Last month’s experiment, ex150nosauce+ACV-6, left me at a new all-time low (ATL) of 206.3lbs. This came after a 17 day plateau, and subsequently eating salmon instead of beef for the remaining 5 days of the experiment.

I wrote the blog post reviewing that experiment on day 2 of the refeed, and in retrospect you can already see what’s about to happen, but I thought this refeed was unique & special enough to warrant more reporting.

Some of you might’ve already seen me gushing about this on Twitter, Reddit, or here in the comments.

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What’s the big deal, anyway?

People keep asking me about my refeeds. Why do I do them? Wouldn’t I lose weight faster if I didn’t refeed? Do I think they’re necessary?

1. I don’t think they’re strictly necessary in a nutritional sense. This is the reason I did them initially: I was embarking on an ultra-protein restricted diet, and everyone was telling me I was going to die immediately. I had no experience with it and was not very familiar with the clinical studies on required protein amounts, so I thought re-feeding on high-protein keto every 30 days would ensure that I wouldn’t keel over.
   
   Since then I’ve changed my mind on this. Studies of nitrogen excretion show that almost all healthy, active, adult men are fine and nitrogen-stable on 40g of protein per day. My diet gives me about that much and I’m not particularly active.
   
   I’ve also since learned that going severely below the 40g/day causes me very distinct hunger symptoms within 4-5 days that won’t go away until I eat protein, but even eating ~25g of protein makes them disappear within minutes.
   
   In short, I am no longer worried about “secret, sneaky” protein deficiency. I have a much better grasp of where the thin blue protein line is, and I seem to be able to get very rapid feedback if I fly to close to the (protein deficient) sun.
   
   

2. I don’t think I’d lose fat faster if I didn’t refeed. It might look like that because on these experiments my weight tends to slowly drop, then jump up when I refeed, and then I have to lose that refeed weight again.
   
   But let’s look at this graph, which is my weight over nearly the entirety of last month’s experiment:

   

   Does it really seem that the big refeed weight spike held me back? I don’t think so. I was back down below my previous low after 8 days or so, and then I bounced around flat for 17 days straight.
   
   Whatever the rapid, linear loss of “temporary/water” weight is from the peak back to the old low or beyond, it seems to be a completely different mechanism to whatever happens after.
   
   If I barely reached my old weight before the end of the experiment and jacked it back up with a refeed, I could see this argument. But it seems clear that I’m losing the refeed weight quickly and predictably, and then something else is holding me back from further fat loss. (Of course I think it’s PUFA in my adipose tissue.)
   
   In the past, I did experiment with not doing refeeds a few times, and that did not seem to help.
   
   

3. Psychological benefits of the refeeds are probably a serious advantage. As much as I still love ex150 after 3.5 years of doing it nearly every day, it sure helps never being more than 30 days away from eating practically whatever I want (except high-PUFA things that would cause lasting damage. Luckily, I tend to not like these foods anyway.)
   
   Initially my refeeds were just higher in protein and keto foods that weren’t good staples, and would consist of beef jerky, steak, keto protein bars, and dark chocolate.
   
   After I noticed that the low-PUFA diet seemed to have permanently fixed my Non-24 circadian rhythm condition, and I could eat tons of (low-PUFA) carbs again, my refeeds shifted more towards starchy or swampy foods.
   
   One of the foods I missed most over my decade of keto was, surprisingly, lentils, and to a lesser degree beans. I also really got into white rice, and so I’ve been making rice & bean stews on refeeds ever since. I also got into making my own bread, and I eat a lot more sugar on refeeds these days, e.g. typically milk chocolate, butter cookies, ice cream, or chocolates instead of super dark 85%+ chocolate like I used to.
   
   I do eat a handful of pure sugar candy here and there, but I just usually don’t crave them. Pretty much the only variant I consistently buy are sour gummies of various kinds, and I suspect it’s more the sourness lol. I don’t particularly care for regular gummies.
   
   Even the old high-protein keto refeeds opened up a ton of possibilities, and now with the ability to swamp if PUFA free, you can really eat quite decadently. Steak, butter cookies, chocolates, ice cream.. this is pretty much the most opulent and delicious diet you can eat. Yea, I still avoid PUFAs, but the PUFA-laden foods tend to actually be less delicious and more junky anyway than their traditional, saturated fat-laden counterparts.
   
   Fried chicken & doritos with soybean ranch/queso sauce might be more “hyper-palatable” than butter cookies and ribeye steak in the technical sense of making you overeat, but they’re clearly low-quality trash & not as “delicious.” Nobody pays extra for PUFA trash “foods,” they’re just cheap, ubiquitous, and addictive.
   
   

4. A new reason for refeeds that I probably valued subconsciously, but that really came to the fore this time: they are a measuring stick for my ability to metabolize a more “regular” diet and more “normal” foods.
   
   If you think about it: losing 85lbs on a heavy cream or pure white rice diet is cool & healthy and probably worth the trade off vs. being morbidly obese and in constant pain.
   
   But wouldn’t it be even cooler to be able to eat ribeyes, butter cookies, and chocolate ice cream every day and still have the exact same benefits? Seems like a pareto improvement to me!
   
   While “it takes 4-8 years to deplete your body of PUFAs” makes our Modern PUFA Theory (MPT) hard to prove/disprove and somewhat of a grind, it’s also a pretty optimistic promise long-term: unlike keto, low-fat, or carnivore, where people just declare entire macronutrients as total no-go zones for life, MPT promises that you only have to avoid one specific type of fat forever (omega-6 PUFA linoleic acid). Once you’re sufficiently depleted, after the aforementioned 4-8 years, you’re supposed to be able to eat the decadent diet of your grandparents, back when foods contained much lower amounts of linoleic acid because not everyone had replaced butter and beef tallow with soybean oil.
   
   The monthly refeed, besides the points above, therefore acts as a “are we there yet?” test. I didn’t fully, consciously realize this until last week, when I had…

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The Longest Refeed

Alright, this entire preamble was just to explain why this particular refeed was so different, and why it made me so optimistic.

The refeed lasted for 6 days. For comparison, the last refeeds were typically 2.5 days, 3.5 days, or sometimes 4 days. Now what determines the length of my refeeds? Nothing formal. I tend to go to the store the day before or the day of, and buy everything that looks delicious. Sometimes I make a list beforehand of things I definitely want to buy, but this time I did not.

I tend to massively overeat on refeeds because 1. swamping and high protein still tend to make me massively overeat and 2. because eating a large number of delicious foods in a short time frame can incentivize this.

This time I didn’t have a written list, just because I didn’t actually crave anything in particular. I was pretty confident I was going to make bread again and a rice & bean stew, but I still had the flour from last month.

Because the overeating tends to make me feel like crap the latter half of refeeds, but my satiety signal has been completely turned off by the swampy & high-protein foods, I usually end up wondering how I could cut the refeeds short, or prevent myself from overeating so much. (Not refeeding at all is, obviously, one solution to this problem.)

So I went to the store the last day of the experiment and bought delicious foods for the following day. I bought rice, lentils, beans, some vegetables to put into the stew, milk chocolate, chocolates, beef sticks, havarti cheese, and probably a bit more.

Day 1

Day 1 of the refeed went just as expected: the first meal, or often even several meals, I’d usually gotten very strong satiety no matter what I ate. This used to be a pretty miraculous feeling: satiety from a 3-egg omelette, or butter cookies, or a ribeye steak.

Unfortunately, it usually only took a 4-24 hours for this “ability to get satiated on anything” to disappear, and then I’d be in that state that made me reach morbid obesity in the first place: ravenous hyperphagia after eating 4,500kcal in a sitting and being physically bloated to the point of pain. (So much for “filling.”)

Day 2

But day 2 of this refeed I woke up and I was… stuffed. Not merely physically, although I also just felt like my belly was quite full, but I was VERY satiated. I only managed to drink a single (!) creamy coffee that morning. Usually I drink at least 2, and sometimes 4. But I was immediately hit by cement-truck satiety.

This was different, and I sort of loved it. Eating a ton of food on day 1 and then waking up super satiated is literally what I’d been touting as a measure of metabolic health for years: if people are obese, how come they don’t wake up every day feeling “stuffed” and satiated?! Based on the Bucket of Calories theory of obesity, wouldn’t we expect all that body fat to go right into fat people’s blood, flooding them with carolies and keeping them satiated? Or do they have a leak somewhere?

By noon of day 2 I regained the ability to drink 2 more creamy coffees, and I ate a few of my refeed foods, including home made bread.

But I couldn’t eat 2 slices of the bread in one sitting. Now these are pretty thick slices admittedly, because I’m cutting them by hand out of a bread machine sized (=small) loaf. Think nearly an inch thick (that’s 0.013 fathoms for my European readers).

I spread some butter on these slices, and would add either sliced cheese or cottage cheese or something like that.

But even eating a single one of these slices was like getting hit by a sledgehammer of satiety. When I’d start on a second one, I’d be unable to finish it every time, and so I’d have half-eaten slices of bread lying around much of the day.

Now don’t get me wrong, the homemade bread is DELICIOUS. I’d say it’s probably the tastiest bread I’ve ever had. It’s thick, it’s dense, it’s earthy, it has the perfect consistency. None of that spongy PUFA shit they sell at the store, where you need to eat half a loaf to reach any sense of having eaten food.

(By the way, the recipe is trivial: flour, water, yeast. I don’t even use salt, still works. My favorite was half white flour, half whole grain flour. I use organic flour like King Arthur brand to avoid “fortification.”)

But despite it being super tasty and topped by butter & havarti cheese, I was unable to take another bite. It was just too.. not filling, too satiating.

I still hadn’t finished the pretty modest sized bread machine loaf by that night, so I didn’t end up making the rice & bean stew yet and put the bread in a ziploc bread to prevent it from drying out overnight.

Day 3

Day 3 I woke up and… I was HAMMERED with satiety. It was like a satiety hangover. I once again only managed to drink a single creamy coffee despite my best intentions.

It continued like day 2. I had zero desire or even ability to eat much until around noon, and instead went out and did a bunch of stuff.

Around noon I regained the ability to nibble on stuff, and I finished the last 1.5 or so slices of my bread.

I also finished some of the cheese, ate a few of the beef sticks, and an ice cream sandwich I grabbed in the store.

I got incredible satiety from the ice cream sandwich. Bizarre. I came home and couldn’t eat.

I finished day 3 without having even entertained the idea of making the rice & bean stew.

Day 4, 5, 6

I woke up incredibly satiated on day 4, too. This was bizarre, was I living in a time loop? This is how Groundhog Day starts, isn’t it? (By the way, I highly recommend you watch as many movies about time loops as possible.)

Getting initial “satiety on any food” was normal for refeeds for a few hours, maybe a full day. But 4 days?!

To make a long story short, the ability to get satiated on pretty much any type of food never went away. I don’t even think it diminished. I ate ice cream sandwiches 4 days in a row, and they hit me with crazy satiety every time.

Like they should! It’s high-flour, high-sugar, high-protein, AND high dairy fat! The combination of flour, sugar, and dairy fat traditionally was peak food. It’s peak energy, allowing you to eat more carolies more easily and more palatably than pretty much anything else out there. Very few people can choke down a jar of beef tallow, and many even balk at me drinking a pint of heavy cream.

But everybody can enjoy a delicious ice cream sandwich, or eat tallow fries, or butter cookies.

And people used to do this all the time and not get obese or overweight on it. They certainly weren’t counting carolies or exercising to stake off the fat gain.

I kept underestimating the time it would take me to finish off my decadent foods. At one point I made a second loaf of bread, because the first one had been so delicious. One time I managed to force down a second entire slice of bread, but it was literal torture. Most of the time, I’d eat 1 at a time, which seemed the right amount.

I did end up making that rice & bean stew with plenty of vegetarbles, cooked in plenty of butter, with an entire pound of ground beef thrown in, fried to a brown crisp.

I ate on that stew for 2 entire days. It was swampy as heck, very high carb and decent protein from the rice, beans, and beef, and despite all that it was super satiating.

On the last day, just to prove a point, I even bought a regular sugar coke. I usually don’t even like sugary cokes on refeeds, I’ve just gotten so used to the “zero” taste and soda with actual sugar feels weird and sticky to me now.

But I wanted to try it, so I bought a 12oz bottle of coke with the the red cap and drank it.. and got HAMMERED with satiety. (I also had a Twix with it, and those contain palm oil which tends to be 10% linoleic acid. That’s about the biggest amount of linoleic acid I tend to eat on my refeeds.)

Satiety from Twix and sugary Coca-Cola. After stuffing my face for 6 days. What was even happening?!

Because I underestimated how much satiety I was now getting from EVERYTHING, it took me 6 days to eat the things I bought for a 3-4 day refeed, supplemented possibly by the ice cream sandwiches, the coke, and the Twix.

I ate the last beef stick from that initial pack the evening of day 6. Normally, I’d have destroyed the entire pack on the drive home.

Wild. I had never experienced anything like it. Was I in heaven? Had I died?

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Why? What mean?!

I’m not 100% confident why this happened. In comparison, the literal same foods in the near exact same amounts had not given me lasting satiety just 30 days prior. Sure, the first half day I’d get satiated, but after that I’d eat a box of butter cookies on the drive home from the store, and then eat half a loaf of bread w/ butter and cheese, and then start cooking my real lunch.

In that sort of “satiety-less” hyperphagia that defined most of my life on non-stupid mono internet diets, I could easily eat 4,500kcal in a sitting and still be ravenous.

This time, I was basically not hungry a single time for the entire 6 day refeed, and I had to force myself to eat just to get it over with.

So it wasn’t the foods I was eating on the refeed, per se, cause those were the same.

What changed? Ideas:

1. Maybe I finally depleted the linoleic acid in my body fat enough? I hadn’t looked at this for a while, but my own linoleic acid adipose depletion calculator predicts that if I started around 25% linoleic acid in my body fat from years of Standard American Keto, and I consistently ate 2.5% on ex150, I should be at around 5-6% linoleic acid stored now after 3.5 years (42 months):

   

   Now 5-6% isn’t the 2-3% we think it should be, but maybe I had crossed a threshold?
   
   

2. Or maybe it was that I’d eaten salmon instead of beef for the 5 days preceding the refeed? I had eaten salmon instead of beef for an entire month before on ex115salmon, and while I reached a new all-time low the results weren’t entirely positive:

   

3. Was it the double dose of Apple Cider Vinegar I’d taken during the last experiment? After hitting that plateau, I’d started taking a second serving in the evenings, around dinner time, about halfway through the 30 days. Maybe that had finally kicked in, possibly causing the 1lb drop to the 206lbs ATL on the last day, and the lasting satiety in the subsequent refeed? (I’ve been keeping this up ever since then, even during the refeed.)

4. Was it a combination of depleting my body fat omega-6 AND upping my omega-3 intake via fish? If what’s important is really the ratio, then dumping a fixed (and relatively small) amount of omega-3 from salmon onto a raging omega-6 trash fire would not necessarily be expected to work. If you’ve eaten a lifetime of the SAD or SAK, you’ll be so high in stored o6 that no amount of salmon could balance it out.
   
   What the Omega-Balance/Ratio people like to forgot is to do the math: 1tbsp of soybean oil would require you to eat 5lbs of wild salmon to keep the balance.
   
   Not only is that unrealistic and none of them do it, it doesn’t even take into account that the fats we eat get stored in our body fat, and, over time, define its fatty acid profile.
   
   My adipose flux calculator predicts how much total fat and how much linoleic acid is released every day at varying levels of body fat and LA%, here the original 25% assumed:

   

   That’s right, 60g a day of linoleic acid just from my own body fat, or the equivalent of 8tbsp of soybean oil. Good luck eating 40lbs of salmon to balance that.
   
   Now compare to the expected level of LA in my body fat now, let’s go with the upper end of 6% and also a slightly lower total fat mass from a more recent DEXA:

   

   Only 12g/day of linoleic acid, or ~2tbsp of soybean oil. That’s not perfect, as I hope to achieve <6g one day, but it’s certainly much better. It’s less than 1/3 of the original amount, and would only require 10lbs of salmon to counter (lol). That’s still a lot, but it is much, much better.

Positively Optimistic

Of course I don’t know for sure, and it could’ve been a fluke. And, yes, I think I still gained a bit of fat during this refeed. I’m certainly not 100% metabolically fixed yet.

But this is what you’d expect to happen if Modern PUFA Theory was correct, and you stayed the course of avoiding PUFAs, and deplete your adipose tissue.

I find this incredibly motivating. MPT seems the most correct of all the hypotheses of what caused the obesity epidemic and in particular my own morbid obesity only a few years ago. And we’ve seen a bunch of incredible anecdotes of people reversing morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, sunburn, mental & physical conditions of all sorts, including my own aforementioned Non-24 disorder.

The somewhat unfortunate thing is that you have to really believe and stick it out for a couple of years sometimes. I got “lucky” in that I was immediately rewarded with incredible weight loss and feeling great when I started ex150. 20lbs lost in the first month will motivate you, and 45lbs down after 3-4 months.. I was a believer.

I stumbled into the low-PUFA thing by accident and was obviously motivated by the weight loss and the much improved quality of life.

But there were improvements that I only got years later, and this ability to reach satiety on cookies, ice cream, chocolates, and other decadent swampy foods, is a first.

And, so far, it seems to likely depend on eating some fish. The OmegaQuant tests from long-time omega-6 depleters tend to be quite good in terms of the o3:o6 balance even in total absence of eating any fish or similar seafood. It’s commonly assumed that this is because omega-3 and omega-6 use similar enzymatic pathways in your bodies, and an excess of o6 “blocks” the body’s ability to use o3 in many places.

You can jack up your omega balance quite a bit by just eating fish a handful of times a week, and it tends to stay in your body for some time too. Depending on tissue type it depends on how long, but the red blood cells typically measured in most Omega tests stick around 3-4 months.

I’ve taken OmegaQuant Complete tests after eating fish previously, e.g. after ex115salmon and ex_sardines. Both times my o6:o3 ratio was markedly lower, hitting 4.7 and 5.7 respectively. But that’s just borderline “Ok” and a good ratio would be 2:1, with 1:1 being the goal. The best I’ve ever seen was 1.1:1 from my friend Steve, who eats the cleanest, lowest-PUFA diet I’ve ever seen, and eats tons of wild seafood on top. He’s a real salmon snob and won’t even let me non-Alaskan, non-Sockeye salmon for fear of it being contaminated lol. I expect 1:1 to 2:1 to be the endgame for most people, realistically.

Is it therefore a sensible strategy to eat wild caught salmon 1-2x a week, at least until your adipose tissue is sufficiently depleted to reach a good Omega balance without eating any?

This experience certainly seems to hint at that. I still think that, once you’re depleted to normal, healthy o6 levels after 4-8 years, you’re likely to no longer need to eat the fish.

And it doesn’t seem to do as much when fighting the raging trash fire of o6 most people’s diet has them eat & that they have stored in their body fats.

But it could be that it has an effect on the margin, and that enough avoiding of o6 improves your balance enough for the o3 from wild salmon to actually make a difference in satiety, and maybe other things.

In any case, I’m on day 5 of ex150salmon right now and have lost 13.5 of the ~20lbs I gained during the refeed. I do suspect that I did gain some fat over the 6 days, but I’m not sure how much.

If just 5 days of eating salmon had this drastic an effect on my refeed satiety, I’m hoping that 30 days will be even stronger? We’ll see next refeed.

I’m also planning on taking another OmegaQuant Complete toward the end of this experiment and see if the ratios there have improved since the last salmon experiment.

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Previously on Lost

My last experiment was exactly the same as this experiment, my new standard diet, ex150nosauce+ACV:

• 150g of beef + some leafy vegetables per day

• Ad-lib heavy cream, usually with coffee but sometimes plain

• Each morning, 1 serving (~=1 tbsp) of Bragg apple cider vinegar capsules

As expected, I started out losing weight very linearly and rapidly, until I hit pretty much my previous modern all-time low of just under 208lbs. Then I plateaued for 2 weeks straight, bouncing around the 208-210lbs mark.

I suspected then that I’d hit my “settling point” and would need to deplete more linoleic acid from my body fat to hit a lower ad-lib weight.

But to make sure, I was just going to do it all again this month. I predicted I’d hit that same level of ~207-208lbs and plateau once more.

Play it again, Sam

And here’s what happened:

Refeed weight gain of 17lbs, back down 17lbs within a week, back down to 207-208lbs 3 days later.

And then, a slow, steady, bizarrely stable plateau for 17 days.

It happened EXACTLY as I predicted. A few days into the plateau I ate 2x my normal beef, just in case it was a protein hunger thing. It wasn’t. I never really did get that ravenous PLH hunger, but just in case.

Next, a reader suggested I could try doubling my ACV dosage. Heck, why not, I thought, that stuff’s cheap enough. So I started also taking one serving in the evening, usually around dinner. I think I only forget it once or twice from then on.

About 10 days into the plateau I had a cheat meal of rice, lentils, and some meat, home-cooked at a pot luck. I could’ve easily said no, but at that point I was 100% convinced I was correct about the plateau and that I might as well cheat. Since it was only a single meal, my weight didn’t even noticeably bounce up.

Two weeks into the plateau, with the double ACV dose seemingly not having had any effect, the same reader suggested I just try something, anything at all. Might as well do a mini experiment-in-the-experiment, right?

So just for shits and giggles, I switched from 150g of beef to 150g of wild caught Alaska sockeye salmon for the last 5 days.

On day 29, I reached a new all-time low of 206.7lbs. And on day 30, I was 206.3lbs, besting my old ATL by a whole pound. I was now down 85lbs from when I first started ex150. Feels good, man.

What the heck happened?

I don’t know. Maybe the 2x ACV finally kicked in, after 2 weeks. Weirder things have happened.

Or maybe the omega-6:omega-3 thing did make a difference on the margin.

A Brief History of Fish

Or, more accurately, my brief history with fish.

In short, I don’t like fish. Never have. I could happily go the rest of my life without eating any fish ever again. Most fish is tasteless. Much fish is worse, actively nasty-tasting. For example sardines. I don’t like sardines at all.

Back in 2023, I did a sardine experiment: ex150sardines. I lost 4lbs, but I hated the sardines, and at that time, 4lbs wasn’t an incredibly impressive amount of weight to lose. I was still 245lbs then, and would lose similar amounts just doing my regular beef.

Salmon is pretty much the only fish I actually enjoy eating, but it’s not nearly as good as even standard 80/20 beef, it’s expensive, it’s a pain to cook, and so I generally don’t.

I did once do a 30 day experiment replacing my daily beef with salmon, back in 2024: ex115salmon.

On that I did lose weight and reach a new ATL, but only by about 3lbs, and after reaching it 2 weeks in, I regained 2lbs so it was mostly a wash overall:

I generally found the salmon to be less palatable than the beef, and I got a major sunburn that month, which I sort of hadn’t in a year at that point, having cut out seed oils.

Overall I wasn’t particularly impressed by “oily fish, rich in omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids” even with the pretty extreme intake.

There are lots of seed oil deniers out there who claim you don’t need to avoid omega-6, all you need is to eat fish once in a while to maintain a healthy omega-6:omega-3 balance.

Those people are stupid.

It just doesn’t work. You can do the math; these people never do. You need to eat 2lbs of salmon to counter a single tablespoon of soybean oil. That ranch dressing you’re putting on your salad? 5lbs of salmon.

Americans are eating an estimated 15-25% of their entire diet from seed oils and derivatives. There isn’t enough salmon in the world to counter this, apart from the challenge of eating 5lbs a day.

The math just doesn’t work out.

That said, have I finally reached levels of omega-6 avoidance where eating salmon daily does make a difference?

I am generally skeptical of broad “omega-3/fish” advice, but I’ve also been working hard for 3-3.5 years on the other side of the equation, avoiding omega-6. I believe this to be the much longer lever.

My own Linoleic Acid Depletion Estimator would predict that I’m arriving around the 5-6% mark, presumably having started very high in the 20-25% range.

And if we plug those percentages into the Adipose Flux Calculator, we come up with some very different scenarios:

At 25% LA with about 68lbs of body fat (from my DEXA at the time) I would’ve gotten 60g LA or ~8tbsp of soybean oil per day from my own body fat. That’s too much for any man, and you couldn’t possibly eat the 16lbs of salmon required to counter this and achieve a reasonable omega balance.

But now at an estimated 57lbs of body fat and 6% LA:

Aha! That scary toxic green mountain is almost gone. A mere 12g of LA, or 2 tbsp of soybean oil, would drip into my system each day.

Since the “officially safe, ancestral” number is about 6g/day, I might just be getting mighty close. And the few grams of omega-3 PUFA from 150g of wild salmon might just be enough to push into the margins here and put my metabolism into a near-healthy, satiety-inducing state.

(If you don’t understand marginal utility from economics, do yourself a favor and read up on it. I maintain that you cannot understand about 1/3 of reality without understanding how things work on the margin. Don’t be like all those people claiming you just need to eat some fish to counter the onslaught of seed oils in the Standard American diet!)

A Surprising Refeed

I’m merely speculating of course, but the refeed after this experiment has been very interesting. In terms of what I bought & ate, it was almost identical to the last two refeeds:

• Milk chocolate & chocolates

• Home made butter cookies

• Home made bread (with butter, cheese)

• Butter croissants (also with cheese)

• Rice with beans and beef

You can see that my current style of refeed is quite swampy, it contains quite a bit of sugar, and it’s not particularly low in protein either.

Usually I’d experience quite a bit of satiety for the first meal of these refeeds, which would quickly disappear to be replaced by ravenous hyperphagia, and I’d be stuffing my face for 4 days trying to re-experience that first sense of satiety. But I would never get it again until I forced myself to stop and go back on ex150.

This time was different. It’s the evening of day 3 of this refeed now, and I just barely finished a single slice of bread w/ butter and cheese.

Both the mornings of day 2 and day 3 I woke up satiated, to the point I didn’t manage to drink more than a single cup of creamy coffee before having to go out and distract myself for a while.

The hyperphagia is largely absent. I did binge a little bit on chocolates last night, but then I drove to the store today to buy an ice cream sandwich and returned home with a case of Dr Pepper Zero.. having FORGOTTEN to buy the ice cream sandwich.

“Forgetting” about food, about effing ICE CREAM, is just about the best sign of normal-working satiety and a healthy metabolism I have yet experienced.

A well-oiled machine

Among the believers of Modern PUFA Theory (MPT), we largely believe that metabolically healthy humans eating metabolically-inert or -positive foods should experience good satiety and not become obese. The system should be self-regulating, as it had been for most of human history.

The obesogen introduced sometime in the mid 1800s, MPT followers believe, which has caused the epidemic of obesity and other diseases of civilization, is linoleic acid (LA). LA is an omega-6 polyunsaturated fat found mostly in seed oils, in products made with seed oils like junk food, pastries, or ranch dressing, and in the fats of animals fed seeds (soy/corn) or seed oils.

Anyone living in modernity would almost certainly be filled to the brim with LA, having eaten large quantities for a lifetime, with the nasty fat stored in our adipose tissues.

If you were to avoid LA for hard & long enough, your body fat levels of it would decrease, which would take about 4-8 years. After that, you should no longer need to do “weird diet hacks” to achieve satiety: things like keto, low-fat diets, avoiding the metabolic swamp, or low-protein should no longer be necessary.

The body’s metabolic machinery, having been cleansed of the nasty obesogenic gremlin linoleic acid, would achieve satiety on any mix of foods, no matter how scrumptious or decadent they might appear: tallow fries, butter croissants, ice cream, milkshakes - all these opulent “unhealthy, fatty, sugary” foods would be efficiently used for energy, and not lead to obesity.

There are a few anecdotes of people achieving this in the MPT community: people who’ve avoided LA for typically 4-5 years at the very least. These people report reversing type 2 diabetes, long-term obesity, and never gaining much fat again even when “pigging out” on foods that would give any registered dietician a heart attack.

I am personally probably not quite there yet: I’ve only avoided LA for about 3 years now, maybe 3.5. Coming from Standard American Keto high in soybean oil salad dressings, bacon, nuts, and roast chicken, I probably started pretty high, too.

But this refeed feels like a major step.

Why refeed anyway?

This is one of the questions I get the most: why do I even do refeeds? I keep gaining 15-20lbs on them, and then have to re-lose them. Wouldn’t I be much leaner already if I didn’t do these every month?

In short, I don’t think so. I’ve tried doing no refeeds for 2-3 months straight, and I’d just plateau and stay there, scraping along the new settling point.

Let’s look at this month’s weight chart again:

Do we really think that the refeed prevented anything here? The weight came off rapidly, linearly, and predictably within a week or so. After that, SEVENTEEN DAYS OF STALL CITY. I plateaued twice as long as it took me to lose the refeed weight.

It just doesn’t seem that these refeeds are what prevents me from reaching leaner weights. 17 days would’ve been plenty of time to lose as much as a single pound.

But one thing that I love about the refeeds has always been that first meal, and sometimes the entire first day, after finishing up an ex150-style experiment.

And the reason was that, while still somehow in a metabolically healthy mode, I could experience satiety eating ANYTHING.

A 3-egg omelette. Butter cookies. Croissants. Spaghetti. Rice & beans. If you’re used to becoming hyperphagic on pretty much any diet but the most extreme versions of keto or carbo (=rice diet), being able to eat a 3-egg omelette without becoming ravenous feels AMAZING. Heck, satiety on chocolates?! Where can I sign up?

Of course it would never last, and the following 2-3 refeed days I’d just keep chasing that high and making myself sick, only to realize the magic was gone and resuming yet another ex150 experiment.

I’m not saying I’m quite fixed yet, but this refeed feels fundamentally different. Like a major step up, my metabolic wheels spinning, the furnace firing, the engine banging on all cylinders.

Maybe it’s just the double dose of ACV and the salmon speaking, but this refeed feels like a glimpse of a metabolically healthy future. I’m usually a cynic and not somebody who’s too optimistic that “we can have nice things.”

But then, cutting out the linoleic acid did fix my incurable circadian disability/disorder, and combined with those anecdotes I mentioned..

Maybe there is a metabolic happily ever after?

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Notes

As always, here are my notes:

Rinse & repeat

Day 1

Lol got first sunburn of the year

At least got pretty red from hours in direct sunlight (neck & arms) but so far, I don’t even feel it

Will see if it’s a “burn” tomorrow (narrator: it wasn’t, just a farmer’s tan. never hurt, never peeled)

Day 4

Somehow drank huge amounts of cream today even before 2pm

Ok cream consumption is getting out of hand. Finished 2 quarts today, which is a lot for me.

Think PLH reared its ugly head, day 4 seems early - then again it was very fatty beef (=less protein) and I did get the same symptoms day 4 of the sugar fast

Had 2nd portion of beef and immediately got brick-in-stomach feeling & cement truck satiety.. within minutes! So yea probably PLH.

(Note: I think this sudden “protein hunger” on only day 4 of the experiment might be related to the mild “sunburn” (not really a burn but a huge tan) I got the very first day?)

Day 8

Did a lot of physical labor today and was in the sun again

Sort of expecting PLH soon lol

Day 9

For some reason, couldn’t sleep at all at night..

Day 10

Sort of waiting for the PLH to set in, but so far, nothing..

Day 12

New ATL: 207.15lbs

Day 13

Ha, woke up 208.5lbs, literally first day this experiment that I’ve seen my weight go back up. Plateau incoming?

Day 15

4 day plateau now. Doing 2x the beef today just in case that helps. Just ate my meal twice, once for lunch and once for dinner.

Didn’t help, still drank about 2x the cream I did previously. I think I’m just at the settling point again, whatever causes it (hint: LA)

Day 16

Starting 2x ACV, morning and evening, due to reader suggestion

Day 19

Social cheat meal w/ rice, lentils, dessert instead of ex150 dinner

Day 21

Stopped buying bulk zero soda

Day 23

Headache

Day 25

Because weight’s been flat for almost 2 weeks now, reader suggested I try “something” the remaining days and see if it moves the needle. Started doing 150g of salmon instead of beef as of today. Surprisingly satiating given that there’s almost zero fat in wild salmon.

Shower thought: I haven’t whipped my cream in months, either. Did get to new ATL just drinking it straight, but of course I COULD try whipping it again for a while..

Day 27

(Mild) acid reflux for the first time in.. I don’t even know. Effing fish lol.

Day 28

Lame duck period of the experiment heh

Day 29

Well I’ll be danged.. new ATL, 206.7lbs

That feeling of surprise satiety again that fat loss whooshes often come with, I am just intuitively WAY less hungry

It’s not “Eat less -> lose fat” it’s “lose fat -> eat less”

Refeed

Day 1

Bought WAY too much food again lol

Day 2

Woke up still strongly satiated.. not just full, satiated. Could only drink 1 creamy coffee, then went out until lunch or so and finally managed to eat something.

Overall, satiety feels stronger or that it lasts longer, at least. I think this is what it’s supposed to feel like? Not sure if the extra ACV or the fish is helping, or I’m just slowly depleting my LA and getting better at this.

Conclusion & Coming Up

You could say that an ATL is nice, even if only by a single pound. Only 28 days into the experiment I would’ve called my prediction perfect, I felt like I was in the “lame duck period” of an experiment.

(For my non-U.S. readers: “lame duck” is what we call it when e.g. a president is already voted out or can no longer run due to term limits, but is technically still in office. There’s typically no longer a mandate, and he can’t do much since the will of the people has already moved on. This is what the 17 day plateau felt like.)

But then.. that single pound drop after just a few days of eating salmon..? The nice, round number of 85lbs lost total now?

