Have you considered a USB Microscope to capture dandruff on your face directly?
Log #5
Day: 8
Rank: Meh
Pre control log, at this point I feel like it’s enough logs to have set a baseline;
Typical days eating ketovore have mid to high levels of dandruff. Over the past two days I’ve been fasting in longer amounts. I will continue to increase fasting intervals and then go strict meat only for at least a week. That’ll be just steaks, livers, salt and water. It means I’ll be cutting out; butter, eggs, any animal derived oils, spices and herbs, cheeses, nut products, and whatever other sorta keto foods I typically eat such as occasional tomatoes etc.
Not looking forward to cutting coffee! 
I might stay strict carnivore for a longer period of time, depends on how much I miss food basically.
Today I’ll make a spreadsheet on Notion for tracking results.
Holy moly I had not considered that. Hell I’d be interested to see what it looks like, not that I have a single clue what I’d do with such images lol. I could just observe and see what I find I guess!
Sounds fun!
Interesting I hadn’t at all. I suppose I’ll need to track my dandruff for a really long time to get meaningful data. Which I’m open to! 
Hopefully I won’t need to because I’ll stumble upon a long term solution at some point.
I’ve had a quick go at making a table, this is what it looks like at this point.
Most likely will change and adapt as it goes. All records so far have been pre-control measure so pretty chill. This means it’ll be easier to track on days when I’m too busy or can’t be arsed to whip my camera out and fool around with all that noise!
Any thoughts and feedback welcome!
Log #6
I’ve got a good baseline for now I think, sitting at between Meh and Bad ranking most of the time. From now on I’ll only post updates when something changes, because each one is basically exactly the same as the last!
I’m doing a fat fast today, meaning I’ll only consume fat calories, then tomorrow I’ll eat the same way I have been eating only lower portion sizes and larger fasting period. The day after I’ll consume zero calories. The day after that I’ll go full carnivore for at least a week.
I’m going to track my calories and food intake religiously from now on, I’ll post the spreadsheet soon.
If you’ve got any tips or tricks around food tracking please share, I’ll probably stick with Notion as it’s what I know / am familiar with and use basically 23 hours a day for work and other things.
I think for food tracking it’s a good idea to take a picture of what you eat as a kind of notebook stream you can consult for troubleshooting your record. If you shoot your food pictures with the camera upside down you can use the orientation metadata to collect them.
Oh dang that’s a good idea, thanks again mate! I’ll start doing that.
Log #7
This was from yesterday and I’m uploading now that I have time.
It seems like the dandruff is improved but as you can see in the video I’m pretty sceptical, sometimes it can seem great at one point in the day and then turn into a snowstorm later on so we’ll see.
I wish I had been more rigorous about recording and tracking my food!
Log #8
Day: 12
Rank: Good?!
I’m terrified! It can’t possibly take effect this soon. I’ve only been experimenting for like 14 days and it seems my dandruff is looking way better. I only fully went carnivore yesterday so I find it extremely hard to believe that it’s my own intervention which is causing these results. Though I have been moving more toward meat and even more toward fasting for… over a week now.
This marks two days where the dandruff is looking better than I remember seeing it… literally ever in my life.
If it does have something to do with my experiment, I guess it’s either fasting or carnivore. Time will tell I guess! If this keeps up as it is I plan to eat a heap of trashy food for some period of time and see what impact that has! At least it’ll be fun lol.
For now I’ll see how long I can stay full clean carnivore, aiming for at least a week, hoping for at least a month.
Any tips to improve please let me know!
Log #9
Day: 13
Rank: Good!
Ok, I really need to dive into the science to see if I can actually understand… anything about what I’m doing lol.
No idea what’s causing such good results but I’m very keen to explore, experiment and find out! Do I think of this as simply ‘treating’ the dandruff, meaning that going back to standard eating will bring it back, or can I actually ‘cure’ it?
If my partners theory is correct, that dandruff is a reflection of inflammation brought by food, is there a period of time that I could stay carnivore for, which would eventually lead to a long term ‘resilience’ so to speak which would allow me to eat whatever without bringing it back?
