Day 9 - PSK
I feel good. No headache yesterday or this morning. Very low hunger. Calm, clear.
I am feeling some pain in my abdomen… it’s like a discomfort in my lower belly muscles that gets a little intense then fades back to discomfort.
I will post pics soon but I’ll say the combination of new activities and supplements has reduced my belly fat and skin faster than I expected without fasting.
Thinking on the weight gain on PSK …
because I chose a vegan PSK, the fiber in my diet is a lot higher than my usual carnivore+. Add to that the fact that I had just come out of the extended fast. I think that the fibrous material was causing me to soak up a lot of water and it created a lot of bulk that needed time (5 days) to start to work its way through.
I would call that the adaptation period for vegan PSK 
If I were to do this carnivore, I would expect the results to be more immediate.
Day 9 - PSK - final
No idea what happened, but my ketones crashed today from 2.0 to 1.2 and glucose shot up from 72 to 85 and negligible weight/composition change…
Here’s what I ate today.
Still PSK but I needed something different so I had a choczero dark and cut out enough of the other fats to compensate.
End of the day and the headache is back… 
I’m starting to get concerned that I may be causing harm…
Thinking of fasting tomorrow to reset but it might mess up the PSK experiment.
Day 10 - PSK
Woke up feeling better. Slight headache & no hunger. I also think I understand what’s going on a bit better.
I’ve been trying to eat protein and fat only at a 50%:50% ratio keeping calories under 1000. That’s how I’ve defined this PSK approach. That basically ends up at 55g of fat and 125g of protein. But implicit in the macro math is the high fiber carb that I’m excluding since I only look at net carbs ~ 10g. This is a biproduct of doing vegan PSK.
So I’m eating fiber and protein with a little fat… the result is that my digestive system is struggling to move the material through. I take a lot of magnesium but it’s not enough. There’s just no signal to eliminate and that creates digestive stress. Add to that the daily saunas that are causing temporary dehydration… And even when I do eliminate, it’s uncomfortable.
I think the digestive stress is causing my headache and since that’s my condition every time I eat and hadn’t eliminated, the headache keeps coming back… It’s chronic unless I fast or find a way to improve my elimination.
Solutions?
More magnesium?
More hydration?
More fat?
Less fiber? (yes, fiber makes it worse - not better)
Less coffee? (it’s a diuretic so it can aggravate dehydration)
I’m going to add some more fat and start measuring my fiber…
any other ideas?
Day 10 final - PSK
Weight loss still progressing but it has a larger component from muscle mass too… and that’s while consuming a lot of protein.
My GKI has been steadily increasing and is in the 3-4 range now… so low level ketosis with Glucose in the high 80s and ketones in the low 1.0s…
I’m getting sun, sauna and deadlifting outside every day now.
Day 11 - PSK - looks like I’ve succeeded in putting the audience to sleep again 
Had a lot more fat yesterday and the headache went away.
Gained a lot more water weight (4lbs!!!) overnight but I’m hoping to dry out before my OMAD today.
Day 12 - PSK
I’ll post My results a little less frequently and go over how I’m doing instead.
I decided to eat a little more yesterday. Moving from 1000 calories with 50g of fat and 0.9g/lb protein up to 1400 calories with 80g of fat and 1.0g/lb protein.
That upped my carbs from sub-10 to a little over 11g. I dared to have an avocado and a snack (kale chips)!! 
I still consider it a protein sparing keto day because I was eating 1.7g of protein to each 1.0 gram of fat. I was also still in a caloric deficit since I still had a lot of energy and I weightlifted.
I also decided to stop taking vitamins C and E to allow for more inflammation while lifting. I also stopped resveratrol. I’m not seeing any gains and I suspect it’s the result of the anti inflammation vitamins. I considered the risk of doing this during the COVID 19 pandemic but I’m working from home and I’ve been home bound for two weeks with no symptoms.
Results:
The additional volume of food and extra protein and fat made me very full and sated. Almost uncomfortably so since I’m OMAD. I haven’t measured yet but I’m surprised that I would feel that way on 1400 calories given that I used to eat 4500 calories on carnivore some days while bulking.
Also, the extra volume is helping with the elimination process. I think that consuming less than 200g of food a day is “confusing” to my body. It just refuses to function normally. It’s not fasting, but it’s not eating normally either… so it waits for days instead of hours. That’s my theory on why the volume helped.
I think that fat plays an important digestive role beyond just being there as an energy source. Being too high in protein and fiber without enough fat doesn’t feel comfortable to my digestive system.
Conclusion
Once I’m done with this vegan PKS experiment, I’m going to eat Keto for a couple of days, then go back to an extended fast for a week or so. I’m hoping to flush out the fiber I’ve been building up and start fresh on carnivore+ in late April. My carnivore+ allows fermented plants and mushrooms since they’re not technically plants & instead feed on plants (like herbivores do).
