I was a little less than 30 minutes into a video call with Sean O’Mara, the trim and handsome 63-year-old doctor who has reportedly been giving dietary advice to several members of the Trump cabinet, when he pulled up an image of two liquids the color of radiator fluid. This vibrant yellow-green, O’Mara explained, occupies a specific attention-getting wavelength. “Soda companies use that color to get people to buy,” he said, gesturing to the first liquid, which was Mountain Dew. “Your brain kind of lights up. You’re like, Wow, that’s cool stuff.” He directed my attention to the other liquid, roughly the same color, and in a jar.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked me.
“No,” I said.
“That’s urine,” he said. “That’s urine from a human being.”
The strong implication was that it was his. Passing urine this color is a good thing, O’Mara said, and it started happening to him six years ago: a byproduct of his diet, which comprises almost exclusively steak and fermented foods. The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., JD Vance, Howard Lutnick and Sean Duffy had all taken up the O’Mara program. Kennedy has credited it with reducing his visceral fat load by 40 percent; the president has reportedly taken notice of Vance’s slimming figure.
I understand the appeal of a radical — and radically simple — dietary intervention. Last year, facing down 40, frustrated both with my body and with the sudden appearance of miraculous fat-melting drugs, I stopped eating carbohydrates and started running a lot in the mornings. I lost something like 25 pounds this way. Naturally, I was intrigued by the existence of a more powerful and manly diet for more powerful and manly people.
So I joined the cabinet — for a week, anyway.
O’Mara calls it the Living Diet: You eat nothing but the flesh of grass-fed ruminants — cows, yes, but also bison, elk and venison — and as many different fermented foods as possible, because their bacteria help repopulate your gut, which he says improves your metabolism, leading to weight loss. Wild-caught seafood is cool, too, but ruminants are best, O’Mara says, because they ferment what they eat in their many stomachs.
He wanted me eating fermented beets, carrots and radishes; Roquefort and Parmesan; yogurt, kefir and kvass. He showed me a picture of his typical plate of food: It looked as if a steak had been dropped on a painter’s easel, studded as it was with multihued hillocks of fermented vegetables. “I have a refrigerator that has about 20 to 30 ferments, and I just get little bits of each one,” he explained. “I’m just rubbing this meat around in all that bacteria.”
It turns out a breakfast of ground beef with a pile of kimchi and a fried egg is, frankly, invigorating. But lunch, by virtue of having to take place near the Times Building in Midtown Manhattan, allowed me to really spread my wings: I found my way to the skirt steak from a Spanish restaurant, which could be secured off menu — and, mercifully, to go. I would drag my jar of kimchi, plastic trays of fermented banchan and a wedge of Roquefort to a shared lounge area and hope the staff of T Magazine across the way didn’t notice my grotesque feeding ritual; at times I hoped someone would ask what I was doing, just so I could explain that I’m not normally like this. They never did.
Setting aside the magic of fermented foods, the diet also seems to operate by straightforward math. There are barely any calories in kimchi, and it’s actually pretty hard to eat that much beef, even — or especially — if it’s all you’re eating. It’s as high in satiety as nearly any protein you can find. As the week wore on, the mere thought of my next meal of metallic, tangy beef would almost turn my stomach. I was putting away about a pound and a half of meat most days, and even that was well below “maintenance” — or the amount of calories my body would need before turning elsewhere for fuel.
I ran the basics of the diet by Marion Nestle of New York University, whose views on nutrition are more mainstream than O’Mara’s. While she questioned his claims about fermented foods improving metabolism, Nestle agreed the diet would be an effective as a temporary route to weight loss, provided you kept your caloric intake below maintenance. “I can’t think of any nutrients that would be missing from this,” she said. “But it just sounds boring to me.”
I was still running — or trying to. One interesting thing about carbohydrates: They really do supply your body with a readily available source of energy, and if you don’t eat them, exercising will feel as if someone has turned the gravity up. You can feel the weight of your legs, your shoes, everything. Your body adjusts eventually, but you’re never as fast. Eating pasta, by contrast, makes you feel spring-loaded.
At home, my son complained about the miasma of beef smoke coming from my cast-iron pan twice a day, but I had total control over what I ate, drank and didn’t. That control is perhaps the primary appeal of this sort of diet: Because there’s no room for compromise, you never have to bargain with yourself about anything. You’re like a monk or a prisoner — shackled, but free of temptation. And, as they often are, trim, and a little penitent.
To O’Mara, the diet is not just a temporary means of losing weight but a way to eat for good. He has been doing it for 10 years, and credits it with turning his life around. At one point in our conversation he pulled up the Bristol Stool Chart, which ranges from Type 1 (“separate, hard pellets”) to Type 7 (“watery, no solid pieces”). O’Mara is consistently delivering Type 4 (“smooth, soft, like a snake”), with pointed ends, indicative of healthy rectal function, he told me. “When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”
“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”
As it happened, I had a dinner party to go to on Friday, the last full day of my diet. I felt good. I was taut and energetic, in control; I had some fresh ideas about this whole Strait of Hormuz situation. Then I had two martinis and situated myself at the dinner table. So my guard was down when before me landed a glistening bowl of linguine with clams, a panzanella salad, a heaping platter of roast vegetables and bread baked by the host, with butter softened in the July heat. My last 18 meals had been beef and ferments; the scent of the clams was intoxicating.
I caved within 10 seconds, eating all of it heartily. I barely had room for the main course, which was — what else — steak.
Willy Staley is a story editor for the magazine.
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