human health. And that is why following a carnivore diet works.