I’ve recently cut caffeine and I’m finding it a LOT easier than I thought I would, given how many coffees I normally have per day (3 - 8). Two days without caffeine now and barely any real noticeable impact, just a wee slump in the middle of the day which, honestly, I normally have a much heavier one so.
Anyway, here’s the latest video update. As always, any tips or hints please share! I’ll post soon to show updated tracking via Notion.
Placeholder
Summary of what I would do differently;
- Track metrics before making any changes
- Have less flexibility around method (??)
- Include an experiment change log where all changes get tracked from day one
- Include a questions log, to track any important questions that come up as they come up
More to come probably.
Log #10
Day: 20?!
Rank: Good!
It’s been almost two weeks of full carnivore and the results seem quite convincing.
The underlying dryness is still there in my skin, but the dandruff has almost completely disappeared. Occasionally throughout the day I might find a spot of dandruff here or there, maybe on my chin, or behind an ear etc, but compared to a head full of intense dandruff that’s a miracle…
I’ll continue eating only carnivore this month hopefully, and then when ready start experimenting further by reintroducing other foods back in to my diet.
I’m doing these logs much less regularly now because I feel there’s a decent baseline set out with what I’ve done so far. At some point I’ll have to chart some data and then see what things we can do it!
I got an Oura ring today I’m fucking excited lol. Will start fooling around with data in my spare time over the coming months. 
Any tips or hints please let me know!
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Wrapping up Part One
To summarise;
It’s been one month since I set out. I’ve learned a lot, there seems to be a correlation between eating all meat and lowering dandruff significantly (to the point it almost completely disappeared). I learned more about experiment design and planning than anything else. It might feel and seem finnicky to spend heaps of time planning and meticulating but in retrospect I wish I had done even more than I did.
I’m currently restructuring the project for a sprint format. I think this will lower friction for my own motivation to keep it up. I’m also putting a LOT of effort into sleeping on time ever since receiving my Oura ring so that’s making a huge difference in consistency and motivation (and general feelings of overwhelm).
What I did;
I found an interesting correlation between eating and dandruff (eating meat only seems to lower my dandruff significantly, and reverse too, suggesting something in standard western diet doesn’t agree with my skin).
How I did it;
I fat fasted for a few days eating barely any food (just drinking butter). Then switched from high fat low carb to almost total carnivore. I recorded videos of my beard and sideburns each day. I tracked using notion (with varying degrees of discipline) a simple ranking of how my dandruff was looking. I had four teaspoons of cocoa on day recently, my dandruff mildly returned the next day. I then (Saturday just passed) pigged out on whatever foods I wanted during a potluck, and had my dandruff come back with a vengeance lol.
What I learned;
-
Meta
- I struggle to stay motivated (will have a deep think about new project energy - hackable?).
- In order to make the black paper tracking method feel meaningful I’ll want more controlled methodology.
- Videos daily feel like a strong way to stay consistent but come at the cost of feeling self conscious of wasting space in the forum (maybe just upload privately?).
- Sleep data is probably important.
-
Fasting
- The hardest part of fasting and restricted eating is the beginning, when I am confronted by how often and regularly I think of escaping my feelings with food.
- Going full meat makes it very easy to say no to spending money
-
Dandruff
- Dandruff can be classified by size, thickness, toughness and density.
- Use a comb rather than fingers as dandruff shows up better on camera.
- My dandruff best shows up after trimming my beard.
- Dandruff seems to localise to specific areas, it’s not all always everywhere, it seems to move.
- Having cream and 4 organic cocoa powder table spoons seemed to trigger dandruff big time.
-
Eating
- Eating butter and ghee hasn’t triggered dandruff.
- Eating all meat makes my stool runny.
- Eating a lot more meat than I need still seems to have me losing weight.
- My skin has cleared up to the point where I rarely get a single pimple.
- I’ve been caffeine free this whole time, napping helps.
What I struggled with;
- Measuring such a fickle and tricky thing as dandruff hurts my feelings. Because I want the results to be meaningful and yet haven’t given this the attention I’d like to.
- I want to measure so many things. My microbiome, my gut health, water in my city could be contributing.
