Last August, a before-and-after weight loss photo appeared on Instagram. A bearded man, with a gleam in his eyes and a joyful smile, was enjoying life after losing 270 pounds (122 kilograms) in 17 months.
His new look, starkly contrasting with his previous despair-filled eyes, morbidly obese face, and oxygen tube in his nose, depicted a contrast between near death and a healthy life.
He credited a simple, primal diet for saving him.
“Meat Transformations” filled his entire page on Instagram. Piles of marbled red meat chunks on cutting boards, more before-and-after photos, and advertisements mocking globalists and vegetarians.
After shedding off 200 pounds, he could walk normally again, no longer needing oxygen or medication. The man in the photos is Todd Bockness, a 41-year-old from Bozeman, Montana. His doctor was surprised by his severe vision decline due to insulin resistance, which miraculously improved.
Most doctors didn’t approve of him making meat his sole food source. One even said he was shocked by Bockness’s eyesight, which severely worsened due to insulin resistance.
Others were less enthusiastic about his dietary plan.
“My doctor wasn’t happy. He wasn’t impressed. He just said, ‘Oh, I’m concerned about your diet.’ That was the first time he mentioned my diet, at a time when I had an oxygen tube, weighing over 700 pounds,” Bockness said, “Now, I can breathe on my own, walk on my own, and he’s concerned about my diet.”
Mr. Bockness survived on soda. His parents homeschooled him until high school, and they were poor, often skipping breakfast and lunch, opting for soda as a cheap energy source. At night, they would have a hearty dinner mainly composed of carbohydrates: bread, pizza, and cheap noodles.
His mother suffered from diabetes. His exposure to gluten in the womb caused symptoms of insulin resistance and excessive obesity from birth. Contrary to logic, his size (600 pounds at age 14) didn’t hinder him from working. He learned the trade of an electrician, which remains his job to this day.
“If you’re overweight your whole life, you grow a skeleton to sustain that,” he said. “So, I’ve always been strong. I’ve always been able to lift heavy things.”
From that perspective, he was normal. What was abnormal was his weight “wrecking a lot of stuff.” He had collapsed chairs, broken ladders, stepped through two staircases on a construction site, and even crushed a floor, falling from one story to another.
Reflecting back, Bockness found the culprit was not his parents, but a more systematic force: elite institutions and industries imposing the standard American diet and food pyramid on the public. These diets tend to be high in starch and carbohydrates while minimizing meat intake.
A meat-based diet broke almost all those guidelines and surpassed the ketogenic diet. The premise of a meat-centric diet is that humans lived for millions of years by hunting mammoths and tigers, making meat the ideal diet, as plants contain harmful defensive toxins.
He had tried the ketogenic diet and many other diets, all of which failed to help him lose weight. The failure of other diets, including the ketogenic diet, was mainly because they never addressed the underlying issue. They helped him shed a couple hundred pounds, but he quickly rebounded. His addiction to sugar still lingered. The real problem was his body’s malnutrition, needing nutrients from meat rather than plants.
“Before 38, my weight fluctuated, then my health started declining,” he said. “I got really sick.”
During the 2021 pandemic, his body fully collapsed. In the last few weeks of declining health, his weight fluctuated around 600 pounds, his chronic lung problems causing discomfort.
“That’s when things really started to deteriorate, and I gained about 84 pounds of fluid in three weeks,” he said. “I swelled to over 700 pounds, unable to move, unable to breathe.”
In a last-ditch effort, inspired by the ketogenic diet, he prayed to God and prepared to start a meat-based diet. He took the step in 2022, becoming a carnivore, consuming only animal products. He said God led him here.
“I only drink water or soda. I only eat eggs, bacon, beef, lamb, butter, salt, and vinegar,” Bockness explained, outlining his strict carnivorous diet. He ate one to two meals a day for 84 hours a week, fasting for the remaining hours to burn stored fat for nutrients.
A pure meat diet was no easy feat. Six months later, he had shed 205 pounds, mostly inflammatory fluids. All his symptoms quickly disappeared. His heart rate decreased from 107 beats per minute to 68. His severely swollen shins healed. When interviewed, he had lost 270 pounds, weighing around 450 pounds.
Most importantly, his cravings for food diminished. He was liberated.
However, doctors viewed him disapprovingly.
Mr. Bockness continued to advocate for a meat-based diet. Despite research from the World Health Organization suggesting that red meat may cause cancer and other criticisms, he pointed out doctors who dare to risk their careers support eating meat, and only meat.
While a WHO study suggested a link between red meat consumption and pancreatic and prostate cancer, Dr. Ken Berry, a meat-based diet advocate, clarified in a YouTube video that these were the weakest types of studies, as causal connections couldn’t be definitively proven from epidemiological studies.
“You can say, ‘This looks highly correlated, this looks like it’s causing this,'” Dr. Berry said. “But you can never definitively prove cause and effect from this type of study, an observational study.”
He gave an example: Nicolas Cage movies.
“A study showed that every time a new Nicolas Cage movie came out, there was an increase in family swimming pool drownings,” he said. “That’s absurd, right? Clearly, Nicolas Cage isn’t responsible for these people dying in their own pools, but you can prove that correlation, but that doesn’t mean there’s causation.”
He mentioned hundreds of such refutation studies by scientists.
Dr. Berry shared two large studies contradicting the WHO: one on colon polyps and another on women’s health advocacy, both finding significantly lower cancer rates for red meat eaters.
“I have a lot of respect for those doctors,” Bockness told the newspaper, now wanting to support meat-based diets by sharing his journey.
“I don’t think my doctor wants to kill me,” he said. “I think the medical school, Vanguard, and all these pharmaceutical companies fund these epidemiological studies.”
In dissecting food conspiracies, he emphasized the so-called “fat-shaming” that breeds paranoia. He called it “brainwashing propaganda.”
Striving to reach 280 pounds, he lamented to others still suffering, “You have the right to your weight, and you should be proud of your body.”
“In Christian culture, we don’t hate cancer patients,” he said. “We hate cancer because it killed our brothers and sisters.”
He added, “I hate obesity because it kills our brothers and sisters.”