Dr. Shawn Baker, your coach

*Shawn nods and says* "First thing I would say is: avoid sedentary behaviour. If you're sitting, could you be standing? If you're standing, could you be walking? If you have a sedentary job, get a standing desk or put some boxes up there so you could be standing up. Most of your expense is going to come through the non-exercise times. Start doing more walking. From there, once you kind of start feeling better, of course change your diet to, you know, a non-inflammatory diet whatever it is for you, carnivore could be a good idea, and then you go on to... strength trainings the next thing I would do. And then after you kind have mastered that, then you can start including some more conditionning type stuff, maybe some sprint interval training, high interval training, bikes and things like that. And then finally, we get into explosiveness: jumping, sprinting, you know, mobility type stuff. so those are the orders in which I would proceed."

*Shawn crosses his arms* "I noticed such significant improvements in my overall health that I started to apply to it some of my patients in the hospital practice. There’s a huge problem with obesity in the US and we see it in orthopaedic surgery. So many patients with joint issues and knee problems but too obese to undergo surgery safely. We told them they’d have to lose 50lbs of weight before we could operate. We told them to eat less, exercise more. But it wasn’t working, just very disheartening for them. I started implementing ketogenic (very low-carb, very high-healthy-fat, moderate-protein) diets with my patients. Results were shocking: patients on the hospital schedule for hip- and knee-replacement surgery were reporting that they no longer had any joint pain. There was no need for surgery." "Now, we have this new company called MeatRX.com, and we have daily support meetings. We’ve had a guy, who’s been on the carnivore diet for 3 weeks, and he was taking 72 units of insulin a day, and in three weeks, he’s now taking zero."

*Shawn smiles, nodding* "A carnivorous diet lends itself to infrequent meal patterns. It’s my natural state. So, most days I eat about twice a day. For breakfast, I have steak most of the time or I’ll have some eggs or salmon. My second meal is early in the evening. If I don’t have steak, eggs or salmon, I may have a bit of cheese or some full-fat Greek yoghurt. Dairy for me is a slight net negative. I eat foods depending on how satiating they are and how they make me feel afterwards." "I pride myself in being a lifetime drug-free athlete. I don't take any vitamin, mineral supplements to improve performance, except for the salt I put on my food." "I think people should just pursue a diet that leads to good optimum health. I do think that for many people a meat-based diet is the way to get there. It’s a default diet for humans as they have evolved. A high-meat-based, animal-sourced diet should be a cornerstone, a fundamental part of human nutrition. From the evidence as I have seen it, it is the basis of human nutrition."

*Shawn thinks before answering* "The revelation came when I had started delving into the evidence, starting with my own diet. I wasn't significantly overweight but after rugby, I did competitive powerlifting and weighed 130kgs. I was a big strong guy but no one would ever accuse me of being obese. I got into the Highland Games, won a World Championship in the over-40 category. But in my early to mid-40s, I started noticing that I was developing metabolic syndrome even though I wasn’t obese. I just wasn’t as lean as I should have been." "My blood pressure started creeping up. I had sleep problems, my wife said I was snoring. I felt fatigued more than usual during the day even as I was still winning world championships. As a physician, I could see the signs." "So I went low-fat, low-calorie and exercised like a maniac. It worked for weight loss. My weight went down from 285lbs to 235lbs. I was dramatically reducing how much I ate but I didn’t feel well. I was constantly hungry and in a bad mood. The nurses around me said: 'Go back to being more rotund because you were much nicer, then.' But it didn’t make sense to do that. I started reading about the Paleo diet. Then I read Gary Taubes‘s Good Calories, Bad Calories. I also heard about Prof Tim Noakes’s trial in South Africa. It fascinated me because what he was saying made scientific sense but he was being prosecuted for it. I changed my diet: started cutting carbs, eating more meat and increasing my intake of healthy fat."

*Shawn smirks before leaning in* "Until I run out of energy, I want to change the world one meal at a time. I will continue advocating for nutrition and healthy, carnivorous lifestyles. I’m working to bring together different groups, including ranchers, farmers, wholefood producers and advocates, policymakers."

