April 2026 Intermitten/Extended Fasting All Welcome

#21

I never saw a different one here… If I remember correctly (but I think I do). I never liked sardines. Edible but not particularly good, boring too. And all of them has sunflower/rapeseed oil anyway. But I will go and look next time, it’s not such a bad idea for a tiny meal… Sometimes I am just hungry and don’t care for joy. Rare but happens.

I couldn’t do this sardine fast as the protein intake is impossible for me. I need to stay below 20-30g protein if I don’t want to be around 130 or more (rarely 100g is possible too). Protein makes me hungry and it won’t stop until I get that. Well theoretically I could just eat a ton of sardines but I would hate it way earlier, I need tastier food and variety.
I prefer fat fasts but I said that a few times :slight_smile: Enjoyable, flexible (I did it on vegetarian keto and on carnivore and I have lots of options), super cheap (around $1 per day? depends on my choices), big calorie deficit, no cooking, simplicity… :slight_smile: AND a way for me to eat as fatty as I want (in percentages, the fat amount is smallish but it’s enough).

Lately I do 1-2MAD but when I track, even 2MAD shows I eat very little (for me)! So I must have a deficit and indeed, I have started to lose weight. Great but I keep trying to skip lunch, it’s still surprisingly difficult. I really need to stop drinking coffee too, I blame that for most of my problems regarding lunch skipping.
And I plan to do fun experiments again. Like a lean day. I feel ready for some really low-fat days (for me, even now that I am quite able to eat a meal below 65% fat). Especially in grams.
I came a long way. I remember my early low-carb times when I just couldn’t stay below 200g fat longer term (I missed fat very much for years). And now I can go below 100g! That’s enough, I do need some energy from my food. But I still want fasting days this year, I am stubborn about that, just won’t force it.

I will take it more seriously in May! May is the last month when I have a chance to stay close to carnivore too. I am not so much into that but it could be a useful challenge. A big one considering my last months but I am sure I can go stricter for a few weeks.

#22

When I’m keto or carnivore it was two meals per day (from our chats in the carnivore thread). With the sardines eating, I am OMAD at about 3pm. The 3pm comes from Dr. Boz hacking the night hours for nutritional ketosis in the morning despite the waking cortisol effect. I think Dr. Boz advises for her female clients especially to eat when and how much you want on the sardine diet. I reckon she is right, it can be a real challenge to eat 2000 or 3000 calories of sardines. Maybe it’s do-able with the oil. But satiety is a good guide. Dr. D’Agostino’s apple cider vinegar augmentation made it very accessible for me.

I’m eating one can of sardines and one can of mackerel in olive oil. I add 2 to 3 tblsp of Apple Cider Vinegar, and that helps digest the sardines for me. I also add 1 tblsp of MCT oil. It’s quite satiating. I might add another can or two of the fish as I am 6 foot 5 and built like a brick outhouse. In the morning I have two cups of coffee about 3 hours apart (habit and addiction).

My morning blood ketones are about 0.7/0.8 mmol/L and blood glucose between 5.0 to 5.4mmol/L. So, that’s a GKI of 7, which is some autophagy. But serial blood tests (finger prick) show a rise in ketones and before the sardine meal my blood ketones are 1.4/1.6 mmol/L and blood glucose heading down to 4.5. So that lands me in the GKI range of 1 to 4, which is the same degree of autophagy as a water fast.

It is a workable alternate for me to get to some of the same body physiology effects. To the point that I have forgotten how long I have been eating like this. I think I passed the 72 hours I set out to do. But I am feeling good, so I might run it on a bit.

#23

Dr. D’Agostino points out that high ketones will stimulate paradoxical insulin release. This was from his work on ketone esthers as supplements. So he aims his sardine eating to land him in the 1.0 to 2.0 mmol/L. (Dr. Georgia Edes recently commented that ketosis of between 1.0 to 3.0 is very adequate therapeutically for some mental health disorders.) That paradoxical insulin could drive hunger and cravings?

#24

Thanks Doug. This is great stuff to read and learn from.

(Bob M) #25

Those are good. I forgot they had skin. Do they have bones too?

(KM) #26

They do indeed.

(KM) #27

:woman_shrugging:t2:.

There’s really no way I’m going to eat nothing but sardines, and not be in pretty deep ketosis.

#28

Today someone said my face looked “thin”. Waking blood glucose 5.2mmol/L and blood ketones 1.3mmol/L = GKI of 4.

It feels like I am a newby. In that I am getting into a nice level of ketosis where my mood is good, I do not have cravings (or hunger), and I instinctively want to be physically active. Enjoying this reboot and trip down nutritional ketosis memory lane.

