Welcome to April.
We’ve settled into 2025, no fools here.
Let’s consider some concrete goals for April. They can be large or teeny tiny. Short or long. Just pick an actionable thing so that we can cheer for you as you work towards it.
And of course, all carnivore conversations are welcome!
Goals? Well the usual I guess…
My dairy consumption dropped (and it usually wasn’t high before, at least not nearly as high as in the more distant past), egg stayed lowish so it’s a bit tricky to do carnivore, I need variety. Or more pork chuck 
It’s barely above green ham price wise and as I don’t eat much very fatty extra items, I don’t need so very low-fat meat. Fattier, tastier meat makes my meals simpler. I still will have the leaner ones too, paired with some fattier items as I still love those, just don’t feel the need for them every day.
I think it is interesting that you wait until afternoon to drink coffee. I’m usually a morning coffee drinker, myself. Maybe an espresso after dinner on special occasions.
What’s your time frame for your goals? Seven days to start? I know I always do better if I can do something for a specific amount of time, at least in the beginning.
So 14 months ago I posted:
And …I can tuck my shirt in! Yay!
I’ve lost 13 pounds in 13ish months, so I’m not setting any speed records here, lol. But my non-scale victories are solid, too. No antihistamines, my two prescriptions are lower, and I’m stronger.
My goal for April is to
Stay the course one more month at my current 99% carnivore level, then do some careful re-introductions in May. I may try to add pork, eggs, and goat dairy yet this month. I’ve been low histamine long enough that I might be okay with small portions of these.
Keep to the plan for my workouts (the ketogains barbell/ kettleball workout 3x a week/ Jeff Galloway 10k training 3x a week, and yoga).
Continue to eat mindfully.
Six hour eating window is comfortable.
Also, since I’m as likely to under eat as over eat, I decided to try to track with my Garmin watch, which I actually bought for the GPS. It estimates my calories pretty accurately. Since I know I need to reduce, I figure out what 80% of what the watch tells me I will burn that day, then I put that into my Nutronix app when my eating window opens. If I need more or less, I go with it, but usually I’m satisfied.
The beauty of a restricted diet is being able to spot the “thing” that’s causing trouble. I think I found my last “thing”- citric acid.
My original goal for April was to pull out artificial citric acid (the kind derived from mold) for 14 days and then challenge. Except. I doubt I will want to challenge. I’m on day 4, and I feel really good.
After years of gastro trouble, Hubby’s doctor had him do the MRT test, and it turned up some chemicals (plus corn, garlic, pineapple, and peas). On closer inspection, his sensitive chemicals and the citric acid are in our water softening salt products. We’re bringing drinking water in from the outside well spigot and avoiding all three chemicals in our food.
So I guess all of this is my very long way of saying…things are going well so my goal is to stay the course.
@beannoise: I am the type who can’t just stop easily before the day is done. If I want to avoid consuming something if possible (and mitigate the problems when it’s not), I should wait for longer. The other part is that I almost get a tabula rasa when a new day starts. The urge is smaller. (It may not be true for coffee though, morning coffee became a thing for me, sadly.) It works best with eating, fasting is trivial when I am well fasted as long as I get some very serious urge to eat. It’s usually my SO coming home to have lunch but temptation and strong hunger works too. But to some extent, it may work with non-ideal food/drink items. It’s easier not to start than stop.
And coffee and tea caffeine doesn’t have any noticeable effect on me. So it’s quite fine for me to drink multiple coffees at midnight, much better than starting at 9am and triggering a 12+ hour coffee drinking period. I am very, very bad with coffee and I don’t even like it or get anything good from it at this point. I still find the taste interesting… But it’s a very bad stubborn habit at this point, probably keeping alive by my worst, anti-hedonist saboteur parts of my subconscious.
I don’t have a time frame now. I don’t even believe I can pull off a single carnivore day in the near future 
This winter was bad, my track record is horrible. And it’s FINE if it’s just carnivore-ish and I know I shouldn’t try hard at all, I would fail now… So I don’t really try, I just eat in a way I like (I do love carni food and don’t want plants for a while), I try to avoid temptations around me though. And try to stop to think before giving in immediately…
So I just try to do whatever I can until June (and even afterwards).
Today seem to be easy as Alvaro is busy and won’t come home until dinnertime. So I skip lunch today. I got hungry after 4pm and had a few bites of fried pork chuck but that’s it this far. OMAD has many great benefits, it’s way easier to stick to carnivore(-ish) on it. If I have 2 meals, that’s tricky as I usually can’t have two meaty meals, I get bored and my meals aren’t small and I rarely can pull them off with only a tiny bit of meat. But there are very many other reasons why I pretty much need OMAD.
Congrats! 