- Tracking while busy reveals the weaknesses I’ve had (food, sleep, procrastination, everything).
- Self consciousness around posting update logs.
- Tracking the experiment itself, when is day one, how often do I track etc. It felt over the top to want to set all that out before hand, but I believe doing so would have lowered a lot of the difficulty in deciding constantly ‘is this a day I can skip a video?’ etc.
What I’d do differently;
- Spend more time and energy structuring the experiment before hand. Particularly the following;
- Define dates and times of records, expectations and logs.
- Design the tracking table with a little more rigour and thoroughness.
- Prioritise sleeping if not on time (due to work) at least 6.5 hours a night.
- Build tracking into my routines (clean dishes and log food simultaneously, for example).
Into the future
- I will take multiple passes at this experiment, improving design with each pass.
- Hopefully doing so will hijack the new project energy and help keep things more on track with more consistent reviews.
- I will continue the experiment, at this point indefinitely.
- I will slowly start looking into research around dandruff and gut health.
- I will learn about statistical analysis so I can perhaps make the data I’m collecting a little more user friendly than word dump via text or video.
[edit]
Here’s the last video log closing out phase one.
Using Notion to track.
I’ve had a long history of ambivalence around tracking consistency.
I’ve tried many different things and very few have stuck. Sometime last year when I first discovered QS I also discovered Notion. Wanting to move my tracking from paper to screen I decided I’d experiment with tracking as a way to say hello and get a feel for QS (though I mostly to this day have been qualitative more than quantitative… I’m patiently challenging that).
When I started this experiment I decided to revive my old, dead tracking system to include a few metrics around dandruff. The simplicity helped me get started, having a lower amount of friction, but it didn’t stick as tracking just hasn’t been a big part of my life (since moving and some big changes) recently. Using my old system for my new experiment could potentially have contributed to the feeling of resistance, of not wanting to track in the same way resistance builds up when I look at the piano I haven’t been practicing or any of the other million things in my life I don’t have time for.
This is how my notion use did look;
As you might be able to tell it’s a frankenstein’s monster of tracking sheets. With some metrics being important months ago and long since forgotten about, and others which are important now having barely been logged and tracked.
Here’s how the same data looks after adding ten seconds of filtering;
Much more clean, yet far from ideal.
Here’s how my new tracking sheet looks now;
You can see there are some field updates. They feel a lot more meaningful, plus it’s much faster to whip out a comb in the morning, have a quick look, track into notion using simple drop down / select menus for each field, than it is to film, edit, upload and post a video each day (an exercise which I will admit helps me keep accountable and therefore motivated in a big way).
I’ve broken tracking into the different parts of my head, given that dandruff only shows up there (nowhere else on my body). Also gotten a bit more detailed on exactly what ranking I’m giving each section. Plus I can take multiple 'logs per day easily enough by adding the time taken.
Qualitative data fits right in next to quantitative, as you can see. Ranking dandruff flakes by size, density, thickness and toughness allows me to easily capture data which, while it feels like it would probably be meaningless to everyone else on earth, is very meaningful to me.
Having the check boxes helps as both record keeping and to do listing and in a months time I imagine these numbers will be pretty handy, and I might even be able to quantify something! 
[edit]
Whoops! Totally forgot to include my food tracking. Since I’m not interested in tracking macros (protein fat etc) I’ve opted for Notion to solve this need too.
As you can see here, the view I’ve set as default only shows today and yesterday’s food.
The full log contains many more entries.
Benefits of doing it this way have so far been that it’s simple, I’ve always got my phone on me and I’m already tracking things in Notion so the friction is quite low.
I believe I’ll be able to create a relational database using the date fields, and in that way, maybe easily able to impose data from one database over another. I don’t really understand this feature of Notion yet, so it’s on the list of things I plan to learn.
I am curious to learn how to plot data on google charts for example and illustrate correlation easily.
In conclusion
Keeping things simple by hijacking my old, dead tracking system helped lower the barrier of entry for me to start this experiment in the first place. But that simplicity brought its own problems, having to make a thousand decisions each day while work, study and life is busy happening wasn’t very sustainable. In other words, I took a shortcut and paid double for the privilege.