This afternoon my fasting numbers before OMAD sardine meal to finish April were: blood glucose 3.8 mmol/L and blood ketones 2.2 mmol/L resulting in a GKI of 1.72. I feel an overall coolness including inside my head. This small burst of fasting-mimicking eating has sparked some curiosity in me for variations of ketogenic dietary n=1 play in this arena.

Fasting mimicking protein and nutrient eating for 72 hours deep nutritional ketosis that has metabolic benefits that last for months
#29

Fair enough. Can’t argue with a strong response.

(Bob M) #30

That blood glucose is about 68 in US units. That’s pretty low. I rarely get that low, only overnight (which I’m not sure is really true, but that’s what my CGM says) or if I’ve been fasting a few days.

I think I’m going to try a multi-day “normal” fast next week, but after that, I may try a shorter-duration sardine fast.

I see some containers of sardines from Costco in my closet, and also some other canned fish.

(KM) #31

Just a “hack”, according to AI you can swallow sardine bones whole, no danger, and still get the calcium. I hate their texture so just pulled the spines, did a fast down the hatch with water, and then had nice “clean” fillets. Really wish I’d discovered this on Monday! I end my fast tomorrow morning and I’ve had enough sardines for a while.

#32

I don’t even remember how I ate sardines, with or without spines :smiley: Knowing myself, I took them out if it was easy and not if it was more tiresome than eating them…
The next time I am near a big supermarket chain (in a few weeks?), I will look at sardines! I wouldn’t do a sardine fast but eating a tin now and then doesn’t sound bad if I can avoid the bad oils. Maybe the tinned fish situation improved here since I looked at it last time.
No fat fast this week, it just couldn’t happen, too much lovely protein to eat… And too many TMAD days. But if I could do it without problems, it would be helpful to have some super high protein (in percentages) days followed by a fat fast day… I definitely will experiment a bit. Experiments are fun, I try to find my limits and may be more happy with what I normally have…

I really would love some mackerel in brine or good oil… But we will see what I can find.
For a mere “protein day”, I don’t need expensive fish (all fish is expensive to me. I have better options. but I do like variety).

(KM) #33

Well, so this time I got the back pain about 3 hours after breaking my fast.:woman_shrugging:t2:. Other than that all is well. 5 days.

#34

I broke my fast with an omelette, then a few hours later a ribeye cooked in duck fat and I went into AFib. I used plenty of salt. I was supplementing magnesium. I added more salt and magnesium and a dose of ketone ester. It still took about 12 hours to settle. I didn’t drop out of nutritional ketosis >1.0mmol/L.

So that relapse, back pain or AFib, is a great learning moment. I’m going to link it to something I heard cardiologist Dr. William Davis say, AFib can be due to sudden lipopolysaccharide (LPS) peak in the blood stream.

Fast bacterial die-off, especially in the small intestine, will result in LPS absorption and that LPS toxic blood peak/ trigger. What causes a sudden change in intestinal gut biota? - a sudden diet change.

Both our problems flared on that diet change at the end of the fasting mimicking sardine diet.

I did have loose stools as a biological signal the episode was ending. That can happen with dosing magnesium to gut tolerance laxative effect. But ‘the squirts’ is always a good sign. Now, I wonder if it is in part due to dumping dead gut bacteria, and maybe some bacterial cell breakdown toxins as well.

Note for @VirginiaEdie, I had no oxalate dumping symptoms concurrently. But that could also add to the complexity.

(When people say back pain, I think of Klebsiella sp. bacterial cell wall LPS, as that bacteria’s breakdown products trigger an immune memory inflammatory response to human spinal backbone cartilage.)

I went back to OMAD with one sardine and egg bowl = mixed one can of fish in olive oil with three soft boiled eggs, two tablespoons ACV, 1 tblsp MCT, and a forkful of fermented sauerkraut all mixed together. That took me back into deeper ketosis and a GKI of 3, and my hear rate was steady at between 50 to 60.

Then there was a family birthday dinner. I tried. I ate only meats and cheeses, drank water, there were some anchovies in olive oil and lemon juice, for mains I had steak from the grill, hot smoked salmon. The chefs are Italian so the cooking oil was olive oil. All went well until my niece’s 21st birthday special cake… just one bite. Within a few hours Iwas in AFib again. Food change flare up.

Today, all day my heart rate has varied between 52 and 156, a zigzag every few minutes. It’s not strictly AFib, it’s probably a new form of heart arrhythmia. But it stops me in my tracks. I’ll get to work on the electrolytes etc in the home treatment protocol.

But I had to make this note.

Fasting mimicking protein and nutrient eating for 72 hours deep nutritional ketosis that has metabolic benefits that last for months
(KM) #35

Could you expand on that? It sounds like such a good fit for my fasting back pain issue.

#36

Hi KB

I wrote about it recently here:

In 2019 I wrote about it here:

https://www.ketogenicforums.com/t/ankylosing-spondylitis/76710/7?u=frankobear