I did something similar when I went low-carb, those were the good times… I was very happy with my stable not quick fat loss especially that I sacrificed NOTHING. Low-carb was for me. Why no one ever told me it was a thing before? I just ate like everyone else but it wasn’t a good fit
Oh and I haven’t written with m y goals as it’s not a goal but I plan to track a bit too. Nothing too troublesome, only if I do simple! I already took some notes (that’s why I know I had 400g pork chuck for lunch yesterday) but I messed things up in the end… But I go for simple, mostly carnivore food now and only as much as I need or really would like! No extra snacks later just because I can… 
It wasn’t too bad lately but it happened to a tiny extent…
Good luck to that!
I need to go back first… I want the easiness that comes after a few days… Unless I get tempted.
At least my own garden is fine until June I just enjoy the blooming trees and gardenwork. I don’t normally like gardenwork but it’s nice now, I am filled with expectations And my first little plants came out too. And this is the time with the most flowers! So I am pretty enthusiastic. About the garden. My life isn’t good at all and IDK how to feel optimistic about it but I probably don’t need that, just trying to change in the right direction.
The start of April has a flurry of family birthdays in my world. I need to politely hurdle and dodge the celebratory foods being offered.
I have to heal a broken heart. As in an anatomically misshapen heart that actually looks like a heart 
symbol. So I’ll feed it ketones, building block proteins, and fatty acids, apparently heart muscle’s 
preferred food.
Dr. Saladino said a seemingly weird thing that I may try. He wants to be quite manly, so he eats testicles. I hope you read that without laughing or retching. In that discussion he reckoned that eating the organ that you want to heal is a strategy. Because it is hard to get human hearts at the butcher’s these days, I wonder if my Goth barbarian ancestors ate them?, I’ll keep a look out for lamb or beef heart to eat this autumn.
My chicken waffles, local veal cutlets, and chicken fat for dinner. Three well rinsed, cooked haricot vert. Half a scoop of beef protein isolate and baking soda for workout recovery. Continue to reduce coffee. This is easiest with a coffee press. ETA ordered a whole lamb from the butcher.
Heart is nice! But I will eat beef tongue next week
Bought 50 eggs after too many days trying to spare them… It was fine but makes carnivore near impossible for me. I made 12 sponge cake buns and ate 11… Yum. Along with some leftover liver and pork chuck. Tiny meals happened, about 4 of them, in 5.7 hours. Carnivore or anything close to it is like that for me sometimes.
No workouts for now, I have various aches but I did 2 hour walking today (for the eggs) and I will do the same tomorrow (dentist). Around the lake today, through the wildlife park tomorrow… The trees are greener and greener every day and my first tulips will bloom really soon. Then cold, gloomy days will come, allegedly so it’s good I walk a lot on these warm, sunny days!
I have bought a pull up bar and use it sometimes. I am building up to pull up and push up and a bar at the right height is useful. I never was good at hanging, it would be nice if I weighed a bit less… But of course, my arm muscles are way more important and people can do pull ups with a way higher weight.
Ate sirloin steaks cut from a roast, made and ate chicken waffles with chicken fat, and my 1/2 scoop of beef protein. I did a longer run this morning and ended up “eyeing” my portions at dinner. I’m uncomfortably full right now. I think I’m better off weighing and measuring.
Kind of an on the go kind of day.
Dentist day and if I already was in a human settlement, I bought stuff too Quark, sour cream, chicken legs and pork shoulder… The latter has those very much non-smooth parts nowadays (IDK what those are but not suitable for me to eat) but not much and the cats were happy with those Not a very fatty slab but that’s good, I cut off the little visible fat with some meat around it and fried it, it was pretty good even though the work of the dentist left a bad taste in my mouth (I never had that, definitely not nearly this bad I ended up using a super minty bubble gum to get a little break. I drank and ate and still that taste, yuck! but the pork managed to overpower it, not all the time but mostly)… I even got a little lard out of it! And I had some nice tinned fish, not carnivore but most of the (otherwise very tasty but a bit too sugary) sauce went to Alvaro’s pizza with some meh fried hake fish and I ate the tasty herring He was totally fine with it, of course, the pizza had a lot of cheese and whatnot, it wasn’t so very obvious what kind of fish I have used. But hake fish isn’t fun and it got pricier, I probably won’t bother for it anymore. A pizza needs very little fish, the tinned kind will do just fine.
I think I will make a carnivore pizza in the not too distant future… I rarely bother with it as I don’t fancy it often but it’s fun here and there. The mozzarella one was the best this far but I dislike mozzarella (it’s tasteless here, that makes it so good for pizza, no overpowering flavor but nice texture) so I will make a different one. Egg, meat, little cheese, it should be fine for a dough. I did such ones before but I do it so very rarely I forget. I probably have notes in my cookbook though but it’s so messy due to my zillion experiments that I often just do another version from scratch. I like to experiment anyway, only very, very, very good recipes tempt me to make them again.