So, naturally, I am postponing the silly YOLO experiments & the longer-term HCLF experiment I’d been planning, and I’ll do ex150salmon first.

I’ll also keep up the double dose of ACV, one in the morning and one in the evening. Cheap enough, and who knows, maybe it does something.

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Preamble

I realized that I haven’t written a specific post about what diet I actually eat in over 3 years.

Somehow I just assume that everyone reading this blog knows what I mean when I reference “ex150” or “the heavy cream diet” or “my cream diet” or “90% fat HFLC low-PUFA keto” or “my stupid internet diet.”

But a few readers recently pointed out that it might make sense to periodically remind everyone, for example new readers, what this “stupid internet” diet is that has me reliably down 84lbs without counting carolies or exercising.

Other good things that happened to me on this diet:

• My testosterone regularly tests over 1,000 (“way too high”)

• My teeth, gums, eyes, and joints have become less inflamed

• I get 90% less sunburn. Used to burn to a crisp in 45min, now I can stay out for 2-4h in crazy summer sun (no sunscreen)

• I cured an incurable circadian rhythm disorder/disability, Non-24

• Did I mention the 84lbs fat loss without counting carolies or going hungry?

Note: while I love this diet and it works very well for me, I do not think that everyone should/must eat like I do. ex150 is a pretty extreme variant of a pretty specific type of ketogenic diet, and plenty of people don’t need it, hate it, wouldn’t benefit from it, or straight up cannot do it sustainably.

While I appreciate it when people give my diet a try, I highly recommend you check out my post on How to Find your Personal Optimal Diet. This is just one of the possible options.

What's good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander.

ex150 - What the heck does that mean?!

The ex stands for experiment.

When I started this blog, I initially called my diet “low-protein keto” because that’s why I invented it. But I realized that I wasn’t 100% sure that “low-protein” was the load bearing part of what I was doing. Instead, I decided to name the blog “Experimental Fat Loss” (=exfatloss in short) and that I’d name my diets merely describing what they consisted of, without presuming to understand the mechanism by which they worked.

The 150 stands for “150g of beef” which is roughly 1/3 of a pound. To be honest, I picked this because I was shooting for “low protein” and cutting a pound of beef in thirds is pretty easy without having to constantly weigh or measure anything. It just happened to work out pretty well, and so I stuck with it.

Technically I also add a small amount of non-starchy vegetables to the ground beef for flavor and texture, and to help soak up the rendered fat. I used to weigh the vegetables relatively strictly to be 60-80g per day, but I no longer do this. I just pour a “generous amount” in and probably end up closer to 150g of non-starchy vegetables a day. Think spinach, bell peppers, okra, onions..

Now 150 grams of beef & some vegetables is not the only thing I eat on this diet. In fact, it’s missing the major ingredient of my ad-lib food intake: heavy cream.

ex150 would be more appropriately called ex150cream, but I literally just thought of this the very first time 3.5 years in. My bad.

People mockingly call ex150 “the cream diet” because it almost entirely consists of heavy cream. Depending on the type of beef (I prefer 80/20 ground chuck) and how much cream I consume ad-lib on any given day, the vast majority of “carolies” I consume come from heavy cream. The rest comes mostly from whatever fat is in the ground beef, and the butter I cook it in, since vegetables have nearly no carolies in them.

As of the last 6 months or so, ex150 has also involved supplementing 1 serving of apple cider vinegar daily, which adds minimal cost & inconvenience, and seems to work well for me.

Another recent note: I used to always whip the cream into a pudding consistency for the first 3 years. I haven’t whipped it in 6 months, and have recently still reached a new all-time low after plateauing forever. I therefore think that it’s fine to just drink all the cream straight, or with coffee. Whipping cream for a “dessert meal” is still a valid option though.

What’s NOT in ex150

In a sense, ex150 is much better defined by what’s NOT part of it:

• No caloric restriction: the heavy cream is ad-lib, and always has been

• Minimal linoleic acid from seed oils or other sources, because I think seed oils did obesity

• Just about as little protein as a sedentary adult can sustainably eat, because almost everyone in the West eats too much protein (vegans & seniors may be the exception)

• Almost no carbohydrates, hence the diet is extremely ketogenic (90% kcal from fat)

• Extremely low fiber (I used to say <3g/day, these days it might be up to 5 or even 10g), and thus low irritation of the bowels

• No food variety, which can lead to pleasure-induced eating. You literally eat the same thing every day.

• No added salt, citric acid, or glutamate (e.g. mushrooms/tomatoes): these seem to induce overeating aka hyperphagia (note: like the addition of ACV, this is a relatively recent change that I intend on keeping going forward)

What therefore ex150 is

ex150 tries to push all the fat loss levers you can possibly push at once.

It is:

• Hyper ketogenic (90% kcals from fat)

• Super-low omega-6 PUFA linoleic acid (the bad one in seed oils)

• Super-low salt

• Super-low glutamate

• Super-low protein

• Super-low carb

• Very high in MCT fats because dairy fat is about 11% MCT

• Extremely simple

I’m not aware of any other diet pushing as many buttons at the same time. There are a small handful of things you could add, like a focus on omega-3 from fish, or some other supplements, but nothing that I’m convinced will make a huge difference, at least without trading in a lot of complexity.

And simplicity is a big reason for why this diet works so well.

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Who can’t or shouldn’t do ex150

There are some obvious candidates:

If you’re diagnosed diabetic or prediabetic, or are taking any medication related to blood glucose or diabetes, you should be careful when switching diets in general, and ex150 is just about the most extreme diet I know.

It will MASSIVELY change the amounts of glucose your body will get & how it’ll deal with it. If you take medication or are otherwise sensitive to this, please consult a doctor about how to switch to a heavily ketogenic diet before trying this.

ex150 is also heavily based on dairy. If you know you don’t deal with dairy well, e.g. based on your heritage, family members having issues with dairy, or having problems with it yourself in the past, this might not be the diet for you.

There are even people who do fine on normal or moderate amounts of dairy, but not on the extreme amounts consumed on ex150. Remember, the diet is practically 90% heavy cream.

People will gall bladder/fat digestion issues. The diet is 90% fat. The fat in heavy cream is already emulsified, which makes it easier to digest. But it could still be an issue for some people. If you know you have issues digesting fat, be careful and watch out for signs when consuming a ton of cream. I’m told the symptoms include diarrhea and undigested fat in the stool. You probably know more about this than me if you have such a condition.

Word of warning: carrageenan or other emulsifiers

I am in the lucky position to have cheap, affordable, delicious store brand cream available that uses only cream as its single ingredient, and even a backup that just uses gellan gum as an emulsifier. Companies add emulsifiers so that the cream won’t clump, which can happen if it’s being stored or transported for long periods of time (I think).

But most, especially cheap, brands of heavy cream contain the emulsifiers carrageenan, and so-called mono- and diglycerides.

I personally try to avoid these. I don’t have any solid evidence that these are bad, but I’ve heard many anecdotal reports, and seen some studies, in which carrageenan has caused indigestion or other issues for people.

If you have in the past had issues with digesting dairy even though you think you should do ok on it (e.g. pastoral heritage like Northern European or British Isles) and many in your family do ok on it, I recommend that you check your heavy cream’s ingredient list.

If the cream you use contains carrageenan, I recommend trying to switch to another brand if you can.

A brand that’s usually available in most stores nation wide in the U.S. is Horizon, and their heavy cream only has added gellan gum, no carrageenan. You can find it at many middle to upper level grocery stores. Many high-class grocery stores also carry single-ingredient cream that contains nothing but cream, but these tend to be rare and expensive. You’ll be drinking A LOT of heavy cream on this diet, so I recommend finding an affordable combination of ingredients & price. I do fine on gallons of gellan gum cream per week. (Yes, you will most likely be drinking over a gallon of cream each week.)

How to do ex150

Ah, finally! Having said all these other things, how does one actually do ex150?

Cold Turkey yet a 1-2 week adaptation period

You have to do it cold turkey. Unfortunately, ex150 works by what it’s cutting out of your diet, mostly not by what it’s adding.

DO NOT just add more heavy cream to your Standard American Diet, it will not work.

You have to go all-in over a span of maybe up to 1-2 weeks. And that’s only to give your digestive system some time to get used to the higher fat and lower fiber intake. Oh, and going to low-sodium and keto adaptation.. remember, you’re pressing ALL the buttons.

Personally I like just going cold turkey and switching diets suddenly, but then I’m used to high-fat/low-fiber/low-sodium keto. If you’re currently not used to any of that, plan to not feel amazing for 1-2 weeks, and possibly have a digestive adaptation period.

Go very strict. Don’t change the plan.

I’ve written about the strategy of finding what diet works for you before.

Just follow the plan strictly for 30 days. There are many ways to mildly change the diet that make it not work. If you start out with one of those and it doesn’t work, you don’t know if the diet doesn’t work for you at all or if you just changed it too much.

Once the diet works for you, you can modify it.

If you have any serious amount of weight to loss, it’ll take you more than a few weeks anyway. Even the most aggressive fat loss stories take people half a year to years.

Set yourself up right for sustainable, long-term fat loss and reaching a healthy weight in a healthy way.

Here’s the exact plan

• Eat one real meal a day: 150g of fatty (80/20) ground beef and some non-starchy vegetables, cooked in butter. No salt, no spices, no sauce, no sides. Pick either lunch or dinner.

• The rest of the day, drink heavy cream plain or in coffee. Drink to satiety, but don’t guzzle it down too fast - you can make yourself nauseous that way. I recommend drinking small cups at a time or sipping until you get a feel for how much you need.

Do it for 30 days

You should of course see some initial weight loss before day 30 on any diet that works. But anything much shorter won’t give you a clear enough trend to really tell.

Many people’s weight fluctuates naturally by over 10lbs, especially overweight and obese people.

If you just do the diet for a week, you might be catching a random up or down trend, and not actually see the effect of the diet itself.

Commit to doing it 30 days at a time. Again, if you have serious weight to lose, you’re in this for the long haul anyway.

View it as a probation period of sorts; you’re just trying to figure out if you and the diet are a good match. You can reinvent the business once you have some experience.

Appreciate, but don’t over-appreciate, the water weight loss

You will likely lose a lot of water weight in the beginning. I believe any diet that will eventually lead to sustained fat loss will also lead to short-term loss of water weight.

Losing water weight is therefore a good sign, but not necessarily proof that the diet will work. Less water retention is generally a good thing up to a point: it probably means less inflammation, less bloat, and it IS less body mass your joints are supporting. You will also look dramatically thinner when losing water weight.

But of course there’s a limit to water weight loss: if you’re morbidly obese, it’s not because you have an excess of 100lbs of water on you.

Water weight is like a puppy: excitable & moves a lot in the short-term, but not necessarily indicative of a greater trend in the right direction.

That said there’s also nothing wrong with the water weight loss. So just be prepared for it, appreciate it, but don’t get used to losing 20lbs in a week over and over again, cause it’ll be the same 20lbs.

Let me know how it goes!

I’ve previously run an ex150 trial, and 7 out of the 10 participants stuck through the full 30 days. All of them lost weight, on average 9.6lbs.

But I’m always interested to see people’s experience on the diet. A lot of people tell me they find it much more enjoyable than it sounds at first. Others can’t deal with it, or find it very hard.

The more data, the better!

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I think that cooking your own food is such a foundational step in.. survival.. (?) and daily life that everyone over age 16-18 should learn the basics.

If you’re going to experiment with your diet or eat healthy, cooking for yourself is nearly the only option: you have no clue what restaurants are really using to cook; the employees often times don’t know it themselves. With store-bought food at least you have the nutrition label, but there are enough tricks, loopholes, and fraud that I wouldn’t rely on that much either.

This post is for those people who somehow never got into cooking for themselves. (OH HI, MARK!)

What is “Cooking?”

I’d say that, technically, the word “cooking” means to heat something inedible until it becomes edible. But you might also make things edible without heating them (much) or (re-)heat things that were already edible, just to make them tastier.

So we’ll also include other related things like “peeling things” or “cutting things up.” In short, “cooking” here is just a catch-all for “preparing your own food.”

For the sake of this post, I am explicitly not interested in:

• Feeding your dog/cat/pet iguana

• Efficient/cheap/bulk/organic grocery shopping

• Making fancy multi-course meals designed to impress others

• Making ever-new meals that serve as “foodie” entertainment instead of nourishment

• Cooking for your family

Those are all cool & stuff, but it’s another topic. In this post I’m just hoping to relay the few skills needed to sustain yourself from regular, common ingredients. You can always get fancier later.

Cooking is really easy and takes very little time!

When talking to fellow millennials, and often other generations like boomers, it seems that 95% of them fall into one of 2 categories:

1. “Foodie” who uses food mostly as entertainment. Goes to different restaurants all the time, eats out all the time, likes food variety, sometimes (15%?) cooks fancy meals for himself/friends/family on a regular basis.

2. People seemingly intimidated by how complicated 1. looks, and who gave up on the idea of cooking for themselves. They go to the same restaurants all the time, eat out all the time, and order the same meal every time. Home-prepared meals tend to be packaged from the store: cereal, protein bars, sandwiches, or - if fancy - hardboiled eggs.

The thing is, if you’re not interested in the “foodie” variety & entertainment, preparing food to sustain your body is VERY EASY and VERY SIMPLE and takes ALMOST NO TIME. It’s also relatively affordable, but that’s for another time.

I’ve cooked most of my own meals daily for the last *checks watch* 20 years or so, and I rarely take more than 30 minutes a day including prep and cleanup like dishes.

Buying ingredients takes some additional time, but if your alternative is eating out, that’ll take even more time. Especially when compared to bulk shopping once every week or 2.

On top of that, if you cook simple meals, you can do other things while your food is cooking. I tend to check messages, read, and sometimes even write or work while cooking. You typically do have to check in every few minutes unless you’re doing a fire & forget meal in an instant pot or slow cooker, so it lends itself more to activities that you can get in & out of quickly without too much mental or physical context switching. I typically sit on the couch or at my desk, listening to the meal sizzle away in the kitchen, reading. Every few minutes I’ll get up, stir the pot, and then return to my book.

In that sense, time-actually-taken-away-from-all-other-things is probably closer to 5-10 minutes a day.

I’ll divide this post into a few chapters:

1. Meal strategy: how many meals a day, what times, meal prepping

2. Recipes: what to actually eat

3. Food prep: thawing, opening, peeling, slicing, cutting, portioning

4. Actual “cooking” with heat: searing, boiling, steaming

5. Cleaning up: washing dishes, soaking, drying

6. Equipment

7. Examples

Warning: this post is over 11,000 words long, and is my New Longest Post. Substack thinks it’ll take you 50 minutes to read it.

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Meal Strategy

Now I suspect that many people who "regularly” cook for themselves don’t think about explicit strategy very much. But, even if you don’t have an explicit strategy, you’ll exhibit SOME pattern of what and when and how you eat.

I always fell into a “skip-breakfast” mentality once I moved out of my parents’ house and started cooking for myself. I’m just not hungry in the mornings, it’s easy enough to just make a coffee or 2 and go to work.

I was also always a “boring eater” eating the same meals over and over. In one anecdote, my college roommate commented that he thought I’d been eating eggs & bacon every single day for an entire month. I thought about it, and concluded he might be right: it just hadn’t occurred to me eat something else. I liked that meal so I made it over and over. Another staple in college was spaghetti with tomato sauce, sometimes with some ground meat or sausage mixed in.

In terms of physiological needs, there are a few requirements in terms of food:

• You need to eat enough

• There are limits on how much you’ll be able to eat in one sitting depending on what you eat: fat has 9kcal/g whereas protein and crabs only have 4kcal/g, meaning you’ll have to eat way more of them to get the same amount of stored energy potential.

• High-fiber/water also make food less energy dense (and therefore less… food)

• Your stomach volume & digestive system have rate limits on how much of certain foods they can fit/digest at any given time

There might also be social requirements:

• You work at an office and only realistically have 45min over lunch to make/acquire/eat food 5 days of the week

• You have a long commute or work very early, so breakfast might have to be super rapid, eaten in the car, or skipped

• You have weird shift work times that don’t allow you to use some stores or facilities that other people take for granted, because everything is closed

And, of course, personal preferences:

• Maybe you have allergies or food intolerances that dictate certain diet choices

• Your family or religion might be vegan or have other dietary preferences

• Something intuitive, like my general disinterest in breakfast, or some people’s preference not to eat too close to their bedtime

It’s fairly easy to just answer these for yourself and come up with a general plan of how you will eat, and therefore, how to cook. You can always make exceptions or change things, but it really helps to just be aware how you generally eat.

If this feels “restrictive” to you; trust me, you already follow a plan. You just haven’t written it down.

Most people follow something similar to one of these:

• 3 meals a day, some smaller/easier (like breakfast or just coffee w/ cream) and some bigger/more involved (like ground beef & vegetables cooked in butter)

• More of a snacking/grazing pattern, but typically still 1-2 real “meals”

• OMAD (one meal a day) or 2MAD: basically me if you discounted the coffee and ate a bigger main meal instead. Popular with keto/carnivore.

Macros & diet plans

Some of these are more compatible with certain styles of diets. For example, I’d expect it to be extremely difficult to eat OMAD unless your diet was heavy in fats. Carbs and protein just don’t have enough energy density: getting 3,000kcal takes about 5lbs of (cooked) rice. That’s doable in a day, as I showed in my ex_rice diet, but in a single meal, or even a narrow window?! On my rice diets, I was eating every 2-4h, typically 4-5 meals a day.

Protein is even worse: 3,000kcal of chicken breast is about 5.5lbs of food. You could probably stuff that much down theoretically, but it’d be painful and inconvenient. Bodybuilders doing very high carolie chicken breast & rice diets are eating 6+ meals a day and planning their whole days around eating. That’s not very convenient for most people.

Fat, on the other hand, is very energy dense. You can easily get 3,000kcal from just under a single quart of heavy cream, or just under a pound of butter. If you only eat 80/20 ground beef (my favorite kind) you’re still getting enough fat that you only need about 2.5lbs of it per day - less than half of what the lean chicken breast requires.

Additionally, glucose clears out of your system in 2h in healthy (non-diabetic) people, maybe a bit slower if you eat a mixed or very big meal. Fats, on the other hand, can stay in circulation for 12-18 hours easily, providing energy the whole time.

As a consequence, people on fat-heavy diets like keto or carnivore tend to favor intermittent fasting/OMAD type diets. It’s much easier for them, and takes a lot less effort.

People who eat lots of starch or fruit, especially if high in fiber, tend to eat many more smaller meals throughout the day.

That’s just a limitation of the foods and our physiology. It’s really not very complicated, but it’s important so you don’t pick a “plan” that’s a bad fit for your diet, like “OMAD watermelon.”

Prep/cook/bulk strategy

For much of my career I worked at an office. I never had a crazy commute, but there were no cooking facilities besides a microwave there, and I only had about 45min of real free time over lunch. Parts of that I’d eat out like most of my co-workers. I never really brought prepped meals to heat up at work, although I tried it a couple of times. It just never felt very convenient to linger around the microwave and wait my turn.

After I started doing keto, most meals at local restaurants were no longer on the menu. Parts of that time I did OMAD and would only eat dinner, parts of that I’d just have coffee with cream over lunch (easy to bring cream if your office has a kitchenette with a fridge), and parts I would “assemble” (not technically cook) my own meals from packaged items available in the office snack bar: string cheese, boiled eggs, nuts (yes this is the part of keto where I regained 100lbs😬).

But there were plenty of co-workers who brought their own prepared meals from home and just heated them in the microwave.

Meal prepping

One great and popular strategy to deal with this is meal prepping. You just cook for an entire (work) week on the weekend, then take 1/5th of it to work every day. You can either fill 5 of those plastic lunch boxes right after you cook and keep them in the fridge, or you can keep a big pot/container in the fridge and fill up your reusable lunch box every morning (or the prior evening). If they have utensils and (paper?) plates at your office, you can just bring zip-loc bags.

If you’re really lazy and don’t care for variety, you can just meal prep for 7 days all at once and eat the same thing on the weekend. But for many people who like SOME variety, having 5 convenient lunches for the office and cooking from scratch the rest of the time might be a better option.

If you don’t work in an office but drive around, work on a job site, or similar, you can get a simple cooler to keep your food from spoiling until lunch. Honestly, unless it’s crazy hot in the summer, it’ll probably be fine even without a cooler.

Instead of actually cooking a prepped meal at home, you could also just buy packaged foods that are suitable and bring them to work. Cheese, boiled eggs, chocolate, candy, if you find a suitable variety, sliced bread. (Yes, I get that this is more “assembling” than “cooking” but hey it’s a step. I once ate pre-cooked rice for 2 weeks straight while traveling during ex_plainrice.)

Working from home

Once coronavirus hit, everyone I knew started working from home. This was an amazing benefit for me in terms of diet. Suddenly, I had access to my own kitchen while at work!

I was also way more flexible with my lunch break because I could put a pot on the stove, continue working and just stir every few minutes, and just generally had more flexibility schedule wise.

If you work from home, you have almost no limitations on what and when to cook. Lucky you, this is easy mode!

Conclusion

Pick your diet. I’m not telling you what to do here, if you don’t have one just write down what you actually eat on a day by day basis, and in which pattern. You likely already have a pretty regular routine.

Now take a look at your living/work situation. Are there meals you can’t easily prepare from scratch, e.g. during lunch at work? You need to figure out a solution to that: meal prep, fasting over lunch, or just bringing packaged convenience foods that accommodate your diet.

Recipes

This is probably the biggest lever you have. You can dramatically cut down on the effort, skill, & cost required to cook all your own food if you just keep it simple.

In terms of variety, everyone has different preferences. I have a friend who claims that he physically cannot eat the same meal twice a month (!) without gagging (!!)

I’m on day 1305 of ex150 today if you discount refeeds & the other experiments I’ve done. I’m not bored yet. Most people are probably somewhere in between.

If you look at which of your meals are pure nutrition and which ones are mostly entertainment/social, most people will probably find about a 70/30 ratio or higher in favor of nutrition. Let’s discount the fancy/social/entertainment meals because that’s not the focus of this post.

For your baseline “nutrition” meals, just pick something that’s simple, easy, and that you enjoy. I like fatty beef. I like heavy cream. I don’t really love vegetables, but adding some to beef makes it even more delicious and adds some texture and flavor. I like tomato sauce, so initially, ex150 was very heavy on tomato sauce (another friend called it “the sauce diet.”)

In fact, my beef-vegetables-tomato-sauce main meal was just the meal I had already been eating for years, scaled down. Having done paleo and keto before I began experimenting more seriously with my diet, “fatty beef & vegetables with some sauce” was already my staple. It was just pounds of everything instead of grams, heh.

(I later stopped using sauce and haven’t in half a year now, and got used to that easily.)

You can likely do something similar. Just note what you’re already eating 80% of the time at restaurants. It’ll likely be a pretty limited selection, unless you’re one of those “foodies.”

Maybe it’s your favorite pastry at the coffee shop for breakfast, your favorite sandwich for lunch, and your favorite take-out food for dinner. Maybe you have 2-3 favorites in each category.

Pastries are actually a bit complicated, but the rest is trivial.

Sandwiches are just sliced stuff on sliced bread. Find a type of bread you can buy that fits your diet (e.g. no seed oils, no flour fortification with “vitamins” would be my preferences). You can even make your own bread, but obviously that’s a little more involved.

Next, you’ll need roast beef or sliced cheese or whatever’s on your favorite sandwich. These you can also just buy packaged, but making roast beef is super easy as well, and it keeps very easy in the fridge. So you could just buy a roast once every 2 weeks or so, cook it, and slice it up to keep ready for sandwiches.

Next, let’s say your sandwich contains sliced tomatoes and some lettuce. The main limitations with these is that they don’t keep super well, a week might be a stretch in my experience. But you still likely only need to buy them 2x a week, as they do keep a few days easily.

Now you have all the makings of a great sandwich. Maybe you’ll want some sauce, too - and you’ll have full control of what goes into it, not like that soybean crap at the sandwich store!

For dinner, let’s say your favorite takeout is some sort of Chinese food. That’s almost easier: rice, 1-3 types of cut up vegetables like broccoli/peppers/onions, and some chopped up meat like chicken breast or beef.

Since you can use frozen, pre-cut vegetables for this, they keep much longer (in the freezer) and you can buy them in greater bulk than the tomato & lettuce for your sandwich. The meat you can buy in bulk and freeze as well, pre-prepping by cutting it up and freezing it portion-sized. That way you only heat a pan/pot, toss in your frozen stuff, and wait until it’s delicious. Same sauce thing applies as above: if you like sauce, find one that works on your diet and buy it in bulk. Sauces store nearly indefinitely unless you make fresh mayo.

So ignoring the breakfast pastry, what do you need in terms of ingredients for the whole week?

• 1-2 meats (say chicken breast and a beef roast)

• 1-3 types of frozen vegetables (broccoli, green beans, onions, peppers)

• Some fat like butter to cook your stir fry in

• Rice

• Bread

• A few tomatoes and some lettuce that you buy 2x a week instead of in bulk

• Optional sauce, but these last forever and you just need to buy them once in a while

That’s a very easy & simple grocery list, and nearly all of it you can buy weekly or less, except for the fresh tomatoes and lettuce. Doesn’t even take up a whole shelf in your fridge and just a bit of your freezer.

And if you pick foods you already like and enough variety for yourself, you could eat this daily & forever! It’s probably what you’ve been doing already, you just paid someone else to add soybean oil to it.

Food Prep

Food prep here doesn’t mean meal prepping your work lunches on the weekend, but simply preparing foods to be cooked.

This includes taking them out of the freezer/fridge to thaw. This applies to most animal products, since they spoil quickly.

Vegetables or fruits often need to be peeled and sometimes cut.

Rice needs to be rinsed, and beans soaked.

The main point here is that all these are super trivial and will become routine within days if you just eat the same meals over and over. Each food ingredient needs to be prepped a little different, and they have different “rhythms” and stages of being able to be prepared.

Meats

Meats generally need to be kept in the fridge (a few days to a week) or freezer (nearly indefinitely). If you’re buying your meats every week or shorter, no need to freeze anything. If you buy them in bulk, you’ll want to keep a few days’ worth in the fridge, and the rest frozen.

If you buy in bulk portions, that means you might have to split it up - it’s not convenient to thaw a 5lbs block of ground beef to just shave off half a pound for dinner.

Many meats come in package sizing that is convenient for this, e.g. 1lb rolls or bricks of ground beef. I eat only 150g of meat a day, and one of these 1lb packs lasts me 3 days. It’s no problem to keep meat sitting in the fridge for 3 days. Therefore I keep 1 of those 1lb packs open in my fridge at any given time, and when I’m down to 1/3, I take the next one from the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge. It’s usually thawed within 24h. If you forget to take it out, leave it on the counter over night (thaws much quicker) and it’ll likely be ready the next morning. Or, worst case, put it in a bowl with warm water and it’ll thaw out in 30 minutes.

Meats actually keep longer once they’re cooked. So you can cube (for stir fry) or slice (for sandwiches) for several days or even the whole week, and just keep it in the fridge as prepped ingredients.

For our sandwich & stir fry example, you can either cut them up daily before cooking, or you cook them once a week, cube/slice, and then just grab once you’re ready. Doesn’t matter much either way, just personal preference.

Dairy

Dairy is usually the same as meat, except you typically don’t need to cook it. I typically don’t freeze it, but just buy fresh once a week or so. In a pinch, 2 weeks in the fridge tends to be fine too, unless it’s raw milk/cream.

Starches

Starches (usually) need to be cooked to become digestible and palatable to humans. Some of them (wheat) need to be ground into flour. Rice needs to be rinsed. Beans need to be soaked, e.g. overnight. Potatoes need to be peeled.

The package will usually tell you what you need to do. If not, look up recipes online and they will usually tell you to e.g. rinse your rice, soak your beans, or whatever.

Once you’ve done it a handful of times with your favorite starch, it becomes second nature and part of your routine, and you won’t even think about it.

Starches often need to cook (or bake in the case of flour) for quite a while, so there are a lot of specialized tools like rice cookers or pressure cookers or bread baking machines.

Usually you can still just cook these with your regular cooking equipment, but the specialized tools will make it easier. E.g. a rice cooker or instant pot is “fire & forget” and you don’t need to babysit them. It can be worth it, but I’d just start out making things yourself to see how simple it really is.

Rinsing rice or lentils before cooking takes only a minute, you just have to remember to do it. Soaking beans overnight takes a bit more planning, but you can just get into a routine of just putting some beans into a bowl of water after dinner, and then they’ll be ready the next day.

Some starches last longer in the fridge than others. Rice, beans, lentils, and potatoes last a day or 2 in the fridge and taste fine. Eventually, they dry out and taste worse. You can pre-cook them for 2-3 if you keep them separate from other foods like sauces, which will turn them into a mushy slop.

Bread obviously keeps quite a bit if you keep it in an airtight container like a breadbox or a bag, without which it’ll dry out. Dry bread is edible and lasts quite a while, but doesn’t taste good. If you don’t bake your bread with oils, like most commercial bread using seed oils, it’ll dry out SIGNIFICANTLY faster. I’m talking 6 hours to 1 day if you’re not careful. Seed oil bread from the store lasts a week. There’s a reason people used to get their “daily bread” and not “weekly bread.”

Vegetables

Many vegetables can be eaten raw, some need to be cooked. Most need to be peeled, and, depending on the meal, chopped up.

I really like eating raw carrots and cucumbers, and foods like these are the basis of many salads (e.g. greek salad).

Almost all vegetables need to be cleaned unless you’re peeling the entire skin off anyway.

Just put all the vegetables for your meal (or batch) next to the sink and put a bowl or kitchen towel on the other side. Then, with the water running, take them one by one and wash them with water and scrub of any visible dirt. Put the cleaned vegetable in the bowl or on the kitchen towel to dry. Very easy.

Next, peel those vegetables you want peeled, like carrots or potatoes. Same technique, use a source pile, this time with a cutting board in the middle, and a “finished” pile.

Chopping up is the exact same, and you could either peel everything & then chop everything, or peel & chop each individual piece in one go. Largely depends on preference and how much you’re making at a time.

For our sandwich example, you’ll want to wash a tomato and some lettuce, then slice the tomato (cut off all the green stuff) and maybe cut up some of the lettuce so it’ll fit on the sandwich.

If you have leftovers, they’ll last for a few days in the fridge, just becoming a tiny bit more soggy and less crunchy, which is fine.

For the stir fry, just wash all the vegetables and cut them into cubes or similar size. Or, if you bought frozen vegetables like I tend to, you don’t need to do anything but take them out of the freezer.

One note on thawing: I mentioned that the 1lb packs of meat take about a day to thaw in the fridge. If you’re using pre-cut vegetables, you don’t need to take them out. That’s because thawing things (or changing their temperature in general) is hugely influenced by surface area to volume ratio. A huge ball or block of meat is just about the worst shape to thaw out. Hundreds of tiny, pre-cut bits of vegetables are the best shape.

Just put any remaining vegetables into a ziplock bag if you want to refreeze them. Uncovered stuff in the freezer will get freezer burn and turn into mush (also true for meats).

If you cut your stir fry vegetables fresh and have leftovers, they store just fine in the fridge for a few days, too.

While you could get away with only cooking & cutting/slicing your meats just once a week, I’d maybe do 2x a week for vegetables, because they tend to lose their “crunch” over time.

Fruit

Fruits are typically the same as vegetables, except you usually don’t cook them. Peel them if required or you want to. Wash them otherwise. Cut into desired shape and they’re ready to eat. It doesn’t get much simpler.

Congrats, you’ve now prepped all your ingredients for either a single portion or maybe even a week’s worth of food! Wasn’t so bad, was it?

If you’re unclear on any specific food prep technique, just search on Youtube. “rinse rice” or “chop tomato” will yield infinite results. You don’t need to be as strict or meticulous as all those professional chefs on Youtube, because you’re just cooking for yourself or your family, and not impressing any food critics.

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Actual Cooking

Ok, frankly I started out writing this post as “The Physics of Cooking” because that’s always fascinated me. Then I thought I’d go a little more broad, and here we are 4,400 words later, and I haven’t started on the actual cooking part.

Cool! We’ve bought our ingredients, we’ve prepped them, we’ve taken them out of the fridge or whatever. Now we’re ready to finally do the thing - add some calories to the raw food to heat it up! Remember folks, CICO is the the first law of thermodynamics: can’t cook food without carolies!

There are tons of different cooking methods out there and I won’t cover them all. I’ll just mention the ones I use the most and that seem most common:

1. Searing/shallow frying

2. Boiling

3. Deep frying

4. Steaming

5. Baking/air frying (same thing)

6. Slow cooking/BBQ

Methods of heat transfer

Before we get into the specific techniques, let’s briefly look at the different methods of transferring carolies from your pan/pot to your food. There are generally 3 methods of heat transfer:

1. Contact: steak meets pan metal

2. Convection: hot air meets steak

3. Radiation: infrared radiation hits & goes through steak

These all contribute to cooking food in various ways, depending on the method.

Contact depends a lot on the material you use: that’s why cast iron pans are great for making steak. Metal can get extremely hot and emits a lot of radiation, which gives you both a great sear in a short time, and cooks the food through. That’s why people make steaks in cast iron pans and not thin sheet metal: the thin pan will burn your food on the outside and leave the inside rare. That doesn’t even work well for black/blue steaks.