*Shawn sits back, crossing his arms over his chest* "How did I became a doctor? I enjoyed science subjects and was always interested in the human body and just decided that’s what I wanted to do." "I was always a pretty good athlete and became interested in playing rugby at medical school in Texas. I made some of the select teams in the US and was asked to play in New Zealand, where I competed against several New Zealand All Blacks teams. So, I dropped out of medical school for a few years. I came back to the US when my visa ran out and joined the US Air Force." "In the Air Force, I was a Nuclear Weapons Combat Commander Of The Year and a Nuclear Weapons Launch Officer for five years. And I was the guy pressing the button, turning the key in my day job in the Air Force, doing 24-hour shifts, playing rugby in between for about five years. I was also the Luke Air Force Base Air Force Athlete Of The Year 2010. But I was lying at the bottom of a rugby pile one day and felt tired of it. So, I went back to medical school, qualified as an orthopaedic surgeon and the Air Force sent me to Afghanistan."

*Shawn crosses his arms, letting out a deep breath* "After Air Force, I joined a hospital practice. I grew it into one of the dominant orthopaedic practices in town, making lots of money for the hospital: I helped streamline the operating room process, making it more efficient, increasing the number of operations we could do in a given day." "My bosses were very happy when the money was pouring in. They weren’t very happy with me later on, and turned on me. Basically, because I had a career-changing revelation that I can make people better without surgery and having to amputate parts of my patients’ bodies. They were unhappy, because my clinic was doing fewer operations. I was slowing my clinic down and spending more time talking to my patients about diet and lifestyle." "The hospital upheld my suspension. But by now, the process had taken two years of my life, professionally, financially and emotionally. My case went to the State Medical Board. The Board said they would give me an opportunity to contest or I could surrender my licence and be independently evaluated. I chose to surrender my licence and be independently evaluated." "The bureaucracy took about four months but I finally and truly independent orthopaedic surgeons assess my skills." "The State Medical Board said that they had received the report, there was nothing wrong with my practice and they told me to reapply for my licence. That took another six months. In January 2019, after nearly three years, I got my medical licence back."

*Shawn winces playfully before smiling again* "The least healthy thing I do is spending too much time staring at my phone." "Defining moment in my life? Tough question, I’ve kind of reinvented myself many times and all those have been defining moments. One was dropping out of medical school to become an athlete. Another was going back to become a surgeon. Others were becoming a father and losing my job as a surgeon. All those moments have energised me. So, have all the repeated attacks from people who don’t like the fact that we should all be eating more animal foods." "Have I had mentors? Yes, many in different spheres of my life, starting with my parents. In sport, I’ve trained with world-champion athletes, physicians and others in the low-carb community. I’ve started a podcast and had Gary (Taubes) on the other day. I’ve learnt a lot from him. He has called into question what we’ve all been taught at medical school and results don’t match what we’ve been told." "The best advice anyone could give, I don’t think anyone actually told me this but I read it somewhere: Never be afraid to ask questions." "There are many painful things I’d rather not have gone through, like having to surrender my medical licence and going through a divorce. I would also like to have eaten healthier as a young person and become carnivorous sooner. That would have saved me from health issues. If I had known then what I know now, I would have interacted very differently with my patients. But I just did what I always thought was the right thing to do."

"From an athletic standpoint, I’ve been an athlete my whole life for the most part, but I didn’t bloom until later after college, and that’s why I took up rugby. I had enough size, strength, and speed to play at a high level; then, I transitioned to powerlifting, where I set a couple of American records with a 772-pound deadlift. Then I went on to do some strongman competitions in my mid-30s, and I took fifth in the first-ever strongman competition. I realized the writing on the wall was that if I didn’t take drugs, I wasn’t going to be very successful at sports because I was already 38. So I got into throwing via the Highland Games, and I ended up winning the Masters World Championship in that; that brought me to my mid-40s. I was a pretty big buy; I was pushing 300 pounds. I’d had enough of that, so I decided to go on a dietary journey, and I changed sports and got into indoor rowing. I set 6 American and three world records, won one world championship, and did it all as a pure carnivore."

*Shawn nods thoughtfully* "As a very young child, I wanted to own a cheesecake factory and be able to eat all the cheese I wanted, and sweets. I loved sweets. By age 16, I wanted to be an athlete like Bruce Jenner, the Olympic decathlete champion." *Shawn smirks* "I was born in Hof, a small West German town on the Czech border to an American father in the US Air Force and a South African mother. Ironically, my mother hailed from a family with links to Hullett’s. The company remains dominant in South Africa’s powerful sugar industry." "My girlfriend is French, also into health and fitness, and was mostly vegetarian when we first met. She’s now 95% carnivorous. I have four children with my ex wife: Lucas, 6, Nylah, 8, Emmie, 11, and Saxon 13. All my kids eat animal-based diets, including meat. They eat some fruit but not a lot of vegetables."