Not very hungry today, I did eat twice but little (or it seemed so…? no tracking yet and I am bad at guessing. I got borderline hungry later but no mood for eating so I didn’t. I don’t have some tempting ready to eat meat right now, you see). So I have all the big pork loin slab I have defrosted, I roast it tomorrow, Alvaro needs some food too as he does some political work (collecting and counting votes for something, it’s the 3rd time in 8 days) and he won’t be able to cook the rabbit for lunch. It’s the carbier rabbit dish he used to make but I don’t need to eat the sauce… And of course, I focus on my pork as the rabbit is little and not very satiating or tasty (it IS tasty and tender, I love it but it’s like a better chicken, not substantial enough).
Oh the shopping. The government forces supermarkets to do something with certain prices now…? Main thing that all the meats and some dairy items I regularly buy seem to got significantly cheaper. Like my green ham, it is as cheap as pork shoulder on a good sale, that’s nice. I just won’t buy the items where price raise will happen due to this…
And the greengrocer yesterday… We talked about food when I bought 50 eggs, I mentioned I love pork and love eggs and he said they are especially good together Considering what kind of guidelines I meat nowadays, it was mildly pleasantly surprising though it’s true that many, maybe most Hungarians love dishes with pork and eggs in it…
Nowadays I don’t use eggs as side dish for meat so often (I am quite happy with my fav meats all alone, I just can’t often make a big meal of meats alone) but it’s still a nice combo.
I hope I won’t go back to writing long comments all the time again but the forum is so slow and I have needs… And it helps to get serious. I do love carnivore food but not only that and there are many temptations… It’s useful to remind myself why I should choose the best option for me from multiple similarly tasty ones.
Leftover frozen lamb breast, leftover steak, and some goat kefir. The kefir is an intro, so we shall see how it goes. I’m not optimistic but I really would like to get more nutrition from food and not supplements.
Well. So far, so good on the goat kefir. I did take a DAO supplement with dinner last night. I guess I shall proceed cautiously with goat dairy.
The roasted pork loin was awesome. A bit lean here and there but pretty good (and I had leftover cheese and sausage to balance the fat out a bit)! My only problem was my very very tender tooth after a root canal treatment… It’s so nice when one can enjoy food without problems but I can survive 1-2 days like this.
I seem to have lost all interest in cheese, surely just for a while but it’s nice I am not that super attached to it all the time.
Still no tracking but I have all the notes so maybe I will do it later for the last 3 days.
And I have realized that I actually have an experiment now. Even without carnivore days, I probably will see what happens when I focus on meat instead of eggs and dairy (oh my past carni days when the vast majority of my calories came from eggs and dairy… at least half the protein too… well those days are very much over) and maybe even how much plant carbs interfere. And animal carbs, I have some serious milk powder consumption sometimes… It’s as irresistible as coffee and they usually join forces, one day I will do something about it but I am not ready for that yet. Now that I have eggs, my milk is very eggy, it helps somewhat. And eggs make milk so much better, not surprisingly. Eggs make almost everything better, for me at least. Alvaro prefers most of his food eggless. It’s so weird and wrong to me but more eggs for me and I know tastes are very individual… He even complained when I put eggs into about everything in the past… 
Low egg consumption or not, I am a huge egg lover, that’s quite certain.
Good workout this morning and on the go all day. Helping one of our adult kiddos with some house moving tomorrow, so truck is loaded and we will have a very early start.
More goat kefir today. Chicken waffles with chicken fat, a slice of beef liver (yum), ground beef patties, and about 1/2 ounce of cabbage cooked in my chicken broth.
Tinkering with supplements to minimize artificially-derived citric acid. I don’t need a multi everyday, though. Just calcium/ magnesium when I run my numbers.
Odd, maybe it’s the meat but I am able to resist my borderline hunger in the evenings. I don’t eat very much for my meals to keep me perfectly satiated but I eat enough for my body. I used to be unable to resist food just when I was not satiated in the evenings let alone this baby hunger (carnivore merely tended to give me very good satiation until bedtime so it wasn’t a problem on it)… But I can do it now. Wow. And it’s not even carnivore yet, just close, with a big focus on meat and I don’t eat a lot of too calorie dense non-satiating dairy either. Maybe positive changes will come!
But today I am hungry early so I will have a lunch around noon, probably. No mood to push as we have rabbit since yesterday evening and I haven’t even tasted it yet! And I want to.
Moving done, back to class today. I’ve been getting a lot of grading caught up in between things.
It looks like goat and sheep milk are good to add back into my diet. I’m challenging pastured eggs this evening. Fingers crossed on this one. I did whites and yolks, which might be a mistake. We shall see.
Anyhow, with the removal of the citric acid and the l-glutamine to heal, I’ve been surprised how much less reactive I am. EU cheeses with geographic designations aren’t allowed to use citric acid. I would like to find a chreve without citric acid, too.
Pot roast, poached eggs, chicken waffles, pecorino Romano today. Lots of water. I’m not restricting anything today since I donated blood.
I’m not carnivore (rather LCHF) but I’m posting here anyway because now I have a goal:
My old leather pants. I only need to get rid of two inches from my waist to properly fit in.
That will take longer than April but this is a start anyway. I have lost 20 kg since November, a very good boogie is going on now.
I weigh and measure once a month.