Convection is the main heating method used in air frying, and to a degree traditional baking (the oven also emits some radiation). It’s a very inefficient method of heat transfer, because air doesn’t have a high thermal capacity. (By the way, check out how Calories are really a property of thermal media lol.) Water has better thermal capacity, oil even better, and metal is really, really good. That’s why we mostly cook with metal cookware. Different metals have different thermal capacities, which is why you’ll see some pans with aluminum cores or even entirely made out of copper. Iron and steel are definitely good enough, though.

The advantage of convection is that it can give us a very even heat transfer across surfaces not touching a pan: you can have a whole loaf of bread or a cake or cookies bake evenly without having to press every surface against a hot pan. It’s also a dry cooking method, which allows for nice crispy/crunchy crusts in bread, cake, cookies, or steak.

Ok, on to the actual cooking techniques.

Searing/shallow frying

I’ll consider these the same because most people, including me, add some fat when searing. Searing means using heat (calories!) to cause the maillard reaction in food, which makes the surface of the food crispy, brown, and delicious. I think it’s the proteins that undergo this reaction, which is why it’s mostly associated with meat.

Some people call this “browning meat” and I assume those people also drive a “red car” and live in a “green house.”

You can technically sear “dry” without fat, e.g. when grilling or just using a very hot pan with no cooking fat. But adding tallow or butter 1. makes the food more delicious and 2. makes the searing process much easier.

Some things you practically need fat to sear, whereas something like a fatty steak provides its own cooking fat if your pan is hot enough: the fat just renders out and turns into cooking fat.

(Now that I think of it, is boiling “contact heating with water instead of a pan” or “convection heating with water instead of air?”🤔)

Fatty steak or ground beef sear just fine with almost no fat added to the pan because they bring their own fat. If you try searing chopped vegetables in a hot pan without any fat, you’ll have a bad time - the parts touching the pan will burn quickly and stick to the pan, and the rest will be cold.

This is because air is such a terrible medium for heat transfer, and 99% of the heat transferred will be through contact where the vegetables are touching the pan.

That’s why we add fat (hopefully not any of those sneed oils!) when cooking many/most meals. Fat has quite a high thermal capacity and will heat up, and it’ll transfer that heat efficiently to not just the parts of your food in direct contact with the pan, but anything touching the hot fat. This is “shallow frying” which is different from “deep frying” because you’re not submerging the entirety of your food in the fat. The fat just helps transfer the heat (and often tastes good).

Fat also helps your food not stick to the pan, because it’ll undergo the maillard reaction quickly before having a chance to get stuck to the hot surface.

The best strategy is to put some butter or beef tallow into your pan and wait for it to heat up. It can be tricky to tell if beef tallow is hot; once it’s melted from solid into liquid, it doesn’t change its appearance between being lukewarm or scorching hot.

Butter contains about 20% water, so you’ll want to cook out that water before it can fully heat up and make for a good cooking medium. I add butter and wait for the bubbling to stop, which means that the water is gone. It takes a little longer for the fat to heat up fully, and butter does eventually turn brown and begins to burn. I usually wait for that burning to begin before I put the meat in, but if you go a little early it’s just fine.

If you don’t wait long enough for your fat to heat up before you add your ingredients, it’ll probably turn out pretty fine too. It’ll just stick to the pan a little more and you might have to scrape more when cleaning up.

Does it matter if your pan is hot before you add your cooking fat? No. It makes logical sense and you can easily test it: put butter in a cold pan & turn the heat on, vs. letting the pan heat before adding the butter.

Since both the pan and the fat will be mediums of heat transfer, you’ll need them both up at temperature. The calories generated (or rather transferred, BECAUSE CAROLIES CANNOT BE DESTROYED PER THE FIRST LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS) by your stove and going into your pan don’t change depending on when you put the butter in.

In fact I much prefer adding fat to the cold (or warming up) pan instead of a hot one: heating butter too quickly will cause the water in it to instantly vaporize and explode, which gives you those nasty “fat splatters” that fly all over your stove, or can even hurt you if they land on your skin.

In short:

1. Put pan/pot on stove

2. Turn on heat

3. Add some butter or beef tallow

4. Wait at least until it’s melted and swirl the pan around to spread the fat evenly over the surface

5. If it’s butter, also wait until the bubbling stops and maybe until it begins turning brown in some places

6. Add your ingredients

7. Cook until your desired level of sear is achieved

8. During cooking, use a spatula to stir your food if it’s small pieces (chopped vegetables or ground beef, this is why it’s called “stir fry”) or tongs to flip big pieces over (steak)

How much butter or tallow should you use? There’s no exact answer, but at least enough to cover the entire surface of your pan/pot. That’s often less than a tablespoon, but I use significantly more because I like butter. If your meal is no longer “searing on top of the pan” but “drowning in butter” then you’ve reached “deep frying” and you might want to scale it back down, unless that’s your intent.

When is your food “seared enough?” Depends on the food and your personal preferences. The FDA recommends you cook foods enough to kill harmful bacteria in it. Especially chicken & pork spoil easily and you should cook them through. Beef can often be eaten raw, even ground beef if it’s recently ground and high quality (see: steak tartare). Vegetables: until they get nice and crispy and have some burned flavor, if you ask me.

Personally, I sear the crap out of my food: my ground beef is nearly burned and crispy, and my vegetables are on the verge of turning into charcoal. I just love that texture & flavor over the bland “lukewarm grey beef & floppy vegetables” you’d get if you turned off the stove 2 minutes early.

If you sear beef & vegetables enough, you won’t need any spices or salt - your food will be extremely delicious just from the maillard reaction.

Besides mostly meats, which you cook to desired temperature to kill bacteria, searing is mostly for flavor and texture. You could boil or steam your ground beef & vegetables and I’ve done it. They’re perfectly fine to eat and contain the same nutrients (maybe more cause you didn’t turn any into charcoal). They just don’t taste nearly as good.

Sub-category: Steak

Steak is a little trickier, and technically so is fish. Besides just the total amount of heat calories transferred into the steak, it also matters how fast you transferred them.

This is why you can’t cook a rare steak with a nice crust over low heat: the heat transfer would be low & slow, and your entire steak would be cooked through and grey before the outside would get to a nice brown crust.

You therefore need relatively high heat, and many people also bake their steaks to get the outside nice & crusty (because it’s a dry, even heat).

Fish is kind of the opposite: you need to limit not just the amount of total heat transferred, but also the rate of heat transfer, aka cook it on relatively low heat. If you go too high, it’ll just fall apart immediately. In this sense and many others, fish is the opposite of steak.

For a great steak, you’ll want a thick pan that gets very hot (cast iron/carbon steel/certain stainless steel pans) so you can get a nice contact sear but also strong radiation. It sounds like you’d want to minimize radiation and use a thin sheet metal pan, but in fact you’ll just burn the few tips of the steak resting directly on the pan, and none of the heat would reach the other 95% of even the steak’s bottom surface.

Equipment wise, using a pan vs. a pot actually makes a difference for steak. Since a pot has higher sidewalls, any moisture or steam escaping from your steak will stay in contact with the meat longer, and you’ll end up partly steaming your steak, which makes it grey & not particularly appetizing. That’s why a pan with low walls is better, the steam can escape immediately. This doesn’t matter for ground beef, vegetables, or other things you want to cook all the way through.

You don’t need to add butter or tallow to sear a steak, but I still like adding butter. The steak will obviously leak rendered tallow during cooking, but the butter proteins and lactose sugars burn into a nice, brown crust.

If you cook a steak over a fire, you’ll notice most people actually cook over the hot coals, not the flames for much of the duration. They are cooking almost entirely with radiation: the hot coals have crazy high thermal capacity and are emitting a lot of radiation. You can finish it with a sear over the flame, but it’d probably burn if you cooked entirely over the flame.

Boiling

Boiling is most often used for starches (pasta, potatoes, rice), legumes, or vegetables. Because boiling submerges the food entirely in water, it cannot reach a temperature higher than the boiling point of water (212°F), upon which the water will turn into steam and fly away.

The advantage is that you cannot burn your food with water. The disadvantage is that you cannot sear it, either: the maillard reaction typically only occurs at 280-300°F or higher.

Some people think that this makes boiled food healthier, because you’re not turning any of your meat/vegetables into nasty, evil, carcinogenic charcoal. Maybe they’re right, or maybe they’re just conflating bland food with healthy food. I’m not going to find out.

But one nice thing is that boiling food is relatively fire & forget. You have to make sure your pot won’t boil over, but apart from that it’ll approach and stay at a certain temperature until all the water is eventually steamed off, but that will take up to an hour depending on your heat and amount of water. It’s very forgiving, whereas a pan on high heat might totally burn your food if you forget it for 2 minutes.

Boiling will get your food heated beyond the safety (for meats) and digestibility threshold (starches, legumes) evenly and safely, but it does take a long time due to the low maximum temperature of the water.

Because of this, it’s common to first sear food and then boil it, e.g. stew meat. This way you get a nice delicious sear, and then you cook the food all the way through with some vegetables, allowing the flavors to mix nicely and evenly and soften the potatoes or vegetables or whatever else you have in there.

Boiling is also pretty good at doing high volumes of food at the same time: a pan allows only as much heat transfer as the surface of the pan. A big pot might fit on the same burner as a pan, but you can fill it all the way up with water and then cook 10x the amount of food in it at the same time. Because of this, boiling is pretty common in feeding lots of people, or for “poor people food.” You also don’t need a crazy high heat source like for searing a black & blue steak, it’ll just take longer for the water to reach the boiling point. And you don’t need a high quality pan with a thick floor, pretty much any metal container will work.

Of course boiling is a very moist method of cooking: there are lots of things you can’t make with it. Boiling cookies, bread, or cake wouldn’t work out very well. On the other hand, many food ingredients come dehydrated (rice, legumes, those bagged camping meals) and you’d need to add water to them anyway - perfect!

Sub-category: Simmering

Simmering is technically just cooking, but it’s an important point that I think deserves attention.

As you add heat to the pot of water, it’ll approach boiling temperature. It cannot go above that as it turns into steam.

How much heat you add (low/high heat) will change how fast your water will reach that boiling point, but it can’t push it over. But once your pot is boiling, how much heat do you need to KEEP IT boiling?

The answer is: almost none. You only have to counter the heat constantly lost to the environment as you unwillingly heat your kitchen.

Because of this, you’ll see most recipes for pasta, rice, or legumes recommend that you bring a pot of water to a boil, and then turn it to low heat and let it simmer. Often with the lid on, because that’ll keep more heat & steam in.

Simmering is just the act of letting the water cook your food for some time, without any further increase in temperature. It requires very low heat from your stove and a little bit of an intuition or feel depending on your stove, pot, amount of water/food, and so on.

For example, when I cook rice in my pot I need to turn the heat so low after reaching a boil that it’s below the “Min” point on the stove dial. But it turns out you can turn it even lower, to where you can barely see the flame, and that’s more than enough. If I leave it at the “Min” mark, the pot boils over. Your stove might be different.

Sub-category: pressure cooking

The only difference is that pressure cookers allow the water to reach a higher temperature without evaporating into steam. This works because the boiling point of water is actually dependent on its pressure: 212°F is just the point it happens to be around our normal atmospheric pressure (this changes slightly with elevation).

A pressure cooker will pressurize the water, allowing it to get to a higher temperature. It also traps the steam, which will be significantly hotter than the water, which adds more higher-temp heat transfer.

Because of this, you can cook basically anything you could boil in 45 minutes, but it’ll only take 10-15 minutes in the pressure cooker. Pressure cookers will do rice in 3 minutes instead of 15.

Instant Pots and similar electronic pressure cookers do the same thing, they just manage it for you so it’s easier.

If your routine includes a lot of boiled foods like rice, beans, lentils, potatoes, or stews, a pressure or instant cooker is a great investment.

The electronic ones are nice too because they’re fire & forget: put the ingredients in, walk away. They won’t burn or explode if you leave them on the stove overnight, they’ll just turn off or switch into “keep the food warm” mode.

Steaming

We just talked about steam, and how it likes to fly away from you and it’s very, very hot.

Warning: DO NOT put your hand into a jet of steam, e.g. that coming out of your pressure cooker when it’s depressurizing. The steam is extremely hot and you might end up in the hospital with 3rd degree burns. If you think boiling water is hot, steam is MUCH, MUCH hotter.

Steaming is a time-honored way of cooking things. It’s very similar to boiling in that it’s a moist heat. Since steam is a byproduct of boiling water, it’s often used in conjunction: while you’re boiling something in a pot of water, you can put a basket of vegetables above it and the steam will cook them through.

Many pressure cookers and rice cookers will come with a little basket that allows you to do exactly that. You can also just put a few cups of water into a pressure cooker, put the basket in, and steam your food without anything actually boiling beneath.

I’ve personally never steamed food except tossing in some vegetables into the rice cooker. I just don’t see the point; I don’t like soggy, limp vegetables.

It’s very popular & common in Asian cuisines, and that makes sense given that it goes well with rice cooking.

The “white rice with some steamed vegetables and sauce” thing just isn’t my favorite, I’d much rather cook the rice and a stew and add them together. But I thought I’d mention it because it’s quite convenient and common.

Deep frying

Deep frying is just cooking, except you’re cooking in fat instead of water. Fat has a much higher boiling point than water, allowing you to cook the food at much higher temperatures.

That’s why almost all deep-fried foods have the same uniform golden brown crunchy texture & look. It combines the even cooking of boiling with the high temperatures & maillard reaction of searing.

Despite the fat being liquid, at least when you heat it, deep frying is sort of a “dry” heating method because there’s no water (it’d just boil out). Hence the crunchy texture, and the fact that you can e.g. deep fry donuts but not boil them to a crisp. (Bagels are actually interesting here, I think those are boiled, not baked? Not a big bagel guy.)

Because you will be saturating your entire food in high heat for quite some time in the fat of your choice, the choice of fat obviously matters A LOT.

It used to be common to deep fry in beef tallow, but that got changed to mostly seed oils once those were invented, because they are cheaper.

Almost any fried food you buy these days will be boiled in nasty, highly oxidized seed oils. That’s why fried foods are among the most unhealthy food in existence, which is even acknowledged by mainstream nutrition science.

They’re just really confused as to what it is about cooking a potato in oxidized soybean oil that makes it unhealthy… maybe it’s the heating part?🤔Surely not the seed oils..

I haven’t personally deep fried anything in beef tallow, but “tallow fries” is a big trend now. If I have more success swamping in the future, it’s definitely on my list to do a tallow fries or tallow-fried rice balls experiment.

One thing I like about deep-frying is that it’s such a troll move. If you argued “seed oils are unhealthy, I lost weight eating white rice & steamed broccoli” mainstreamers would roll their eyes and say you cut out “junk food” and “ate clean, healthy, whole foods.”

But if you lost weight by eating nothing but tallow fries & tallow chips & tallow donuts, it couldn’t be the “junk food” or the “carolies” part. The only variable you changed was the frying fat.

Baking/air frying

Baking and air frying mostly use air convection for heat transfer. Air is a TERRIBLE heat conductor, which is why it takes forever to heat anything in an oven. There is also a little bit of radiation, especially in more conventional metal ovens, maybe not so much with air frying.

The advantage is that it’s a dry, uniform, even heat, so you can bake things and give them a nice crust. Some people like air fried steak, I never thought it was very good.

The main reason for conventional baking is that you have to for certain foods: pastries, bread, cake.. baking is pretty much your only choice. Some people make bread in a dutch oven, which heats mostly by radiation. But try that with cookies.

The main reason for air frying seems to be convenience: air fryers are cheap, ubiquitous, easy to store away, and relatively quick as they don’t have as much volume to heat up compared to a big, conventional oven.

Personally I hated air frying and I got rid of my relatively fancy air fryer. I thought the food never tasted particularly good, I don’t bake much anyway, and the cleanup process was always a huge pain if you cooked fatty foods like steak. The fat splatter just gets everywhere, and unlike a pan, the surface of the air fryer’s inside is extremely hard to clean.

That said it’s convenient for other foods, popular, and it’s relatively fire & forget and might be a great candidate for food prep or just cooking up something while you’re busy elsewhere in your house.

Slow cooking/BBQ

These are sort of special cases in the rate of heat transfer department, similar to steak searing. Slow cooking is just cooking on low heat for a long time, and BBQ is typically made with a dry heat (smoking, which is flavored convection), but similarly slow & low.

The main difference is that you can cook things this way and make them edible/palatable that you largely wouldn’t if you just cooked them normally. Heating something for a very long time makes certain parts of the food softer, like the cartilage that makes tough cuts of meat tough, or certain vegetables.

If you just took a tough piece of meat and seared it like a steak, it would be, well, tough. You can grind it down into ground beef or you can slow cook it, which will yield a delicious piece of BBQ.

Besides that, you can slow cook pretty much anything you can regular-cook or pressure-cook; it’ll just take longer. Slow cookers, like instant pots, are convenient and largely fire & forget. Because the temperatures are so low, it usually doesn’t matter if you overcook your food by a couple hours, and many modern ones even have an electronic shutoff and switch to “keep warm” mode after a certain period.

I sort of wouldn’t use a slow cooker for anything besides BBQ-type meats that need the low & slow. I used to do that a lot when I still ate pork, and would make pork ribs every other weekend or so (cooked ENTIRELY IN TOMATO SAUCE).

But these days I don’t do that, because I don’t eat pork any more and I’m too lazy to slow-cook or smoke a brisket or a beef rib. I also just don’t eat enough meat any more, it’d take me a week or 2 to make my way through a beef rib. Ground beef is so much easier to portion up into any amount you want.

Implementing your plan: pick your cooking methods

Remember the plan you made, about which meals you’d eat throughout the week? It’s a good idea to pick methods that fit your plan, of course. If you chose 5 meals that each require a different cooking method, then you’ll have more work to do: you can’t just do one thing more or longer or with a bigger pot.

Boiling, slow-cooking, and pressure-cooking all lend themselves to bulk cooking, which means they’re great for prepping a week’s worth of food, but not so great for cooking just one small meal every day.

I tried prepping and I honestly missed the ritual of cooking.

Hence I’ve settled on searing/shallow frying; my 1 meal a day is cooked in a small saucepan in 1-2 tbsp of butter. Because I only eat 150g of ground beef and some vegetables, it takes no time at all to heat up the pan, sear the crap out of it, and be done. It takes me about 30 minutes to prep, cook, eat, and clean up each day, and about half of that time I don’t have to actively do anything, although it’s better to be close to a hot pan or your house might burn down.

If I were doing a rice/bean/potato HCLF diet, I’d probably set an instant cooker once a day, maybe even overnight. That way it’d be easy enough to always have warm food around.

If you wanted, you could make a giant portion and just bag most of it for the rest of the week. Easy to take to work and heat up, or even eat cold.

For our hypothetical food plan of sandwiches with roast beef for lunch, and stir fry for dinner, we would choose:

• Sandwich: Sear & then slow/pressure cook your roast once a week (then let it cool down and slice it)

• Stir fry: You can either just shallow fry some cubed chicken/beef and chopped vegetables every night, like I do. Or you can make bigger portions at a time and just store leftovers in the fridge. You can do a few days’ worth to easily a week of this at a time.

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Cleaning up

Sweet, we’ve cooked our food! I’ll skip the part where you eat the food, because you presumably know how to eat food or you’d be dead by now.

Cleaning up is an important part of cooking. Luckily, it’s just as easy as prepping & cooking itself. Maybe easier!

No matter what prepping or cooking methods you used, the solution is likely going to be hot water & dish soap. Even if you burned something pretty bad or it stuck to your pot, more hotter water for longer will likely get it off.

Once my meal is finished and I’ve transferred all the food to my plate, I put my saucepan into the sink, put a few drops of dish soap into it, and then fill it with hot water. Then I let it soak while I eat. When I come back, I do all of my dirty cookware & dishes together. By that time the saucepan has had 15 minutes to soak in hot dish soap water, which will significantly soften & loosen anything stuck to the bottom.

When you cook with lots of saturated fat like butter or beef tallow, you need pretty hot water. That stuff is solid at room temperature. If your water heater or kitchen faucet doesn’t produce reliably steaming hot water, one method you can use is to just heat the water on the stove - in the pan or pot itself.

This method is popular with camping, where you don’t usually have running hot water.

Just put some water into the pan/pot, put it back onto the stove, and turn the stove on. The water should cover any stuck/burned food still in there. Once the water is up to a boil, turn off the stove. You can just let it sit and cool down again, the heat will do its magic in the meantime and soften/loosen the stuck bits.

Besides heat and dish soap, friction is an effective cleaning method. I use a kitchen sponge, but those nylon brushes work as well. If the rough side doesn’t get everything off & our pot clean and shiny, you just need to add more hot water and let it sit for a bit longer. It should just immediately wipe clean off.

I like the yellow/green scotchbrite sponges as they last a long time, but the other ones are usually fine too.

Pro tip: after using your kitchen sponge, squeeze the water out of it and store it in a way that lets remaining water drain out, e.g. in one of those sponge holders. That way it won’t rot and will last much, much longer. If you leave your sponge in the water, or soaking wet on the bottom of the sink, it’ll rot in a matter of days or a week.

After getting your cookware nice & shiny, dry them off. I like to shake off any obvious collected water over the sink, then wipe everything dry with a kitchen towel, then set it down to air dry. Make sure the surface you set items on can take moisture, or it’ll rot or warp over time. Most kitchen counters are designed to be moisture resistant, or you could just place a kitchen or paper towel under the parts touching the surface. A dish drying mat is a good investment, as is a hook for your kitchen towel so it can have a chance to dry.

A few hours later, I’ll put everything back where it belongs. That way the kitchen looks nice & neat and is ready to cook the next meal.

Equipment

While the “foodie” crowd & Instagram posers would want you to believe that you need a crazy amount of pots, pans, knives, and what not, you can actually cook with only a handful of items.

Being sort of a minimalist, I cultivate a very small but nice amount of cooking equipment that is flexible enough not just for my daily ex150 meal, but also almost everything I do during my refeeds.

I own the following cooking equipment & use it daily:

• Saucepan (for cooking/frying)

• Silicone spatula

• Kitchen scale

• Santoku knife

• Cutting board

• Plate

• Spoon

• Cup

• Scissors (to cut open bags of frozen vegetables)

• Zip-loc bags (to store leftover portions of ground beef/frozen vegetables)

• Kettle (to heat water for coffee)

You can cook amazing meals in just 1 pot if you add thing 1 at a time. You don’t need more than 1 knife if it’s a versatile one. I used to have just a paring knife, but it’s a little small for cutting steak or other bigger food items during refeeds. Now I have a santoku knife, which is small enough for easy daily use, but big enough to cut anything short of a giant roast.

Even during my refeeds I only use the one saucepan. I can even make enough stew to last me several days. It also cooks rice just fine, I’ve never had the rice burn when making it just in a regular pot. It’s nearly impossible to do wrong.

The only thing is that I have to store either the stew or the rice in a separate bowl, because I obviously can’t make both in the same pot at the same time. Then I mix them on the plate when I’m ready to eat. Mixing liquid into rice tends to make it soggy, so I don’t store them mixed.

The following I do own, but rarely use:

• Cheese slicer (for refeeds)

• Stick blender (used to use this daily to whip cream, but I haven’t whipped any in months, I just drink it these days)

• Stainless steel milkshake cup (used to whip my cream in this, now it just holds the blender)

• Can opener (for cans of tomato sauce/beans during refeeds)

• Fork (only really use this when I make steak every 3rd refeed or so)

• Knife sharpener

Recently, I’ve started making my own bread during refeeds. For this I’ve used a friend’s bread machine that he let me borrow. If I were to do a month-long bread experiment, I’d buy my own bread machine.

If you’re interested in the specific things I have, I’ve written about many of them (pot, knife, spatula, and more) in the past: Gear post 2, gear post 1, gear post 3.

The kettle has changed; I just use a cheapo metal one from Walmart on the stove now. I still drink the G7 instant coffee. I think pretty much everything else is the same, too.

If you’re gonna cook most of your own meals, it’s a decent idea to invest in some solid cookware. If you keep it simple & don’t buy sets of 19 knives and 7 pots & pans, it won’t break the bank even if you get nice quality stuff.

My All-Clad saucepan was $130 if I remember it right, but it looks like new after over 3 years of literally daily use and performs amazingly. A pot/pan is really a good place to invest some money, you’ll notice the superior cooking performance and it’ll clean up nicer, too.

On knives, I’m almost the opposite: you can sharpen any knife to any desired sharpness, some just won’t keep the edge very long. As long as you don’t get the shittiest quality possible, I’ve never noticed any benefit of an expensive over a regular knife. Butchers use extremely cheap knives and just sharpen the heck out of them all the time.

Examples

Just to round it out, I thought I’d give two examples. The first is how I actually cook my food on ex150 every day, and have, mostly unchanged, for over 3 years now.

The second example is how I’d do a rice-based high-carb/low-fat diet. This is based on a few rice/bean stews I’ve done over the last few of my monthly refeeds, although I’d change how I do it slightly if I were to eat like this daily, and those changes are reflected here.

ex150

Upon waking I run to the kitchen and heat some water in the kettle on the stove. Hot water + instant coffee + cream in the cup = delicious creamy coffee. I stir it with one of those matcha blender things. Typically I drink 2 of these, but sometimes it’s 3 or even 4.

For lunch, these days, I just do the same thing again. Usually 2 more coffees. So far, no real “cooking” has taken place.

For dinner, I actually cook:

1. Put saucepan on stove, turn stove to medium heat (meal is so small high heat is not needed)

2. Put 1-2 tbsp of butter into the pan

3. Let butter melt, then swirl the pan around to cover the entire bottom in butter

4. Let all the water cook out (you can tell by the sound, the sizzling stops and the pan goes oddly quiet)

5. Take zip-loc bag with pre-portioned ground beef balls of 150g each out of fridge. I rip the beef off in tiny pieces and drop each into the pan evenly.

6. Wash beef-covered hands, seal zip-loc bag, put it back in the fridge.

7. Go do something else in hearing range, intermittently come back and stir ground beef until it’s evenly almost burned. Usually I read or reply to messages on my phone.

8. When meat has reached desired maillardness, take zip-loc bag of frozen vegetables out of freezer and pour very vaguely estimated amount into pan. Stir briefly, then put lid on top. The trapped steam will thaw the frozen vegetables very quickly.

9. Once steam is visibly escaping from under the lid, take off lid (careful hot!) and set it in sink to cool off (cold water helps.. remember thermal capacity!). Meanwhile, stir vegetables from time to time so they can almost burn evenly.

10. Once both meat & vegetables have reached even, almost burned status, turn off stove and let everything cool down. Because there’s a lot of butter & beef fat liquid in the pan now, letting it cool down will allow those to solidify and soak into the meat & vegetables a bit better. The meal will still me nice & warm, don’t worry.

11. Dump meal onto plate, put pan into sink w/ some dish soap and fill it with hot water. Let it soak while eating commences.

12. After finishing the meal, do dishes & dry them immediately.

13. A few hours later, when everything has air dried, put dishes.

My food prep is simple: I usually buy the 1lb packs of ground beef and random bags of frozen vegetables. The 1lb beef I just cut into rough thirds. Sometimes I see a great deal on a bigger (say 5lbs) package of beef. In that case, I’ll pre-portion the beef into ~150g balls and put 4 at a time into a zip-loc bag. At any given time, I have 1 bag of beef in the fridge ready to use, and all the other ones go in the freezer.

Vegetables I just keep in the freezer. When I open a new bag, I pour that day’s vegetables into the pan and the rest into a zip-loc bag that goes back in the freezer.

These days I don’t weigh the vegetables, it’s just a generous pour. The beef I still weigh pretty accurately (within ~5g of 150g), unless I cut a pound into thirds, which will average out anyway.

HCLF

This is hypothetical, but here’s what my rough plan is for when I’ll eventually do a longer-term (3-6 months) high-carb/low-fat diet. (By the way, if you’re an experienced HCLF person, feel free to leave feedback on this!)

First, the rough parameters of the diet:

1. White rice & legume (beans & lentils) based

2. Some beef (150g again? Or slightly less? Not sure how fatty it can be to count as “low fat”)

3. As with ex150, vegetables for flavor

4. No sauce

5. No cream or creamy coffee

I will likely buy an instant pot. I hated the last one I had, but maybe I’ll get lucky this time and I’ll get a decently put together one lol. Maybe I’ll try a different brand electronic pressure cooker.

For starches and especially legumes, fire & forget pressure cooking is just hard to beat. In addition, I’ll have to eat way more meals every day on this diet - no more cream, remember!

That means whatever effort cooking a meal will take, I now have to do it 3-5x per day instead of only 1x, or I’ll have to cook in big batches.

The instant pot makes things pretty easy with starches, and can probably cook up a day’s worth in a single cooking session. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to cook white rice & beans in the instant pot at the same time; their cooking times are just too different.

But rice only seems to take 15 minutes, so it won’t be too bad to run the instant pot twice in a row, once per day. Worst case I’ll buy a rice cooker, too, so I can run them at the same time. Vegetables can be cooked with either, you can even steam them in a rice cooker.

Because there will be more meals spread throughout the day, I’ll likely pre-sear at least a day’s worth of ground beef once a day. Maybe even for several days or a week.

While cooking ground beef + cleanup once a day is easy & quick on ex150, doing it 3x or more per day would likely get old quick.

This way, I’d still cook once per day: sear my ground beef, cook lentils or beans and vegetables, and cook rice. I’d just eat it spread out over the day instead of drinking cream.

Conclusion

To conclude, and definitely not just to get this post over the 11,000 word mark (!), I think everybody should not only know how to cook, everybody should cook.

If you’re not making your own food pretty much from scratch, you don’t know what’s in it. And in modern America, what’s in it is soybean oil.

If you’re not looking, they’re putting soybean oil in it. That’s the sad reality.

Learning to cook is easy, and once you have a routine, it’s trivial and quick. Certainly quicker than going out and eating at a restaurant, or getting takeout.

It’s much cheaper, too. And, usually, it tastes much better.

Not knowing how to cook your own meals is like not knowing how to drive. It’s an essential life skill, and lacking it makes you dependent on others, likely (in the modern food environment) to your detriment.

I hope I could convince you that it’s not that difficult, and not that much work, Mark. (That’s probably not your name, I know.)

Brief update: I’m almost 2 weeks into ex150nosauce+ACV-6, and just woke up to another all-time low of 207.15lbs this morning. We’ll see if it plateaus again or if it keeps going down.

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Previously

Last month I did this exact same experiment and lost 8lbs, reaching a new all-time low (ATL) of 208.7lbs.

What is the experiment, ex150nosauce+ACV?

• 150g of beef & 80g of vegetables cooked in butter for one meal of the day

• No sauce added to the meal (I used to use a lot of tomato and alfredo sauce)

• Entirety of remaining food intake is exclusively from heavy cream, often in coffee, ad-libitum

• Each morning, I supplement with 1 serving (3 capsules, 750mg acetic acid) of Bragg apple cider vinegar (ACV) capsules.

Hence: ex(periment) 150 (grams of beef) nosauce + ACV. And it’s the 5th iteration of this, hence the -5 at the end.

The Question, answered?

What I was wondering at the end of last month’s experiment: did the nosauce + ACV merely help me get back down rapidly to a certain “settling point” and would stop working there? Or would I smash through this new ATL (208.7lbs) and lose another 8lbs, which would’ve brought me close to the magic 200lbs mark?

The answer, if this month is any indication, is the former: it merely helped me rapidly get down to a new plateau.

Now the plateau is at a new all-time low, which is great, don’t get me wrong. But it seems that whatever is causing it (and I suspect it’s linoleic acid stored in my adipose tissue) is preventing me from going lower, even on a diet that had me lose 8lbs last month.

One note: I had originally set out to split this month into 2 stages of 14 days each, with a 1 day starchy refeed in the middle. I did not do this because it took me the full 14 days just to get to pre-refeed weight. Doing another refeed right then, I thought, would surely ruin the experiment: if I refed and then lost no new weight, it could’ve just been due to the refeed.

The experiment is just one go instead.

Tale of the Tape

Let’s look at what happened, then:

On the left you can see my previous ATL of 208.7lbs, 3 days before the end of ex150nosauce+ACV-4. My weight shot up 15lbs during the 2.5 day refeed, and slowly dropped for about 2 weeks.

This actually took longer than normal to lose the refeed weight, despite the refeed being only 2.5 days vs. last time, when I did one for 4.5 days. Maybe that was an early indicator?

I did very briefly hit another ATL of 207.8lbs. But the entire remaining 2 weeks of the experiment, I just bounced around in the 207-210 range.

Now I did cheat twice in those last 2 weeks, but I think that wouldn’t have been enough to mask or prevent 8lbs of fat loss from a previous low, as I had seen last month.

Neither cheat was very drastic: one was a ribeye steak (salted) instead of my regular dinner meal. The other was 2 slices of ham for Easter, when I was invited to somebody else’s house. Also salted.

I did also cheat last month, with a similar type of meal (brisket) and still lost 8lbs. Somehow I don’t think these 2 cheat meals were enough to deny 8lbs of weight loss for the entire month.

I suspect that this indicates that something else is preventing me from accessing & burning more of my body fat. My #1 suspect is, of course, linoleic acid stored in my body fat from decades of eating seed oils, commercial pork, chicken, nuts, and so on.

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Set points vs. Settling points

I believe this is a settling point issue. Many people like to throw around the term “set point.” I have yet to hear anyone even make an argument for set points. The people arguing for set points in obesity, no offense, don’t know what the word means.

