Carnivore diary: 1,500 calories and zero carbs a day

Carnivore diary: 1,500 kcal a day and zero carbs

On June 1, 2025, a 62-year-old man measuring 1.75 meters and weighing 88 kilos —74 of them lean mass, according to his gym's scale— started a public carnivore diet diary. First day: a coffee with butter at 7:00, eggs with mackerel and a "fake mayonnaise" of egg, fresh cheese and water, half a grilled chicken breast and, for dinner, a jar of whipped cheese. Declared total: 1,500 calories. He comes from twenty years of primal eating and claims he has been in ketosis for a while. What was meant to be a personal log ended up as a tug-of-war over fat, protein, cholesterol and electrolytes.

The day's menu: 1,500 kcal and 2.5 liters of water

The protagonist drinks 300 cubic centimeters of butter coffee and about 2.5 liters of water a day, to which he adds electrolytes because, he argues, his ketosis will become more severe in the coming days. He went to the bathroom normally and attributes it to a specific detail: the butter in the bulletproof coffee. No vegetables or fruit the day before, just some olives. The thread opens with a screenshot of a calorie-counting app that puts the total at 1,500.

Immediately the first objection arrives, and it's fundamental: that figure is too low, worthy of another era. Some ask to know the real motivation before continuing to read a diary that is updated daily.

Why does fat matter more than protein?

The most repeated argument in the thread doesn't dispute the quantity but the composition. Eating chicken breast, fresh cheese or prawns isn't a problem in itself; the problem is doing so without fat. Those defending this thesis throw out a figure that structures the whole discussion: between 60% and 70% of ingested protein ends up transformed into glucose, so a menu that's too lean doesn't train the body to run in what they call here fat mode. The recommendation is bacon, salmon, cuts of beef, pork or lamb with fat.

Another current goes further and attacks the menu's base. Cut out chicken and pork, it argues, because they are monogastric animals fed soy and corn feed and therefore loaded with omega 6. Fatty red meat should be the axis. The technical reasoning: an essential omega 6 fatty acid out of balance with omega 3 acts as inflammatory, and modern diets break that natural 1-to-1 balance.

The cholesterol no one takes as proven

Here the food diary becomes something else. A participant contributes his April blood test: total cholesterol 193. Then the so-called cholesterol hypothesis appears on the table, with its seventy years of age and the repeated claim that there is no causal evidence that cholesterol alone clogs arteries. The tone rises. Defenders of the classic line respond with empirical evidence and the discussion drifts into cross-recriminations that add not one new fact.

Meanwhile, someone asks for what almost nobody provides: a baseline with HbA1c, triglycerides, total cholesterol, HDL and LDL tests, plus height, weight, body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio. The request goes almost unanswered.

Zero carb: onion out, bay leaf in

The culinary drift of the experiment is amusing. The author, a professional cook for ten years, adapts a homemade pâté: removes onion, swaps York ham for more bacon and keeps garlic, bay leaf and nutmeg. His justification is as simple as it is debatable: onion is a vegetable, bay leaf is aroma. And he warns of a common beginner's mistake: replacing bacon with pure pork lard leaves an excessively fatty pâté.

Are bottled electrolytes any good, or better homemade?

Hydration occupies another stretch of the thread. Anyone urinating more than normal —something they attribute to glycogen depletion and fat oxidation— loses electrolytes, and drinking only water isn't enough. The discussion jumps to effervescent supplements from a sports chain: they contain sorbitol, citric acid, potassium chloride, steviol and natural flavorings. The label reads like a list of sins for this audience. "It's processed junk," one declares. The alternative is mixing salt, potassium and magnesium in a bottle, though the taste is, they say, disgusting. Magnesium bisglycinate is also mentioned as the most absorbable form.

Two weeks with no change in the waist

The practical balance comes at the end and is more sober than the start promised. Two long weeks of strict carnivore diet, with one meal a day and a snack, and the tangible finding is that his pants fall down: some waist volume, not much. The author, coming from a clean paleo diet, finds no advantage. He sums it up without embellishment: eating 1,500 or 3,000 calories is irrelevant to him, because the count comes from a calorimeter, not his body.

The side effects that others do report don't appear in his case: no inflammation, no pain, no bad mood. On the contrary, what surprises him most is the effect on mood. Others, however, go weeks without adapting, with slumps before dinner and light sleep. The usual timeframe mentioned is two or three weeks.

The question hanging over the whole diary remains unanswered: if you started from reasonable health and already careful eating, what is left to improve? The total cholesterol of 193 in the April blood test clarifies nothing. And twenty years eating fresh produce doesn't either.