Carnivore-first, room for ferments
Meat-heavy logging plus sugar-free kraut, pickles, and olives. No plant-app clutter. No purity police.
Meat, ferments, and one long fast a week.
This is what I eat and how I fast - written down honestly, including the parts nobody has studied and the parts that did not work. Not a program. Not a promise. Just one person's approach, with the reasoning shown.
The fasting tracker
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Journal
Latest from the journal
Short, plain notes on carnivore, fasting, and zero-sugar ferments. Research is shown as emerging, not settled.
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Salt and water in week one
Why the first week of carnivore or long fasts can feel rough, what the research says about electrolytes, and a simple salt-first approach.
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Break it small: the first meal after a fast
A simple, protein-first way to break a 16 to 48 hour fast, and what the refeeding research does and does not say.
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Read the jar: fermented pickles vs vinegar pickles
Fermented and vinegar pickles can look the same on the shelf. How to read the jar for sugar and real fermentation.
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Lift something, then eat your meat
Why strength work earns a spot next to walking when the goal is visceral fat, and how to try it around a fast.
Start here
Your diet is yours. This one is mine.
This is a record of what I eat, how I fast, and what I have noticed while tracking my own numbers. Not a program. Not a recommendation for you specifically.
Food is personal. People differ in genetics, meds, history, training, sleep, stress, and what they can sustain. Two people can do the same thing and get opposite results, and both can be honest about it. Anyone who says one way of eating works for everybody is selling something.
Take what is useful here, ignore what is not, and run your own experiment. Where something is well supported, I will say so. Where it is one small study, I will say that. Where it is just my experience, I will label it as exactly that.
The approach
Three moving parts.
Nobody has studied this exact combination. What follows is the reasoning behind each piece, and the honest state of the research around it.
A meat-based base
Beef, lamb, eggs, fish, butter and animal fat. Organ meat regularly rather than occasionally - that part turns out to matter more than the carnivore internet suggests.
Sugar-free ferments
Real lacto-fermented sauerkraut, kimchi, fermented garlic, and brined pickles. Not vinegar-pickled, and not the sweetened supermarket versions.
A fasting rhythm
A daily eating window most days - usually 16:8, sometimes one meal - plus a single 36-hour fast once a week.
01 · The base
Meat first, and organs are not optional.
The base is ruminant meat, eggs, fish and animal fat. What I want to be straight about is the part the community tends to skip.
Well supported
A 2025 nutrient analysis in Nutrients modelled four carnivore meal plans against reference intakes. The plans came out high in B12, zinc, selenium, B6 and vitamin A - and short on vitamin C, folate, calcium and fibre, with fibre under 1% of the reference value in every plan.
That is the strongest practical argument for eating liver and other organ meat rather than living on ribeye, and it is why I do. The popular claim that you need less vitamin C on a low-carb diet is a community theory - I looked for human evidence supporting it and did not find any.
The other honest caveat: this way of eating raises LDL cholesterol substantially in some people. In the largest survey of carnivore dieters, average LDL was around 172 mg/dL.
On cholesterol, plainly
Whether a high LDL and ApoB in a lean, metabolically healthy person carries the same risk as it does in the general population is genuinely unresolved. The study most often cited on that question was retracted in May 2026, and the follow-up analysis is currently an un-peer-reviewed preprint. Anyone telling you this is settled - in either direction - is overselling. Get your lipids tested and take the numbers to a doctor.
02 · Ferments
Why I add fermented vegetables to a meat-based diet.
Strict carnivore removes essentially all fibre and most of what gut bacteria feed on. Adding a small amount of live, sugar-free fermented vegetables is the one plant exception I make - and I want to be careful about how strong a claim that deserves.
Mixed evidence
The encouraging study. A 2021 Stanford randomised trial in Cell put 36 healthy adults on either a high-fermented-food or high-fibre diet for ten weeks. The fermented-food group increased gut microbial diversity - more servings, bigger effect - and showed decreases in 19 inflammatory proteins, including IL-6. The high-fibre group showed neither.
The study that complicates it. In 2026, a larger crossover trial in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition gave 87 people 100 g of sauerkraut daily for four weeks. Both fresh and pasteurised kraut nudged systolic blood pressure down by about 1.5-2.5 mmHg, but the inflammatory markers did not reach significance and gut barrier integrity did not change. The authors concluded four weeks of daily sauerkraut "was not linked to an appreciable systemic health benefit in healthy individuals."
Where that leaves it. Fermented vegetables are a plausible, low-risk, low-cost addition with one encouraging small trial and one larger, mostly null trial behind them. That is not nothing, and it is not a cure. And critically: nobody has studied fermented vegetables on top of a carnivore diet. I am extrapolating, and so is everyone else who tells you to do this.
How to tell a real ferment from a pickle
- Refrigerated, not shelf-stable. Live microbes do not survive a warm shelf.
- Vinegar in the ingredients is a red flag - that is acidified for stability, not fermented.
- The label should read vegetable, salt, water, spices. Little else.
