Reviewed by Dr. Eric Westman, MD, MHS (December 2025)
7 Common Carnivore Diet Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)
If the carnivore diet didn’t work for you, you’re not alone. Most people make the same handful of mistakes, and they’re all fixable. The difference between those who succeed and those who quit often isn’t willpower or commitment; it’s simply knowing which pitfalls to avoid. In this guide, we walk through the seven most common mistakes carnivore beginners make, what causes them, and exactly how to overcome them. If you’ve tried carnivore before and it didn’t stick, understanding these mistakes might be the key to finally making it work.
Mistake #1: Not Eating Enough Fat
This is the #1 reason beginners abandon carnivore within the first two weeks. People often fear fat due to decades of low-fat diet messaging, so they rely on lean proteins without adequate fat. The result? Energy crashes, intense hunger, and the feeling that “carnivore just doesn’t work.”
Fat isn’t just fuel on carnivore… it’s essential! Without sufficient fat intake, your body can’t efficiently make the metabolic switch from carb-burning to fat-burning. Your brain is starving for energy, your mood plummets, and your body sends distress signals in the form of relentless hunger. Your individual needs may vary, but a good place to start is a fat-to-protein ratio of roughly 1:1 by weight—meaning, 1 gram of fat for every gram of protein.
How to fix it: Choose fattier cuts of meat—ribeye, ground beef, pork belly. Cook with animal fats like beef tallow or lard. Add butter or ghee to meals. If energy crashes and mood swings persist after a few days, fat intake is often the culprit. Increase it deliberately and watch how quickly your energy stabilizes.
Mistake #2: Ignoring Electrolytes
The “carnivore flu” or adaptation fatigue isn’t a sign the diet doesn’t work—it’s usually a sign of electrolyte depletion. When you eliminate carbs, your kidneys excrete sodium and water at a faster rate. Without adequate sodium, potassium, and magnesium, you experience debilitating fatigue, headaches, muscle cramps, and brain fog.
This mistake is particularly dangerous because it’s so easily fixed, yet most beginners don’t realize electrolytes are the missing piece. They interpret the discomfort as the diet failing, quit, and never discover how close they were to a breakthrough.
The basics: Sodium (3,000-5,000 mg daily) can come from salt added generously to food, or from bone broth. (If you make homemade broth, be sure to salt it liberally.) Potassium (3,000-4,700 mg daily) is abundant in organ meats like liver and heart, as well as fatty fish like salmon. Magnesium (300-400 mg daily) is found in seafood, particularly shellfish, and bone broth.
How to fix it: Don’t fear salt, embrace it. Add salt liberally to your meals. (Any kind of salt is fine – no need to seek out expensive gourmet salts.) Incorporate organ meats regularly. Include fatty fish like mackerel or sardines. Listen to your body: fatigue, dizziness, and muscle cramps are your signals that electrolytes need attention.
Mistake #3: Expecting Instant Results
Your body ran on carbohydrates for decades. Expecting it to transform overnight is unrealistic and sets you up for disappointment. Healing from metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance, or chronic inflammation doesn’t happen in 30 days. Most people need 7-10 days just to adapt to the diet itself, and real metabolic changes take weeks to months.
The timeline matters. Your digestive system is adapting to a radical change. Your hormones are recalibrating. Your energy systems are shifting from glucose-dependent to fat-dependent. These are profound shifts, and they take time.
How to fix it: Commit to at least 30 days, ideally 2-3 months, before assessing whether carnivore works for you. Around days 5-7, many people experience a mental clarity breakthrough. This is often the first real sign that your body is adapting, so use this, and not the initial 3-day fatigue, to start gauging how things are going. Don’t use the scale as your only tool to assess things. Track non-scale victories: energy levels, mental clarity, sleep quality, joint pain, digestion. Improvements in these often occur before dramatic physical results.
Mistake #4: Undereating
Some people fear calories or worry that they’re eating too much, especially fat. This can lead to overly restricting food intake and eating small portions of meat without adequate fat. The calorie deficit that results feels like deprivation and can cause cravings, hunger, and fatigue. Carnivore diets encourage you to eat to satiety—not count calories, restrict portions, or white-knuckle through hunger. Undereating also prevents proper adaptation. Your body needs fuel to make the metabolic switch. Without it, you’re asking your system to run on empty while simultaneously learning a new fuel source.
How to fix it: Eat until you’re genuinely satisfied. If you’re still hungry after a meal, eat more. Fat is calorie-dense but also satiating, so a modest amount of fatty meat goes a long way toward providing fullness. Don’t overthink portion size; let hunger and satiety be your guide. If you’re experiencing constant fatigue despite adequate sleep and electrolytes, you may be undereating.
