Update on Max: Brain Surgery + Therapeutic Carnivore Diet

I posted on August 13th the original story of my brain tumor, with two surgeries (2020, 2023) and my story so far. It’s time for an update. The original post is here: ‘Max: Health and Brain Surgery.‘

I think it is wise to post that there were no ill-effects of this surgery, just because you never know how people will react to this kind of story. I know people can get nervous when they hear about brain surgery – which is one of the reasons I have deliberated about saying anything. In fact, various people said that I was a lot nicer after the surgery than before, probably due to the tumor pressing on my brain and causing issues. So, the tumor removal has not impaired my mental competence and overall it has made me more chill, so don’t worry about attending training!

Above is the scar on my head at the first post-surgical appointment in 2020, and on the right is the original CAT scan with the first view of the tumor, which is an Oligodendroglioma.

In my previous post I talked about my refusal to submit to ‘standard of care’ treatments for cancer, including chemo and radiation. That is still the case. Last March I started on what is known as the ‘Dr. Makis Protocol’ of Ivermectin and Fenbendazole. These are large doses of these drugs. For example, I was taking 50mg of IVM twice per day, and for the last three months I have upped that to 97mg twice per day because that is what is recommended for brain cancer. I was taking 444mg of Fenbendazole twice per day. More recently, I have learned (and this is part of the story below) that Fenbendazole is not great at passing through the blood brain barrier and I have got myself on Mebendazole, which still only gets about 20% of its strength through into the brain.

I should also say that for someone who has brain cancer, I have been fortunate. Other than the alternative treatments that I am doing, and the inconvenience of them day to day, I am not affected by pain or disability. I am not sufferings pain like many with cancer do, and because I am not doing radiation or chemo, I am not suffering the ill effects of those treatments. I am able to be mobile, conduct physical training, and basically do what I want to do.

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The reason for this post is to update you on my treatment after I realized that I was making a silly mistake. I said I had started on the ‘dog and horse deworming’ drugs back last March. However, I had missed a key point, which is that these drugs should be taken with a ‘fatty’ diet and ideally on a ketogenic diet. I had kept my diet as the ‘standard American diet.’ The idea of the fatty diet is to increase absorption on the drugs. However, there is more.

Cancer is a metabolic disease and most of us are killing ourselves with the standard American diet. Cancer feeds on glucose (carbohydrates) and Glutamine (an essential amino acid). The presence of too much glucose (either directly or as a break down from more complex carbohydrates) causes insulin to spike. Insulin is a fat storing hormone. If you keep glucose high, not only is cancer having a field day eating it, but you are beginning to get hyperinsulinemia, which is also known as being insulin resistant. This is what causes all those symptoms to include that fat belly / obesity. Not only that, but insulin resistance pushes you towards diabetes, heart disease, Altzeimers, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and many of the diseases caused by visceral fat. Insulin is not only essential, it is also the bad guy in this story. As a 50 year old guy having lived on the standard American diet, it is obvious to me (without a diagnosis) that I was insulin resistant.

At Thanksgiving 2025, I decided to fast and then go onto a ketogenic diet. I did a 2 day and then a 5 day water fast before Christmas. I began the ketogenic diet. The purpose of a ketogenic diet is to fat-adapt the body by severely cutting down on the use of carbohydrates, so that you are eating protein, large amounts of fat (which is where your energy comes from) and a small amount of vegetables / carbs. When you are on a ketogenic diet, you produce ketones, which are fat bodies, and that is your fuel. This is the natural state for a proper human diet. It is true that you do need a small amount of glucose, but the body will make all that is required in the liver, and healthy cells can live happily on ketones. However, cancer cannot. It cannot survive on ketones. Their is still the issue of glutamine (see Dr. Seyfried and his press / pulse protocol, you’ll find talks by him on YouTube) but once you get the cancer on the ropes, you are hitting it with the off-label deworming drugs which have a strong effect on the cancer. Cancer is not a parasite, but the deworming drugs act on it in a similar way due to the way that cancer cells conduct aerobic fermentation.

It’s important to add that a keto ‘diet’ is not a diet in the normal sense of the word. You eat to satiety. Yes, you may miss certain foods such as carbohydrate or glucose based foods, but you will soon get over any cravings and you will eat until you are full.

I will not tell you that producing ketones was easy, and also the need to keep them high, because it wasn’t. I have been battling my previous state of insulin resistance. I have a keto-mojo which I use to test my glucose and ketones several times per day. I’ve started to win but at times my ketones have been low. This is all part of properly fat-adapting the body to run off ketones. Everybody will produce ketones, but it is important to produce enough as a result of correctly fat-adapting the body to run off them.

I discovered that it wasn’t enough to be on a keto diet, but that I had to be on a therapeutic keto diet, where I was working to get my GKI index sufficiently therapeutic with the ketones, balanced against glucose in the blood. I was watching a lot of YouTube videos where all of this was discussed. As a practitioner of alternate cancer therapy, you are working on your own, finding out what you need to find out, and actioning it yourself. You are treating your own cancer. I must mention that throughout this period of time I was still seeing my oncologist on a ‘watch and wait’ protocol which involved having an MRI every 3 months. The MRIs have been stable. I also stopped the contrast (gadolinium), which the oncologist was not happy with, but I did so based on advice about how bad that contrast agent is for you.