When you question them why they think there’s a set point, they don’t even try to make arguments: they just assume they’re right.

“I tried to lose weight and I didn’t” is not proof of a set point, and that’s usually about what you get.

Take this from someone with a background in computer science and who has had to learn what a PID controller is and implement one: it’s probably not a set point.

Now we don’t currently know for sure what miraculous mechanism keeps obese people obese. And yes, it COULD be a set point. But I don’t see any indication that it is, and I see lots of evidence against it.

But first, we’ll have to discuss what a set point even is.

Set points

The classic example is a thermostat. You set the thermostat to 70°F, and then your AC or heater keeps the house roughly at that temperature.

There is a goal state (the “set point”) and when the current state deviates from it, a controller like the aforementioned PID controller takes action by either heating or cooling until the world is at the goal state once again. (The PID part of the controller just indicates what algorithm the controller uses to do this.)

Now, is there a set point for obesity in our bodies? Is it set wrong? By whom or what?

We do sort of know several mechanisms that clearly play into this. The problem is, we’ve researched them all extensively, and none seem to actually be the root cause.

There’s insulin, leptin, ghrelin, FGF-21, GLP-1, and there are others. But while each of these seemed promising and clearly do something in the causal metabolic feedback loop that keeps people obese, they don’t seem to be a clear set point that is set incorrectly and lets us merely correct the thermostat to become unobese.

Settling points

A settling point, on the other hand, is not a complicated regulatory system like a thermostat. It is, in essence, simply a (temporary) equilibrium between various factors.

Imagine a mountain lake. There’s certain runoff from rain and glaciers and rivers that flows into the lake. There’s probably some overflow that continues downhill, and also evaporation. But there’s some sort of natural dam, which is why there’s a lake.

If it rains or snow melts, the water level in the lake might rise. If it’s dry for a while, the water level might drop.

But no matter how much water you were to dump into the lake, it wouldn’t rise beyond a certain point: the rate of outflow would drastically increase as you went, for example, over the natural dam height.

Similarly, many lakes never quite empty even when there’s no rainfall or snowmelt for a while, because the rate of outflow decreases naturally as the level drops beyond a certain point.

This isn’t necessarily anyone’s complicated plan, it’s a coincidence of nature and the entire reason why there’s a lake to begin with.

Many lakes therefore stay in a certain band of water level almost all the time.

Is there a “water set point” in these lakes? No. It’s just a natural equilibrium between inflow and outflow.

A man-made dam like the Hoover Dam might be built & configured to a certain water level set point, and the engineers running it can lower the water level by opening certain runoff valves. They could raise the water level by closing more valves and runoffs.

But not a natural lake.

Why even care?

At this point in the discussion, the set point people usually try to shift the goalpost set point and argue that it’s a distinction without a difference.

But there’s a huge difference.

If you were to find a mountain lake and you went looking for an office with an engineer inside who controls the set point, you could look for the rest of your life and never find it.

I’d argue this is roughly what obesity science has been doing. The have been searching for something that doesn’t exist. And lo and behold, they haven’t found it.

If you’re trying to understand something, being wrong about the fundamental nature of the system matters. A lot.

Slow Drop

Most people who’ve lost a huge amount of weight have a similarly shaped weight graph:

Rapid initial drop. I was down from 292lbs to 240 in about 6 months, and under 220 by about a year and a half. That’s actually when I hit that previous low of 217lbs. But then, the diet that had been working so miraculously for me stopped working, and I was stuck in the 220lbs range for months despite doing the same stuff as before.

Immediately, people online told me “duh of course you’re stuck, your diet isn’t working!” But it had been working super well for the first 50lbs?! Why did it stop? “Diets sometimes work and sometimes don’t” is neither satisfying nor helpful.

Hitting that 217lbs plateau was almost exactly 2 years ago, in April of 2024. Avoiding seed oils strictly and experimenting with a bunch of stuff, I hit my new low of 207lbs in April 2026.

In other words, it took me 2 full years to lose another 10lbs. You could argue that losing 10lbs in 2 years is very slow weight loss, but that’s not the point.

The point is that my “set point” or “settling point” or whatever was previously stuck around 217lbs, and now, 2 years of avoiding seed oils later, it’s at 207lbs.

This lines up suspiciously well with the theory that miscalibrated ad-lib food intake, satiety & obesity are mostly a function of linoleic acid (depletion) in our adipose tissue.

It’s commonly assumed among adherents of Modern PUFA Theory (MPT) that it takes about 4-8 years to deplete the linoleic acid from a lifetime of eating the Standard American Diet back down to healthy, ancestral levels of about 2%. The half-life of linoleic acid in body fat seems to be about 2 years, meaning our levels would halve every 2 years.

I started aggressively avoiding linoleic acid a few months after I began losing weight on ex150, so I’m about 3 years in, maybe a bit more.

Having lost a lot of body fat, but not quite being at “normal” levels (I’m still at BMI 27-28) is pretty much what this theory would predict at 3 years. Here’s a made up example of what my linoleic acid % might have been over the years:

Jan 2023: 25% - super PUFA’d after years of Standard American Keto
Jan 2024: 18%
Jan 2025: 12.5% - first halving done
Jan 2026: 8.5%

Of course I have no actual data for my body fat LA% because I don’t have access to regular (or any, really) adipose biopsies. And we don’t have a chart telling you what LA% causes you to retain how much body fat either.

But the “end goal” is typically assumed to be around 2% LA in adipose, and you’d already see most of the effects at 3% or maybe 4%.

My conclusion, so far, is then that Modern PUFA Theory is correct, and I will carry excess body fat when eating ad libitum until my LA is sufficiently depleted. This would likely take another 1-5 years, depending on what level I started at and how low I can go. (Actually hitting 2% would be extremely difficult even on my diet.)

Messing around with other diets is merely entertainment and helps me pass the time, MPT would predict, but ultimately I just have to wait until the linoleic acid is out of my system.

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Notes

As usual I took notes. Honestly nothing super exciting this time. The diet is just so normal to me now that I don’t miss the sauce.

ex150nosauce+ACV-5

Only 14 days
Strike that, wasn’t down to previous low even on day 12.
Just doing regular 30 days.

Day 1

Lol such a return to normalcy I don’t even notice I’m doing it

Day 5

Drank quite a bit of extra cream

Day 6

Super hot out

Day 7

Super hot out
Ate 2 tallow fries
Switched to salted butter (note: didn’t like the salted butter and switched back to unsalted after 2 days)

Day 8

Hm water weight (?) still not quite off, taking a bit longer this time despite shorter refeed. Hm!
Dinner meal was super satiating today somehow

Day 15

New ATL - 208.5lbs. Was 208.8 last 2 days haha.
So now we’ll see if weight loss actually continues, or if I’ll just bounce off the bottom
Last few days kinda felt a tiny, vague extra hunger.. PLH sneaking up on me again? (note: I don’t think it was protein hunger, just that fat loss pretty much stopped from here on out and I had to compensate by eating more)

Day 18

Cheated w/ steak (very salty) & homemade bread

Day 21

Ran up about 1.5-2g of caffeine today, which made be dizzy: 5 celsius energy drinks & 5 coffees
Interestingly weighed in lower than my waking weight in the afternoon
Used very fatty beef patties (ripped up) for dinner that were incredibly satiating. Might be even fattier than 75/25, maybe 70/30 lol.

Day 22

Patties incredibly satiating again

Day 23

Cheated w/ some ham and vegetables at Easter Lunch (refused seed oil sauce obv)
Light headache all afternoon lol. That’s what I get for cheating with pork.

Day 25

Had a cup of cream cocoa directly after dinner, now wish I didn’t lol. Feeling slightly nauseated.
Small injury, swelling. Wonder if it’ll increase water retention.

Day 26

Decided to shorten experiment to 28 days to time it with a weekend. Cooking complicated things on work days sucks, I want to enjoy the refeed over the weekend and be back on ex150 by Monday.

Day 27

Only slept 4-5h tonight for some reason

Refeed

Ate a friend’s home made butter cookies (seed oil free).

Huh, was in the store and got.. vegetables, beans, tomato sauce, a twix and 2 hard boiled eggs. Both eggs & twix were exceedingly meh. Then ate some black beans w/ tomato sauce & ACV from the can lol. Delicious!

Weird feeling to not be interested in my usual refeed foods. I picked up some cheese, beef jerky.. and then just put it back down.

I ended up buying some more candy and some cheese the next day, but it once again feels like I am less and less interested in “cheat foods” with every refeed.

I still made myself sick by cramming too much food in on the second day. Should probably start trying to shift away from these refeeds somehow, so that I don’t become hyperphagic every time.

Rinse, Repeat

Does this month prove that “it’s just linoleic acid!” and nothing else matters? No.

That’s why I’ll obviously just run the same experiment for another month. ex150nosauce+ACV-6 here we come!

I predict that MPT is true and that I will just bounce around 207-210lbs the entire month after losing any refeed weight.

If that were true, the implications are interesting. It would mean that I could probably do just about any diet experiment for the next few years and expect to lose maybe 5lbs a year in “settling point” weight aka weight I can “effortlessly” fall back down to eating ad-lib ex150.

I’ve long been interested in doing a longer term experiment of a low-fat, starch-based diet, mostly based on white rice. Something similar to whole-food, plant-based with some beef added. If all I’m doing is waiting around for LA anyway, I might as well “take 6 months off” from ex150 and do that instead? Or I could do some fun, stupid experiments, as I’ve done a few times in the past.

But first, another science real quick for a month.

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A friend asked me to expand on my “algorithm” to find your personal, optimal diet that I briefly touched on in my recent post about my decade of keto.

I did a similar post a little over a year ago, summarizing my thoughts about obesity & fat loss as of early 2025.

What is ExFatloss about?

I have 2 goals with this project. The first was to reverse my own (morbid) obesity. I did that about a year into my ex150 heavy cream diet.

In this graph, the red “Obese I” line represents the border between “overweight” and “obesity” as measured by BMI. It’s at about 227lbs for me. You can see that I broke through it in January of 2024, about a year and 2 months after I started ex150. And I tend to stay below that line unless I experiment with other diets.

The second goal is to find out what caused the obesity epidemic to begin with, and, hopefully, solve it.

I am fully aware that not everyone wants to spend the rest of their lives living off of heavy cream. Heck, if I find a way to pull it off, I’d probably eat a more varied diet as well.

My current hypothesis is that I’ll be able to eat a more “normal” and varied diet once I deplete enough omega-6 polyunsaturated fat (linoleic acid) from my adipose tissue, which I had stored over a lifetime of excess linoleic acid consumption.

Of course for some people, my diet might not even work if they tried it. Human dietary genetics have evolved significantly in the last 5,000 years alone, and we have vastly different abilities to live/thrive on certain foods. Our ability to deal with lactose, casein, starches, and fats has a huge genetic component. Maybe other things, too.

So even if I got to shredded six-pack abs drinking a quart of heavy cream a day, how does that help you? You probably don’t have my extreme pastoralist dairy genetics.

Create your personal Map to the Diet Landscape

Well, it’s more of an algorithm than a map. We’re all trying to figure out the map together, each of us experimenting and trying out different areas.

I can tell you what works for me. I can tell you what has worked for quite a few people, and what works for almost nobody. You could say we’ve colored in parts of the map.

But maybe the most important thing I can give you is an algorithm or heuristic to create your own map as you go.

The Algorithm

First, a little disclaimer:

1. I don’t think this is complete (yet). There are many factors that influence metabolism. I do think this covers a lot of them, including the biggest ones, but certainly not all.

2. People are on a scale when it comes to how affected they are by various factors. Some lucky people are barely affected by whatever is messing up our modern food environment. Some people are extremely affected.

3. While I do think that this covers the major factors affecting many overweight/obese people, there is a long tail of people with outlier conditions that aren’t covered. This might be genetic, acquired, or just (bad) luck.

That is all to say: I don’t think this will work perfectly for everyone, and I don’t think it’s set in stone. But I think it will work for 85% of obese people, meaning it will reverse their obesity despite eating ad-lib carolies.

If your argument is “Ok buddy, but you’re still in the overweight range and don’t have shredded abs!” Yea, cool. But that’s not my goal, and I don’t think most people need shredded abs.

I intend to reverse the obesity epidemic. If your goal is to get people shredded six-pack abs, godspeed, but I don’t care.

My definition of “diet success” is not just losing weigh. It’s fixing your metabolism in a way that allows you to eat ad-lib, without restricting carolies, and with as little negative impact on your metabolism as possible - hopefully zero.

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Seriously now, The Algorithm

These steps go in descending order: the first step applies to everyone, all the time, forever. The last step applies only to certain people, and possibly only for a short time frame.

That means you can progress along these steps slowly, and see how they work. Some people only need to do step 1, especially if they’re only 10-20lbs overweight to begin with. Others might go all the way and play around in the “random hacks” drawer, maybe even having to come up with a few tricks I don’t know about.

The good news is, many people won’t need to. I estimate that 15% of people only need to do step 1 & 2, maybe 40-60% need to go to step 3, and step 4 should help about 80% of people to reverse their obesity. After that, it tends to get specific & individual, which is what step 5 is for.

Here we go:

1. Strictly limit linoleic acid for the rest of your life (<= 2% of total kcal). No seed oils, no commercial salad dressings/sauces containing seed oils, no nuts, no seeds, no bacon, no fatty pork, no fatty chicken, almost no restaurant food, almost no store-bought/prepared food, including most breads.

2. Deplete the linoleic acid from your body fat over time to <=2%, which takes 4-8 years of eating like step 1. If you’ve eaten 10% of your dietary fat as linoleic acid for the last 10 years, your body fat is 10% linoleic acid. To get to <=2% “consumption” you will also have to lower its level in your body fat, since your body burns body fat.

3. Find the best “energy staple” food for you: fat, starch, or sugar, or some combination. This will end up putting you on a ketogenic diet, a “whole foods, plant based”-adjacent starch diet, or a fruit/sugar based “honey diet.”

4. Determine your optimal protein intake. Despite popular belief, moar brotein is not always better. Almost everyone these days eats more than enough protein, and for about 30-50% of the population, excess protein has negative consequences. This will depend on you individually (likely genetics) and your activity levels, which influence your body’s demand for “building material” (=amino acids).

5. If that’s not enough yet, play around with various little hacks that affect some people’s metabolism, but aren’t necessary for everyone: salt, glutamate, fructose, MCT fats, vinegar, and more.

In addition to THE ALGORITHM, here are some general notes & tips:

• Steps 3-5 might only be conditionally required based on the state of your metabolism. If you fix your metabolism enough, e.g. by depleting your stored body fat linoleic acid sufficiently, you might no longer need to use as many “hacks” or limit your food intake as much. We have decent anecdotal evidence of people fixing their metabolism this way and regaining the ability to swamp macros.

• To find out what works or doesn’t work for you, run a series of 30-day experiments. 30 days is long enough to determine if a diet is sustainable, enjoyable, and if it leads to fat loss. There are some exceptions, but defaulting to 30 days is a great idea, especially when you start out. Eventually, you’ll find things that you can’t even do for 30 days, or things that you want to try for longer periods of time. But start with 30 days.

• Weigh yourself every morning. Write it down in a spreadsheet or similar. Take the running average of the last 7 days as “your weight” to smooth out daily fluctuations. Don’t worry, you’ll learn not to panic over sudden weight swings.

• Once you hit the “jackpot” (= a diet that lets you rapidly melt off body fat while being enjoyable, sustainable, and subjectively pretty effortless) you should see a rapid drop in weight the first few weeks to months. Your fat loss will probably slow down and somewhat peter out later, at which point more losses will take a much longer time.

Now that we’ve covered the whole heuristic in short form, let’s look at each step in more detail. Let’s dig in (🤖).

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1. Limit Linoleic Acid intake

I believe that excess intake of the omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) linoleic acid (LA) is the root cause of most modern “diseases of civilization.” I’m not 100% sure, but it appears to be by far the best hypothesis. It best matches most types of evidence we have:

• We understand the biochemical mechanisms and the impact of excess LA on various functions of metabolism and the body

• Matches the timeline of the obesity, diabetes, and heart disease epidemics

• Is clearly not something any of us evolved to eat in high doses, as it requires industrial machinery to be produced in current quantities

• Cutting out LA leads to drastic improvements in many people who try it, including broad-spectrum disappearance of “weird conditions,” inflammation and, typically, improvements in satiety & body fat levels.

• In appropriately designed studies, high LA intake has been shown to cause various problems like increased all-cause mortality, increased incidence of heart disease, and more

• In rodent studies, varying LA levels can leave the animals healthy & lean vs. diabetic & obese

The one “weakness,” if you want to call it that, of Modern PUFA Theory (MPT) is that it’s a bit complex, and not trivial to prove/disprove. Of course, we know that the correct hypothesis for the obesity epidemic is somewhat complex, or we would’ve found it by now. But it requires a bit of an introduction to explain it appropriately, you can’t just give people an elevator pitch. Or, you can, but it’ll almost certainly be oversimplified and not be convincing/sufficient to make good decisions.

I’m convinced almost everybody would benefit from eating less linoleic acid. Even the mainstream, official numbers of how much is “required” are extremely low, amounting to just a few grams a day depending on whom you believe. Some people can deal with the excess linoleic acid better than others, but almost certainly nobody benefits from eating more.

Practical advice

So what do? In short, you have to cut out a lot of foods - forever. Luckily, a lot of them are mostly processed junk anyway, and the rest often have better, healthier, tastier alternatives. For some, you’re just going to have to limit them to very rare occasions.

• No seed oils: soybean, canola, corn, safflower, sunflower, rapeseed, peanut, sesame, cottonseed, grape seed, rice bran. All of them are very to extremely high in linoleic acid.

• No commercial salad dressings/sauces containing seed oils, which is most of them. Almost all commercial dressings like ranch, or mayo, are almost entirely made of soybean oil. Even a single tablespoon is going to put you over your daily safe limit of linoleic acid.

• No bacon, fatty pork, or fatty chicken. These unfortunate animals are monogastric, unlike cows, sheep, or goats. That means the fat we feed them is the fat they will put on their bodies. And what we feed them, at least in America, is soy & corn. Therefore they are walking stores of seed oils. Bacon is just chunky canola oil. “Seed oils mediated by pork/chicken” is one of the highest sources of linoleic acid in the Western diet. Eggs are ok if you don’t eat too many. 1-2/day are fine if your diet is low in LA overall, but don’t eat 12 for every meal.

• No nuts & seeds, except macadamia. Most nuts are very high in linoleic acid, reaching from 20-60% (!). Seeds.. well, they’re what seed oils are made from. Easy enough to just remove them completely. People often say “But nuts are natural!” But in nature, nuts are rare, seasonal, and a lot of work to pick and shell. You surely wouldn’t have found jars of peanut butter lying around in the stone age.

• It’s best to avoid olive & avocado oil too. Besides the risk of them being adulterated, even real olive/avocado oil have up to 20% linoleic acid. That might be fine if you’re consuming them rarely and are otherwise metabolically healthy. But if you’re all PUFA’d up like most modern people, the more you cut out the faster you’ll recover.

• Almost no restaurant food. Pretty much everything will be cooked in seed oils. They cook your steak in seed oils, and they drizzle it onto the vegetables. Some foods are more prone to soaking up these oils, or are easier to hide seed oils in. For example, anything with creamy sauce, “butter” or “olive oil blend,” mashed potatoes, curries, is going to be heavily loaded with seed oils. How much seed oils will a steak absorb while being seared? Not that much.
  
  There are of course exceptions: McDonald’s burger patties are cooked only in their own juices, and are therefore pure beef (or sometimes with salt/pepper). Maybe other fast food places are similar. Starbucks and other cafes typically have espresso based drinks with only pure dairy added, be it milk, half & half (ask for a “latte breve”) or even heavy cream. Yes, almost any Starbucks in the world will make your latte with heavy cream, I’ve tried it on 3 continents.
  
  Apart from these few, rare 100% safe options, it’s best to limit eating at restaurants as much as possible.

• Almost no store-bought/prepared food. Just spend a few weeks checking every ingredient label when you get groceries. You’ll be shocked to find out what is loaded with seed oils, typically soybean oil, canola oil, or sunflower oil.
  
  Anything that’s creamy yet not refrigerated will be a seed oil emulsion. Most cookies contain seed oils. Sometimes, even gummy bears! Apparently they coat them in seed oils so they won’t stick together. Chips are obviously deep fried in seed oils, as are chicken nuggets, french fries, fish sticks, or anything else breaded or fried.
  
  If it has ingredients, read them. You’ll learn quickly what few things you can buy.

• Most commercial bread. Yes, this is typically store-bought, but it bears mentioning because people often don’t think of bread as oily. But if you check the ingredients on most loaves in the store, almost all of them will contain seed oils. In short, modern bread is a processed faux-food. If you make your own bread from organic flour without adding seed oils, it’s fine.
  
  The same is true for nearly all pastries and baked goods in general. If in doubt, it’s likely full of seed oils.

One common way is to just eat a generally low-fat diet. Starch based with some meat works well for many people. If it’s super lean you can eat pork or chicken, but personally, I prefer the taste of beef anyway. And if you’re not eating very much of it, it’s not that expensive. I spread a pound of beef over 3 days, so it’s only ~$2/day.

Should you prefer doing low-carb or keto, dairy is very helpful if you tolerate it well. Dairy fat is extremely low in linoleic acid, as is beef fat. For some people, beef-based carnivore works well. Just stay away from the fatty chicken and bacon.

If you want a target number, try to stay below 6g of linoleic acid per day or 2% of your daily caloric intake. That’s generally considered the “ancestrally safe” number.

It’s not entirely clear how much over you can go and get which effects, but in rodent studies, 2% is safe and 8% is “definitely too much.” So you don’t have very much room.

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2. Deplete linoleic acid in your adipose tissue

One of the pernicious aspects of linoleic acid is that, like all fats you eat, it gets stored in your body fat over time. In the L.A. veteran’s study, they fed one group a diet high in linoleic acid for a few years. Over the course of 4-5 years, their body fat composition slowly but surely approached that of their average dietary intake, rising from 12% at the beginning to about 32%.

Your body constantly releases some of your body fat via lipolysis and it enters circulation, same as if you’d eaten fat that day. What that means is that even if you stop eating any seed oils or other foods with linoleic acid, you’re still getting a constant drip of it - from your own body fat!

There don’t seem to be any good studies of the time it takes to deplete linoleic acid from your body fat again, but if we just reverse the above, it sounds like 4-5 years is just about the minimum.

And yes, our modern starting point is likely as high as the seed oil-group was in the L.A. veterans study: one analysis from 2015 indicates that people’s average linoleic acid as percentage of body fat rose steadily:

The graph ends in 2005, and people already had 17-25% linoleic acid stored. That was 20 years ago!

The slow depletion and “constant drip” of linoleic acid makes the hypothesis so tricky. It’s difficult to run studies on this, because they would have to last years. A handful, like L.A. veterans, Sydney Heart study, or Minnesota Coronary trial lasted that long, but not many. It’s just too expensive and difficult to do.

You also can’t run good randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on it, because there is no control group: anyone in the general population will, on average, be an order of magnitude too high in linoleic acid to begin with.

One analogy Tucker Goodrich likes to use: imagine an RCT about smoking and lung cancer between 2 populations, but both groups start off smoking 2 packs a day. Now you add a 3rd pack for one of the populations.

Will you see a strong correlation between smoking that 3rd pack and increased risk of lung cancer? Maybe a little, but it won’t be nearly as strong as if you found a control group without any smokers.

Today, we’re all smoking 2 packs a day when it comes to seed oils. There is no control group.

Practical advice

While you’ll likely see some improvements, even big ones, right away, just be aware that it might take years to fully deplete yourself of the excess linoleic acid your body has stored.

I lost 20lbs the first month of cutting out seed oils. But after the first 40-60lbs came off rapidly, weight loss became more of a trickle. Even 3 years in, I’m still getting small benefits all the time. Reduced overall inflammation, reduced gum bleeding. Reduced or almost vanished joint pain. Improved pain tolerance. Hugely reduced sunburns. Oh, I fixed an incurable circadian rhythm condition, one that’s legally considered an actual disability. My eyesight improved, in my late 30s. Amazing digestion, no more acid reflux or headaches.

You’ll get used to cooking most of your own food and saying no to a lot of restaurant, store-bought, or offered food. Lots of people will be confused why you would reject their food or their gifts, and you’ll learn to respectfully decline. Eventually, they’ll accept your dietary choices, especially if you’re not preachy or annoying about it. Just bring your own food and don’t make a big deal out of it. The fun is in hanging out together, the food is just an excuse to meet up.

Because the big benefits are often front-loaded and you keep experiencing a small trickle of unexpected improvements, it’s actually sort of fun to keep doing it. The variety of foods you can eat is big enough that you can play around and make it work for most any dietary preference, culture, or season.

Heck, almost all humans up until about 50-150 years ago ate a low-linoleic acid diet, and their diets were varied, delicious, and nutritious.

Checking your progress

Unfortunately it’s quite difficult to test the percentage of linoleic acid in your body fat. You’d have to get an adipose tissue biopsy, which is not easy. I haven’t been able to do so.

What you can get is an OmegaQuant Complete test, and do it fasted in the morning. It tests the fats in your blood, which consists of red blood cells (or their phospholipids, specifically), the fats you’ve eaten recently (hence doing it fasted, as not to mess with the results), and the fat coming from your own body via lipolysis.

The LA% number won’t correspond 1:1 to your adipose tissue number, because the red blood cells interfere with it. But it is a rough proxy that’ll tell you if your LA% is super high, pretty high, moderate, decent, or very low.

I’ll warn you that it’s a pretty coarse proxy. You can go a year without seeing much change.

Still, if you’re deciding to do this, it’s useful to get a baseline test very early on, and then maybe test again years later. You don’t need to test very often, and the test is $110 on Amazon without a prescription - you just poke your finger, drip blood onto a folded piece of paper, and mail it in.

Besides that, many people just go by the symptoms and the weight loss.

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3. Find your optimal energy mix

A short recap. There are 3 macronutrients: fat, carbohydrates, and protein.

Fat and carbs are very good energy sources. Protein is not. Your body can convert protein into other substrates and generate energy in a pinch, but it’s neither efficient nor healthy, as there are byproducts.

So what else do you eat besides a modest amount of protein from e.g. beef or beans?

You either eat mostly carbs (e.g. starch based or fruit based), mostly fat (keto), or you mix the two (“swamping”).

It seems that many modern people have an easier time losing weight and keeping their hunger under control if they either stick to carbs or to fat, but don’t mix them much. This was discussed by Denise Minger in her post In Defense of Low-Fat, where she coined the term “Metabolic Swamp.”

If you’re overweight, or even obese, or pre/diabetic, you’re likely going to benefit from picking either the keto or carbo side of the swamp. There are a handful of people who lose weight while “swamping” carbs and fat, but most people don’t seem to.

There are anecdotes of people cutting out linoleic acid for long enough that they were eventually able to swamp without gaining fat. Sorry to tell you this, but you’re unlikely to be the lucky one initially losing fat on an ad-lib butter croissant & ice cream diet. Many have tried.

Deplete your linoleic acid for a few years, and you might just be able to.

Practical advice - keto/HFLC

If you pick fat as your main fuel, as I did, for God’s sake be careful about your linoleic acid intake. Due to the high-fat nature of.. well, high-fat diets.. it’s VERY easy to accidentally eat huge amounts of linoleic acid. I used to pound a pound of bacon every weekend, with lots of eggs fried in the bacon grease. Whole roast chickens. A bag of nuts as a snack.

Should you pick keto, stick to dairy and ruminant fat like beef, sheep, or goat. Cook food in butter or beef tallow, which you can buy or render yourself. Avoid lard.

Stay away from dressings and sauces. I ate In-n-out “protein style” (=low-carb) burgers for years, until I realized their burger sauce is pure soybean oil.

Stay way from nuts, except macadamias.

My personal diet consist mainly of heavy cream. It’s pretty tasty, I can pour lots of it in my coffee, and I can whip it for a sort of dessert meal. Besides that, I eat a moderate amount of ground beef and green vegetables cooked in butter daily. But my main energy source is heavy cream.

Practical advice - carbo/HCLF

There are 2 main paths here, starches or fruits. Most people seem to do better on starch-based diets, but some do well on fruits or even refined sugars. This is a bit similar to the “swamping” mentioned before: if you’re metabolically unwell, your chances of refined sugar working out for you are somewhat small.

Personally I love white rice. It’s cheap, easy to prepare, delicious and easily tolerated by most people. Other people do well on potatoes. If you bake your own bread, that’s an option - just don’t buy any commercial bread in the store.

Beans go well with rice, and there are many starchy vegetables.

I don’t have as much practical advice on HCLF, but I’ve done a few months of it that I tolerated surprisingly well.

In general you can follow the advice of many vegan/whole foods plant based diets. Just ignore the negative talk about animal products in general and the purity spiral aspect of it, and add a moderate amount of beef and dairy every day. That should easily cover your bases, and vastly improve any purely vegan diet.

If you add a few pieces of fruit per day to the starch diet, that’s totally fine. Just be careful chugging gallons of OJ and eating jars of honey per day, that only works for a very small number of people.

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4. Determine optimal protein intake

I list this after the energy mix, because it’s not as big an issue for as many people. Many people can just eat protein to appetite and do fine if they cut out linoleic acid alone, or also restrict themselves to one side of the swamp.

But some lucky people, like me, need to be careful about protein intake.

Think of protein as a building block for your body, whereas fat and carbs can fulfill your body’s energy demands. Yes, fats are also building blocks, but that’s not relevant for this part.

Your body’s requirements for building blocks (protein) is probably modest, unless you’re an athlete, bodybuilder, or you’re sick or injured. Daily maintenance for regular, even active, people is only about 40-50g of protein per day. This was tested in active, adult men.

The RDA is 0.8g of protein per kilogram (2.2lbs) of body weight, and technically that’s probably “optimal weight” and assuming you’re not obese. For me at 210lbs, even though I’m still overweight, that’s only about 76g of protein per day. At my ideal weight of 188lbs (85kg) it would be 68g of protein per day. That’s less than a pound of beef per day if you get zero protein from other sources.

In short, don’t believe the bodybuilder gurus: almost nobody in the West is undereating protein. If you like it and do well on it, sure. But if you don’t, be aware that it is a lever you can pull, and some of us have to.

Practical advice

First, this is where things get a bit individual. I estimate that only about 30% of obese people have severe issues with protein intake, like me. Another 20% or so probably benefit to a degree, but it’s not nearly as important for them.

The rest probably does fine even on high amounts of protein. These are just personal observations in the fat loss space over 20 years.

I therefore advise you to do step 1 (reduce linoleic acid) and 2 (pick an energy mix, preferably either carb or fat side of the swamp) first and try that for several months. It might be all that’s required for you to feel great, experience strong satiety, and lose weight.

But if you’ve been doing keto or carnivore for a year and aren’t losing any weight, which seems to happen in about 30% of people who try it, then try lowering your protein to a more modest amount. You’ll have to make up for it with your preferred fuel source, be that fat or carbs.

I would just slowly titrate my protein/meat intake down from where you start, toward the RDA. Once you go below the RDA you get into a bit more tricky territory and you have to be careful, because there definitely is such a thing as too little protein.

In my own case, I can do 40-45g of protein at a height of 6’1 being only moderately active. I’ve done that for 3 years now and it’s very sustainable. But if I go below that, I “bonk,” often within 4-5 days.

Your own limit may be slightly different, but the RDA should be enough for almost everyone. And going down from high protein to RDA levels should also unlock fat loss & metabolic benefits for many people.

Down with the Sickness

If you’re doing low-protein and you get sick or injured, I’d give the protein restriction up for a while. Just go up to your normal/higher protein levels until you’re fully restored to health, and add a week to be safe.

I notice that I crave way more protein when I’m sick or injured.

Also, make sure to eat extra carolies while you’re sick & injured so your body can heal. If you reach your goal weight 2 weeks later, that’s fine.

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5. Various hacks

Now we’re getting into pretty individually specific ideas, which is why this is more of a grab bag of hacks. I’m only listing the ones I personally have experience with, but there are, of course, more.

Unfortunately I can’t tell you why some of these work so well for some people, and not at all for others. I also can’t tell you how to tell what will work for you - you’ll just have to try it.

This is similar to the protein thing, except each one is probably an even lower percentage than 30%. Similarly, therefore, I recommend that you only try these if the above steps aren’t enough to get you to lose fat consistently, or if you plateau for a long time way above your optimal weight.

It’s probably best to add these 1 at a time, just so you know which ones actually have an effect on you. Or, the aggressive strategy: add all of them at the same time and if it works, remove 1 at a time until it stops working.

Vinegar

There’s a surprising literature on weight loss after nothing but supplementing vinegar to people’s diets. Personally I’ve used apple cider vinegar, white wine vinegar, and a few others. While I like the taste of vinegar, I didn’t like that it’s acidic and attacks your teeth, so I elect to just take 1 serving per day of Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar capsules in the morning.

The idea I’ve read is that acetic acid, the acidic part of vinegar, helps rejuvenate so-called “senescent” fat cells.

The first time I added a lot of vinegar to my meal, I experienced a very dramatic decrease in appetite and fat loss. It was quite shocking, really.

Not everybody gets this, but it’s simple enough to try.

