Founder
Twenty years of testing things on myself.
The Sardine Protocol exists because I kept running the same cycle on myself, kept reading the same papers, and eventually realized nobody had pulled the literature and the practice into one place.
Early body hacking
Cold exposure, breath work, varying sleep schedules, every diet that went through a credible review cycle — I tried most of them. Some helped. Some did nothing. A few were worse than the baseline. I started keeping logs because memory is a bad biographer.
[TODO: Rado — the first body-hacking experiment that actually changed your baseline, and how you knew.]
Diet experimentation
Standard western, then vegan, then strict paleo, then ketogenic, then carnivore, then cyclical. Each one held up some claims and quietly violated others. I came out of it with a low-carb / keto baseline because that’s the diet under which my own biomarkers, sleep, and lifting performance hold steady — not because of dogma. I consider the question of optimal macronutrient ratios still open.
[TODO: Rado — which biomarkers convinced you, and what your last reading looked like.]
How sardine fasting entered the picture
The first time I read about sardine fasting, it was a footnote in a discussion about protein-sparing modified fasts. The logic was elegant: keep insulin low, keep nitrogen balance positive, keep omega-3s coming in, do it for a finite window. I expected it to be unpleasant. It wasn’t.
[TODO: Rado — first cycle. Which brand of sardines, hour-by-hour notes, how you felt on day 4 refeed.]
From first cycle to dozens
I’ve now run more cycles than I can count without checking the log. The protocol has stabilized into the three variants you see on this site. The variant chosen depends on the season, recent training load, and whatever else the body is doing.
One full cycle log is published openly on this site as proof of practice. Year-over-year biomarker trajectories live inside the Inner Circle, where the conversation can be specific without becoming generalized health advice.
Why build this now
Most sardine-fasting content online is shallow. The science is there in the literature, but nobody is doing the work of pulling it into one place that practitioners can actually use. That’s the gap.
[TODO: Rado — what specifically made now the right moment, in one paragraph.]
The boundaries of this work
I am not a medical professional. Nothing on this site is medical advice. Everything I publish is either backed by primary sources (linked, with the strength of evidence noted) or labelled as personal practice. The Safety page spells out who should not attempt this protocol — read it first.