What it actually is

Reducing carbohydrate, usually without the strictness of keto, often as a way of eating fewer calories without counting them. It works for a lot of people for exactly that reason. Two things get overstated: the early weight change is substantially water as glycogen stores empty, and long-term trials against other approaches mostly land in the same place. The version that holds up is the one you can still be doing in six months.

Why this is hard to keep track of

  • The first two weeks are mostly water and everyone reads them as the trend
  • The energy dip lands around week two and takes the plan with it if it's a surprise
  • Evenings are where it comes apart, and evenings are the worst-logged part of any diary
  • Carb counting apps record grams and miss all of it

Worth recording

  • What you ate, in plain words. The carbohydrates are obvious enough
  • Energy through the afternoon, which is where the first two weeks show up
  • Evening eating, since that's the usual failure mode
  • Weight if you want it, read as a trend and not as a day

Cadence

A sentence a meal, plus a note on how the afternoon went

In practice

Say it once, or photograph it

The entries most worth having are the ones made at the exact moment nobody wants to fill in a form. A sentence — typed, dictated, or replaced entirely by a photo of the plate — is a much lower bar, and it carries the context a calorie field would have thrown away.

Low Carb Chat

Week two. Eggs and avocado, chicken salad, salmon and green beans. Wiped out by mid-afternoon again and really wanted bread by nine.

Called 5 tools

  • log_meal(items: ["eggs", "avocado"], meal: "breakfast")
  • log_meal(items: ["chicken salad"], meal: "lunch")
  • log_meal(items: ["salmon", "green beans"], meal: "dinner")
  • log_energy(level: 2, at: "15:00")
  • log_craving(type: "bread", at: "21:00", acted_on: false)

Logged. Afternoon energy has averaged 2.6 over the last eight days against 4.9 in the week before you started — that dip is well documented and usually lifts. Evening cravings are at six in eight days, all between nine and eleven, all on days lunch was under about 500g of food by your descriptions.

Every figure here was counted from entries you made. The model chose which tools to call — it doesn't score the meal, estimate calories from a photo, or decide what any of it says about you.

And then ask

The question the log can answer

Months of entries hold real answers to the things you've been guessing at, and reading them properly has always meant a spreadsheet and a free evening — which is exactly what nobody has.

Ask in plain language. The answers come back with the counts behind them, including when those counts are too thin to mean anything yet — which is the more useful answer far more often than people expect.

Asking about the pattern Chat

Am I actually going to be able to keep this up?

Called 3 tools

  • get_history(topic: "low-carb", window: "6m")
  • find_pattern(group_by: "context")
  • compare_periods(metric: "entries")

Your own log has an opinion. Over six weeks you've kept it fully on 31 days, partly on nine, and not at all on two — the two were both days out with other people. Afternoon energy recovered from 2.6 to 4.4 after week three. Evening cravings are down from six a week to two. The pattern that predicts an off day is eating out, at eight of the 11.

Counts and averages over your own entries, nothing more. Where the data is confounded or too thin, the answer says so instead of rounding it into a conclusion.

What it does

Set up around low carb

The same mechanics as everything else here, pointed at what actually matters for this one.

Log the protocol as you're living it

What you ate, in a sentence, plus whatever this particular protocol turns on — a window, a training day, a threshold. No spreadsheet to maintain.

The parts that drift

Windows stretch, thresholds creep, and the rule you're following in month three is rarely the one you started with. Drift is obvious in a record and invisible from inside it.

Whether it's actually doing anything

The question every protocol dodges. Answered here by comparing your own weeks against each other, rather than against a claim from a website.

Straight about the evidence

Where the research is strong we say so, and where a popular claim doesn't hold up we say that too. You can get the marketing version anywhere.

The weeks it slips are the useful ones

Adherence is what separates protocols that work from protocols that don't. The days it came apart, and what was happening on them, are the most informative entries in the whole log.

Something to review with someone

Several of these interact with medication. A real record of what you ate and how it went is what makes that a conversation rather than a guess.

The reason a lot of people start

Something to actually bring to the appointment

You get fifteen minutes, and the first question is always some version of "so what does a normal week look like?" — which nobody on earth can answer accurately from memory.

What this gives you: A record of what changed and when, which is what makes a conversation about adjusting medication or approach possible at all.

  • Export the date range you were asked about, as a file you can print
  • Photos alongside the entries, which say more than any description
  • Counts and timings rather than an impression of the worst week
  • Nothing shared anywhere unless you choose to share it

What it won't do

  • Score a meal, or sort food into good and bad
  • Estimate calories from a photo and present the guess as a number
  • Set you a calorie target, a macro target, or a weight
  • Run a streak you can break, or tell you that you've fallen behind
  • Comment on your body. The photos here are of food
  • Diagnose anything, or suggest that a pattern is a diagnosis

It's a notebook that can do arithmetic and answer questions about itself. Deciding what any of it means is a job for you and the people advising you.

Early access

Start with what you're already trying to hold in your head

Tell us what you've been trying to keep track of and we'll set it up with you — recording the thing that's actually useful, at a cadence that survives a bad week.

  • Founding accounts lock their price for life
  • No card, no trial clock, no notification designed to make you feel behind
  • Export everything you've logged, photos included, whenever you want

No card required. Unsubscribe any time.

Keep the record without it becoming another job

Founding pricing is locked for accounts opened during early access.

Founding accounts lock their price for life. No card required.