One note: on the 1 serving per day dose, it takes me about 1-2 weeks for the effect to set in, so plan accordingly. I recommend doing a full 30 day course to give the ACV a chance to work.

ex150vinegar review: lost 4-6lbs, but nothing crazy

ex150nosauce+ACV-1 review: Down 10lbs

ex150nosauce+ACV-2 review: Blasted through plateau, new record low weight

Reduce salt & glutamate

This one was surprising to me, but cutting out (seed oil-free) sauces high in salt and tomato (glutamate) led me to some pretty dramatic weight loss. It was about the same effect as supplementing ACV, and the 2 seemed to stack when I did both, leading me to a new all-time-low weight after having plateaued for most of a year.

There’s some evidence that the polyol pathway in our body can endogenously convert glucose to fructose if excess salt or glutamate are present, and many metabolically messed up people can’t deal with fructose.

A Metabolically Shaped Hole

Quick review: Nature Wants Us to be Fat

Remove fructose

Speaking of fructose..

Even in a non-swampy high-carb/low-fat context, fructose can cause issues for many people. I personally get as bad hyperphagia, overeating, & fat gain on a near-zero fat, moderate-protein starch + fructose diet as I do when swamping. In practice, I was drinking OJ, eating fruit drizzled with sugar and honey, and eating dried fruit.

Some people report success on anabology’s honey diet or the more recent sugar diet, but neither have worked well for me.

If you’re eating quite a bit of sugar beyond a handful of pieces of fruit a day on a HCLF diet, and not feeling satiated or losing fat, I’d try to cut out that fructose.

ex150honey review: gained 5.4lbs lean mass, no fat loss

ex_sugar review: Spectacular failure in 9 days

Other ideas

There are more such little “hacks” including MCT oils, the amino acid glycine, and some people report improvements by supplementing vitamin B1. I’m only listing those that I’ve personally seen benefits from here. These are pretty specific to the individual anyway, and it’s more of a grab bag. If you’re not yet completely happy with how things are going, try some of these and do some research on what has worked for others.

Now that we’ve covered THE ALGORITHM in detail, let’s elaborate on the general advice that goes along with it.

Conditional on Excess Linoleic Acid

There is some anecdotal and historical evidence that humans can, in principle, eat a swampy diet with mixed crabohydrates and fat, yet remain healthy & lean.

The “French Paradox” is one such example: the French ate refined white flour with butter and cheese, and they also ate quite a bit of sugar, and were healthy. Your grandparents probably did; mine did for sure. Bread & butter, meat & potatoes, butter cookies for dessert.

Just like people didn’t have to count calories or exercise them off in the past, and everyone’s appetite just mostly worked, most people could eat from either energy macro or mix them without much of an issue.

Similarly, the protein issue and the various little hacks might not be necessary if you’re not pathologically loaded up with linoleic acid.

Besides historical examples, we do actually have some people who’ve restricted linoleic acid for a few years now, and have made big improvements in their ability to handle these food combinations.

This includes formerly obese and even diabetic people who can now eat pretty much whatever they want, not gain weight, and maintain stable blood sugar - while restricting linoleic acid, of course.

Personally I am clearly not quite there (yet). While I would say my satiety has improved when doing high-protein or mixed macro refeeds, I still get pretty hyperphagic and gain fat rapidly.

There’s no guarantee that any of us will ever be “fixed” by cutting out & depleting linoleic acid, but enough people are doing it now that I think we should see some interesting results in a handful of years.

Practical advice

I’d recommend that even if you dial in a certain diet, say low-PUFA, low-protein keto in my case, you still try other things once in a while. For me that usually takes the form of a monthly refeed for 2-4 days.

But maybe run a month-long diet experiment that isn’t just more of the same - that’s how I found out that cutting out linoleic acid seems to have fixed my life-long circadian rhythm disorder. Had I not tried eating carbs for a month, I might’ve never found out.

In case that needs to be said: I don’t recommend you ever “try” eating a high-linoleic acid diet again, be it for a few days or for months. You might eventually get to a point where you can eat a modest amount, or eat seasonal foods that contain a lot of linoleic acid (e.g. nuts), but it might just be better to strictly limit LA forever. There is some pretty convincing evidence that lipid peroxidation is one of the culprits in aging and all its negative side effects.

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Run 30 day experiments

I think 30 days is pretty much the optimal default time frame for diet experiments. It’s the goldilocks zone: too long for most people to just “power through” an otherwise unsustainable diet, but short enough that you can pull off a diet that is maybe not your favorite (plain white rice diet, anyone?)

30 days should show you a weight loss trend and cut through the daily noise of weight fluctuations most people experience. Nothing is more frustrating than running an experiment and then concluding “who knows, it just went up and down.”

If you’re not seeing a significant trend over 30 days, assuming you start out with significant fat to lose, the diet is not doing anything.

At the same time, if you do lose significant weight but you hate every second of it and had to force yourself to finish, that’s probably not a great long-term diet for you either.

Short experiments

Sometimes, shorter experiments make sense. I’ve done several experiments that I never planned on doing for longer than 7 or 14 days. Other I planned on doing for 30, but had to quit because they turned out to be unsustainable.

Here are some reasons to plan shorter experiments:

• You’re pretty sure it’s not going to be sustainable for 30 days, and the downsides could be significant (in terms of general health, or fat gain). For example fasting, which most people can’t do even for a week. Anything that has made you hyperphagic or gain fat in the past, e.g. prolonged high protein or fructose intake for me. Anything involving explicit force-feeding or overeating - I once added 1,000kcal of coconut oil to my diet every day on purpose. I did not plan on doing this for 30 days.

• You suspect that the dynamic between refeeds and the actual diet is significant. E.g. maybe it’s not the “low protein diet” that helps you lose fat, but the act of switching between high and low protein. Some people speculate that switching between keto and carbo could help deplete linoleic acid faster. In this case, a 30 day cycle might be suboptimal. On the other hand, switching daily might also not work well. It’ll depend on the individual hypothesis you’re testing, case by case.

• Whatever hypothesis you’re testing should be answered by day 7 or day 14. For example, I’m currently testing the hypothesis that supplementing ACV and reducing sodium & glutamate sauce intake will help me linearly lose weight below my previous all-time-low (ATL), or if it just helped me get back down to the ATL more quickly. If you are currently at your ATL, you might not have to do a 30 day experiment to answer that question. If you do it for 14 days and lose 3lbs, there is your answer. On the other hand, only losing 1lbs over 7 days might not be a clear enough trend to be distinguishable from noise. In that case, you might want to extend the experiment until a clear trend emerges, or enough time has passed (say 30 days) to confirm there is no trend.

• For logistical reasons. Say it’s 2 weeks from Christmas and you know you’ll be cheating during family meals over the holidays. One option is to just give up now and eat whatever for the next 2 weeks, because a 30 day experiment won’t fit. Another option is to just run a shorter, 2-week experiment of something you think has a reasonable chance of working. If you don’t have a hypothesis you think can be answered in 2 weeks, you could just run another iteration of something that tends to work well for you - I’ve run ex150 style experiments for dozens of times now, nearly unchanged. “Does it still work?” is a reasonable experiment.

Longer experiments

There are diet ideas out there, and strategies, that won’t work over just 30 days. For example, many “depletion” strategies, including depleting linoleic acid from your adipose tissue, will likely take years. Another popular such strategy is depleting stored vitamin A from your liver, a strategy promoted by Grant Genereux. Similar to LA, this will take years of a consistent low-vA diet.

Another thing that won’t fully work in a month is, for example, getting started with a ketogenic diet. Sure, you might see some benefits during the first month. But it typically takes quite a bit longer than that to fully adapt to it. Some studies say at least 6 weeks, others say way longer. I believe I’ve seen up to 18 months to fully adapt!

I honestly couldn’t tell you how long it took me 10 years ago, but for example my carb cravings went away around 12 months in - quite a wait.

One longer term experiment I am interested in doing one of these days: 6 months of continuous low-fat, rice based HCLF with moderate beef. Basically replacing the cream on ex150 with rice & beans. This would actually be pretty close to Grant’s original low-vitamin A diet.

Why do this? The idea is that eating super low-fat might deplete linoleic acid from adipose faster, even compared to a low-linoleic, high-fat diet like my ex150 heavy cream diet. If that is really the case is speculation at this point.. but hey, I like trying things. Since even an accelerated depletion effect would still take a very long time, 6 months is just about the shortest time span that I’d expect to produce a visible effect.

Related posts

Fail Fast: I quit a glass noodle experiment after only 1 day

Low-fat diets better at depleting Linoleic Acid?

Weigh yourself every day

This one’s pretty self explanatory, but some people have an aversion to it. I recommend you overcome that aversion.

If you’re worried about being scared by big jumps in weight from day to day, don’t: for one, eating a very consistent & repetitive diet tends to eliminate most of these jumps. Second, you can just use a rolling average to “judge” yourself.

You’re not trying to score yesterday’s diet anyway, that’s much too short term to tell you anything about its efficacy. You’re running 30-day experiments, and you’ll be judging 30 days at a time.

I use the rolling average of my last 7 days’ weigh ins. That means even when I do a refeed, my weight only goes up by maybe 5-7lbs before it slowly stabilizes and trends back down. Day to day I don’t even see any noise.

Look at this graph of my weight over the last 30 days. There’s an insane peak of going from 209lbs to 224lbs in just 2.5 days of refeed, but the average (yellow line) only ever, slowly, reaches 217lbs.

The average is much smoother and less prone to make you overreact.

Why the scale?

I’ve written about this before, but I think the scale is still the best tool for daily tracking. It’s fine to measure your waist circumference, but in my experience it’s far less accurate and more noisy. I know people disagree on this, and maybe it’s different for different people, but it’s always been the case for me.

Scales that pretend to measure your body weight fat tend to be extremely inaccurate. Even DEXA scans are pretty inaccurate on “lean” mass, in the sense that water is lean aka non-fat mass. You can therefore change your “lean mass” and body fat percentage drastically just by increasing/decreasing water intake or retention.

That said, I still get a DEXA scan every couple of months, just to verify. Usually it’s pretty much in line with what the scale has been telling me anyway.

Related posts

Why I measure my progress with a boring old scale

Losing Weight with Unix: How I track All The Things

Rapid Fat Loss at first, then a slow trickle

You’ll likely lose a bunch of weight in the beginning, but then it’ll slow down to a trickle, and you’ll slowly approach your optimal weight over a few years. I personally went from morbidly obese, through obese, and I’m now about in the middle of the “overweight” range (BMI 27.6 this morning). The entire time, I didn’t restrict my carolies and I didn’t exercise much at all.

Almost everybody’s weight loss graph looks like exponential decay, not linear. (If you’re not currently obese or very overweight, your weight loss might not be as dramatic. You might reach your goal weight in only a few months. Lucky you! This is really for people struggling to reverse their obesity.)

Cutting out linoleic acid tends to fix your appetite and your body’s ability to use its own stored fat. All the quality of life improvements are a nice bonus to keep you motivated.

Stick with the program, and don’t panic when you plateau for a while, even a few months. Eventually, a weight plateau while you’re still quite a ways away from your optimal weight might deserve action or a change of plan. But it’s never a good idea to panic.

Give it another 2 months of the same experiment. If you’ve lost zero pounds over 2 separate, strict 30 day experiments, on a diet that you’ve previously lost a lot of weight on, you can start tweaking it - maybe try some of the random “hacks” from step 5, like cutting out salt or glutamate (=tomatoes, mushrooms).

Related posts

“Water weight” - temporary fluctuations during fat loss

My Constituency: Tough Obesity Cases

Torricelli’s Law for Fat Loss

Conclusion

There you have it, folks. This is pretty much my entire obesity & fat loss paradigm as of early 2026. I think that, at 7,700 words, this is the second longest post I’ve written so far after Sleep, Jet Lag & Circadian Rhythm.

Find you a girl who loves you as much as I love typing.

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Right to the Point

I’ve written about the specifics of cutting out sauce & supplementing ACV before, and this month was just a repeat trial of ex150nosauce+ACV 1, 2, and 3.

Let’s look at the weight graph:

A familiar pattern, previous iterations went much the same:

• Rapid loss of the previous refeed’s water weight for about 5 days

• Transition into slower, but very steady & linear fat loss

• A series of nearly-plateaus (slower weight loss) and whooshes (faster weight loss)

• As I neared my previous all-time low weight, the linear weight loss just continued and stayed below it for the entire rest of the trial

I recently wondered if the nosauce+ACV variant of my ex150 heavy cream diet is actually doing something, or if I’m just “passing the time” until my adipose tissue is depleted of enough linoleic acid to lower my body fat settling point.

This month’s results can’t inform on that yet, as I’m only about a pound lower than my previous all-time low. But I’ll just do the almost exact trial again.

That means I should go back to nearly my new ATL of ~208-209lbs within hopefully 5 days, possibly less this time as I did a much shorter refeed this time.

Then we’ll see: will I spend the entire month circling the 208-209lbs, or will steady, linear weight loss continue? If the latter, and I lose another 8lbs or so, that would make quite a dent in my previous all-time low and almost certainly point to the “nosauce+ACV actually does something” hypothesis.

Hopefully we’ll have an answer in 4 weeks.

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Continuing to Skirt the Protein Line

Protein restriction has been part of my diet paradigm for a long time. I’ve eaten ~40-45g/day of protein for the last 3 years, with minor interruptions. I’m 6’1 with about 150lbs of lean mass, and not particularly active. It’s totally fine and I haven’t lost any lean mass or seen any other side effects.

And that makes sense, given that nitrogen excretion studies show similar numbers: in groups of young, active men, almost everyone lost some lean mass on 20g/day, but almost nobody did on 40g/day. Almost everyone will get “enough protein” at 40g/day.

My daily 150g (raw) portion of ground 80/20 beef only has about 25g of protein. The remaining 15-20g I was getting, nearly half of my daily protein intake, was coming from cream.

The conundrum with the nosauce+ACV version of ex150 is that it drastically reduces my appetite for heavy cream (“energy/carolies”) and therefore gets me below the 40g threshold quite regularly.

And, unlike on my regular ex150 diet, that leads to occasional bouts of “protein leverage hunger” (PLH). This has happened once or twice every single time I’ve done this particular experiment.

I could increase my meat intake to make up for it. Instead, I previously decided I would just bump against the PLH threshold, recognize it, and eat a little extra protein that day.

That’s exactly what happened this time, around day 22. It was pretty mild at the time, but I’d had a cheat day earlier on day 10, which maybe helped delay the issue.

Anyway, I decided to nip it in the bud on the following day, day 23, by doubling my meat ration just for that day. This made the PLH disappear, and I had no issues for the remaining 7 days.

This will influence my strategy going forward, so I’m bringing it up. More on it later.

Notes

As always, copious notes:

Day 4

Lol first entry, it’s really just “my normal diet” now

Water weight loss has been crazy as normal. Always fun if you’re over a pound lighter in the evening than that same morning.

Was 220 evening of day 4 today, which is within 3lbs of last month’s lowest weight.

Given how excessive this refeed was and that it was 4 days long, actually surprised how fast it all came back off. Maybe cause the last 2 days were pretty low protein, mostly starch? Only really ate high protein the first 2 days.

Day 7

First day w/o drastic (water) weight loss. Sort of incredible that from a 4.5 day refeed with a total of 17lbs weight gain, only about 1lb was fat?! Everything already came off in the first 5 days.

Day 9

Lower than last month’s lowest point

Day 10

Cheated, instead of ex150 dinner had a bit of brisket, 2 slices of sourdough bread w/ butter, and 1 homemade cinnamon roll

Sourdough bread is somehow super dense & filling

Day 11

Down half a pound despite cheating last night

Day 13

Ate modest amount of brisket (150-200g?) instead of beef for dinner

Day 14

Huhhhh weird lack of satiety today

Hm went away a bit later, maybe nothing

Day 15

Had 32oz HWC latte, not really cheat but exception

Day 16

Had extra amounts of cream just to make sure I’m not undereating

Day 17

Weight down despite eating lots of extra cream yesterday heh

Day 18

Added a friend’s home made beef boullion to my meal, a bit salty

Day 21

Had 2 bites of beef fat cut off from friend’s steak

Drank extra cream intuitively [note: beginning of PLH?]

Day 22

Had a small bout of hunger today which has been a sign of protein deficiency (?) in the past, but went away. Maybe will hit harder tonight/tomorrow

After work, at the store, felt drawn to beef jerky but didn’t buy any

Def seem to notice meat more than I normally do

Somehow expecting protein hunger to strike any second lol, but dinner was fine

Haha 1h later, very hungry w/ rumbling stomach

Probably the protein thing

Day 23

No weird hunger today, but ate 2x the beef and 3x the vegetables just to nip it in the bud [note: this worked]

Day 25

Starbucks HWC latte

Wow, weighed 209.5 in the evening, which is almost a pound lower than this morning - and below my ATL!

Must be in turbo fat burning mode

Day 29

Cheated with restaurant steak & vegetables for dinner

Decided to just end experiment 1 day early, ate some cheese & a bar of chocolate

More of the Same. Almost exactly the Same.

As mentioned above, I’ll just run this again, nearly exactly.

One difference I’ll incorporate, as suggested by a reader: I will separate this month into 2 bouts of 14 days each, separated by a single 1-day refeed.

This reader analyzed the weight graphs I’ve posted the last few months, and concludes that I lose weight more quickly at the beginning of an experiment (even after water weight loss) than toward the end, and thinks that I should run shorter experiments more frequently.

I don’t necessarily believe that the data is clean enough to conclude this. But since I’ve been cheating/”combating my PLH by premature refeeding” anyway, I might as well do this instead.

Having cheated around day 10, and eaten a double portion of meat on day 23, one might as well conclude that I really did 3 separate trials punctuated by slightly higher protein.

Might as well try to structure the trial like that?

The only potential downside: if it took more than 14 days to get into fat burning mode on this diet, and fat burning only kicked in toward the end of a month. But that doesn’t seem to be happening: I was well below the previous month’s lowest weight by day 14, and I actually dropped relatively quickly after my doubled protein portion that I ate on day 23.

Famous last words, but I can’t imagine that splitting it up into 2 experiments of 14 days each, separated by a single refeed day, would change it for the worse.

I’ll let you know in 14 days.

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Just over a decade ago, between Christmas and New Year’s of 2015, I randomly began the keto diet. I had tried low-carb before, and was doing a vaguely Paleo + Rice diet at the time. I was over 300lbs then, although I don’t quite know how much, because I was avoiding the scale.

I forgot what or who exactly inspired me to try keto, but I do remember my goal was weight loss.

I lost 100lbs almost effortlessly within a year, ending up at around 200lbs for the first time in my adult life. I wore size M t-shirts. I got a suit tailored. Friends told me I looked “too skinny.”

Keto also put my chronic, life-long circadian rhythm disorder (Non-24) into remission - within 3 days.

It also improved my quality of life dramatically besides (and before) the weight loss. I slept much better. I was never very hungry - hunger just functions differently on keto, especially high-fat keto. I felt cool, calm, and collected - not like a chicken with its head chopped off, the stereotypical “blood sugar roller coaster” or whatever it is that so many people describe.

I have been in ketosis for almost the entire time since, for 10 years or about 25% of my life. The only exceptions are a handful of high-carb experiments I’ve done in the last year, e.g. ex_rice or ex_bread+butter.

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Weight roller coaster: +/- 100lbs

Speaking of roller coasters, I regained the 100lbs I had lost during the first 12 months or so over the following 2 years, while still maintaining strict keto.

Why? Of course I’m not entirely sure, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of ketoing. In fact, as the weight crept on, I tried ketoing harder and harder - or what I thought, at the time, was ketoing harder, namely going more towards a steak/meat/carnivore direction.

I had actually started out with heavy heavy cream supplementation just to get the fat in. I also started keto while living in Asia, where meat, especially beef, wasn’t as readily available and affordable.

The weight gain happened exclusively after I had moved back to the U.S., which I considered “carnivore heaven” - affordable, delicious beef everywhere. You could practically eat nothing but steak & eggs!

I also started lifting weights, which increased my appetite - and made me gain weight even more quickly.

My diet then was what I would now consider extremely high in protein, like most Standard American Keto (SAK) or carnivore diets are. I now consider protein restriction a major part of my fat loss success on ex150.

It was also high in linoleic acid, again, like the SAK tends to be: a big pack of thick cut bacon every week, typically eaten with half a dozen eggs fried in the bacon grease.

If I ate out, I’d order the salad - with chicken breast and often drowned in dressing, aka soybean oil. If available I’d eat the fattiest cuts of chicken, or buy the Costco whole roast chicken and mostly eat the fatty parts. I ate lots of Korean BBQ, especially pork belly. My go-to snack was nuts with cheese, and I ate nut butters with a spoon.

No amount of fasting, eating purer carnivore, or working out would even stop the rapid fat gain, let alone reverse it.

Within about 2 years, I was back up at 280lbs. My weight gain slowed down a bit, maybe partly because I tried some pretty crazy stuff including extreme fasting. These “hacks” tended to lead to drastic weight loss in the short term, but I’d quickly rebound within hours to days of going back to any sort of ad-lib eating.

As an example, I fasted every weekday and only ate on weekends - for an entire month. That’s right, NO food intake for 5 days out of every 7 days, 4 times in a row. I lost no weight at all over the entire period.

Another time, I ate only 2,000kcal/day, mostly of In-n-Out (protein-style, low-carb) burgers, for about 20 days, after which I could no longer sustain the caloric restriction and my thermogenesis and immune system had basically collapsed. I started this experiment at 295lbs. I was down to 279lbs after the 20 days, but another week after resuming ad-lib eating, I was at 299.

Soon, I cracked the 300lbs. I hovered around there for quite some time and I just gave up. I stopped weighing myself, leading to a gap in my weigh-in data for about a year. This is a shame, as I have accumulated over 2,800 data points since my records began in late 2016.

In my body’s defense, even when I had “given up” and ate just about the shittiest version of keto you can imagine, I didn’t seem to go over 300lbs much. This is in contrast to before I first started. I don’t know how heavy I was exactly, but it was surely much more than 300lbs - I had to buy special large & tall clothes back then, which, at 300lbs on keto, I didn’t.

When people hear about this, they often ask: if keto didn’t work, why didn’t you do something else?

The answer is easy:

1. What else was I gonna do? I had tried everything else (or so I thought) before starting keto, and none of it worked either.

2. It reliably kept my Non-24 in remission, which was a life-altering improvement. Since it’s difficult to relate to this for normal people: imagine that you’re in a wheelchair, but you can walk as long as you do keto. You’d keep on doing keto even if you regained the 100lbs, trust me.

My Keto Renaissance

After having given up and accepting that I’d spend the rest of my life morbidly obese at 300lbs, my rejuvenated keto journey began with… the potato diet.

That’s right, the humble spud. I had started reading A Chemical Hunger by Slime Mold Time Mold, which had convinced me that something was literally in the water in America, and probably across the (Western?) world.

In 2022, these enterprising Citizen Scientists/Authority Disrespecters/Conspiracy Bloggers started a Potato Diet Trial. I didn’t formally partake, but their general attitude of “Let’s Science the Shit (tm) out of this!” had inspired me. And, frankly, what did I have to lose?

I took the summer of 2022 off, knowing that going on a non-ketogenic diet would bring my Non-24 sleep disorder back, and began purchasing large sacks of potatoes at my trusty local grocery store.

My records indicate - and, yes, this is basically when I started taking more serious notes besides just daily weigh-ins - that I only lasted 16 days.

I just could not eat enough potatoes. It was a very weird sensation: the potatoes tasted great, I just couldn’t… eat them. I’d go to the fridge, take out a delicious, pre-cooked potato, take a bit.. and be nearly unable to swallow.

Now you might say: that’s great, potatoes are so satiating! But they weren’t. I was starving. Ravenously hungry. I just.. couldn’t eat potatoes. I ate maybe 600kcal a day, which rapidly led to starvation symptoms. Only the first 7 days of that I was able to maintain a pure potato diet, with no spices, no salt, no sauces, no additions. The second week I added spices & sauces. Soon, I was adding a brick of butter to my potatoes, and the starvation symptoms went away - but of course that made it a “butter with potato flavor” diet, not a potato diet.

It also gave me terrible rashes all over my body. In retrospect, people tell me, I should’ve peeled my potatoes. I had not, because I was under the impression that the skin is the most nutritious part of the potato. But apparently it also contains tons of oxalates and other anti-nutrients.

Rashes were strange because I had never had skin issues my entire life, even at 300lbs. I barely had acne as a teen, and I didn’t remember my last rash before the potato diet.

By the way, my Non-24 sleep condition returned like clockwork a few days into the potato diet, and it disappeared again a few days after I stopped:

You can see I woke up around 10am most days doing my regular keto. A few outliers of 8:30am or 11:30am, but the trend was stable. On the potato diet, my wake-up time started creeping later and later nearly instantly, until I woke up in the afternoon, around 2pm. After I quit the potato diet, my sleep stabilized in the afternoon.

Oh yea, I have even more sleep data points than weigh-ins: about 3,200 wake-up times, in fact. I kept recording it even during the year when I’d given up on diet & weight loss.

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Serious Experiments Lain

To give you a sense of this, here’s my 10 years of weight data (see the gap in the middle?) overlaid with my record of diet experiments:

You can see that I only started getting serious about recording hypotheses and experiments in 2022, after getting inspired by Slime Mold Time Mold and their potato trial & experimental mindset. I did try random stuff before then, but wasn’t keeping detailed notes or records besides my weight.

Ever since late 2022, I basically did one experiment per month the entire time. Some I repeated, others were designed to be shorter or failed much more quickly - but I kept track of it all.

Third Time’s a Charm

Depending on how you count, I struck gold the 2nd or 3rd experiment after reading Slime Mold Time Mold and getting inspired.

After the potato experiment failed for me, I just went back to my regular old Standard American Keto ways for a few months. Then, I tried a month of only consuming distilled water. I even made my coffee only with distilled water. This was to see if reducing lithium in my drinking water would help me lose weight. It did not, I lost 0lbs that month.

For the following month’s experiment, I remembered a previous time when eating pretty low protein/meat and supplementing with lots of heavy cream had led to some success - and I started the heavily protein-restricted heavy cream diet that I basically do to this day: ex150.

The 150 in ex150 stands for 150g of beef, and that’s the daily amount of meat I eat. I eat it cooked in butter with some vegetables, and I used to add lots of sauce - although I stopped doing that about 6 months ago.

The entire rest of the diet is ad-lib heavy cream. This leads to about a 90% fat diet by kcals, depending on the (variable) cream intake, about classic ketogenic diet macros.

This was a total coincidence at the time, but besides being low-protein and highly ketogenic, this diet is also extremely low in the polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acid linoleic acid (LA). Compared to my previous Standard American Keto, ex150 contains no chicken, no pork, no salad dressings, no bacon, no eggs, no nuts, and no olive oil.

ex150 is about the lowest-LA ketogenic diet you could do. The only way to go much lower in LA is to keep the same strict standard for ruminant (or similar like cocoa/coconut) fats, but reduce the total fat content of the diet.

Of course it wasn’t on purpose; I basically didn’t know about seed oils at the time. Only a few months later, when I began posting about my weight loss success on the internet, did people inform me, and I’ve since become a big proponent of Modern PUFA Theory (MPT). It seems to explain my 100lbs weight rebound while maintaining strict keto the entire time.

And boy, did I lose weight on ex150:

The horizontal lines are 10lb marks. I lost 30lbs the first 2 months, and another 10 the following. Then I took a pretty big break and regained some weight, and it took about 1.5 months for the next 10lbs, and 3 months for the next.

That was 55lbs down, effortlessly & eating ad-lib, in about 7 months, including some breaks. No hunger ever. No intentional caloric restriction.

The now-popular GLP-1 drugs weren’t available (or known as much) then, but compare this to a trial on Tirzepatide, the 2nd-generation GLP-1 drug:

• I lost over 18% of my body weight in 7 months

• The highest-dose, best-performing group on Tirzepatide lost, on average, 14.7% of their body weight in 18 months

In short, I lost more weight than the best performers on Tirzepatide, in less than 40% of the time, without the associated lean mass loss or any of the side effects. People sometimes ask me why I’m so down on GLP-1 drugs; this is why.

Then I began to plateau, and that’s when I began to experiment with more ideas instead of just “sticking to the plan” (the plan being ex150) cause it always worked.

When the plan stops working, you need to adjust.

ex150 did keep working in the sense that I never gained a single pound on it, no matter how much heavy cream I consumed. Some weeks I averaged over 4,000kcal/day, yet no fat gain.

I do somewhat believe that fat gain on an ex150-style diet is nearly impossible, at least if you don’t purposefully overfeed yourself. Maybe even then. I should try it some day.

About 2 years into ex150-ish diets, user Whatsup_Coconut on the r/saturatedfat subreddit challenged me: having cut out PUFAs, did I even still need keto to keep my Non-24 sleep condition in remission? I would’ve bet a lot of money that I did, but she was right: the Non-24 was gone. I no longer “needed” keto, and could now eat entirely rice-based or bread-based diets for months on end, and sleep just fine.

This opened up a lot of non-ketogenic diet experiments for me.

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The 3 phases of my keto decade

While I’ve been in ketosis for most of the last decade, the experience was very heterogeneous. I’d separate it into these phases:

Year 1 - Honeymoon: Non-24 gone, lost 100+ pounds, great quality of life

Year 2-6 - Desperation: Fought rapid fat regain tooth & nail, but lost every battle. Ballooned back up to 300lbs

Year 7 - Resignation: Totally resigned to being morbidly obese for the rest of my life

Year 8-10 - Renaissance: Protein-restricted, low-PUFA heavy cream diet. Everything “keto” was for me in the beginning and more. Cured Non-24, seemingly permanently. Down over 80lbs again, eating ad-lib.

Conclusion: Should you Keto?

Overall, even though I’ve experimented with carb-heavy diets recently, I still feel by far the best on a high-fat, low-protein ketogenic diet.

There’s just an almost ethereal quality of life to it. I am never hungry. I am never tired. I am never exhausted. I just have infinite energy reserves, all day, every day.

Nutrition becomes effortless: fat is extremely energy dense, and clean (=low-PUFA) sources are available everywhere for very cheap (per carolie). You can walk into any McDonald’s on the planet and order plain beef patties for the protein. You can walk into nearly any Starbucks on the planet (yes, I’ve done this on 3 continents) and order a heavy whipping cream latte. You can walk into most grocery stores, purchase a pint of cream, drink it on the spot, and be fueled up for the rest of the day for maybe $5.

Whereas eating a high-carb diet seemed to require constant attention, effort, and fiddling, being in deep ketosis feels like being a shark in deep water: calm, cool, collected. Focused.

Not everyone seems to get this, but some people clearly do. Those people just LOVE keto. I am among them. My body clearly thrives on ketosis.

That said, not everybody seems to do well on it. That’s probably just genetic influence: we have quite a few genetic adaptations that vary strongly over the last 5,000 years. I am probably in the 99th percentile of dairy tolerance; I drank half a gallon of milk a day for most of my childhood. I can drink a pint of cream straight and get zero side effects or symptoms except cement-truck satiety.

Other people probably need more meat, or thrive on carbs instead. Some people just love starch diets. Others love fruit/sugar based diets.

Besides finding the type of diet your body was made for (e.g. high-fat keto, dairy based, meat based, starch based, fruit/sugar based) the most important part is cutting out linoleic acid strictly.

In this regard, keto is technically orthogonal, but in practice is a minefield.

Standard American Keto (SAK) is extremely high in linoleic acid: bacon, pork belly, sauces, salad dressings, eggs, olive/avocado oil, roast chicken, nuts, and nut butters.

If your goal is <2% of daily carolies from LA, and you eat a 70-90% fat diet, your fat sources must be EXTREMELY low in LA. As you approach 100% of food intake from fat, your limit approaches 2%. That’s basically only ruminant fats plus cocoa butter or coconut oil. Grass-fed ruminants preferably.

On the contrary, it’s much easier to stay below 2% LA total if you eat a low-fat diet to begin with - unless you purposefully seek out literal seed oils or use soybean oil dressings.

Many “plant-based” diets are pretty good in this regard in theory, e.g. Starch Solution. On the other hand, many common plant fats are pretty bad - all seed oils are, of course, plant-based.

In short, I think it’s much more important that you drastically cut out linoleic acid than do keto. If you thrive on keto & want to use it as a vehicle for reducing your LA intake, that’s great. If you prefer another vehicle like High-Carb/Low-Fat (HCLF), that’s better than Standard American Keto.

Figuring out Your Optimal Diet

I propose not an optimal diet for everyone, but a framework: run 30 day experiments along a few simple guidelines, and you’ll probably find the diet that fits you & your genetics best.

1. Avoid linoleic acid strictly for the rest of your life. No seed oils. If you eat animal fats, only ruminants (beef fat, dairy, sheep & goats would be ok too). No nuts except macadamia. Pretty much no avocado/olive oil: besides being heavily adulterated with seed oils in practice, they tend to be relatively high in LA even if “clean.”
   
   If you must eat out/eat commercially prepared foods, NO SAUCES and NO DRESSINGS. Avoid anything that oils could’ve been mixed into, like stew or curry. Get the steak & asparagus or baked potato. Avoid their “butter” and “sour cream.”
   

2. Figure out the best major energy staple for you: fats, starches, or sugars. I do very well on (low-PUFA) fats, so-so on starches, and terribly on sugar. I know a few people who absolutely thrive on mostly sugar diets, but not many. On the other hand, quite a few people do best on starches. Maybe even more than do on keto.
   