I’m hoping that by engineering the tracking aspect of this experiment, I’ll set myself up for better consistency and therefore results which are more helpful for others.
I think I’ll do talking head type video updates (both for the purpose of keeping track and also to learn more about video production) less regularly and focus on making them better quality, while using this simple yet more robust tracking method in the day to day.
As always, thanks for reading this - any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
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Hi Said, Thank you for posting this, I continue to find it interesting and inspiring. Some comments and a few questions. You write:
I had a similar issue with my arrhythmia tracking project. I have daily measurements that I was posting to my project log, but this seemed like an unwieldy use of the Forum. It required a few extra steps for me and also seemed like it would discourage people from following the topic, even if they were interested in arrhythmia issues, because unprocessed daily measurements are not very useful to anybody but me. I decided to use the Project Log for reflection and analysis and to register changes in my approach, but not for daily measurements. This had the unexpected downside, though, of reducing the amount of reflection and analysis! Now I have a low friction way to record my measurements, so I tend to “measure and forget.” I keep reminding myself to go back to the project log and do a post, but first I need to review my record, and see if I’m still learning something. I have some intuitions, but haven’t followed up on them yet. I don’t have an answer for you, maybe there is a rhythm in your project (and mine) that has to be identified, so maybe something like a weekly post would make sense.
A question: How do you export your record from Notion? What does the export look like? I read some reviews of Notion after reading your post, but couldn’t get a sense of this. It seems like it’s mainly a productivity app (I use Roam Research for a lot of these functions) with calendaring features. For tracking, how to you get the data out?
A suggestion: I think you are doing a lot in this project, but one of the most useful things may be the daily record of dandruff severity. This could prove extremely revealing over time. You write that :
Maybe do a simple experiment to demonstrate your measurement reliability. Every day for some # of days (maybe 10-20), take a photo or video that shows your dandruff using whatever protocol you have the most faith it. Also, each day during the test period, give yourself a daily rating using your regular scale. At the end of the test period, review the photos or videos without looking at the dates, and rate them using your scale. Then compare the original ratings with the ratings of the photo or video record and see how closely they match. The result can reassure you (or raise doubts) about the reliability of your measurements.
Thank you so much Gary!
That perfectly summarised the tension, I’ll use this log for reflection and analysis going forward, and will hopefully remember to do so in the future with other projects as well.
I think producing video and article content is the way that I’ll remain interested in analysis and reflection. I want to get better at writing, more clear, more concise, and same with video and video editing etc.
I haven’t tried exporting yet! Because I haven’t taken any steps toward charting numbers etc, but I will do that soon. Over the next month or so as it’s a skill I’d really like to master too. Here’s an image of the button I imagine would do the job, just under the 3 dots to the top right of any page.
I’m not sure about the functionality, whether you can filter your exports etc, or if it only does full database, I’ll have to fiddle to find out.
I treat Notion as a complete workspace. I track things for my job such as hours, to do lists, goals, write drafts for creative content, write reflective journal type stuff, capture meeting notes and minutes, and have a few collaborative spaces where I help my mates organise their life and brainstorm / reflect. I feel like the calendar feature is it’s least useful, though it might be vastly updated since I last tried it a year ago. Also when I’m working more efficiently and don’t have study I feel the calendar view will be a lot more handy.
That experiment idea is just genius! I’m already a week into this one so I might try something based on that idea for the next pass. Not sure what would be meaningful in terms of videoing / photographing etc but I’ll refine as I go.
I think I’m so taken by that idea because… it perfectly solves for a difficult to define problem. Maybe it’s an issue that’s been well defined here and I just don’t recall / haven’t read it yet… But calibrating to myself is sort of like trying to move in space. I have nothing to push up against, or at least that’s how it feels… and so any direction I want to go is only relative to myself… without that wider sense of grounding by wanting to push against other science or experimentation, tracking just my experiments, on myself, it feels… ungrounded and fuzzy.
And yet, running these experiments has already made completely life changing differences for me lol. I feel like I’m not doing a very solid job of describing this. Oh well.
