This is the whole programme, free, on one page. Eight weeks, two variables, and a rule at the end that lets you keep going without it. Nothing is held back for a paid tier, because the parts that work are not secret — they are simply harder to do than to know.
Before you start: who this is not for
Cutting carbohydrate and lengthening the gap between meals both lower blood glucose and blood pressure, often within days. That is the point — and it is exactly why some people need medical supervision rather than a web page.
Do not begin without talking to your doctor if any of these apply: you take insulin or a sulfonylurea, in which case a diet that lowers glucose while your dose stays the same can cause hypoglycaemia; you take blood pressure medication, which can quickly become too strong a dose; you are pregnant or breastfeeding; you have type 1 diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, pancreatitis, or have had your gallbladder removed; you have a history of disordered eating; you are under eighteen.
None of that means the approach is wrong for you. It means the first step is a conversation about adjusting medication alongside the diet, not instead of it.
How the eight weeks are shaped
Two things change over the programme, and only two. The window in which you eat gets shorter, and the carbohydrate inside it gets lower. Everything else — what counts as food, how much protein, how much fat — is set in week one and stays put.
They move in sequence rather than together. Cutting carbohydrate hard and closing the window to six hours in the same week produces a miserable fortnight and a high chance of quitting, and the misery is avoidable: it comes from sodium and water loss, not from the diet being wrong. So the window narrows first, while carbohydrate is still moderate, and the deeper restriction arrives once your body has already learned to run between meals.
The arc looks like this:
- Weeks 1–2 — window 14/10, first meal late morning, carbohydrate under 100 g per day
- Weeks 3–4 — window 16/8, carbohydrate under 70 g
- Weeks 5–6 — window 18/6, carbohydrate under 50 g
- Weeks 7–8 — window 18/6, carbohydrate under 30 g
The numbers are ceilings, not targets. Coming in under them is fine; the goal is that the ceiling comes down steadily rather than all at once.
What you eat, from day one
The food list does not change across the eight weeks. Only the quantity of the carbohydrate-bearing items does.
Eat freely
- Eggs, and plenty of them
- Meat, poultry, fish and shellfish, unprocessed
- Butter, ghee, olive oil, coconut oil, tallow
- Leafy greens and the cabbage family — kale, broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts
- Courgette, aubergine, peppers, mushrooms, asparagus, avocado
- Full-fat plain yoghurt and hard cheese, if dairy suits you
- Olives, and nuts in moderation — they are easy to overeat
Measured
- Berries, a handful rather than a bowl
- Root vegetables early in the programme, less of them later
- Tomato and onion, which carry more sugar than people expect
Gone, and not returning
- Sugar, under all of its names
- Wheat, rye and their flours
- Industrial seed oils — sunflower, rapeseed, soybean, corn, “vegetable oil”
- Anything liquid with calories in it, fruit juice included
- Ultra-processed food, which is most of what carries a brand
If you did nothing else for eight weeks except remove those five categories, most of the benefit described on this site would still find you.
A word about the salt
This programme tells you to salt your food generously, and which salt you use matters more than usual because you will be using a lot of it.
Refined table salt is washed, heated and stripped down to sodium chloride, with the other minerals removed and an anti-caking agent added in their place. Unrefined salt keeps what seawater or ancient seabed put there: magnesium, potassium, calcium and trace minerals in small but real amounts. When salt is a seasoning, the difference is marginal. When you are deliberately taking several grams a day to replace what low insulin makes your kidneys excrete, it stops being marginal.
Use grey sea salt — sel gris, the damp Celtic kind — or another unrefined salt with the minerals still in it. Coarse or flaky sea salt and rock salt work too. The test is simple: unrefined salt is rarely pure white and rarely completely dry, because the minerals and the moisture come together.
Supplements that actually help here
None of this is required. The programme works on food alone, and most supplement spending in this space buys nothing. These are the few that address a real problem this specific transition creates.
Worth taking
- Unrefined salt — the single most useful thing on this list. Most of what people call keto flu is sodium loss and nothing else.
- Magnesium, 300–400 mg in the evening. Glycinate if sleep is the issue, citrate if constipation is. Depleted by stress, caffeine and low insulin alike.
