Yesterday’s menu:
salmon
bone broth
raw beef suet
beef liver
bacon
ground beef with beef heart
salt (This is a given but thought I should mention it from time to time. I use Redmond Real salt cause I love the taste of it.)
summer sausage (better kept as a side dish)
baked fat yum
I was just reading someone’s blog around carnavore and they cite some evidence that A: states that carnivore can result in low to no trace ketones and B: tracking can cause obsessive behavior causing people to not eat enough for the healing effects.
So what I’m taking away from this is that I may have two objectives that while they may not be mutually exclusive, could be at odds with each other.
Now to noodle around which is more important to me.
Exactly! That’s why I don’t do my testing very often. We need to let our bodies tell us what they want and so on, especially those of us doing this for better health.
Yesterday was 30 days keto/carnivore but not Paleolithic Ketogenic Diet (PKD). I’ll be 30 days on THAT next week. I’d have to say that this month has been a transitional month so far. For most of it I didn’t really see any kind of improvement except that my hair loss (which was horrible during all 3 years on regular keto) has stopped and I see new hair growing in.
In the last few days I have noticed that my psoriasis has stopped getting worse. It ALWAYS got worse in the colder months. It was starting to get worse again this Fall but it has now stopped. That’s after only 30 days. I’m super excited!! Bowels are s l o w l y changing and hopefully for the better. Sleep is much better. I start yawning a lot around 8pm and wake up ready to go around 5 to 6am.
What amazes me the most is that I’ve never been a meat eater. Yes, I could enjoy a good steak or roast but most of the time I just didn’t eat a lot of meat. So…I was wondering how I could do keto/carnivore but boy oh boy has my body taken the front seat on this issue, LOL. Where have meats been all my life?! I love them now, simply amazing.
One of the first things I noticed about this WOE was that it felt like some kind of super calm (like taking a relaxing magnesium bath) took me over…nice! 
I feel like my body is finally being given a chance to “come alive” for the first time in my life. I also LOVE the FREEDOM from the kitchen. Wow! We eat when we are hungry and that’s it, and since it’s only meat I don’t spend days trying to decide and plan out menu’s, etc.
My only con so far is that I wish I had known about this years ago, but it’s never too late to begin anew and get going in the right direction!
I can’t begin to thank everyone here enough! I appreciate all the comments, links and so on. You guys are beyond amazing! 
just some keto stick info:
There are three main ways to measure the ketones in your body, all of which have their advantages and disadvantages. The most common ways to measure are:
Urine sticks…They measure the acetoacetate in your urine, which is an unused ketone by the body. As you get deeper into ketosis and your body adapts, your body will also become more optimized in ketone production.
You should notice a dark purple color when you’re newer to the ketogenic diet. If you’ve been on keto for many months, you’ll probably see a much lighter color. Many people assume this is a bad thing, but it’s usually not. Your body has just become more efficient at creating the ketones that fuel your body. If you’ve been following a ketogenic diet for a long time, it can be common for the sticks to give a false negative result.
------So those in deeper longer term ketosis the sticks are just not accurate enough and our ketones are not dumping like in the beginning etc…so just some info on it a bit for those interested.
I tried them once…like a year into my carnivore plan and I barely turned the little bit pinky purple…and I thought what the??? So I went off and learned all about why the urine sticks just don’t cut it for those of us in a deep keto adapted body.
good point.
but a lot of people expect miracles in 1 day let alone 30
carnivore will heal inside first. Correct hormone inbalance and inflammation and all that jazz. weight loss might not happen fast for many. Yea we dump water weight etc but then the true force of carnivore kicks in.
It wants to tackle the insides. The healing that is required for a natural balanced body and since overweight is a symptom of hormones and more out of whack etc…it might be a bit til it gets it all arranged well again and can easily tackle dropping great weight.
but also we ‘lean up’ and drop that carby fluffy look…so we do get leaner and meaner even if the scale is not moving.
Each of us doing this plan is so different inside. Heal time can be very long for some. I remember on ZIOH (Zeroing in on Health) a few members were like a year into it and still struggling with ‘where is the fix’ and didn’t get the benefits others were chatting about but that one day one would come on and say…wow I am finally improving on XYZ and we would cheer them on.
Faith on carnivore is very important for those who need big changes
Renee that was such a wonderful post!!!
