⏰24 Hours, 3 Hours of Sleep, 🌊Flood Cleanup — and No Energy Crash
Over the weekend, I got a hard reminder of one of the biggest benefits I’ve noticed with carnivore. My last meal was around 7:00 PM. Just hamburgers and cheese. Later that night I went out with a buddy, got home around 1:00 AM, and was about to grab another bite to eat. Then I got distracted. I came downstairs and felt the carpet under my feet — crunchy, squishy, wrong. I heard an odd noise in the furnace room, opened the door, and found water everywhere. I live on a farm, so there are water pumps in there, and one section had about four inches of standing water. From that point on, it was go time. I was pulling levers, pulling plugs, mopping water into buckets, then dragging out a pet vac and sucking up water 500 mL at a time. I filled five 5-gallon pails. I did that for about six hours, got maybe three hours of sleep, then went to the rental place, picked up a proper carpet vac, came home, and kept going. Then it hit me. I still hadn’t eaten. I’d had some water with salt in it, which I normally drink anyway, but beyond that? Nothing. No food. No crash. No brain fog. No shaking. No “I need to eat right now or I’m done.” I went a full 24 hours without eating, while doing hard physical labor, running on three hours of sleep, and I stayed steady the whole time. That never used to happen. In the past, if I worked long hours, I had to eat or I’d hit a wall. I’ve done 17-hour shifts before, but I couldn’t push through without food. This time, I did heavy work solo — moving furniture, hauling equipment up and down stairs, pulling water, ripping out soaked material — and I kept going. And keep in mind: I’m not in peak physical shape. I’ve got an arthritic spine, and jobs like this are harder on me now than they were in my twenties. Was I sore? Absolutely. But the second thing I noticed was recovery. Normally, a job like this would flatten me. Instead, yes, I was in pain while doing it, but the recovery was far better than I would have expected. Today I ended up pulling the carpet because the underlay was still soaked and mildew was starting to creep in. Even with that extra work, I’m handling it better than I normally would.