- Potassium, ideally from food — avocado, leafy greens, salmon. Supplemental doses are capped low for good reason; if you are eating vegetables and salting properly you will not need a tablet.
- Creatine monohydrate, 3–5 g daily. Protects muscle during weight loss and costs almost nothing. Take it every day rather than only on training days.
- Vitamin D from autumn to spring at northern latitudes, with K2 alongside it. Test first if you can; the right dose varies more between people than any other supplement.
- Omega-3, only if you are not eating oily fish two or three times a week. Food first; the capsule is the fallback.
Skip
- Exogenous ketones. They raise blood ketones without any of the metabolic work that makes ketosis useful, and there is no evidence they speed the adaptation.
- MCT oil beyond a spoonful. Useful for tolerability early on, but it is fat you are paying a premium for, and too much of it has a swift and memorable digestive effect.
- Fat burners, carb blockers and anything sold as an accelerator. The mechanism that makes this programme work is the food and the timing.
Week by week
Week 1 — Clear the kitchen, move the first meal
14 hours fasting, 10 hours eating. Carbohydrate under 100 g.
Empty the cupboard of the five categories above before you change anything else. Willpower is a poor substitute for an empty shelf. Then move the first meal of the day to late morning — around eleven — and stop eating after seven. Two or three meals inside that window, as many as you need.
There is no breakfast in this programme. Eating within an hour of waking is a habit, not a requirement: cortisol is already mobilising fuel at that hour, and adding food to it mainly guarantees you will be hungry again by eleven. Children growing rapidly are the exception; adults are not.
Expect to be hungrier than usual by day three as the constant glucose drip stops. Add salt to food generously; you are losing sodium and water, and most of what people call low-carb fatigue is that and nothing more.
Week 2 — Protein and salt
14/10 held steady. Carbohydrate under 100 g.
Keep the window where it is and fix what goes in it. Set protein deliberately: roughly 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of your target body weight, spread across the meals. Protein is the variable people underdo, and it is what protects muscle for the rest of the programme.
Drink to thirst, not to a schedule, and salt your food with unrefined salt. Aim for 3–5 g of sodium a day — more than official advice, and appropriate here because low insulin makes the kidneys excrete it faster.
Week 3 — The window closes to 16/8
16 hours fasting, 8 hours eating. Carbohydrate under 70 g.
The first meal moves to midday and the last to eight. Two meals is usually enough by now. If you are ravenous, the answer is more fat and protein at the first meal, not an earlier one.
Digestion often complains this week — constipation is the common one, from lost water and less bulk. Magnesium citrate in the evening, more leafy volume, and enough salt fix nearly all of it.
Week 4 — Sleep and movement
16/8. Carbohydrate under 70 g.
Add walking: thirty to sixty minutes daily, ideally after the largest meal, where it does more for glucose disposal than the same walk at any other time. Add two short resistance sessions — bodyweight is fine. Do not add long cardio; it raises cortisol without giving you what brief hard effort does.
Sleep usually improves around now, and sometimes gets worse first. If you wake at three in the morning, it is often glucose or salt: a pinch of salt before bed helps more people than it should.
Week 5 — Into 18/6 and under 50 g
18 hours fasting, 6 hours eating. Carbohydrate under 50 g.
This is the week the programme was built toward. Eat between, say, one and seven. Under 50 g most people are producing meaningful ketones by the end of the week. Two meals inside six hours, both substantial — this is not the week to eat less, only to eat in less time.
Watch for the second wave of electrolyte symptoms: headache, calf cramps, light-headedness on standing. Sodium 3–5 g, potassium 3–4 g from food, magnesium 300–400 mg. Almost every unpleasant symptom at this stage is one of those three.
Week 6 — Eating when life gets in the way
18/6. Carbohydrate under 50 g.
The mechanics are settled; this week is about the situations that break them. Have a default restaurant order, a default answer at someone else's dinner table, and a default travel meal. Decide them now, in writing, while you are calm.
Alcohol: it stops fat oxidation while it is being cleared, so it pauses the process rather than reversing it. Dry spirits and dry wine are lowest in carbohydrate. Beer is liquid bread.
Week 7 — Under 30 g, and the plateau
18/6. Carbohydrate under 30 g.
