Reality of what happens to your body when you only eat red meat

There are some folks who support the idea of a 'carnivore diet' which involves eating lots and lots of meat, hardly the balanced diet you get taught to follow to give your body everything it needs.

Even more extreme versions of this diet focus on red meat alone, which any doctor will tell you is not the greatest thing to be eating for your health.

A balanced diet does have space for meat, though the healthier kind is poultry like chicken or turkey, but the proponents of a carnivore diet claim it's given them all sorts of health benefits.

One guy who tried it showed off that he'd gained muscle and shed body hair, though the British Heart Foundation has warned that evidence of this diet being good for you is really lacking.

As for what actually happens to your body if you decide to go carnivore and just eat red meat, National Geographic has the answers.

Want some veg to go with that? (Getty Stock Photo)

Since you're just eating meat and not carbs, your body has to switch things around a bit and burn glycogen for energy, which does result in you losing weight, but it's water weight rather than fat.

Getting your body to burn fat requires making it work through another set of stored energy instead.

However, once your body has gone through the glycogen, it goes into ketosis, which is the process of it switching onto burning fat, while making you less hungry and telling your brain you feel decently full.

This is why in the first few weeks, people on the red meat diet might actually feel like they've properly lost weight and become leaner, because they genuinely have.

On the other hand, your body is missing out on important things like fibre and various vitamins you'd get from chowing down on vegetation.

Nutrition scientist Emily Prpa warned that doing without things like fibre for a long time can lower your body's tolerance to it, so if you go back to plant-based foods, your gut might react dramatically.

Could a red meat diet actually make your body burn fat for a bit? Yes. Could it massively mess up your long-term health? Also yes (Getty Stock Photo)

What you might gain in a leaner physique, you lose in your body's long-term health as it goes without some of the necessary nutrients, and your digestion will suffer too, so toilet time becomes quite the ordeal.

More protein puts extra strain on your liver and kidneys as they have to work harder, and you run the risk of painful kidney stones.

Meanwhile, that lack of a balanced diet also means your noggin isn't getting what it needs, and with your brain affected from lack of nourishment, your mood can drop.

Cardiologists also warn that eating lots of red meat results in a 53 per cent increase in heart disease and more than doubles your risk of a stroke, so looking a bit leaner in the short term is the benefit, but your body really suffers from what you're not putting in it.