I’ll decide if I want to try carnivore PSK after I’ve had my fill of ribeyes 
Day 13 - PSK
Eating at a higher calorie PSK is making me much hungrier. I’m not sure if it’s because of the increase in fat or protein, but I actually wake up hungry. It fades but it’s curiously uncomfortable. It may be the increase from 10g to 12g … that would be sad if that minor of a change has this much effect.
To add to this, my morning ketones were at 0.7… so an absolute disaster given that I’m eating almost 1000 calories below my estimated RMR and 12g of carb!!!
I’m going to drop back down to 0.8g/lb lean protein and try to keep fat around 60g. If I go too low, I get headaches and digestive stress. If I go too high, I apparently drop out of “high” ketosis.
… not happy with the PSK results.
I can’t wait to be done with this experiment and go back to extended fasting in 6 more days!
I can’t remember what PSK stands for and have been searching posts trying to find it.
So if I understand this, eating more protein makes you hungrier?
PSK = Protein Sparing Keto. It’s not really fasting but I’m comparing it to my fasting results.
I eat a fixed amount of protein ~ 0.7-1.0g/lb of lean mass, then as little fat and carbs as I can get away with.
It’s vegan PSK so that’s difficult… it seems that the hunger spike is dependent on the carbs, protein and fiber I’m consuming. I am more hungry than after I had been fasting for weeks.
I think it’s part of the big difference between eating something or nothing. Any food basically gets the digestive system going and part of that is the hunger and satiety signaling.
Day 14 - PSK (Protein Sparing Keto)
Woke up feeling less hungry. Overall feeling good.
Big purge last night so hoping the reduction in intake was good for the results.
It looks like PSK is dropping my fat mass by ~0.27lb a day compared to 0.69lb for an extended fast (excluding the upfront flush that’s offset at the end).
So it’s around 40% the effectiveness of a true extended fast… it works but it was tricky for me. There’s a zone that I need to dial in to for it to work.
Too much protein and my ketones crash and I get hungry. Too few calories overall and I get headaches.My sweet spot seems to be 10g carbs, 0.8g protein / lb lean mass, and total calories around 1000.
I’m going to intentionally try to go higher in protein tomorrow and lower in fat but keep carbs low and calories under 1000.
this is bad since the lower calories will likely cause a headache, but the high protein will likely cause a drop in ketones… so double bad. I still want to see if that’s what actually happens.
If not, it should improve my understanding of my sweet spot.
Looking at your glucose, wouldn’t high endogenous glucose while fasting be a good thing? Some organs of the body are glucose dependent.
Protein Sparing may lower glucose but then you also have the catabolic thing going on?
That why I carb up + protein before lifting weights so I’m not burning up muscle tissue I worked so hard to build.
It gets tricky because you never know what your really burning when lifting (i.e. physical exertion). Fat, ketones, glucose like fuel or amino acids…one flame torching the other.
interesting… it depends on the cause, source and destination of the glucose.
high glucose could only be the result of gluconeogenesis and that is either from food protein, lean muscle or the glycerol backbone of fat (food or body).
It could be the result of high cortisol from excess stress or exercise.
Even when I weightlift, I try to use slow controlled motion with the heaviest weights I can to reduce the need for explosive energy.
I know that I can function on low glucose and high ketones. If my glucose is high, then my ketones are low… and I’m sugar burning instead of fat burning… that just isn’t where I want to be.
I want to be building muscle with protein and using my body fat for fuel. Seeing glucose go up doesn’t line up with that?
Day 18 - PSK
One day left to go. Tomorrow I break the PSK and go simple Keto.
and here’s the comparison of EF to PSK:
So… with one day left to go (19 days EF vs. 18 days PSK)
The fat loss on EF was 11lbs vs. 5.2lbs PSK… so it’s about 50% as effective in fat loss.
The muscle loss on EF was 1.7lbs vs. 1.1lbs PSK … so the PSK muscle loss was about 68% of EF
Another way of looking at this is the ratio of muscle to fat lost:
EF = 1.7 / 11 = 16%
PSK = 1.1 / 5.2 = 22% (…more muscle lost vs. fat lost)
So while it works, my experience on vegan PSK has been that it’s half as effective and disproportionately consumes more lean muscle (1/3 more muscle to fat ratio lost). So if the idea is to lose less muscle, I don’t think it worked for me.
My GKI has been steadily increasing and it now around 4… so PSK does not support autophagy for me. In fact above 3, I don’t think I’m seeing much ketosis… my ketones varied from 1.0 to 0.5 (after weightlifting). That’s after consuming only 850 calories and 4g carbs last night!!!
There’s one more day to go, but I doubt it’ll change the results much.
On an experiential level … PSK got easier over time. I got over the headaches and I didn’t experience the emotional downturn I had with EF. It’s just not as effective though and has little benefit in retaining muscle mass vs. a true EF.
I do think that PSK is likely more effective than traditional Keto but that’s a separate experiment.
I also think that carnivore PSK is probably more effective than vegan Keto but that’s also a separate experiment.
Hope this is useful