You are rocking Carnivore and getting great results.
and psssst……just wait, it gets better and better and better with more time
My nsv this week: my pain on Monday when I pulled my back (from a scale of 1-10) was a solid 10.5. If it weren’t for my diet, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of bed yesterday, let alone work all day. But I did, with pain levels ranging from 5-7 (with layering ibuprofen and Tylenol all day though). Today, no pain meds and my pain all morning was a 2-3, now it’s maybe .5 at 5 pm. I can’t imagine what kind of shape I’d be in if I was still eating SAD!
I don’t track anything. I don’t measure anything. 
If I’m concerned I didn’t eat enough I’ll do the fat test.
Agree that tracking and macros to hit etc can drive one batty.
some love it and it fits into their day and they like seeing their numbers and such…I happen to be one where I do go nuts real fast if I have to do ‘work’ like track…I need a lifestyle tracking is not required ever!
Plus no one knows one bit what macros they require truly LOL
As if we can control every percentage of food into our body and pretend our body says, omg they got it perfectly right Ain’t kidding me one bit. The body is so complex yet we think we can control it down to the percentages and more. We can’t.
but it does get us sometimes into a better level of where we kinda should be and help us walk a path to better health for some.
Daisy, that is such great news! I used to have low back pain, very painful so I know how it is. I mean, doing just about anything uses one’s back so the pain is always at the ready. That’s a super fast recovery time!! So happy for you!
Try to eat more fat. If your body has had enough it will be very hard to do.
If you’re eating a fatty steak and everything is great then suddenly you are physically repulsed at the thought of taking another bite… then you’ve reached that point.
Unlike popcorn, chips, or fries you just can’t comfortably go past full with fat.
It’s 37’ here today.
Celcius.
About 98.5 in old money.
Also not great for walking. But Vitamin D is dosed in about a millisecond.
$1 per strip for blood ketone test strips for the Abbott Freestyle Optimum (box of 10)
That’s 68c per strip in greenbacks.
What is the cost in Euro?
I track blood ketones every morning for the past 1875 days. That way I know when I am in nutritional ketosis and when I drop out, if I do a test feed of a new experimental food. I can also associate the ketone reading with general mood and activity. I may have posted before about it, but there can be a difference between eating keto and nutritional ketosis. The ‘ketogenic’ in ketogenic diet is aspirational, whereas the blood ketone reading is data.
In terms of carnivore, my blood ketones reduced only by 0.1 mmol/L in the trial I did and settled at that level. But my blood glucose went up by about 0,3mmol/L. This mild change matches sympathetic nervous system activation and correlated with increased blood cortisol.
I was listening to Dr. Georgia Ede (again), she keeps popping up in my podcast menu, and she is accidental carnivore. her experience is that nutritional ketosis intensified when she gave up all plant foods.
I’m not sure if it intensified but my mood and general sense of well-being, not to mention other issues, certainly improved when I gave plants the boot.
I used to do the cheap breathalyzer thing on keto and it worked pretty regularly… maybe keto breath is why I’m single??? 
Anyway, on carnivore I typically blow 0.00 unless I’ve gone a while without eating. This morning while writing this I did it just for kicks and blew 0.13. If I do this later today it’ll probably be 0 again.
I decided early on to specifically not chase ketones. I noticed among other threads and posters what seemed to be a disordered obsession with their ketone readings and did not want to go there.
Yup, the purchase of a new toy (a ketone measuring device) does rapidly decline in to competition with the eagerness inherent in the initial novelty.
Definitely worth doing if chasing ketones for therapeutic reasons such as some cancer treatments and seizure control in seeking that blood glucose to blood ketone ration of 1.
That thing where people chase high ketone numbers and brag is just another phase we can silently observe from our position of more experience.
There are interesting goals in ketone measurement. Urine ketones subside with adaptation. Breath ketones indicate an excretion of carbon atoms and body fat loss. High blood ketones can be from a variety of factors. But with a few years in nutritional ketosis and the body tissues well adapted to ketone metbolism the efficiency of the system settles in to low numbers. Just enough to indicate insulin status in a crude way. If blood ketones are present then insulin is low. And it really comes down to knowing about insulin status for many health goals. A lot more so than knowing about ketone levels.
This summer (just started) I’m hoping to lean in toward keto-carnivore again. I need a gentler landing due to problems in retaining some important mineral micronutrients. But the new toy is a Constant Blood Glucose Monitor, which will be n-1 fun in experimenting with OMAD of different non-plant foods and measuring data responses to find a clean carnivore way of eating for this bear.