Thanks so much for your suggestions and feedback!
Surprising things about Carnivore
Tim Ferris has this quote attributed to him; make one decision to cut down on a thousand.
Something weird happened when I stopped eating like 99% of the flavours I enjoy. For reference I really like spices, herbs, sweets, everything. I’ve enjoyed all foods of all cultures, basically. Cheese, wine, seafood, you name it I probably like it (haven’t tried haggis yet).
Since fasting and then only eating meat, I’ve come to only have savoury food, aside from an occasional sweet drink I’ll make with egg, stevia, cream and maybe a drop of, say, peppermint oil, or citrus oil, for example. And so far I’ve had… maybe 5 of those over 5 weeks.
I still drink decaf coffees constantly, just for something delicious to drink and also do. I blend the coffee with butter and it creates such a nice, rich, creamy texture.
This means the landscape of my taste has gone from wildly colourful to almost black and white. My mouth hardly waters now, unless I’m cooking. I’ll walk past KFC and it’s like it’s a different person walking past… like… I’m hardly even registering the smell which once upon a time would have been so difficult to resist, I’d show up at work and literally have thoughts of KFC over the whole next hour or two, and more often than not, end up buying it on my break or on the way home.
I guess I expected to really struggle with this, missing food. Avocado, salad, even ice cream (we have so many great keto options in my country - really lucky), grill’d burgers… I expected it to be a LOT harder to stay on this diet than it has been.
I do look forward to experimenting to find out which foods or drinks trigger the dandruff again, I would like to be able to get kombucha whenever I feel like it.
To summarise;
Life is a lot more simple when I don’t have to decide what I’m going to eat and whether I’m going to spend money on food when I go out or not.
Mini update
I did it! I had a TINY little foray into charting data and it was super easy using google sheets!
I put the data in manually, I figure I’ll learn to import stuff later on for now I’ll just wrap my head around how it works. Without further ado… may I present… SQUIGGLY LINES!
Haha I’m so proud of it.
So let’s get to the point;
This month the results so far have been pretty off putting and disheartening, especially after such good results in the first month (If only I had a pretty chart to compare! lol). One possible reason for this is that I’ve been eating ham basically all of February.
Turns out ham is full of nitrates and super inflammatory, didn’t even find this out until about day 15 or so which meant that my month of February was kind of confounded (is that the word?). Next time I go carnivore, which should be this week coming up, I’ll be a lot more scrutinising about how I do it!
After I learned about the ham potentially throwing all my results, I just went back to keto, including lots of treats and things because it’s my partners birthday week so I’ve been spoiling her which has been really lovely.
Now that I’m no longer afraid of charting data my mind is blowing up with the possibilities lol! I’ve been keeping work data of basically every hour that I spend working on anything in my job, so as a result I have TONNES of data I could display into… who knows what! It’s unfortunately not totally complete (some shifts I rank for quality, others I don’t) so now that I’m thinking in terms of displaying data not just hording it, I might have a restructure of my tracking method to create a bit more consistency and perhaps even make the job easier for future Said to extrapolate and display.
Thanks for tuning in! So proud of myself hahahaha. Feel like I’ve taken my first real step! 
Toward the experiment;
Next week will be full carnivore at least by the beginning of the month, I’ll track the month as I have done and chart it at the end of the month for another review. I’m contemplating deleting a lot of the posts up above because a lot of it really feels like noise at this point! Not sure yet. Anyway, see ya soon!
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Hey man. Ive been fighting dandruff for 3 years now with extensive research. One of the things that makes this difficult to track is due to the desquamation cycle. I think we should collaborate.
Do me a favor. Get a calcium supplement. Supplement it for 3 days. See how ur dandruff reacts. I seem to have figured out it causes a tremendous amount of dandruff for me. I dont really have redness in the eyebrows but sometimes its very faint. My dandruff is like white dust. Rub my beard and it snows.
Its hard to even diagnose this because for me its dry. But then u see what sebboreic dermatitis looks like and they say its large flakes and oily. I have tried every vitamin you could think of. The fact its intensity can improve or get worse says there is a factor we likely can control to improve the situation.