   To figure this out, simply run a handful of 30 day experiments: one mostly starch-based, one mostly fat-based, one mostly fruit/sugar-based. You’ll probably know within 2 weeks if your body tolerates this well, and by day 30 you should have a good weight trend. Allow 1-2 weeks for adaptation, both when you go ketogenic (high-fat) and when going from a high-fat diet to a high-carb diet. It took me about 2 weeks to adapt to all that starch.
   
   If you trial starches, I recommend starting with white rice: it seems the most easily tolerated by many people. You can put some beans and a little bit of beef into the rice for nutrition & flavor.

   
   If you trial fats, and your ancestry supports high dairy consumption, I absolutely advise you to do heavy cream. It’s surprisingly delicious, and if you have British/Scandinavian/Northern European/Steppe ancestry, you’re probably extremely good at it. If not, try fatty beef or other ruminants as available to you.
   
   If you absolutely hate keto, maybe it’s not for you. I personally could barely tolerate the sugar diet, a week of it wrecked me. Same for potatoes (as mentioned before), but I do pretty great on rice. Play around a bit if you don’t hit a home run in the first few 30-day experiments, it might take a few attempts.
   
   You can tell if a food is a good energy staple if it tastes good but isn’t “addictive,” gives you good satiety, digests well, and leaves you feeling good and energetic as opposed to causing bloat/digestive issues or leaving you lethargic.
   

3. When you’ve dialed in your preferred energy staple, play around with your protein intake. I wouldn’t advise you to go much below 10%, although I’m personally doing 6% - but that’s skirting the line.
   
   10% protein is about what’s in most staple starches like rice, potatoes, or wheat. You therefore don’t need to add much meat or dairy protein to get to a reasonable level.
   
   In terms of actual requirements, most people don’t need more than 10% unless they’re extremely active athletes. Some people tolerate very high amounts of protein, others don’t.
   
   Try to dial this in: if you don’t feel great yet, or you have quite a bit of weight to lose, you could try lowering or upping your meat intake. Many people thrive on high-starch with modest protein, basically what most of our ancestors ate since the agricultural revolution.
   
   Others do great on a 30% protein carnivore diet. If that works for you, God bless.

   
   Protein is a bit harder to dial in than the other things so far; the symptoms can be subtle. Personally, excess protein makes me run hot, feel terrible, gives me indigestion, and makes me insatiable despite having a stuffed stomach.
   
   On the other hand, lack of protein also makes me insatiable, but in a different way: my stomach feels like a black hole instead of being painfully stuffed.
   
   One simple heuristic: if you feel insatiable despite having eaten a bunch of your energy staple (e.g. starch, fat) that should give you satiety, eat one big, reasonable portion of meat. E.g. eat a steak, or a pound of ground beef.
   
   If such a protein bolus quiets your insatiable hunger for a few days, it was probably due to lack of protein. If, instead, you’re hungry again 45-120 minutes later, you might benefit from lower protein intake.
   

4. There are a few more minor tips, tricks & hacks you can do. I’ve written about vinegar & glutamate from tomato sauce plenty on this blog. But this is the “meat & potatoes” of my current framework, and it seems to fit pretty much all the anecdata and experiences I’ve seen out there.

If you’ve done steps 1-3, you’ll probably have a staple diet that feels great, is affordable, vastly improves your quality of life & will continue doing so, slowly, over the next 4-8 years as you deplete the linoleic acid stored in your body.

You might find your digestion improve, random health conditions simply disappear, your teeth & vision improve, your pain tolerance increase, your joint pain go away, your body fat melt off, your sense of food satisfaction & satiety normalize, your skin barely sunburn any longer.. and that’s just the first 6 months!

It basically boils down to: are you genetically adapted to be a hunter (=meat heavy diet), a pastoralist sheep/cow herder (=dairy), a farmer (=starch) or a gatherer (=fruit/tubers)?

There are some mixes, but these seem to be the basic dimensions of “proper human diet.”

Personally I appear to be mostly a pastoralist with low meat tolerance, low fruit tolerance, and I do ok on certain old-world starches (rice, bread) but nearly no new-world tubers (any sort of potato/sweet potato). This makes sense given my Northern European ancestry, where people would’ve eaten some meat, lots of butter/milk and bread.

I know people who thrive on high meat combined with lots of fruit & sugar. Yet others are practically plant-based, starch all the way.

Human nutrition is slightly complex, but it’s not impossible to solve. There are only so many dimensions.

Forever a Ketard?

Despite no longer needing keto for my Non-24 (thanks, Modern PUFA Theory!), I continue to feel the best, and lose fat the best, on a 90%+ fat low-PUFA, protein restricted keto diet.

It’s no contest.

Will I be a ketard forever? I don’t know. Probably for the foreseeable future, with the exception of the odd carb experiment here or there.

My hope is still that depleting enough linoleic acid from my body fat over the next 1-4 years will eventually allow me to eat pretty much anything and remain metabolically healthy. But I’m not there yet, and there’s no guarantee it will ever happen.

It seems I’ve figured out how to avoid the pitfalls of Standard American Keto, and I feel better on ex150 than I ever have on any other diet.

But if it’s no longer required, I could see myself opening up the diet and include other foods, especially starches like rice and bread.

Until then, cream it is.

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This isn’t directly diet related, but it’s another one of those weird lifestyle interventions a lot of people are interested in.

I sat exclusively on the ground for about 2 years.

I had no chairs in my apartment. I built a custom floor height desk by screwing the legs from a coffee table into a regular desk top. This floor desk is also where I ate & drank most of my coffee. My bed was just a mattress lying almost directly on the ground, just resting on some IKEA slats for ventilation & moisture control.

After about 2 years of doing this I liked it quite a bit, but I am currently no longer sitting on the floor. The reason isn’t that I’m unhappy with it, but I moved and the new place came with a bunch of stuff that I’d have to get rid of, so it’s easier not to. Also the benefits weren’t exactly staggering.

I might consider floor sitting again in the future, if I ever move into an empty apartment again.

Why sit on the floor?

There are some people out there claiming that sitting is literally killing us, and is inherently unhealthy. The phrase “sitting is the new smoking” is out there, although I’m not sure who coined it.

I have a friend who is waging a “war on chairs” and has been for nearly a decade, who will only sit on floors and construct makeshift desks & tables at floor height wherever he goes.

Additionally, I slept on a mattress on the floor for most of my college years and quite liked it.

Sleep, eat & work directly on the floor

My setup was this:

• Mattress on IKEA slats on the ground

• 42x24” desk top screwed to coffee table legs for comfortable height

• Monitor arm to easily change the height/position of monitor on the fly

• Japanese zabuton sitting/meditation pillow to sit on

At one point I bought a tatami mat, but I didn’t like it. It was too rough/scratchy to sit on directly, and it felt sort of weird to have it with the zabuton on top. I ended up tossing it and using the zabuton directly on the wood (vinyl plank?) floor.

The zabuton would collect dust quickly, and I’d clean it with a vacuum frequently.

If you do this, make sure to measure what a comfortable height from the floor is for you. Unlike with a chair, you don’t have an easy way to change your sitting height once you have a desk, except by maybe adding more cushioning up to a point.

This is easy to try out just by stacking a few boxes or book on top of each other, sitting in front of them, and using them as a desk.

For me, the height of a regular coffee table was pretty much perfect.

I installed a monitor arm off Amazon so I could raise or lower the monitor depending on how I was sitting. Sometimes I was more straight up, other times sort of crouching/leaning forward and therefore lower.

How to sit

There are quite a few ways of actually sitting when you sit on the floor. The big question is, where do your legs go?

There are basically just a couple ways of doing it:

• Sticking your legs out in front of you under the desk, either straight or in a V shape

• Sitting sideways with both legs off to one side, either left or right

• Sitting cross-legged

• Seiza, which is basically just kneeling and sitting down on your heels. This is the traditional and “proper” way of sitting in Japan.

• Sitting on your butt with your knees tucked up against your chest/chin

The Japanese have all sorts of dedicated names for all these and various traditions (because of course they do). E.g. there is one that to me just looks like “anime girl sitting” with the legs spread out underneath you, but I found it pretty uncomfortable for my knees.

I never got used to comfortable Seiza sitting. After a few minutes my thighs would burn. This tells me I wasn’t flexible enough, or maybe it’s still an angle thing and I’d have to be skinnier to do it right.

Usually I’d just alternate the sideways sitting positions every few minutes, and throw in some tucked knees or V-shape here or there.

Overall I never sat still for an hour at a time, frequently switching positions seems to be key to this. I didn’t have to think of it or anything, I’d just intuitively change positions once in a while.

Maybe that’s why people think sitting on the floor is healthier, you keep moving and your blood flowing I suppose. Is that actually healthier? Who knows.

Adaptation was difficult

The first week was hell, and it continued being very difficult for about 3-4 weeks I’d say. After that it became significantly easier, and probably 2-3 months in it was just normal and I didn’t notice it at all any more.

I dove in cold turkey, and I might recommend not doing that. My first work day I could only sit for about an hour, after which the muscles of my lower back were so fried that I was in physical pain for the rest of the day, and had to prop myself up or lie down. I think I worked quite a few hours just lying on the floor those first few days.

My lower back especially, but also my hip and thigh mobility (hamstring?) was so bad that just sitting on the floor was pulling on some tissues constantly, like being in a deep stretch. Sometimes, my tendons (?) would feel red hot from all the stretching and I had to take a break.

The muscles in my lower back were also much too weak to hold me up straight for more than a few minutes at a time.

It was seriously a very uncomfortable first month as my ligaments/tendons stretched out and my lower back muscles slowly became strong enough to hold me up for extended periods of time, e.g. an 8 hour work day or a 12+ hour computer day since I spend much of my free time on the computer on top of work.

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Improved flexibility & balance

The biggest improvement was in my flexibility and balance. Especially my hips got much more flexible after the first few weeks. I still couldn’t get into a perfect ass-to-the-grass, flat-heeled squat, but I think that has to do with weight & leg geometry too: after losing 80lbs, it is much easier for my legs to get into the correct angle for a squat.

At 300lbs, my thighs were just too fat to even “sit back” in a squat, I had to carry it all with muscles the entire time - and of course it was a lot more weight then than now.

Now I can squat pretty well, better than most modern people I’d say, and for longer. But when I watch some Japanese or Vietnamese people hang out in a squat, I’d clearly have to lose even more weight to get the angle right with skinnier thighs.

Still, I got so used to sitting down on and getting up from the floor that it became second nature. I did it probably hundreds of times a day, especially at the desk.

Surely my leg & core muscles got a bit stronger from this as well, as evidenced by the fact that I did in fact get used to sitting on the floor. But it didn’t seem to do much beyond that.

I suppose it’s a bit like going for long walks; after you’ve adapted to walking, you’re probably not going to gain much else in terms of athletic capacity just by walking more.

Posture: almost unchanged

I’ll say maybe my posture got a tiny bit better, but not enough that I’d notice a big difference. Then again I didn’t make an effort to sit super straight at the floor desk either, often times I’d lean on/against it or sit somewhat crooked.

I suppose if you want amazing posture, you’ll have to expend extra effort.

Requires more cleaning

Because your head is so much closer to the ground when sitting on the floor, dust and other particles will have an easier time getting to you.

It’s maybe not a coincidence that the Japanese, who have many traditional ways of sitting on the ground, have a thing for cleaning daily and for wood floors.

I didn’t clean/vacuum/dust daily, but even the amount of dust collecting on the floor during 1 week was usually too much. I’d say I probably dusted every 3-4 days on average, mostly just by sweeping with a big dust mop (dry).

On top of that, I targeted vacuuming every week, although I probably didn’t quite keep to the schedule and it might’ve been every 10 days on average. When I did vacuum, I also vacuumed off the zabuton from all the dust it had been collecting.

It’s especially noticeable in the bedroom, because lying down on a mattress on the floor puts your head even closer to the ground than sitting down on the floor.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I think that sitting on the floor is a great exercise. Like so many things, sitting on the ground for prolonged periods is something a healthy human SHOULD be able to do, even if he does not constantly practice it.

That said, the benefits weren’t overwhelming: I gained some flexibility and balance, and maybe a little leg/core strength, but it didn’t seem to make a dent in terms of weight loss or in any other noticeable way.

If this sounds fun to you, try it for a while. But I’d ease into it if I were you, maybe start just by seeing how long you can sit on the floor comfortably, in terms of flexibility and lower back muscles. Maybe it’s 2 minutes, maybe all day long, depending on your flexibility and lower back strength.

If it’s not too long, maybe start slow and do 15 minute blocks a couple of times a day, then up to 30 minutes, or something like that. I can’t emphasize enough how painful that first month was, lol. I was sore all day every day!

Don’t expect any miracles either, but I would predict that you become more flexible in your hips and hamstrings and build a bit of core strength as well.

I’m certainly glad I tried it for 2 years, just because I know I can do it now, and could go back to it any time with a little adjustment.

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If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’re probably aware of my main hypothesis for the obesity epidemic: linoleic acid, the omega-6 polyunsaturated fat found in seed oils.

Seed oils explain the Mysteries of Obesity.

One of the most insidious facts of this Modern PUFA Theory (MPT) is that fats get stored in our body. Even if you stop eating seed oils today, it would take an estimated 4-8 years until the levels in your body fat returned back to healthy levels.

This makes the hypothesis very difficult to test: we can’t just put people on a low-PUFA diet for 2 weeks and see if they lose weight. While many do, the real effect would take years to be observed. That’s simply not feasible for RCTs or most other studies.

But it can be done by Citizen Scientists like you and me. I’m about 3 years into a low-PUFA diet. I probably started pretty high, given that I was eating a very high fat Standard American Keto (SAK) diet full of bacon, fatty chicken, salad dressings made from soybean oil, nuts, and the like.

When we look at my weight since I began eating low-PUFA, we can see that I lost a drastic amount of weight in the first few months, and then the weight loss started slowing down:

Once I began stalling for months at a time, I began experimenting with various diets besides my heavy cream staple diet: I tried rice diets, fish diets, chocolate diets, sugar diets, exercise, and many more things. Some of these led me to new low weights. Only recently I discovered supplemental vinegar and removing excess salt and glutamate from my diet (e.g. no tomato sauce or mushrooms).

And again, I hit a new low weight.

But what if all of this didn’t matter, and I just slowly lowered the linoleic acid content of my adipose tissue? What if I’ll spontaneously lose weight slowly & hit new low weights as I continue to eat low-PUFA, totally independent of all the high carb, fasting, vinegar, salt, or glutamate experiments?

It’s hard to test, since I can’t exactly A/B test 8 years of low-PUFA with and without these experiments..

Shiny New Experiments Keep Me Entertained

Even if we can’t disambiguate the two hypotheses easily, my experimentation while keeping PUFA intake low is probably just fine.

If anything, experimenting inside the low-PUFA paradigm keeps me motivated, entertained, and doesn’t make the diet too boring.

After all, I discovered I can eat carbs again without bringing my Non-24 circadian rhythm condition back. I discovered I can eat a 90% carb, low-fat rice diet and do just fine on it. There’s quite a bit of flexibility in the low-PUFA dietary spectrum, which makes sense: it used to be nearly all food eaten by humans was low-PUFA, with small, usually seasonally or geographically restricted exceptions like nuts (seasonal) or sesame paste (geographic restriction).

Most humans, for most of human history, ate a very low amount of linoleic acid on average. That’s why most humans used to be a healthy weight and possessed a healthy metabolism.

If one had to eat exactly 1 specific diet, e.g. ONLY white rice or ONLY heavy cream for 4-8 years, that would be a tough sell. But if there’s lots of room within the MPT paradigm for high fat, low fat, starch based, sugar based, low protein and high protein diets of all combinations, that’s great news!

Projection

My current goal is to just ride the ex150nosauce+ACV train and see how low it can go. I did reach a new low of 209.8lbs just 3 months ago on this diet, and so far (this month) the same thing is working very well, although I am not quite back down to that level yet (215lbs this morning).

I’m somewhat committed to just spamming ex150nosauce+ACV until it stops working, meaning an entire month, pretty strict, with zero weight loss.

But maybe that’ll just bottom out around the 209lbs mark until I seriously deplete more linoleic acid? In which case we would expect to see eventual, slow weight loss, not from the nosauce or vinegar, but simply from continuing to eat low-PUFA for years.

In the “it’s just linoleic acid” universe, I would only very slowly lose more weight beyond maybe the recent 209lbs low. It would take years to deplete my adipose tissue of it, and weight loss would only occur according to the level of LA depletion. LA depletion might or might not show up on OmegaQuant Complete tests. They are a pretty blunt instrument, and it might take years to see a change on there.

In the “nosauce+ACV is actually doing something” (call it the.. additive model maybe?) I would continue losing fat more rapidly, maybe relatively linearly. I should therefore keep reaching new lows pretty much every month I do this, presumably until I reach a certain body fat % and body weight, say 15-20% bf at around 180-190lbs or so.

I think I can pretty easily continue what I’m doing right now, ex150nosauce+ACV with monthly refeeds and the occasional social cheat meal.

That means we should know in a few months. I should hopefully reach the 209lbs low this month or early next month. If I’m at 200-205lbs after next month, and break through the 200lbs within 2-3 months of doing this, that’d be a pretty clear signal. (Whoa, I just realized that “signal” contains the word “sign” lol I am retarded.)

lol ok this AI generated picture has zero to do with the blog post, but it just makes me chuckle so it can stay

tl;dr

I decided to just do the “nosauce” variant of my ex150 diet while supplementing apple cider vinegar (ACV) again - all of this for the 3rd month.

But since it was the tail end of the holidays I had some more traveling to do, some friends & family to visit, and so on. I didn’t actually stick to the diet very faithfully for the first half of the experiment.

And this is reflected in my weight graph:

You can see that I lost a bunch of water weight quickly, but then stalled around 223-225lbs for about 2 weeks. I returned home just before that next big drop in weight happened, and by the end of the month I was down to 217lbs.

That’s a weight loss of ~7lbs AFTER the initial water weight loss. Not half bad, given that I’d already sort of written off the entire experiment by the time I got back. Glad I ended up finishing it.

If weren’t for that big hump in the middle, returning to 225lbs, this would be textbook linear weight loss. Could be that I just cheated with high-sodium or high-protein foods that week, potentially masking some actual fat loss. Or maybe I really stalled. Who knows.

Is nosauce+ACV the new ex150 default?

I frankly don’t miss the sauce. My ground beef & vegetables, cooked in butter, taste great. It’s maybe not quite as delightful as drowning them in sauce, but it’s good enough and I don’t usually think of the sauce.

On my most recent refeed I did eat some sauce, and it was sort of meh. Not bad, but it’s not like the flood gates opened and I developed huge sauce cravings. It was just.. there.

Taking ACV capsules every morning is also sort of a no-op, and it’s very affordable at about $20/mo.

I might just stick to this from now on.

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The Fuckarounditis

What this does show is that the diet is pretty “fragile” - even minor indulgences make me plateau. My cheating mostly revolved around some extra beef, extra vegetables, and some sour cream.

At my folks’ house, where I stayed a while after the holidays, I would make a “salad” from chopped up vegetables and sour cream most days.

I also ate a bar of 85% chocolate at one point. Several days I ate extra beef because there was steak or roast beef or something similar, and I ate a “normal sized portion” instead of making my own, separate 150g portion like I normally do.

Because it wasn’t easy to source my recent favorite, low-sodium energy drink (Ghost) everywhere, I fell back on the widely available zero sugar Monster drinks. Those have nearly 400mg of sodium per can. If sodium activates the polyol pathway and contributes to obesity that way, that would’ve been another vector.

All in all, I cheated in some form pretty much every other day for the first 2 weeks and it shows on the graph - stall city!

The.. bread?!

One of the more curious things during this experiment: after I started losing weight around day 15 I did great for a week. But on day 23 I began getting the weird “protein hunger” as I interpret it, which feels different from my normal appetite on ex150.

I’ve gotten pretty decent at recognizing it, and this time I ate… some home-made sourdough bread at a friend’s house.

My friend owns a bread machine and had made a thick loaf, and I ate 3 VERY thick slices with butter. I was basically totally satiated by slice 2, but forced down the 3rd one for no reason at all.

Man, that home-made sourdough hit the spot. Chewy, soft, and superbly satiating.

An hour later the protein hunger was gone and never returned for the rest of the experiment.

Notes

Most of the notes this time refer to cheating w/ vegetables or protein. Not super interesting, but here they are.

Day 1

Not being bloated always feels SO GOOD when going back to ex150

Day 2

Nearly 7lbs down after the first day, lol

WAY less spontaneous diet soda consumption. I just don’t care for it nearly as much.

Day 5

When I eat too many vegetables, even near-zero carb ones, I get hungrier than I was before the “salad” but also when adding too many vegetables to my beef dinner

Day 6

Didn’t sleep well, restless

Day 7

Restless sleep again

Ate a bar of 85% dark chocolate

Day 10

Still sleeping somewhat mediocre, but not as bad

Ate some extra beef and vegetables

Day 11

Ate 100g extra beef

Day 13

Ate steak + vegetables for dinner + chocolate ganache dessert

Day 15

Travel day. Ate some airline lounge food, but not much (~4 shrimps + small salad with balsamic sauce), also a 10g piece of milk chocolate

Day 16

Didn’t eat dinner cause I was busy and just not that hungry

Day 20

Hm, mostly carrageenan cream so far due to Circumstances (tm).. is that why it’s not working this time? lol

[note: on day 20 I was still only 3lbs down since the water weight, so I think I can be forgiven in thinking that it didn’t work. Looking at the graph in retrospect, it doesn’t seem the carrageenan made a difference]

Day 23

Felt pretty cold today (it was cold, too)

Weird yearning hunger, a bit like protein hunger last time but not nearly as bad

Felt lightly tempted to cheat several times during the day, which is typically a sign I’m not eating enough, or something else is wrong

Ended up cheating with 3 slices of sourdough bread with butter, very strong satiety hit during the 2nd slice

Day 29

Hm, I don’t really miss much. Refeed is in 2 days and the thing I look forward to most is sourdough bread and rice with beans lol

I barely notice the absence of sauce at this point

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The Refeed

I mainly report on these because I think it’s an interesting diagnostic. If you barely make it to your refeed, white-knuckling it and day dreaming about certain foods, that’s a sign your diet isn’t sustainable.

Luckily, I found this bout of ex150nosauce+ACV quite sustainable. Now given I cheated a bunch, but I barely had any cravings for the refeed. Once again, my biggest cravings were actually starches - bread, rice & beans.

After cheating with the sourdough bread, I ended up making my own loaf of bread with my friend’s bread making machine. I used only water, King Arthur’s organic bread flour, salt, and yeast. I have to say these bread making machines are quite handy: you don’t even have to mix the dough or let it rise. Pour in the ingredients, wait, done. It even has a great crust!

I also made a giant bean & rice stew with vegetables and some ground beef, which ended up lasting me 3 days.

Plus I ate some candy, mostly milk chocolate and some gummy bear type things.

Curiously I got the impression that eating high protein, or specifically high meat meals, made me overeat WAY more than the starches or even the candy.

On day 1 I ate beef jerky, some cheese, and a giant ribeye steak. That made me so ravenous I overate the available sides until the point of physical pain.

On the evening of day 3, I stopped several times in the middle of eating (delicious!) mint milk chocolate - and in fact I still haven’t finished that bar of chocolate at the time of this writing.

I also only ate 1 plate of (again, delicious!) rice bean stew for dinner, despite having mentally committed to eating at least 2. Yes, there was a bit of ground beef in that stew, but it was only 1lb spread across several cans of beans and over 1lb of dry rice over 3 days. In other words, roughly ex150 amounts of ground beef.

It seems that even swampy carbs only made me overeat moderately this time, whereas meat made me insatiable and hyperphagic.

Very curious. Also makes me even more interested in a future rice + beans + ground beef diet.

Next? EAT SLEEP RAVE REPEAT

7lbs down in the last 2 weeks of the experiment is - surprisingly good?!

Now that I’m back in my stable environment & routine, I’ll just run the exact same experiment and see where I end up. The 217lbs I ended at are just 8lbs away from my recent low of 209lbs.

While new & other experiments are shiny & exciting, I should probably just keep this one going and see how low it can get me.

For science and stuff.

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Summary of the various things I had going on with this blog & project in 2025:

• My personal progress in terms of weight loss & related (broke through previous weight plateau)

• Experiments I ran on myself (17)

• Posts I wrote (40)

• Web tools I released (2)

• What I had planned but failed to do (running another trial)

• ExFatloss plans going forward

This was the year in which I definitely left the keto plantation. While I still default to a ketogenic diet, I experimented with carbs more than ever.

The Goal

My main goal is fat loss, or, technically, “solving the obesity epidemic.” The subtle difference is that I don’t want to find or use weight loss techniques that aren’t relevant or applicable to widespread, mainstream obesity.

That’s why I’m not particularly interested in GLP-1 drugs or “counting carolies” and starving myself down. People somehow weren’t (as) obese in 2000, in 1970, in 1900, in 1850.. and none of them were taking GLP-1 agonists or counting carolies.

I want to find out “what did obesity” and then use that to get lean. Losing fat & getting to a healthy/normal weight by eliminating the root cause of the obesity epidemic, not looking great for the bikini season with an unsustainable method.

Personal Progress

With that said, let’s take a look at my weight for 2025:

Seems like I fluctuated quite a bit between ~225 and ~240lbs for the first half of 2025, then went back down again. Around October I broke though 220lbs, and reached a new low of <210lbs briefly in November.

Clearly I was almost entirely flat for half or 3/4 of 2025, depending on when you start counting the drop:

The answer is: vinegar. Inspired by Jaromir Janda’s writings, I began experimenting with vinegar.

Vinegar

First, I tried just drinking tons of vinegar throughout the day. This worked well, but was nasty and hurt my teeth & throat. This is the first big, visible drop in the summer, although it “only” brought me back to around 225lbs, not to a new low weight.

Later, I just started supplementing a modest serving (3 capsules a day, 750mg acetic acid) of Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar capsules. This led to a month of 10lbs weight loss and another one of around 7.5lbs. This last one was the month I finally broke through my long-term plateau of 217lbs by a substantial margin, briefly touching below 210lbs.

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Carb Around, Find Out

Much of the fluctuation/spikes in 2025 came from my many weird high-carb experiments. If you don’t know, I had a circadian rhythm disorder called Non-24 my entire life, and in late 2015 I discovered that keto completely puts it into remission. This was the main reason I stayed pretty strict keto for the last decade.

But in 2024, after about 2 years of avoiding linoleic acid like the devil, I tried a high-carb diet - and my Non-24 stayed away! I was incredulous. This condition had been part of my life & my identity since very early childhood, and it was just.. gone?!

Now I could finally eat carbs without paying the huge health, physical & social cost of suffering from constant sleep deprivation.

Hence I’ve been doing a lot of high-carb diet experiments that I couldn’t easily do for much of the last decade.

Let’s do the time warp look at the graph again

With all this additional knowledge painted onto the graph in pretty colors, what can we see?

1. I NEVER gained weight on a (teal labeled) ex150 experiment. Usually I lost weight or at least stalled near my previous low.

2. I gained a lot of weight on many of the (orange labeled) high-carb experiments, notably with the exception of ex_plainrice (which came directly after my first vinegar experiment, coincidence?)

3. The “summer drop” (back to my pre-carb weight) begins right at the start of my first vinegar experiment, and continues for about a month after I stopped

4. The “fall drop” (through the previous plateau) begins right after I resumed vinegar supplementation via the ACV capsules

5. ex150 seems to work even better with vinegar added, be it liquid vinegar or later ACV capsules

6. The only high-carb experiment I really lost weight on came directly after a month of basically giving myself vinegar poisoning

It felt super intense too; upon adding the vinegar I immediately felt a massive decrease in appetite within a few days both times. The fat just came melting off and I didn’t feel hungry. My cream consumption dropped drastically.

You’ll understand why I’m so big on vinegar now. I’d say adding vinegar was probably the biggest effect since I “invented” the ex150 cream diet in late 2022.

Caveat: I also cut out my usual (seed oil-free) sauces when I resumed vinegar via the ACV capsules and the combined effect felt even stronger than the initial high-vinegar effect. Maybe this polyol pathway-effect and the vinegar effect combined made it feel so powerful.

In conclusion: while my weight fluctuated quite a bit in 2025, I didn’t really lose any serious weight until I introduced the vinegar. With its help, I broke through my previous plateau with relative ease.

Of course, I also had several very severe high-carb experiments under my belt that might’ve set me up for this, and another year of avoiding linoleic acid.

In fact, the intent of several of these near-zero fat, high-carb diets (e.g. 2 months of eating nothing but rice) was explicitly to deplete my stored linoleic acid. So maybe… that worked?

Speaking of linoleic acid..

OmegaQuants

My main hypothesis for the root cause of the obesity epidemic is an excess of the omega-6 polyunsaturated fat linoleic acid in the modern diet.

To remediate this problem, step 1. is just massively reducing your dietary intake of this fat: no seed oils, no bacon, no fatty chicken, no salad dressings, no junk food.

But step 2. is a little more complicated: you need to deplete the linoleic acid stored in your body fat, which is estimated to take anywhere from 4-8 years.

I’m about 3 years into this process, and I started measuring it via OmegaQuant Complete tests about 2.5 years ago. You can see my entire series of tests on the OmegaTracker.

In 2025 I took 12 OmegaQuant Complete tests, which is $1,200 in tests. Fuck me.

You’ll immediately notice that my numbers went down, then back up, then back down, then back up.

This is due to a phenomenon when eating a super low-fat, near zero-fat diet. With dietary fat low enough, your body will start ramping up DNL (de-novo-lipogenesis) to provide the necessary fats. This is akin to constantly eating some amounts of MUFAs and SFAs (your body can’t make most PUFAs) and washes out the LA (linoleic acid) number in the test.

I can reliably switch my OmegaQuant LA from around 15-16% to around 7-8% by switching between a high-fat and near-zero-fat diet.

Remember that useful diet color coding on the weight chart earlier? Let’s just copy & paste it here:

Aha! It doesn’t quite line up due to the different scales, but all the very low LA data points (in the green) were during high-carb diets with very low to near-zero fat. When I switch back to my usual high-fat diet, the LA jumps back up, too.

It’s unclear if spending a lot of time in this lower-blood-LA, low-fat, high-carb territory actually helps deplete your stored LA, but it is one theory, and part of why I wanted to try these experiments.

That dramatic jump around 1/3 in, where you see several data points in rapid succession, was an experiment I ran to see how much time it would take for my de-novo-lipogenesis to turn off after resuming a high-fat diet. It was back up nearly completely in 3 days, and a few points higher even at 6 & 9 days.

I repeated the experiment in the opposite direction, which is why you see that sudden drop a few weeks later, again with several data points: How long for de-novo-lipogenesis to ramp up? The answer: also about 3-5 days.

I ended 2025 with a higher LA% on my OmegaQuant than I started it, even on the same high-fat diet. On the other hand, the “low-fat diet to deplete adipose LA” theory seemed to show decent preliminary results.

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Experiments in 2025

I ran the following experiments last year:

• ex150-13

• NAC (a supplement, didn’t seem to do anything)

• ex_dryfast

• ex150honey (went ok, didn’t gain any fat but also didn’t lose any)

• ex150glassnoodle (massive fail, I can’t digest potato starch)

• ex150hclflp (rapidly gained weight)

• ex150-14

• ex_sugar (massive fail, liver pain, quit on day 9)

• ex_kempner (massive fail, just starved & had to abort)

• ex150vinegar

• ex_plainrice (only high-carb diet I lost weight on)

• ex150-15

• ex150nosauce+ACV-1

• ex150nosauce+ACV-2

• ex150creamsauce+ACV

• ex_acv_fast (6 day fast, my longest yet!)

• ex_bread+butter (well, I started it 3 days before end of the year, lol)

Wow, 17 experiments! Not bad if I say so myself.

The ratio here is interesting; I learned nothing new in almost any of these experiments. The only things I learned this year were:

• The only starch so far I tolerate ad-lib is rice

• I can tolerate it quite well if in a super plain diet, even lose weight on it

• Vinegar is amazing, even in small doses

• Cutting the sauce from my diet (polyol pathway theory) has a similar effect size to supplementing vinegar

That’s 4 things learned from 17 experiments, or about 23%.

Science man. Most things don’t work out, but those that do can have amazing effects. If you experiment a lot and almost everything fails, keep going! Try weird and crazy things.

If you don’t fail a lot, you’re not experimenting much.

How many posts did I write?

I wrote exactly 40 posts in 2025. My goal is one per week, but sometimes I’m too busy or don’t have any inspiring ideas at the time.

Given that I did 17 experiments, almost half of the posts were reports on experiments I’d done, and the rest were my general musings/rants/ideas and a few book reviews. It doesn’t look like I had a “gear post” this year, which is mostly because I bought almost no new cooking stuff. The things I have are just mostly great at this point, and I don’t see a point in buying more.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t list & link all 40 posts, you can check them out on the archive page.

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Web Tools

Did you know that I released a bunch of web tools like visualizers, calculators, and so on? You can find an overview on the Tools page.

I guess I don’t promote these enough, because people often tell me that they’ve been following me for a long time and had no idea I made them.

Many of these tools I use on a daily basis, for example the Foodulator, which lets you look up very nerdy numbers & ratios for any foods in the USDA database, which is the same database nearly all nutrient/ingredient sites pull their data from.

This year I mostly made smaller additions to some existing tools.

A visualizer to chart obesity trends over time, by country:

And a similar tool to visualize seed oil supply trends by country:

Yes yes, I know the obvious thing is to combine these and get a correlation between obesity and seed oil supply per country.

