Please do not subject yourself to extreme diets.
Last summer, Jessa Duggar welcomed baby #6. She is only 33 years old.
Apparently, she tried a notorious fad diet — one that’s given people old-timey diseases — to try to shrink her post-baby body.
Jessa had to quit, however, when her body stopped producing enough milk for her infant.
Please don’t try this
During a recent episode of the Jinger & Jeremy podcast, Ben Seewald appeared as the couple’s guest.
There, he opened up about Jessa’s post-baby weight loss journey.
It has only been about six months since she gave birth to Edward Owen Seewald.
But apparently, in that time, it was enough for her to stop producing enough milk to feed their child.
How? To hear Ben tell it, it started with an extreme diet.
According to Ben, it’s John David’s fault that Jessa took up this extreme fad diet.
“He was really into carnivore,” Ben said of his brother-in-law. He is not referring to the Kesha song.
“And he was talking to us all about it,” he continued. “He actually got us on it for a little bit.”
The good news is that the Seewalds are no longer trying to exclude most food groups from their diet.
Ben acknowledged: “We couldn’t stick with it.”
The carnivore diet is NOT for breastfeeding (but what is it?)
Sometimes, people erroneously try extreme diets for months or even years before dropping the bad habit.
Jessa and Ben didn’t take that long to learn the error of their ways.
“Jessa was breastfeeding at the time,” he explained.
“And,” Ben detailed, “it really dropped her supply. So she had to get off of it.”
Though he didn’t have the same urgent incentive to quit, he explained that he dropped it also — because doing the diet solo “wouldn’t be fun.”
What is the “carnivore diet” exactly?
Also known as the “zero-carb diet,” this fad diet promotes the eating of meat, dairy, and eggs — to the exclusion of all else. No fruit, no vegetables, no legumes, no grains.
If that sounds like a bad idea to you, then you’re right.
Rooted in pseudoscience, the carnivore diet famously risks causing vitamin deficiencies. (Imagine living in normal suburbs and getting scurvy because you think that fruit is bad for you.)
Additionally, the carnivore diet is often high in “bad” cholesterol. A couple of years ago, a viral post showed a man excreting cholesterol from his palms because he had consumed so much. That’s not good for your overall health.
What was she thinking?
Across social media, numerous Duggar-watchers reacted with dismay to Ben’s revelation.
This kind of fad diet notoriously causes a reduction in breast milk. That is not a secret. If Jessa had done her research, she would have known.
This left people to ask about the motive behind Jessa jumping on with an extreme diet.
Some wondered if this was a sort of malice signaling — essentially, displaying cultural loyalty to various bad people, organizations, and causes.
The sorts of people pushing the carnivore diet tend to be both very weird and very bad. It can even be a contrarian backlash to “feminine” concepts like nutrition, presenting meat as a “masculine” alternative.
But Jessa is also part of a toxic ideology that, even more so than mainstream society, pushes women to be desirable to men.
In her case, the pressure is more extreme, even if the intended audience is solely her husband.
This could conceivably be about rapid weight loss — and not malicious political posturing.
Regardless, it is not a good idea. Fad diets aren’t a good idea. Using GLP-1 shots for medicalized starvation is not a good idea.
We’re glad to hear that Jessa stopped, for her sake and for her baby’s. But still, yikes!