The final step down. At this level almost all carbohydrate comes from vegetables, and hidden sources start to matter — sauces, dressings, the tomato in everything. Read labels for one week even if you never do again.
Weight loss commonly stalls somewhere around here while measurements keep changing. That is usually recomposition, not failure. If it truly stalls, the culprit is nearly always snacking that crept back in, or protein drifting too low.
Week 8 — Measure, then decide
18/6. Carbohydrate under 30 g.
Repeat whatever you measured at the start: waist, weight, blood pressure, and if you can get them, fasting insulin and a triglyceride-to-HDL ratio. Those two blood markers tell you more about what changed than the scale does.
Then decide what the next phase is — not whether to go back, but at what level you intend to live. That is what the last section is for.
What a day actually looks like
Weeks 1–2 — window 11:00 to 19:00
- On waking — black coffee, nothing else
- 11:00 — three eggs fried in butter, half an avocado
- 15:00 — chicken thighs, large green salad, olive oil
- 19:00 — salmon, butter-fried cabbage, a handful of berries with cream
Weeks 3–4 — window 12:00 to 20:00
- 12:30 — four eggs, bacon, spinach cooked in the fat
- 19:30 — ribeye, roasted broccoli and cauliflower, plenty of butter
- Outside the window — coffee or tea, unsweetened
Weeks 5–8 — window 13:00 to 19:00
- 13:00 — mackerel or sardines, two eggs, avocado, olive oil
- 18:30 — beef, courgette and mushrooms fried in tallow, hard cheese
- Any hour — water, salt, black coffee, plain tea
Note what is missing: snacks. Grazing between meals is what the eating window exists to prevent, and it is the single most common reason a programme like this fails to do anything.
When something goes wrong
Headache, fatigue, cramps, dizziness
Electrolytes, nearly every time. Sodium first, then magnesium, then potassium. These symptoms are not evidence that the diet is unsuitable for you; they are evidence that you are excreting minerals faster than you are replacing them.
Constipation
Magnesium citrate in the evening, more salt, more volume from leafy vegetables, and enough water. Fibre supplements help some people and bloat others — try the simpler fixes first.
Poor sleep in the first fortnight
Common and usually temporary. A pinch of salt before bed, magnesium in the evening, and no coffee after midday. If it persists past week three, move the last meal earlier rather than later.
The scale stops moving
Check three things in order: snacking that returned without you noticing, protein that drifted down, and hidden carbohydrate in sauces and dressings. Adding more fasting is the last resort, not the first.
It is making you feel worse, not better, past week three
Stop and get bloods done. A small number of people have thyroid, gallbladder or carnitine-related reasons why this approach does not suit them, and persistence is the wrong response to a genuine signal.
After week eight: the formula
The programme ends; the pattern does not have to. What follows is the rule that replaces the calendar.
Find your ceiling. Add roughly 10 g of carbohydrate per day back each week and watch two things: your waist and how you feel between meals. The level at which either starts moving in the wrong direction is your personal ceiling. For most people it lands between 50 and 100 g. Live just under it.
Keep the window, loosen the clock. An 18/6 pattern most days with a longer window on the days that need one is sustainable in a way that rigid daily timing is not. The aim is that not eating between meals stops being a decision.
Keep the five removals permanently. Sugar, flour, seed oils, liquid calories and ultra-processed food are where nearly all of the effect came from. Everything else is adjustable; these are not.
Go back down when you need to. Once you have done eight weeks, returning to a strict phase for two or three weeks is a small thing rather than a project. That is the real result of the programme — not the weight, but knowing exactly how to get back.
What to do next
Two directions are worth knowing about once the eight weeks are behind you.
If you want to go deeper for a short period — after a stall, after a holiday, or simply to see how it feels — the three-day sardine fast is the natural next step. Three days of one food, no decisions, and it doubles as the easiest way into a longer water fast because you arrive already in deep ketosis rather than fighting for it.
If you would rather consolidate, do nothing dramatic. Find your carbohydrate ceiling as described above, hold the eating window most days, and let the eight weeks become the ordinary way you eat rather than a project you completed.
This page is educational, not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for care from a qualified professional. If you take medication for blood glucose or blood pressure, the dose will likely need to change as you go — that is a conversation with your doctor, and it should happen before week one, not after a problem.