Unfortunately, the datasets are somewhat disjointed, cover vastly different time periods, and the countries in existence have changed a surprising amount in the time frame covered. Some countries have split up, others have joined, yet others simply changed their name (looking at you, “Türkiye!”).

I still want to do it, but it’s not a 30 minute project.

F(a/o)iled plans

Oh boy! I actually had big plans for this year.

If you weren’t around then, I actually ran an ex150 trial with 10 people in 2023. 7 of the 10 people finished, and lost 9.6lbs on average.

I was going to run another trial this year, maybe pitting ex150 against a rice or potato diet. I was also going to make a custom web app to facilitate this, e.g. allowing people to check in daily with their weight measurements and so on.

But how does that saying go, everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face? Just kidding, I didn’t get punched in the face. But life happens, you get busy with other things..

Both running a trial and maintaining web apps is quite a commitment, and I want to be ready to give it a good shot. I’d rather not run a trial than run a shoddy one with broken stuff when I don’t have the time to support people adequately.

Just as a feeler, let me know in the comments or via email if you’d be interested in participating in such a 30 day trial. And even if you’re not interested personally, what sort of diets would you like to see tested? Heavy cream diet, potato diet, rice diet.. so many options! I think it would be fun to have several “arms” of the trial “competing.”

Plans for 2026

I’m still pretty busy, so I’m not 100% committing to running a trial this year, although I’d really love to if possible.

As for my personal diet experiments, I continue to just feel the best and lose the most weight on ex150-style heavy cream diets, with very limited protein.

But I did surprisingly well on the white rice diets, and I would be curious to run that for a bit longer by making it a little more sustainable than JUST white rice. Maybe a Grant Genereux style rice/beans/beef “prison diet?”

If I can dial this in to be pretty sustainable, I might try and do 3-6 months in a row, just to see if that actually depletes linoleic acid faster than my heavy cream diet, as I’ve speculated before. Of course, that’s if it doesn’t make me gain fat if I move away from just pure plain white rice.

Other experiment ideas involve testing out some of the boundaries of ex150 more, e.g. how much protein exactly can I eat before I gain fat? Maybe start working out again and very slowly increase the protein amount to make up for the extra demand? Try something besides just beef, maybe eggs? Cycle the protein on ex150 with low-protein and high-protein days?

I think there’s a very good chance that, at this point, I just need to slowly but steadily deplete the linoleic acid in my adipose tissue. That’ll take a couple more years even if I do everything right. Maybe low-fat diets, fasting, or certain other specific diets will accelerate this, but nobody seems to know, all we have is some anecdotes.

At this point, though, eating low-PUFA and even eating a pretty extreme heavy cream diet is just.. normal.. for me. Preferable, even. I am happy every time I get back on ex150.

It’s nice to now be able to eat carbs without ruining my sleep, or without getting acid reflux like I used to. But I still feel bloated, I don’t get as good satiety on pretty much any carbs except plain white rice, and it’s more expensive & inconvenient than just heavy cream.

Here’s to a happy & experimentally interesting 2026!

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The new edition, just released, is therefore valid from 2026-2030 and is available at https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf. You can get a little slideshow preview at realfood.gov.

Media Splash and “Experts”

After the release, there was a big media splash. Unfortunately, since RFK Jr. is considered a “very controversial figure” most of the reports didn’t seem particularly objective. You already knew if you liked or hated him, and the opinions on his changed guidelines pretty much followed party lines.

Which is kind of wild, given that you’d think health & nutrition would be a common problem or common cause.

The critiques the new guidelines were sort of funny. Kind of like when talking with vegans, I find myself agreeing with part of what they’re saying for mostly different reasons, and still being misaligned for 90% of recommendation.

For example, many critiques involved pushing back against RFK Jr.’s recommendation to increase protein, e.g. from animal sources.

I am on record as saying Please Eat Less Protein and have been on a heavily protein-restricted diet for 3 years now. I think a lot of people (maybe 30%?) can benefit a lot from protein restriction.

That said, all the articles by “experts” that I see criticizing protein increases in the new guidelines warned that red meat comes with saturated fat and cholesterol, and will clog your arteries and give you heart attacks. Of course I massively disagree with that. In my own diet, I replaced the protein from red meat with.. heavy cream, aka more saturated fat.

The entire field of “experts” in nutrition doesn’t agree on almost anything, and what they agree on is largely wrong in my view.

My dietary views are influenced by a decade of keto, and before that, 5 years of paleo. The last 3 years, I’ve also gotten heavily into the seed oil debate and less common things like protein restriction.

I therefore don’t fit into any mainstream camp well, and pretty much any diet opinion is going to be orthogonal to me, be it from experts or not.

My Opinion: The new Guidelines are Mostly Great

Both in terms of the big talking points and most of the details, I think the new guidelines are a huge improvement. This is the first thing you see when you visit realfood.gov:

Now I’m on the record making fun of “real food” and “ultra-processed food.” But we’re talking about very broad guidelines for the entire population here, not trying to pinpoint the exact cause of obesity.

One of my main points against the “real food vs. UPF” dichotomy is that I regained 100lbs eating a keto diet of 95% “real, whole foods.” And I didn’t lose any weight when first going paleo.

In short, I think that “processing” doesn’t mean much, and there are many highly “processed” foods that are fine, and many mostly unprocessed foods that contribute to disease and obesity.

With that said, I do think that reducing the amount of what is currently on the market as “ultra-processed food” and what most people think when they hear the term, would be a huge benefit.

Even though the technical (NOVA) definition of UPF is nonsense, aka not every “processed” food is unhealthy, and not every “unprocessed” food healthy, I think reducing the whole category would still be very beneficial.

After all, what most people think of when they hear “ultra-processed food” is stuff like doritos, oreos, and so on. These products are among the biggest offenders in terms of sneaking seed oils into the Standard American Diet.

It’s estimated that 25% of total calories (!) of the SAD are from seed oils. And that’s not because people are knowingly guzzling soybean oil. It’s mostly because these oils are used in manufacturing the cheapest, shittiest “processed foods.”

You can play this game at any Walmart or even truck stop: pick up random “food” items and guess if they contain a seed oil. Chances are, you win. My friends & family hate me because I constantly play this game with them and I never lose. NEVER!

Everything contains seed oils: bread, crackers, cookies, gummy bears (??), dried fruit (???), mayo (literally just soybean oil), pizza, salad dressings (flavored soybean oil), pasta sauces, hamburger buns, fried chicken, french fries, that conveniently packaged “vegetable mix”..

The dietary guidelines have to be simple, and they have to move the entire population. On average, pushing the average American slightly away from consuming “ultra-processed foods” is a big win.

If this was all RFK Jr. did, I’d already be very happy. Removing “UPF” and recommending “real food” is a huge win, even if neither is well-defined.

Just like with the old food pyramid, not 100% of the population are going to follow them 100%. But nudging some proportion of the population away from the cliff is great.

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What else?

Besides Eat Real Food, what else is new in the guidelines? Honestly, not that much. The rest is mainly clarification on what you SHOULD eat, i.e. a list of foods that are not processed foods.

It’s best illustrated by the “upside-down food pyramid” that comes with it and has been shared widely:

I’ll spare the the South Park screenshot because, at this point, everybody has seen it. In short, the idea of turning the food pyramid upside down was literally the joke in a South Park episode.

In short, the new pyramid keeps copious vegetables & fruits. It adds back meat & similar animal products like eggs & dairy as 1st-grade, recommended ingredients.

Interestingly, it contains almost nothing high in omega-6 linoleic acid, the “bad” fat: the highest sources I can see are the nuts, the fatty parts of the whole roast chicken, and some percentage will be contained in olive & avocado oil, even if they’re unadulterated (which is unlikely to begin with). In addition, I don’t see ANY pork (high in PUFA, especially bacon) and the bread & grains we see are looking like oats, rice, & artisanally baked sourdough bread, not the off-the-shelf stuff made with soybean oil.

I am very pleased.

It keeps whole grains, but puts them at the (bottom) tip of the pyramid, whereas they made up the bulk (base) of the pyramid in the infamous “old, bad” food pyramid.

Notice that the entire bottom layer of the old pyramid is bread, grains, pasta, crackers, rice, etc.

Vegetables & fruit were prominent then, and they still are in RFK Jr.’s version. The tip of the old pyramid, “use sparingly,” is fats, oils, & sweets. RFK Jr.’s version leaves out sweets completely, and the graphic, at least, focuses on “natural” fats like butter, olive oil, and avocados, instead of lumping all fats together. I think this is a big improvement. We were eating beef tallow, olives, avocados, butter, and full-fat milk for millennia before the obesity epidemic. They are not the same as seed oils.

Notice also that this “old, bad” food pyramid is actually from 1992. It hasn’t been the official guideline for a long time, yet people like hating on it. I suspect this is 1. because it was the first such visual, 2. it came out when millennials and Gen Xers were kids or young adults, 3. the concepts haven’t actually changed much since, even if the graphic did.

The last iteration didn’t have a pyramid graphic, but instead showed the recommended MyPlate:

(Don’t bother going to myplate.gov, they apparently changed the content and are just linking to RFK Jr.’s new guidelines.)

Brioritize Brotein

The new guidelines put an emphasis “prioritizing protein.”

Now I am a vocal opponent of prioritizing protein except in special cases: elderly people or similar populations that have trouble eating.

I don’t think most Americans are deficient in protein. The Standard American Diet is 16% protein, which is more than enough for almost everyone. 10% would be enough for almost everyone.

Still, I think that this will likely have a net-positive impact on a population level, at least until companies start putting “High protein!” on 100% of the junk food. (There’s already a huge push for this, you can buy “high protein!” everything now.)

Still, in combination with the “real food” message, I suspect it’ll push the average person away from the doritos and toward the ground beef, which would be beneficial. Or at least, I hope so. More on the unintended consequences of food guidelines later.

There is a group of people (I estimate maybe 30%?) who actually benefit & get healthier from eating LESS protein. I am among them.

But I think we can address that once we get people a bit away from eating 25% of their heat units from literal seed oils hidden junk foods. Protein does not lend itself to being adulterated with seed oils, not like carbs do. Even if you cook a steak in seed oils, it’ll only retain a little bit. You have to cover it in batter to give the seed oils something to soak into.

So unless everybody moves to more fried chicken, I think “moar protein” will be a net benefit. Again, on a population level - we should be ready to advise those this isn’t helping to actually try LESS protein for a bit.

On the specific amounts of protein recommended: the new guidelines suggest 1.2-1.6g of protein per kilogram of body weight, which is about 0.54-0.72g/lb.

I can’t find any per-weight recommendations in the old guidelines, but they give “ounce equivalents” of meat per total caloric intake. For adults, that seems to range from about 6oz at 2,000kcal to 8oz at 3,200kcal, their upper limit.

6oz is just over the 150g/day beef I eat on ex150, or about 7.5% protein. That’s an extreme level of protein restriction, if it’s your only source of protein. 8oz is 224g, half a pound, or 8.5% of total intake.

They also include dairy, grain & legume recommendations, which will contain some more protein.

Still, the old dietary recommendations advised what is, in the modern American context, a very-low-protein diet, close to the most extreme level of protein restriction I’ve observed in myself, others, and studies.

Now I don’t think most people need the 16% the average American eats, but also most people probably don’t need to restrict nearly as much as I do at 6%.

Make of it what you want, but RFK Jr. moved the recommendation from “very low protein” (that nobody was following) to “medium to high-protein”, which everyone is already doing. You can play around with a visualizer I made here, which shows the relation between protein intake & its percentage of total dietary intake:

macros.exfatloss.com

Here you can see that 0.55g protein/lb of body weight is just at the beginning of “high protein diet” for someone with what I’d consider a normal TEE of 3,215kcal/day.

Given that almost nobody but vegans and maybe seniors and me was eating as low protein as the old guidelines recommended, I don’t think it’ll change much.

People like meat and they’ll keep eating it. If they shift from fried chicken to ground beef I’m happy. If not, it doesn’t matter.

Dairy!

This one’s kind of funny to me. I love dairy, always have. By far my favorite food group. My current diet is almost entirely heavy cream.

But it’s still sort of funny how divisive dairy is as a category. It’s been extra demonized by some “experts,” maybe because it’s the big divider between vegetarian and vegan? Or because it’s one of the most saturated fat sources? Not sure.

Equally funny, RFK Jr. seems enamored with dairy, being apparently a proponent of raw milk. I remember that “experts” in my childhood thought dairy was extra important for growing kids, and maybe it is. It’s hard to tell what was the milk lobby back then, and which part of the anti-dairy back swing has been equally untrue.

In any case, the new guidelines have a separate point to advise you to eat dairy:

This is the THIRD point after “Eat the amount right for you” and “Prioritize Protein.” Podium finish for dairy. Impressive.

The old guidelines also included dairy, for the calcium, but recommended going low-fat or no-fat because they were scared of saturated fat.

They also recommend soy milk and such to replace dairy, which I of course think is a terrible idea.

So while dairy had a special spot and still does, the actual recommendations have completely changed: RFK Jr. explicitly wants you to consume full-fat dairy.

I think reversing the low-fat nonsense is a great change, saturated fat harmed nobody.

On the other hand, “dairy” is such a broad category that I’m not sure it’s useful. I eat tons of heavy cream every day, but pretty much zero milk or cheese or yogurt, except during refeeds.

Whey protein powder is dairy, and I don’t think anybody needs to eat that.

Dairy is just too broad.

That said, I think on a population level this will be a positive shift, because it’ll nudge some people out of their fear of saturated fats. It might also shift people from higher protein (skim milk) to higher fat (full-fat dairy) which is a good, if small, shift. Everyone’s already getting enough protein anyway.

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De-demonizing Saturated Fats

Another change I like is this:

Beef tallow!

RFK Jr. completely reverses the saturated fat-phobic old guidelines, recommending what people have eaten forever. He doesn’t recommend ANY seed oils except eating actual seeds, and he recommends many fat sources high in saturated fats (e.g. beef tallow, butter, dairy).

He does mention essential fatty acids, which is sort of nonsense, but at least he advises you to eat olive oil instead of soybean or canola. Of course, even beef tallow and butter contain enough of the essential fatty acids, but at least he’s not recommending soybean oil for them..

Funny: in the right column of that screenshot, they still recommend only 10% of total carolies coming from saturated fat, and limiting highly processed food to achieve this.

10% is also the old number, I believe, and it’s completely incompatible with the left column, which recommends you add tallow, butter, full-fat dairy, and red meat.

In addition, most “highly processed food” is actually higher in PUFAs than SFAs, because seed oils are cheaper than beef tallow. With the “more research” bit on there, I suspect they didn’t want to commit to going full anti-seed oil yet.

I don’t think a single American ever targeted the 10% of saturated fat calories limit anyway. Some vegans probably reached it for ethical reasons, and everybody else ignored it.

The much bigger impact will come from the picture of steak & eggs, and the general rhetoric recommending full-fat “real foods” and ceasing to demonize saturated fats in general.

After the push to avoid UPFs, this is probably my second favorite change. I just think that “avoid UPFs” actually leads to much bigger reductions in PUFA than this point in most people.

Hole Grains

The last of the big bullet points is a focus on whole grains:

This recommendation isn’t that different to the MyPlate’s recommendation of 50% whole grains. Even the 1992 pyramid showed several whole-grain loaves of bread along its pasta and crackers.

I suppose it’s a slight shift in the less-refined direction, but the bigger shift is probably reducing grains from the base of the pyramid to the tip. The 1992 pyramid recommends 6-11 servings of grains a day, now down to 2-4.

It’s likely that the overall impact of this would be slightly positive. Most of the grains most Americans eat are packaged bread, crackers, tortillas, rolls, and so on. These are almost always made with seed oils, they’re fortified, grown with glyphosate, and so on.

I just wrote an entire post about what I recently learned about modern “bread” and what’s wrong with it.

That said, grains per se is a very wide category and modern bread is really the ultra-processed variant of it. If people switched from 6-11 servings of soybean oil-crackers to 6-11 servings of white rice or steel rolled, organic oats, that would probably have nearly the same health impact as just not eating any grains.

So it’s another one of those “Yes, but what will people ACTUALLY do?” ones.

Comparison with the last guidelines

The last guidelines wasn’t actually the 1992 food pyramid, even though everyone remembers that one.

Before we actually look at it, let’s point out that RFK Jr. explicitly focuses on the track record.

If you go to realfood.gov, you’ll be treated to a slideshow of Americans’ health status:

I think this focus on the data is great. Let’s be clear; American health policy has been an ABJECT FAILURE for my entire life.

You can argue that the 1992 pyramid or the MyPlate didn’t mean to do this, but they also clearly haven’t reversed these unhealthy trends. They haven’t even arrested or slowed them down!

It’s useful to argue “what did they intend to achieve” vs “what did they actually achieve.” We can’t judge programs and methods on their intentions, we have to look at the outcomes.

Of course this swings both ways: if the trends don’t get better after 5, 10, 15, 30 years of RFK Jr.’s “Eat Real Food” then we’ll also have to admit that he failed.

Saturated Fat Hysteria

In comparing the new and the old guidelines, we’ve seen that they aren’t necessarily that different overall. Both mention whole grains, both mention dairy. Both really like vegetables & fruits.

Yes, protein recommendations are up from “very low” to “normal/high.”

But to me, the biggest difference is that the old guidelines were, quite obviously, guided by a hysterical phobia of saturated fat.

The crazy thing is, they are from 2020. The irrational saturated fat-phobia, started by Ancel Keyes in the 1960s, has always been a total sham. But I could understand if you propagated it in the 1960s or maybe even 1980s. Maybe you just didn’t know.

But in 2020? We’ve known for decades now that the fear of saturated fat was always made up and never underpinned by any science.

By 2020, people had organized in big keto forums and groups for decades. I was keto 5 years before that point, which followed about a decade of learning about saturated fat & its history online. Paleo got big in the 2005-2010 era. Nina Teicholz wrote a whole book about the unjust demonization of saturated fat in 2014:

Now most people who believe SFA isn’t unhealthy, and who follow Nina Teicholz, are low-carb, paleo, carnivore, or keto people.

But that isn’t at all required. The big trend on r/SaturatedFat has been, for over a year now, a starch-based high-carb, low-fat diet.

It turns out saturated fats are great, but your body can also just make them. If you eat starches, your body WILL just make saturated and monounsaturated fat.

But the main effect of demonizing saturated fats was to push people towards polyunsaturated fats. This might not have been the intended effect, but it was the result. More on this later.

Almost the entirety of the old dietary guidelines is a result of the saturated fat-hysteria:

• Eat lean meats, avoid fatty red meats

• Low-fat/skim dairy, use soy “milk” instead

• The only foods they recommend in quantities are grains, fruits, and vegetables, all of which are (nearly) free of saturated fats

• If you cook, use seed oils:

Fats are THE difference in the new guidelines

This is the main reason I’m extremely bullish on RFK Jr.’s new guidelines. The main difference is that saturated fat is no longer demonized. Even the “more protein!” recommendation largely follows this pattern, since the old ones were scared of protein mainly because people associate it with dairy and meat.

We can quibble a bit about the optimal amounts of protein per se, or how grains actually didn’t do anything by themselves.

But in terms of what most people will take away from the new guidelines, if anything: saturated fat is ok again.

And even in the mainstream, this change is quite late: most mainstream institutions stopped demonizing saturated fat years or even decades ago. The science never really supported it, but that has become clearer and clearer over time.

Still hysterically demonizing saturated fat in 2020 was, frankly, insane. Everything else was just downstream.

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“Nobody followed the pyramid exactly!”

One point I see repeatedly from people on various sides is that nobody ACTUALLY did the exact food pyramid, and nobody ACTUALLY ate the exact MyPlate.

But that’s besides the point. Demonizing saturated fat was like yelling “FIRE!” in a crowded theater.

It doesn’t matter that you didn’t “mean to” cause a stampede that gets people trampled to death, because that is the predictable effect.

Even if you yelled “FIRE! Please exit calmly and carefully!” you can’t be surprised if people start panicking and rushing for the exits.

The 2020 dietary guidelines EXPLICITLY tell you to avoid saturated fats like butter, and to choose oils high in polyunsaturated fats. They also suggest as high as 34g of oils per day. If you were to choose the seed oils high in PUFAs as recommended, you’d get an insane amount of unhealthy linoleic acid even if you ate zero processed foods or nuts:

But that pretty much doesn’t matter. People don’t read the detailed guidelines and measure out exactly 34g of soybean oil.

The main “vibe” of the old guidelines, since Ancel Keyes in the 1960s all the way up until RFK Jr. released the new guidelines in 2026, was that SATURATED FAT WILL MURDER YOU.

In a society like America of the 1960s (or frankly, any western country) the response was obvious. Americans weren’t going to switch to a high-starch, low-fat diet like Japan was eating, or go to the equivalent but with oats.

The American diet was high in refined grains, somewhat high in sugar, and high in fats from beef and dairy.

If you yelled “SATURATED FAT!” in this very swampy theater, people were never going to rush towards the plain rice diet. They were always going to rush towards the other way of keeping their high-fat, high-carb, mixed diet: they were going to use margarine, shortening, and use seed oils for cooking and baking.

And, worse, the big companies and institutions would do it for them.

Institutional Impact

Another very underappreciated aspect of “But nobody followed the old guidelines!” is institutions.

It would be great if Americans cooked all their meals at home, but it’s not what happens. People eat at restaurants. They eat prepared foods from the store. They eat in school cafeterias, hospital cafeterias, or at their workplace.

These cafeterias, and the big food companies, don’t do their own diet research. They follow - shocking - the official government guidelines!

Even if every home-cooked meal was 0% in accordance with the dietary guidelines, a huge percentage of meals consumed in America would be influenced by the guidelines. Everyone at a hospital, be it patient or employee, would eat by the dietary guidelines. Every kid in school. Every student in a college or university. Everyone in the military.

And even the regular restaurants & packaged foods would be impacted; big food companies just follow the rules & regulations on the margin. Why? Because it’s easier than going against the grain or doing your own research.

Sure, there are many products that don’t follow the (old or new) dietary guidelines. But if a company is making a new product, and it doesn’t particularly matter for them what decision to make on a specific point (say, which fats to add to some junk food), and the price point is similar, they’ll probably follow the guidelines.

If you do what everybody does, and what’s officially recommended, you won’t get in trouble.

There’s a saying in computering: Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but it summarizes this corporate, bureaucratic mindset well.

If you take a stand by adding beef tallow or butter to your crackers, you might one day have to defend that decision: in an actual court, to your new CEO, to screaming activists, or just the court of public opinion.

Just like McDonald’s switched from using beef tallow for their fries to using seed oils in the 1990s due to a public pressure campaign, Big Food Companies everywhere have very little interest in being in the news, being bullied by outraged activists.

Hence, when the guidelines recommend they avoid saturated fat and use seed oils instead, they follow those guidelines.

I don’t know what percentage of meals eaten in America are influenced by some form of institutional food production. There’s a spectrum. E.g. it’s literally illegal for schools, the military, senior homes, and hospitals to break the guidelines (if you disagree, frankly, fuck off. I know how incentive-based federal spending policy works).

So there is a percentage (10-20%?) of people who are legally REQUIRED to eat what the guidelines tell them.

Other groups are more loosely influenced, often just on the margins. Maybe the effective rate is about 30-50%, I don’t know.

But it’s obviously a huge amount, and even if no American ever cooked according to the dietary guidelines at all, they have a MASSIVE effect on American food consumption.

Conclusion

The U.S. dietary guidelines literally told people to replace beef fat & butter with seed oils, and the American people followed this advice, be it voluntarily or through institutions:

Crazy increase in seed oils after Ancel Keyes came out with the fraudulent saturated fat-hysteria in the 1960s. Probably a coincidence.

Let’s hope that these new guidelines will reverse the effect, at least partly. Heck, I’d settle for slowing the trend down!

At 75% overweight, 45% obesity, and 50% pre/diabetic, we don’t have much room. What are we going to do, just be 100% obese & diabetic? Who’s going to pick up the trash?

Even if you don’t like RFK Jr., and even if you don’t think everybody should be a steak-eating, high-protein carnivore bro, the health trend in this country has been insanely bad.

And I don’t care if you think the previous guidelines were intentionally wrong or just incompetent & nobody followed them; their effect was predictable either way. And even if you don’t think they could’ve predicted what happened back then, we can see it now. Hindsight is 20/20.

Let’s turn this ship around before we get to 100% diabesity.

On Twitter, Siohban Huggins posted this:

And my honest response was:

It’s not keto, but not everyone needs keto. Maybe some people inherently can’t tolerate gluten, or something else in bread, fine. Some people might not do great on lots of dairy. Ok, sure.

But it’s a huge broadside against the idiotic saturated fat-hysteria we’ve had to endure since the 1960s, and will hopefully lead people back to healthy fats.

Even if we get into PUFA technicalities, I have a hard time quibbling with it:

Sure, modern chickens are very high in linoleic acid. Olive oil can be up to 20% LA and is often adulterated. Nuts can be very high in LA and should be eaten seasonally or in moderation.

But THAT’S IT. It doesn’t even have bacon, or any pork as far as I can tell.

This food pyramid is better than anything I would’ve DREAMED of seeing in my lifetime.

Good job, Bobby. Making America Healthy Again is not political, everyone should be for it. Your dad would be proud of you.

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tl;dr: I ate bread for 11 days.

This one was a bit special. For one, I pretty much expected it to fail - in the sense that I wouldn’t lose any weight.

Second, mixing bread & butter is the first swamp experiment I’ve tried since I started seriously experimenting in late 2022.

Third, reintroducing bread, unlike other carbs like rice or sugar, sort of goes full circle to the beginnings of my dietary escapades.

It’s just bread, bro

As I wrote about in 19 Fat Loss Experiments I’ve Tried & Failed At, I started doing the Paleo diet in my early 20s because I had started getting debilitating acid reflux from eating bread, or wheat in general. I couldn’t sleep at night from the painful reflux, even elevating my head.

Paleo gurus were telling me that this was due to bread, or grain, or modern grain, or modern wheat in particular, being uniquely bad.

So I cut out the bread & most other grains and my reflux got much, much better. I’d say 90% less reflux. I went from being unable to fall asleep most nights to not having ANY issue most days, with maybe 1-2 very mild incidents a week.

I still noticed that lying on my side would cause issues more so than lying on my stomach or back, and that drinking lots of coffee on an empty stomach gave me acid reflux, as did lots of tomato sauce.

I could still eat rice, which gave me zero issues, and I ate low-carb-paleoish-but-with-rice for a while. This was great for the acid reflux, but did nothing for weight loss.

This was before I even did keto, so more than 10 years ago. Obviously my 10 years of keto involved eating near-zero amounts of bread and grains, including not eating any rice.

Over that time frame my acid reflux stayed roughly in the 90%-reduced range, maybe even getting a bit better over time. I remember still noticing the coffee & tomato issues about 5 years ago, when I had regained 100lbs while maintaining a strict keto & wheat free diet. But also it being basically a non-issue, just a bit annoying 1-2x a week.

Then I started ex150, my heavy cream diet, in late 2022. Besides immediately losing tons of fat effortlessly, it also improved my digestion & acid reflux from levels I considered “normal, fine” to 11/10 levels I did not know were possible.

I think I’ve had acid reflux… 1 time in the last year or so? And it was extremely mild. Barely an inconvenience.

Long story short, bread was more than “carbs” for me. Bread was the final boss of eating carbs, way worse than the rice I knew I tolerated well, or the sugar that I had tried as part of the honey or sugar diets.

Bread was the original reason I had given up carbs.. half my life ago. Wow. (I think I was around 22 when I went mostly Paleo.)

I have since stopped buying the Paleo argument as explained in my post RIP PALEO.

The evolutionary logic just doesn’t hold up, that’s not how genetics or evolution work. Also, sort of like the big hole in low-carb is “But what about Asians eating rice and being thin?” there was a pretty big hole in the anti-bread/grain argument: The entirety of Western Civilization ate a high-grain, mostly-bread diet for most of the last 2,000 years or longer.

My grandparents had eaten bread for nearly every meal their entire lives. My parents had eaten bread for nearly every meal their entire lives.

Heck, I PERSONALLY had eaten bread (or cereal, but those are also grains) for nearly every meal my entire life until my 20s. There were many days on which I ate entire loaves of bread as a teenager, and it was mostly fine.

So how did I develop a huge bread/grain/wheat intolerance in my late teens or early 20s, to a food that’s been a staple of my dietary culture forever?

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Enter UK Bread Lady

As I’ve gotten more into Modern PUFA Theory (MPT) the last 2 years and started experimenting with carbs, I noticed that my lifelong Non-24 sleep/wake disorder was gone. For the first time in my life, I could eat carbs and keep a stable sleep rhythm. This had been one of the big reasons that I kept at keto for 10 years even after regaining 100lbs on it.

In fact, people ask me to this day why I stuck with keto for years after regaining 100lbs, instead of trying something else.

Dude, not being able to sleep is WAY worse than being morbidly obese. Easy choice.

Anyway, my newfound ability to tolerate crabohydrates led me to experiment with the honey diet, sugar diet, rice diets, .. so much freedom! None of these worked anywhere near as well as my 90% fat, super ketogenic heavy cream diet. But they also didn’t totally wreck me (except the sugar diet lol). I stayed weight stable on the honey diet & rice with tomato sauce. I even lost quite a bit of weight on plain rice!

My confidence in my ability to tolerate The Devil’s Macro slowly built up, and I was eager to read a series of posts on the subreddit r/PlasticObesity, an offshoot of r/SaturatedFat.

The subreddit is mostly about the introduction of plastics & plasticizers into our food supply, but prolific redditor Extension_Band_8138 there wrote a phenomenal series on the history of Real Bread (tm) and how bread has been bastardized into the absurdity we see on our grocery shelves today.

I highly recommend her entire series The Story of Bread:

• Real Bread

• Roller Milling

• The Green Revolution

• The Chorleywood Process

• Bread in the 21st Century

• Other Grains

In short: bread, maybe because it’s been such a staple of Western civilization, and is a much more complex product compared to e.g. rice, has been adulterated to a degree that few other foods have.

You could argue that bread was the original “ultra-processed food”: even in The Olden Days, it involved lots of physical milling, various ingredients, relatively complex mixing, leavening, and baking procedures and techniques.

Modern bread might somewhat look like real bread (tm), but the grains, the milling processes, the storage, the pesticides, the ingredients, duration, and mixing/rising/baking techniques have all fundamentally changed.

Let me quote Wikipedia on bread:

The Chorleywood bread process was developed in 1961; it uses the intense mechanical working of dough to dramatically reduce the fermentation period and the time taken to produce a loaf. The process, whose high-energy mixing allows for the use of grain with a lower protein content, is now widely used around the world in large factories. As a result, bread can be produced very quickly and at low costs to the manufacturer and the consumer. However, there has been some criticism of the effect on nutritional value.

This industrial process, invented in 1961, quickly replaced nearly all commercial bread around the world (or at least in the West). Traditional bread that your grandmother would’ve bought from the local baker was replaced with an industrial product that was cheap, easy to make in high quantities, did not go stale as quickly & therefore lasted longer on shelves.

Consequences would never be the same.

These bread posts really inspired me to try some Real Bread (tm), now that I could eat carbs. I even fantasized about buying my own counter top stone mill, purchasing organic (=non-fortified, non-glyphosate) grains, and baking my own daily bread from that.

The bread of my childhood had not all been traditional, Real Bread (tm). But my mom had gotten into baking her own bread for a couple of years, and I remember my grandma baking a lot, too. There had been a very nifty artisanal-style bakery not too far from where I grew up, and I remember it fondly.

Maybe my problems with bread started developing when I moved out and unknowingly started buying commercial chorleywood bread made with soybean oil, fortified with who knows what, sprayed & dried with glyphosate?

The timing also lined up pretty well: if this process was invented in 1961, and all these things presumably got worse over the last 20 years, it would make sense that I tolerated bread better in the first half of my life than the last.

Hole Bread?

For my experiment I obviously only considered artisanal, non-fortified, non-seed oil bread. So I found an artisanal bakery that sold bread made without any oils, with organic flour, non-fortified, no glyphosate. They even used traditional methods of baking, which take way longer than the industrial chorleywood method.

You know, the type of baker who gets up at midnight so the bread will be ready, crusty & warm & still gooey on the inside, when you get to the bakery at 8am.

I actually did go pretty early a few days, and the bread was indeed 1. still warm and 2. still gooey on the inside. Manna from heaven!

The bread looked, felt, and tasted completely different. Even commercial “brown bread” or “whole grain bread” is basically a scam. Compare these pictures from Wikipedia:

This is “brown bread” or “whole grain bread” but it looks exactly the same as Wonderbread.. it’s just.. brown. They sprinkled 3 poppy seed over every slice or some oats, but you can tell just by looking at it that is has the consistency of a sponge.

Now look at this:

By God. It LOOKS solid. You can see it has the consistency of an oven-fired brick. This sort of bread counts as a lethal weapon in 23 states. Not just are the grains in it whole, you can probably find a whole field mouse in there.

This bakery had wheat bread, but they also carried lots of other grains: rye, spelt, barley, oat, millet, probably more that I’ve never heard of.

Even their “white bread” was a dark grey color at best.

Besides the non-uniform appearance in shape and color, the biggest giveaway was the texture. You couldn’t compress these loaves like a sponge, like you can even with “whole grain” Chorleywood bread.

