My Seafood Keto / Carnivore Diet Challenge [N=1 Experiment]

Monday, 25th May 2015

I met a girl with a “GHOTI” tattoo recently and immediately pointed at it and remarked “FISH!”. She said I’m the first person to ever get that one. Anyhoo it reminded me a while back it had been asked around the traps whether a keto/carnivore diet is possible for those who don’t eat land animals, from a health sustainability and keto and financial perspective. It sounds like keto hard mode initially, but after spending some time thinking about it I reckon it’s worth exploring more, so in a few days I’ll start my keto pescetarian experiment – after a brief non-keto washout.

I have hundreds of blood ketone strips so I’ll monitor that throughout to ensure compliance, and I’ll test against Ketostix peetones, and occasionally Ketonix breath meter. This isn’t going to be anything about weight-loss and such, I don’t even have scales (unlike fish) but I think since moving back to a city and having a cushy desk job with lots of convenience foods the last couple months I’ve probably stacked on 3-5kg (5-10lb) through socialising and meal indiscretions that follow, compared to how I was getting reasonably well physique’d on povvo carnivore + booze a couple months ago:

I expect most of that to disappear within a couple weeks, I won’t bother meticulously tracking it but I’ll keep a peripheral check on body composition.

The main issue for me personally is that my basis red-meat-n-red-wine diet is super high fat – tending 80-85% (ignoring ethanol) – but a vast majority of accessible/affordable seafood is very lean. AFAIK the populations who subsisted almost entirely on seafood also had access to seal/whale/etc blubber, I don’t fancy chugging fish oil to hit my energy requirements.

I’ll try and go for a month or so, (update: why this only lasted 2 weeks here) and in there I’ll try and incorporate a full week of nothing but seafood – which is to say no supplementing with butter/oil/land animal fats or veggies/shrooms. I’m just a bit worried about the sheer volume of food and protein I’ll have to consume – my normal “calorie” intake is 3-4k a day (that was a year ago, my plant/beer intake dropped dramatically after that) with about 600g of animal bits and my “TDEE” is ~2,100 cals, I tend to get around 100-130g of protein in.

Selecting one of the fattiest fish – salmon at around ~13% – I would need to eat 1-1.4kg (2-3lbs) of the stuff a day just to hit my TDEE, and would provide ~200g of protein, and cost me in the realm of $30-50 a day just to stay alive. The more affordable fish can be obtained for $6-15/kg ($3-8/lb), but most weigh in at 1-5% fat – so I’m looking at chowing through 2-5kg (4-10lbs) of the stuff a day. What?

Dunno, I think I’ll start out with a more keto/mainstream version before going full sharknivore, something catchy I can market like Pescetarian Ketard Megalodon Warrior Diet™ that the average Joe Pesci-tarian can maintian indefinitely – so plenty of greens and shrooms and cheese and such to mop up butter/cream sauces and keep the protein within reality levels. Plus wine.

Update: Abandoned after 2 weeks (for now)

I chose a poor time to do this, as just as I started it I had to put in 13-15 hour days under high pressure at my job and no days off for a few weeks, and one thing that is super hard to do with seafood is find quick and easy and filling meals without thinking about food too much.

So yeah, postponing the piscivore thing until life is a little more relaxed and I have the time/willingness to think about food more, because you also need to eat more volume and eat more often when it’s seafood only.

Anyhoo, here’s a catalogue of the meals I captured – there were probably twice as many that I didn’t bother to photo just because I had to eat and it wasn’t glamorous, mostly would have been smoked/tinned fish and such.