- Look for "fermented," "raw," "live cultures," "naturally fermented."
- Cloudy brine is a good sign, not a bad one.
Two things worth knowing first
- Histamine. Ferments are among the highest dietary sources of histamine and tyramine, and carnivore eaters are already a group that often reports sensitivity to aged meat. If that is you, this may be the wrong addition. Start with a tablespoon, not a bowl.
- Sodium. Sauerkraut runs about 660 mg of sodium per 100 g; kimchi about 500 mg. A generous daily serving is roughly 0.5-1 g. If you also salt your food heavily and supplement sodium around fasts, that adds up faster than you would think.
- Commercial kimchi usually contains sugar - added deliberately to feed the fermentation, so much of it is consumed in the process. It often also contains rice starch, fish sauce or shrimp paste. Read the label.
The caution the carnivore world rarely mentions
Observational studies have linked high pickled-vegetable intake with higher gastric cancer risk - a 2020 meta-analysis found roughly 15% higher risk per 40 g/day. The signal is dominated by East Asian populations with very high habitual intakes and high H. pylori prevalence, and researchers attribute it mainly to salt load and N-nitroso compounds rather than to fermentation itself. It is not a reason to avoid sauerkraut. It is a reason not to pretend fermented vegetables are unambiguously good for you, and a reason to keep total sodium in view.
03 · Fasting
A daily window, plus one long fast a week.
Most days are 16:8, sometimes one meal. Once a week I do a 36-hour fast - dinner one evening to dinner the next-but-one.
- The weekly 36
- Popularly called a "Monk Fast." Worth knowing that the name is a modern marketing coinage - there is no scientific literature using it and no traceable monastic origin. It is useful shorthand, nothing more. More importantly: a once-weekly 36-hour fast has never been studied as its own protocol. Everything below is extrapolated from alternate-day fasting and 5:2 research.
- What fasting reliably does
- It helps people eat less, and for some of us it is dramatically easier to sustain than counting. That is a real advantage. What it does not do is beat plain calorie restriction: in year-long randomised trials - Trepanowski 2017 in JAMA Internal Medicine, Liu 2022 in the NEJM - fasting protocols performed about the same as simply eating less. A 2024 umbrella review across 153 trials found intermittent fasting beat usual diets most of the time, but only edged out continuous calorie restriction in about 56% of outcomes, with most evidence rated low certainty.
- Electrolytes
- Falling insulin during a fast reduces sodium reabsorption in the kidney - the "natriuresis of fasting." That mechanism is well established, and it is why headaches, cramps and fatigue cluster in the first days of carbohydrate restriction. The specific numbers you see repeated (1-2 g sodium, ~4 g potassium) come from practitioner convention, not from trials. A 2025 review was explicit that it could not identify a single study linking these symptoms to measured electrolyte changes. I salt my water. I do not pretend that is science.
- Drinking plain water only
- The one documented way people land in hospital during an extended fast is hyponatremia from drinking large volumes of plain water with no sodium. In a review of 768 medically supervised water fasts, two serious adverse events required hospitalisation - one dehydration, one hyponatremia. Add salt.
- Breaking the fast
- Refeeding syndrome is not a realistic concern at 36 hours for a well-nourished adult - the ASPEN clinical criteria start at negligible intake for five to seven days. That said, an enormous first meal tends to feel terrible. I break with something moderate and protein-forward. There is no trial behind that; it is just what works for me.
- What I do not claim
- You will see a lot of specific autophagy claims attached to specific fast lengths. I have not found human evidence establishing a duration that produces a clinically meaningful autophagy benefit, so I do not make that argument.
My own thing
Whole Ribeye Month.
A challenge I made up. It is not an established protocol and there is no community behind it - I mention that because plenty of things in this space get presented as tradition when they are somebody's invention from last year.
The idea is simple: one month, ribeye as the anchor meal, tracked every day. Not because ribeye is magic, but because removing the decision removes the friction, and because a month is long enough to see something in the data.
One caveat I would rather say myself than have pointed out: a month of muscle meat alone is exactly the pattern that runs short on folate, calcium and vitamin C. If you try it, keep organ meat and eggs in the rotation.
The tracker
None of this means much untracked.
I built a tracker because I wanted to know whether any of it was actually doing anything, and because generic diet apps are built around counting carbohydrates I do not eat.
It runs in the browser. The public beta works with no account at all - everything stays on your device until you decide otherwise. If you want your journal to follow you between devices, you can create an account and it saves to the server instead. That choice is yours and it is reversible.
- Carnivore-first food log, with room for sugar-free ferments
- Long and open-ended fasts - no dark-pattern trials or bait-and-switch
- Local-first on your device; free export; cloud only if you want it
- Timer, meals, electrolytes, glucose, ketones, and weight in one place
18:42:09
18.7h of 24h
124gProtein
82gFat
3gCarbs
Illustration of the daily view
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Questions, corrections, or something I got wrong? david@poeventuresllc.com. I would genuinely rather be corrected than be confident.