To recap; chemo, radiation, contrast agents and the standard American diet are all terrible for your health. It is all such a lie.

A month or so ago I reached out to a British Biology PhD (Dr. Isabella Cooper) who has been working specifically with therepeutic keto diets. Specificaly: Ketogenic Endocrine-Mitochondrial Therapy (KEMT). To quote:

Hyperinsulinaemia represents a central upstream pathology driving a wide spectrum of chronic diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and inflammatory neurological conditions involving neurons and their essential metabolic support cells, including astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocytes, and Schwann cells (Cooper, Kyriakidou, Edwards, et al., 2023b). In each of these conditions, persistently elevated insulin signaling imposes chronic anabolic pressure on mitochondria, disrupting oxidative phosphorylation, impairing redox balance, and weakening intrinsic apoptotic capacity. Ketogenic endocrine-mitochondrial therapy (KEMT) resolves hyperinsulinaemia by restoring physiological metabolic signaling through carbohydrate restriction and induction of therapeutic ketosis.

I took a risk by finding out that I needed to pay UKP 980 into her research fund in return for a 90 minute zoom call. I took that risk and ended up with a 3 hour zoom call followed up with an 80 page document that she created for me, and also utilizing an app to send photos of the food I have been eating plus my keto-mojo results and any questions I have. I believe it was well worth it, and this lady is the mother-lode of knowledge on this subject.

She put me on an 18 / 6 intermittent fast with two meals during the 6 hour period (12 – 6). I am on what can only be described as a carnivore diet, it isn’t really keto at all. For example, dairy is out, the only thing that is in is butter, and I have to eat at least half a bar of butter per day. Most of my meals consist of beef (ground or not), eggs, bacon and butter and salt. I can eat other things but the issue is one of my imagination. I could eat fish, for example. Right now she has me eating a tin of sardines in brine first thing in the morning. I can’t have coffee with crème, and I can’t have tea with milk. But I can have butter (bulletproof) coffee. But I can’t do too much of it, so it’s one or two cups per day. What is really interesting is that fiber isn’t a thing. I’ve had some gut issues which I am getting over, it’s mainly about producing the right amount of bile to digest the large amount of fat that you are eating. There are supplements that she lists in the document that help with all these various aspects. If you eat the right amount of fat, you will be great on this diet. Once of the big issues is when people think it is a protein diet and they don’t eat enough fat.

I’ve lost 35lb and have never felt more energetic! This diet isn’t about weight loss, it’s about tackling the cancer, but if it means also losing all that visceral fat that that is also another great thing, because that is what leads to all these other health issues. Also, I’m not hungry. I eat enough at the two meals to satisfy me, and I don’t get hungry during the morning before lunch. So much has changed. I don’t have the cravings that are created by sugar. I’m not hangry.

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If anyone wants the contact details for Dr Cooper, I’m happy to help if you write to me. Or do an internet search, either way works.

This all comes down to the mitochondria in the cells and keeping them healthy.

This one will shock you. Who has taken maybe 20 mg of melatonin to go to sleep at night? Did you know it helps you get to sleep but it doesn’t keep you asleep? Did you know that melatonin is a hormone that is a very strong cancer fighter? Cancer is most active during the day, which is when you want to be taking the melatonin. I have been taking 100mg of melatonin 4 times per day. I wake in the morning and take a melatonin. I keep taking it throughout the day. Nuts! Once you get used to it, it doesn’t send you to sleep. You just have to be mindful and make sure you don’t sit down for a nap!

Please keep in mind that I am eating this specific therapeutic carnivore diet in order to tackle brain cancer, and to get my mitochondria healthy. If you don’t have cancer, you don’t need to do this. But you probably should do some version of it, such as eating a version of the keto diet that severely restricts carbohydrates. Because carbohydrates / glucose is what activates the insulin, which is the bodies’ fat storing hormone and what is responsible for the obesity in society. Even if you are skinny, you probably suffer from visceral fat ‘skinny fat.’

The bottom line is that humans grew up in ketosis. There would have been times when some source of glucose was available and the people went a little nuts and slept it off. But there would not have been a food supply system constantly bringing in the carbohydrate foods. When it came time to go on a hunt, you would have been in ketosis. You may have been forced-fasting, depending how long it had been. You also have to remember that the food industry is a marketing game, designing food to best satisfy the customer. If you are one of those guys with too much of a gut, welcome to my world before the keto diet. It turns out that it’s a simple thing to lose that gut, you just have to ditch the carbohydrates.

I do have to plan if I am going to be out of the house during the time that I am supposed to be eating. That could be anything from packing some pemmican (expensive if purchased) to making up a cold cut version of what I eat for my meals: cold sliced beef, hard boiled eggs, cold bacon, a stick of butter. I find one of the economical ways to get the beef is to go to Costco and buy up some beef round top round steak packets. The price is far better than buying steaks. Cook them up on the smoker and then slice them up. I just reheat some slices on a griddle while I’m making up my eggs and bacon. You can also get frozen grass fed grass finished burgers at Costco which are great to have in the freezer because you cook them from frozen. It makes things a bit more convenient. They will tell you that a carnivore diet is really expensive, but when I’m buying some economical beef, eggs, bacon and butter, and eating twice per day, its not a big deal.

I haven’t even got onto the whole deal with seed oils, bread, processsed food, and all that!

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