Mistake #5: Not Adjusting Medications
Don’t blame the diet for what your medications are doing! Eliminating all carbohydrate from your diet will have a profound—and rapid—effect on your blood sugar and blood pressure. Taking the same doses of medicine on a carnivore diet that you were taking on a high-carb diet can be a recipe for dizziness, fatigue, light-headedness, fainting and dangerous hypoglycemia. But these don’t happen because of the diet; they happen because the diet is kicking in so quickly and helping to restore normal blood pressure and blood sugar naturally, so the medications become too strong.
How to fix it: If you take blood pressure medication or medicine for diabetes (especially insulin), monitor your blood pressure and/or blood sugar at home so you’ll see when it’s time to contact your doctor about reducing or eliminating your medications. (You can search the directory from the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners to find a carnivore-savvy medical professional who can guide you in adjusting things safely.)
Mistake #6: Skipping Adaptation Support
The adaptation phase is emotionally and physically demanding. Without guidance, many people interpret normal adaptation symptoms as failure. They have no one to tell them that day-three fatigue is expected, that intense cravings are temporary, that these experiences are to be expected and they’re not personal failings.
This is where so many people quit. They’re suffering through adaptation, doubting themselves, and without external support or reassurance, they assume the diet isn’t right for them. In reality, they’re just a few days away from breakthrough.
How to fix it: Don’t do this alone. Find a carnivore community online where beginners share experiences. Read stories of others who pushed through similar struggles. Follow carnivore creators who document their journey. Having someone else’s experience to reference during a weak moment can mean the difference between quitting and persisting.
Mistake #7: Going It Alone
This is the main mistake that encompasses all the others. Most beginners quit in the first two weeks because they lack expert guidance and community accountability. Without both, they’re flying blind—misinterpreting adaptation as failure, making the mistakes listed above, and eventually deciding carnivore “didn’t work.”
But here’s the reality: Community and expert feedback prevent most early quits. When you have experienced experts guiding you, you’ll avoid or minimize the issues that cause most beginners to abandon carnivore in their first few days. Being in a supportive community helps reduce the psychological barriers. You’re no longer isolated; you’ve got a tribe of people to cheer you on. The difference between success and failure often comes down to this single variable: did someone experienced help you navigate the adaptation phase? Those who had guidance succeeded. Those who tried alone often quit.
How to fix it: Invest in education or community. This could mean joining a structured program, hiring a coach, or finding an active online community committed to supporting one another. You could theoretically figure this out alone through trial and error, but why would you? The cost of poor guidance is weeks of suffering and eventual quitting. Good guidance pays for itself when you start experiencing the benefits of a carnivore diet.
The Real Reason People Quit (And How to Ensure You Don’t)
Most beginners quit in the first two weeks. They make one or more of these seven mistakes, interpret the resulting discomfort as evidence that carnivore doesn’t work, and return to their previous way of eating. But here’s what’s actually happening: they’re not failing at carnivore. They’re failing to prepare for it. Carnivore works. The evidence is clear: thousands of people experience profound improvements in energy, mental clarity, metabolic health, and body composition. But it only works if you understand what to expect and how to navigate the inevitable challenges.
The adaptation phase is temporary. The discomfort is temporary. The uncertainty is temporary. What remains on the other side—for those who persist—is mental clarity, energy, calmness around food, and a way of eating that finally feels sustainable. The question isn’t whether carnivore can work for you. It’s whether you’ll have the support and knowledge to push through those critical first two weeks. If carnivore hasn’t worked for you before, it’s not your fault. You just didn’t have the right guidance. Our Carnivore Made Simple course will help you avoid these pitfalls and finally experience the results you’ve been hoping for.
Reviewer Bio
Eric Westman, MD, MHS, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University, the Medical Director of Adapt Your Life Academy and the founder of the Duke Keto Medicine Clinic in Durham, North Carolina. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Obesity Medicine and has a master’s degree in clinical research. As a past President of the Obesity Medicine Association and a Fellow of the Obesity Society, Dr. Westman was named “Bariatrician of the Year” for his work in advancing the field of obesity medicine. He is a best-selling author of several books relating to ketogenic diets as well as co-author on over 100 peer-reviewed publications related to ketogenic diets, type 2 diabetes, obesity, smoking cessation, and more. He is an internationally recognized expert on the therapeutic use of dietary carbohydrate restriction and has helped thousands of people in his clinic and far beyond, by way of his famous “Page 4” food list.
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