These loaves were thick like bricks. The slices were full and not very airy, unlike most commercial bread.

The bread would also go stale incredibly quickly. I’m talking same day. If I bought a loaf in the morning, it’d be noticeably stale by that same evening. The next morning, it was definitely still edible, but would taste quite dry and stale.

This is probably due to the lack of soybean oil, which they mix into commercial Chorleywood bread to prevent it from going stale on the shelves.

I think the longest I had a loaf sitting around was 2 days, and by that time, you basically had to dunk it in coffee to get it down. Which I did.

Rules of the Game

My rules were simple:

• I could only eat fancy, artisanal bread and butter

• I could eat it ad libitum

• I could drink coffee with cream until 3pm

• I could drink non-caloric energy drinks & diet soda (because reasons)

• Oh, yea, I would continue to take the apple cider vinegar capsules I’ve been taking for a couple of months now.

Because bread usually contains some salt anyway, I didn’t particularly limit salt for this experiment. I obviously also didn’t pour any salt onto my bread, but I sometimes used salted butter when available, and I drank some Monster energy drinks, which are relatively high in sodium.

Not having had any bread in over a decade, I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of: how much bread + butter would I eat, intuitively, eating to satiety? How would satiety work with bread and butter?

This was also my first foray into the metabolic swamp of carbs + fat in years.. how would I fare?

And what happened?

Pretty quickly I established the following:

• Eating ad-lib, I would eat about 1.5 loaves per day on average. Of course this depended on the very irregular size of the artisanal loaves. Some types of bread were also much thicker/heavier than others.

• A pound of bread is estimated to have about 1,300kcal, so 1.5 loaves per day is just under 2,000kcal. But, of course, I was eating that with lots of butter and drinking coffee with heavy cream on top.

• I went through more than half a brick of butter per day on average, which is another 900kcal at least.

• I would get both full & satiated on bread+butter eventually, but it would take quite a lot of bread and a surprising amount of carolies.

• It was VERY easy to overeat. Bread is DELICIOUS, especially fancy, artisanal, fresh, warm bread with a hard crust and a gooey center. Add butter on top.. oh my.

• I would EASILY eat 1,000-1,500kcal in one sitting before I would get any satiety.

• Compared to heavy cream on ex150, the satiety came on very slowly and subtly. It was very easy to overeat and ignore the satiety signal. There would eventually be a “hard stop” feeling, but I would estimate it took over 2,000kcal in a single sitting before I would get a strong stop signal at all.

• Despite commonly eating 1,500-2,000kcal in a single sitting, I would be quite hungry again only 4-6h later. I would say that satiety lasted longer than on white rice (2-4h), but rarely longer than 6h. Even if I ate a giant meal of bread+butter right before bed, I’d be very hungry in the morning, 8-9h later.

• It was very easy to make myself sick this way, because the gap between “I could stop eating” and “I couldn’t continue eating” was so wide. On ex150, they are one and the same: I get hit with satiety onset so rapidly I dubbed it “cement-truck satiety.” With plain rice, I could only eat so much because it’s so low in energy density - by the time I was getting any amount of serious energy, I was physically filled to the brim - even if that only lasted 2-4h. But on this, it was sort of the worst of both worlds: I could eat insane amounts of carolies, the satiety would come very slowly and permit me to overeat by 100% or more, and then would still only last a few hours (4-6h).

• Curiously, I noticed that I would get “butter satiety” before “bread satiety” almost every time. I would still be hungry, but unable to stomach any more bread with butter. First I got really confused, then I realized.. I could just eat dry bread? So I did that. Typically, I would eat 1-2 slices of dry bread once I hit the “butter satiety” feeling. The butter satiety felt a lot like cement-truck satiety - a slight nausea. Yet, curiously, I would still be hungry in general/for something else!

• As expected from this satiety dynamic, I gained weight. That said, I didn’t gain nearly as much as expected! More on this later.

• I also did not get ANY acid reflux the entire time. My digestion certainly wasn’t as good as on the heavy cream diet: a constant feeling of bloat, similar to the rice diet. Pretty uncomfortable, even though I sort of got used to it.

• I also got pretty gassy, which was annoying. I get gas so infrequently on the heavy cream diet that it’s pretty much non-existent. With the bread.. let’s just say I was my own worst enemy.

• To reiterate, ZERO ACID REFLUX or anything of the sort. Now I only lasted 11 days, but still! With bread being the Final Boss that made me go Paleo in chapter 1 (before the title screen), I was sort of shocked-but-also-not by this. Clearly, my recent experience had primed me to assume Bread (tm) wasn’t actually inherently the problem, it must be something about modern, commercial bread.

• I don’t know if it’s the added soybean oil, the glyphosate on the grains, the fortification with random chemicals, the Chorleywood process or roller milling itself, or what.. but whatever made me give up bread, this fancy, artisanal bread did not seem to induce the same effect. At least not in 11 days.

Although Tucker Goodrich, who is gluten intolerant, says that the real gluten damage builds up over years. It could be that I just got better in 1.5 decades of eating practically none, and that the damage would come back if I went back to eating bread for years.

Occasional cheating & quitting

I did find myself cheating quite a bit. The fancy artisanal bakery also had fancy, artisanal pastries, and I’d get one every other day or so toward the end of the experiment. I also bought & ate chocolate several times.

On day 10, at the store, I found myself buying (single-ingredient) pasta and (single-ingredient) tomato sauce and making pasta + butter + tomato sauce for dinner. Pasta is basically bread, right?!

It seems that I find myself cheating quite a bit more since discovering that I can eat carbs; many swampy foods are pretty good for cheating, whereas before I had made myself sick of steak & beef jerky in a decade of keto.

Since I no longer believe that carbs do lasting damage to me, maybe that helps - worst case it sets back weight loss a bit. I am still quite aggressive on avoiding seed oils, though. Interesting how the mindset/belief in what constitutes “healthy” makes it easy/hard to have “willpower.”

I am also finding that I have a much harder time sticking to a diet that’s not working anyway. If I lose tons of weight, it’s easy & fun to be strict - but if I’m already not feeling great and gaining weight, that doesn’t exactly motivate me to be strict.

At the beginning I had set myself a limit of how much weight I’d be willing to gain before quitting. That limit was 230lbs.

I did actually wake up just over 230lbs once, about halfway through the experiment, but it was weirdly up from the previous day and felt like a fluke. And it went back down to 223lbs the next day.

Overall my weight fluctuated a lot from day to day on this diet. But after clocking 229, 228, and 231 on 3 subsequent days, I decided to call it quits on day 11.

The fancy, artisanal bread tasted great, but not great enough to continue.

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Tale of the Tape

Ok, so we’ve established that:

• I can eat bread for a bit and be sort of fine

• But I am bloated and digestion is sub-optimal

• And satiety is lacking/fleeting

That doesn’t sound great for fat loss, does it?

For context, this experiment came AFTER a 3 day refeed that already included bread & carbs and was also high in protein - so this isn’t just water weight after a fast. Of course, some of it will be.

Up and to the right! Overall I am actually surprised by how mild the weight gain was. While I felt satiety was fleeting and relatively weak, I did reach it. I was never as hyperphagic as I am on my average protein refeed. I’d say I was about 20-30% as hyperphagic; it felt like I was constantly yet mildly overeating. With some roast beef or cheese on top, I probably would’ve eaten twice as much.

I gained 8lbs in 11 days, although some of that would’ve been just food residue & water weight even after a refeed. 11 days is also relatively short for an experiment to see a clear trend, and 7-pound spikes/drops from one day to the next aren’t exactly helpful. But hey, it wasn’t like everything else about the diet was going amazing.

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So.. don’t swamp?

It sure seems like I did not do well on first contact with The Swamp. It’s hard to exactly pinpoint the macros, what with the irregular numbers in artisanal bread and the fact that I didn’t actually weigh everything exactly. Protein content of different flours also seems to vary quite a bit.

But here’s an estimate:

• 2lb (908g) of bread per day

• half a brick (125g) of butter per day

• Macros therefore: 139g fat (38%), 431g carbs (51%), 97g protein (11%)

This is where that places me on the Swamp visualizer:

Now 11% of protein is not particularly low; usually, I’m at around 6%. My total protein actually more than doubled on this diet from ~40-45g to ~97g/day.

Otherwise, this is pretty solidly in the swamp, near the middle. It seems that it’s much more difficult to approach the 50/50 of carbs/fat when swamping; even as a 1 decade ketard I found it hard to eat more butter or cream on this diet, whereas more dry bread was always possible.

When doing keto, of course, I don’t have that problem: I can pretty easily go to 90% total fat, and even approach 94-95% or so. But when my body is not in keto mode, even 40% fat is quickly unpalatable.

This is probably why you see the SAD at 37% fat, nearly the exact percentage (38%) I had. That’s probably just about as high-fat as you can make a mixed diet and still have people eat it voluntarily. That’s all your starch saturated with fat to the limit.

It therefore seems that, even when swamping, it’s difficult to get the protein low enough. The particular bread entry I picked from the USDA database happened to have 15.6% kcals from protein, nearly 3x my ex150 percentage. I think that’s quite high for bread, but honestly I don’t know how much protein was in the flour my bakery used. The lower limit I’ve seen in breads is 10-12%, it’s among the higher-protein starch staples.

There are therefore at least 3 hypotheses that jump out at me as to why I gained weight (if somewhat slowly) eating bread+butter:

• Protein was still too high at just over 2x my normal amount, though not high enough to trigger super acute hyperphagia, like I see on my protein refeeds

• I can’t swamp (yet?), period

• Bread per se is cursed (let’s say for reasons other than protein)

I could try other starches for the swamping, e.g. tallow fried rice balls or creamy rice. Or I could try and find a way to get the protein down to 6%.

But for now, I think I’m ok. I’ll probably test the swamp again some time later.

Superhyperphagilisticexpialidocious

I can’t stress enough how mild the overeating was on this. When I do my usual refeeds, even when they were just steak/ad lib beef/cheese/eggs, I would go into an insane hyperphagic frenzy. I would eat way more, way more quickly, and I would get way more of a “dopamine” (if that’s what it is) hit.

Then I would feel way more sick. I’d also gain weight faster, I’d say I’ve seen about 2x the rate of weight gain I’ve seen here when doing ad-lib protein.

So while the bread + butter swamp certainly didn’t “work” it also wasn’t nearly as bad as other “normal” diets.

Notes

As always I took a bunch of notes. Here’s a selection:

Satiety

Day 1

Got to satiety surprisingly quick, given I ate high-protein refeed just the previous day
Bread with butter spread on it, coffee w/ heavy cream
Hits well, not quite cement-truck satiety but the probably more normal “full & satiated & comfy warm” feeling that I don’t usually get with “normal” meals
Had to stop eating despite wanting to continue
Was able (not “hungry”) to eat again 2h later, but only a few slices & 1 coffee until I hit a hard limit again

Day 2

Breakfast typically biggest meal, eating half a loaf of bread w/ lots of butter
Lasts 2h or so, then I could eat again, but only a few slices or a coffee
Typically I seem to “run out of butter appetite” before I “run out of bread appetite” so I’ll eat a dry slice or 2 towards the end before I stop

Day 4

Much easier to overeat than either ex150 or plain rice. More akin to tomato sauce rice; where it just tastes good even if you’re already satiated.
5h after a big breakfast... I COULD eat, but I’m not.. hungry?

Day 9

Kind of annoying: no matter how much I eat on this, I’m hungry again 4-6h later
I think I regularly eat 1,500-2,000kcal in one sitting and am hungry again 4h later

Digestion

Digestion surprisingly good, had sort of expected more adaptation
Kind of gassy today

There’s one note that specifically compares satiety on bread+butter vs. ex150 vs. rice, which I thought was interesting:

Interesting to compare “satiety” vs. “appetite” along ex150, bread+butter, and plainrice

ex150 is highly satiating + very low appetite, plainrice is very low appetite but it quickly comes back, this [bread+butter] is sort of a wider gap between the 2 - I could eat again after 2h (”lack of satiety?”) but I’m not particularly hungry or “have an appetite” - but when I do [try to eat], I can!

Probably requires more planning or “willpower” to undereat on this? Whereas ex150 pretty much leaves you no choice, and neither does plainrice (because you’re immediately hungry again ~2-4h later)

Compare: protein hyperphagia, which is satiety but still insanely strong & acute appetite/hunger

8pm: I haven’t eaten in .. 5-6h? I am not HUNGRY per se, in that I am fine sitting here and not going to the kitchen. But also if you put bread + butter in front of me right now, I would easily eat 1,000kcal, I just know it.

Very different from cement-truck satiety. The 2 curves of satiety & appetite are just wide apart. K-shaped satiety lol?

Prediction: I will have gained 10lbs by 14 days and will quit lol

These differences in the various parts or dimensions of “satiety” are pretty interesting and I have to think about it some more. It’s really not as simple as “satiety is when you’re not hungry.”

Conclusion

Hey, I ate a bread and I didn’t explode! This trial actually went much better than it could’ve. Of course it’s hard to disambiguate if this was the swamp aspect, or the bread aspect, but my digestion was “sort of fine” yet suboptimal, just like with the rice.

Unlike the (low-fat) rice diet, I actually gained weight, but then again I sort of expected that.

Honestly, eating really nice artisanal bread after 1.5 decades was great. And the fact that I do ok on it, if not spectacular, was great too. Maybe I’d develop acid reflux and other issues again if I kept eating bread for years. But at least in the short term, Real Bread (tm) wasn’t nearly as bad as I remember (mostly commercial/modern industrial) bread being.

After having some Real Bread (tm) I don’t know if I’ll ever eat that crappy off-the-shelf bread again. The difference in taste & texture is just night and day. Compared to e.g. heavy cream or white rice, the quality of bread makes a HUGE difference. I could barely tell you the difference between the best & worst rice I’ve ever had, but for bread, it goes from “holy crap, this nonsense is INEDIBLE unless you toast it & drown it in coffee” to “this is Manna from the Heavens, how can anything taste so good?!”

It certainly was a fun & silly short experiment to try, and now I feel ready to just do the same old thing that worked last time - coming up, of course, is ex150nosauce+ACV-3. At the very least, I hope to yo-yo off the 8lbs I just gained, lol.

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A little over a year ago, I fasted for 5 days, twice. As I noted in that report, I used to fast a ton when I first got into keto. But I didn’t find it particularly useful for losing weight or anything else.

Instead, I view fasting mostly as a diagnostic: if you’re metabolically healthy, and you don’t have excessively low body fat, you should be able to easily fast a couple of days.

I still have plenty of body fat on me: around 60-65lbs, and according to estimated adipose flux, I should be getting around 2,000kcal/day just from that.

Since it had been over a year since my 5-day fasts, I was wondering if I could fast longer now. I weighed almost the same.

Curiously, I hadn’t even been hungry the entire 5 days last time - but in the evening of day 5, it went from “not hungry at all, I can do this all month long!” to “must drive to the store IMMEDIATELY, can’t sleep at all!” in a matter of hours.

What made me repeat the fast?

Given that I view it mostly as a diagnostic, I wanted to know if my metabolism had improved - would I be able to fast for longer?

I had another year of avoiding linoleic acid under my belt. According to Modern PUFA Theory, excess linoleic acid stored in adipose tissue is THE cause of modern diseases and broken fuel partitioning.

Additionally, ever since discovering vinegar, I’d wondered if supplementing it would make fasting easier. The vinegar seemed to “unlock” more of my body fat on ex150, helping me lose a lot of weight and break through my previous plateau. Would it do the same on a fast?

Hence I embarked on another fast recently. Like the last time, I didn’t set out for the fast to be a specific number of days - I was just going to stop eating, and see how long I could go.

Water/diet soda/energy drink fast

It was sort of a water fast in that I only consumed non-caloric drinks. Mostly diet soda and some energy drinks. I forced down a cup of black coffee once or twice, but I just HATE coffee without heavy cream.

“Food boredom” is a huge issue for me on fasts, much more so than hunger. I just end up drinking tons of diet soda to taste SOMETHING.

I don’t know if this is my body attempting to get nutrients from the faux sweetness of the diet soda or a flavor/psychological/hedonic thing?

Last time I really leaned into the energy drinks, but this time I tried limiting them to 2-3 a day. I suspected that the caffeine starts hitting harder after a few days of fasting, and that this might’ve caused my sleep trouble last time.

6 days

Long story short, I stopped after 6 days this time! It wasn’t actually even as drastic, I could’ve probably gone another day at least. I slept pretty well the last night, if maybe not amazing. Let’s call it 85%. But nothing like last time.

The only real effect I felt was extreme lack of thermogenesis. I was cold the last 2 days. All day long. So very, very cold.

I’m talking sitting in a heated room with a wool sweater, wool hat, and a puffy down jacket. I slept with a wool sweater & wool hat, under 2 blankets. In my heated bedroom.

Pretty crazy stuff. Maybe I should fast in the summer next time.

Luckily I didn’t catch a cold, I’m pretty sure my immune system would’ve been pretty down-regulated.

Energy wise, I felt fine, not low-energy or lethargic besides being cold all the time. I went for walks most days.

Besides the thermogenesis issue, the reason I stopped was - Christmas. I suppose I’m not as autistic as I’d like to believe. But after my family made seed oil-free Christmas food, I had a hard time saying no.. plus I was so, SO cold.

Weight loss? Not impressive

I mentioned above that I never seemed to lose serious weight no matter how hard I fasted. This happened again.

I did lose a bunch of weight quickly, but given how fasting is zero-carb, near zero-salt (energy drinks/diet soda have some), zero-fiber, and zero-protein, even the water weight loss is not particularly impressive.

Compared to the last few days of the previous diet, I barely lost 3lbs. I didn’t even get back to my previous low of 209lbs. And, obviously, I regained it all pretty much immediately.

There might be some therapeutic benefits to fasting, but I’m not aware of them. I certainly don’t seem to sustainably lose ANY fat doing it.

But as a diagnostic to be doing once in a while, I think it’s fine. I was able to go a day longer than last time, and had it been the summer and no Christmas meals had been scheduled, I might’ve gone another day.

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Notes

Day 1

Slightly rumbly stomach after 1.5 day swampy refeed

Feeling pretty cold, wearing wool sweater & down jacket in my heated room lol [weird how this started on DAY 1]

Day 3

So far pretty easy. Got hunger pangs a few times but not bad. Mostly bored lol, want to drink energy drinks/diet soda all day long.

Had black coffee but it’s still disgusting

Day 4

Still pretty unspectacular. Some stomach rumbling but it tends to go away quickly.

Really pronounced “food boredom” or whatever, want to drink energy drinks/diet soda just to taste SOMETHING

Drank pretty crazy amounts of diet soda today. 2 monsters, 7 cans of coke zero, big bottle of dr pepper zero

Otherwise super easy, zero hunger as of yet

Day 5

After waking up, thought about food a lot lol

Not that hungry, not exactly salivating at foods even when at the store (to buy more energy drinks)

But definitely getting REALLY bored w/o food, sort of wishing the fast was already over so I could have some cream lol

Feeling kinda cold in the afternoon, wearing sweater & jacket in a heated room again

Feeling a bit wired in the later afternoon, beginning of the end?

Day 6

Well.. this is a first. 6 days is an all time record I think?

Had absolutely no hunger/appetite on day 5. Felt a bit wired in the evening but it went away, might be heightened caffeine sensitivity?

Felt like sleep was maybe somewhat suboptimal, but still got 7h or so and feeling pretty rested

Thermogenesis is really low now. Went outside in a wool sweater, a puffy jacket, and a rain jacket on top, barely kept warm even though it’s not THAT cold. Usually I can’t wear those 2 jackets on top of each other without burning up.

Tried measuring glucose, got 2 errors in a row; maybe blood too cold? lol

Comical contrast in thermogenesis before/after refeeding

On the last day of the fast, even with wool sweater, puffy down jacket & rain jacket on top wearing gloves, I was freezing when outside for only 5min. It wasn’t even THAT cold.

After the refeed, a 45min walk in even colder temps (below freezing) w/o the down jacket and w/o gloves, I wasn’t feeling cold at all. I actually sat on a park bench in sub-freezing temps and just took in the landscape. I could tell that it was cold, it just didn’t bother me. My body had regained the ability to heat itself.

Very strange, but it was an interesting contrast in experiences.

Conclusion

Was the extra day of fasting enabled by the ACV, or because I’d been depleting my adipose linoleic acid for another year? Or just limiting my caffeine intake to 2-3 energy drinks this time? Who knows.

Either way, I wasn’t magically able to fast 30 days or anything like that. So I’d say nothing substantial changed in my ability to fast. There was improvement (5 days → 6 days) but it was marginal, and could’ve easily been caused just by limiting my caffeine intake.

Some people swear by fasting, but I just don’t ever seem to have success with it. Maybe it helps deplete adipose linoleic acid if you do it more regularly, but in terms of pure weight loss (not even fat loss) it’s not that impressive for me.

Next up: ex_bread+butter

That’s right, I’m doing my first ever swampy trial! After 90% fat (ex150) and 90% carbs (ex_plainrice) both worked well for me, I’d been curious about low-protein swamping for a long time.

Remember my Swamp Visualizer?

There’s nothing in the swamp besides the Standard American Diet, and that’s high-sugar, high-PUFA, and high-protein (16%).

It seems that health-conscious people rarely swamp. The Croissant Diet by FireInABottle.net is one of the only ones I know. Even Peaters tend to eat relatively low-fat, if not very low fat.

But the Croissant Diet is not particularly or explicitly low-protein. I have been doing low-PUFA/normal to high protein refeeds for a long time now, and as of last year, they were also swampy. I could tell from the refeeds that this was NOT working for me. It’s very easy for me to put on a pound of fat PER DAY on a swampy, high-protein, high-sugar diet. (Think butter cookies and butter croissants w/ cheese and roast beef.)

Yet I hadn’t seen anyone try a really low-protein diet that was swampy. It should actually be easier than low-protein high-starch, because you can dilute the high protein content of starch (typically ~10%) by adding the fat.

Plus, bread & butter was just too funny a diet not to try it eventually. Of course, I’m doing seed oil-free, non-fortified bread only, sourdough and similar fancy stuff.

The plan is to run it for 30 days, except maybe I’ll quit if I gain too much fat too rapidly. Then again, my friend John has me convinced that yo-yo dieting is actually great for depleting your adipose linoleic acid.. so we’ll see.

Wish me luck!

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It’s been a while that I’ve coded up a little tool, but my friend Tyler Ransom has compiled this neat little dataset for “Seed Oil Supply” by country and year:
https://github.com/tyleransom/seed-oil-supply-by-country

This makes it really easy to just toss the data into what I was already using to visualize obesity (by country, by year) and change a handful of things to make it work.

So please check out the:

Seed Oil Supply by Country Visualizer

It’s relatively self-explanatory. You can select countries individually at the bottom, or select from a list of sets, e.g. countries people commonly find interesting, including America and Japan.

The x-axis is, of course, the year. The y-axis is “Food supply (kcal/capita/day).” So how many carolies each person in that country, on average, “is supplied with” each day.

We can see in the graph that U.S. supply of seed oils went from around 270kcal/day in 1961 to almost 715kcal/day today.

The average adult American surveyed in the NHANES survey eats an average of 2,155kcal/day.

That means the average American was eating 12.5% of kcals from seed oils in 1961, and 33.1% today. (Actually, total kcals eaten might’ve been different then, now that I think of it.)

Now these numbers need to be treated with a grain of salt, but it’s actually not that off from what I’ve seen estimated in other places by other methodologies. A common percentage for even 10 years ago was 20-25% of total kcals from seed oils. The stuff truly is in everything.

Let’s get to the grains of salt.

“Food Supply?”

First off, the dataset only shows seed oils that were “supplied” in the country. The issue is that we have no way of knowing what people ACTUALLY ate. It’s simply impossible to track.

People commonly use food frequency questionnaires, which are pretty unreliable. If I asked you how many times you ate chicken wings and salad w/ ranch dressing last year, what would you say? If I then estimated your total seed oils consumption based on it, would you feel pretty confident in my number?

This is a little bit like that. “Supplied” means that they collected data on farming, processing, and shipping of seed oils (or other foods). That doesn’t mean all of these were consumed. You could theoretically buy a lot of seed oils and pour them down the drain.

Not all the oil in deep fryers is consumed, a lot of it is thrown out. Some oil gets left in the pan or on the plate after cooking.

In addition, not all countries are great at reliably tracking these things. Looking at the dataset, I have the sneaky suspicion that a lot of poor countries barely track this. Of course, we’d also expect (most) poorer countries to actually eat less seed oils, as that’s historically been the case. So what’s the real effect? It’s difficult to disentangle.

But many of the trends make sense and confirm what every seed oiler is already talking about.

For example, let’s compare America to China, South Korea, and Vietnam:

America has much higher seed oil supply than any of the other countries. In fact, America had more than double the supplied seed oils in 1961 than China does now, and 4x that of Vietnam now. Recall, Vietnam is the leanest country in the world.

You can also see that Korea started out even lower in seed oil supply than Vietnam in the 1961, but started rapidly increasing its supplies in the 1980s, to the point that it’s at more than half the U.S. amount today.

Anecdotally I can confirm this: when visiting Korea, I was shocked how many overweight & obese people of all ages I saw, and how few things I could eat. Their entire cuisine is very prone to being “infiltrated” by seed oils. They even cook their version of sushi (gimbap) in sesame oil. Unlike Japanese food and certain varieties of Chinese cuisine, their diet seems quite heavy in sauces too, which make it easy to hide seed oils.

South Korea has seen a pretty extreme rise in obesity since 1990. Unfortunately, we don’t have data from e.g. 1960, when the seed oil supply data set starts.

Frankly, after visiting Korea, I think that the 7% is an underestimate. Or at the very least, they’ll see a meteoric rise of obesity very soon.

We can also see that Vietnam’s obesity “exploded” from nearly 0% to about 2% in the same time frame. This makes sense given that even Vietnam’s supply of seed oils has more than doubled since 1961, even if it’s still extremely low in both seed oils supply & obesity.

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“Harmonized?”

The data comes from the U.S. Food and Agriculture Organization. They changed their method for collecting or listing data around 2014, and if you look at the raw data, there are huge discrepancies in the before compared to the after.

This “harmonized” data set is an attempt to reconcile the two by seeing how they diverge during the period when both methods overlapped (2010-2013) and then calculating a comparison factor for each country. All this is explained in more detail at Tyler’s data repo.

This method isn’t perfect. For example, Canada is listed as having substantial negative seed oils supply for decades. Now I suppose it’s possible that Canada purchased U.S. soybean oil in the 1960s and dumped it all down the drain, but I’d suspect probably not. It’s probably just an artifact of the harmonization formula.

Canada’s “harmonized” data both starts at -100kcal/day of seed oil supply, and also displays an insane jump around the time of the method shift (~2014), meaning the harmonization didn’t work very well. It more than doubled in one year just due to the shift in methodology.

Seed Oils vs. Linoleic Acid

Lastly, not all seed oils are created equal. Most believers of Modern PUFA Theory (MPT) believe that linoleic acid (LA) is the bad actor in seed oils.

Soybean oil has about 50% LA, corn oil 55%. These are some the most widely used seed oils in the U.S. In contrast, much of Asia uses palm oil (~10%), sunflower oil (~20%) or rapeseed oil (~20%).

In that regard, sesame oil is actually much worse: it has about 40% LA, nearly as bad as soybean oil. But sesame oil seems to have a bit more of a rare/high culinary status compared to the others.

So even if e.g. Korea and the U.S. used the exact same amount of seed oils, but the U.S. used soy & corn vs. Korea’s sunflower and some sesame, we’d expect way more damage done in the U.S.

Conclusion: Grain of Salt, but kind of useful

Given all these, I wouldn’t get married to any conclusions or hypotheses merely based on this dataset or visualizer. But I think it’s still quite useful:

• You can roughly compare several countries, although you have to be aware that the trends might be off by quite a bit

• You can see the trend (=rise) of seed oils of a single country over time

• You can see that the rise of seed oils happens in almost every country over time, although some seem to have stopped (Japan) and a handful even reversed it (France) - interestingly, France is also one of the few countries that have started reversing their obesity trend!

• You can gut-check the people claiming “Asians eat so much seed oils!” - yes, they eat more than ever, and they’re more sick & obese than ever. But for most Asian countries, it’s a fraction of the seed oil supply in the U.S. and many other western countries.

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To find out if it was really caused by cutting out the sodium & glutamate from the commercial tomato sauce, I decided to simply add heavy cream to my meal as a sauce. As I was already on an ad-lib heavy cream diet, surely this was the minimal intervention: I was just adding a little more cream to a meal, which wouldn’t add any more sodium or glutamate, but also wouldn’t change the macros or anything else dramatically. The diet might go from 90% heavy cream to 92% heavy cream or so.

ex150creamsauce+ACV was born.

It Didn’t Work

Frankly, I was surprised by how ineffective the creamsauce experiment was. This has happened a few times before: an experiment that I was 99% certain would go a certain way went very differently.

In short, I lost some water weight but then stayed extremely weight stable and didn’t lose any more weight over 2 weeks. I also developed a weird Protein Leverage style hunger 8 days in, which reminded me of my sugar diet experiment a while ago, and I drove to Walmart in the middle of the night to buy & eat (in the car) a package of beef franks.

But in fairness to the experiment, it coincided with some pretty big confounders: I got a viral infection and was coughing & sniffling for a few days, I was physically pretty active, I spent a lot of time in the cold, and I got a physical injury that swelled up for a few days until it finally healed.

One thing that was quite different compared to the last 2 months of “nosauce+ACV” experiments, too: I didn’t experience the reduced hunger at all that would always come with the weight loss. That makes me think it wasn’t just that the confounders masked some fat loss via water weight gain, it was probably just that I didn’t actually lose any fat.

Let’s look at the graph:

You can see that, even after the initial water weight loss, I never went back down to the average of 211lbs or so from before the refeed. I probably actually gained ~3-4lbs of fat during the 3.5 day refeed, it was pretty excessive. (Seed oil-free butter cookies abound around Christmas!)

I settled around 214-215lbs and stayed there pretty much the entire time, until I abandoned the experiment on day 17.

If this were an experiment last year or much earlier this year, during some of which I only lost 3-5lbs in a whole month, a 17 day plateau might’ve been fine.

But I just went to 209lbs very linearly last month, and this month it just didn’t seem to be working at all.

So why did I quit, instead of riding it out to day 30 as is my usual M.O.?

For one, it not producing the intended weight loss was pretty annoying. Second, I realized that the many confounders didn’t necessarily prove much; it might’ve been any combination of the cold weather, the physical activity, the injury, and the flu/cold I’d gotten.

The mere presence of the weird protein-hunger on day 8 already made me skeptical very early; this NEVER happened on ex150 in 3 years. Something else was afoot.

To top it all off, logistically with travel & life plans around the holidays, it fit better to quit the experiment then & there and start something else instead.

I would consider this experiment a failure: not just in the sense that I failed to lose weight, but in the sense that I didn’t actually learn much.

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Tallow me Maybe

One weak anecdotal point: I had rendered my own tallow once again during this experiment, and ended up using it liberally to cook with. Usually, tallow is very self-limiting for me, because pure tallow just makes me gag, even just when my cooked food is swimming in it. (I.e. not just when I’m trying to eat tallow with a spoon.)

The addition of the cream as an emulsifying sauce, though, seemed to completely counteract this: I could add near-infinite amounts of tallow and it would taste & digest great.

It is thus possible that 1. something something tallow bad or 2. the coincidental addition of both tallow AND creamsauce allowed me to eat vastly more cArOliEs and prevented weight gain.

I had previously designed my nosauce+ACV experiments to specifically disprove “you ate less carolies!” as an explanation, since the removal of the sauce did NOT coincide with eating less at that given meal.

But this time, with the emulsified cream & tallow, I accidentally added a massive confounder in terms of heat units to that same meal.

Most of the first 2 weeks I only added a little bit of tallow, surely not enough to explain the difference between “massive, linear fat loss” and “no fat loss at all.” But then, disappointed by not having lost anything, I began testing out the limits of how much tallow I could add to the emulsion - and couldn’t fine one. I distinctly remember adding a lot of tallow (maybe 50g) to the sauce, and then ADDING TWICE THAT ON TOP. I’m talking a thick soup of tallow, made palatable with cream.

I shall not use tallow if I ever try this experiment again. But I suppose it’s interesting to find out I can actually eat near-infinite tallow simply by emulsifying it with cream.

Creamsauce tastes decent

The first few days I was disappointed with the flavor: adding cream just made the meal taste watery, and the cream didn’t seem to convey much flavor. Then I dialed it in: you just have to cook the cream low & slow until it turns brown and nearly falls apart, and it makes a pretty great brown sauce that isn’t too thin.

That said, it wasn’t a 10/10 like my normal tomato/alfredo meals were on ex150, more of a 9/10. But taste-wise, a pretty good upgrade over the 8/10 that was nosauce.

BUT WHY DID IT NOT WORK!

You and me both, buddy. You and me both! I think I just let too many confounders mess up this experiment. It’s hard to draw any real conclusions.

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Protein Leverage Hunger like on Sugar Diet

By far the most interesting & “different” day was day 8, when I experienced a weird hunger that couldn’t be satiated by seemingly any amount of cream. This felt very similar to my experience on the sugar diet, when I eventually could not get ANY satiety even after eating sickening amounts of sugar.

That day, I consumed 3 pints (!) of cream, which might be my all-time record - and I’ve literally been on a heavy cream diet for most of the last 3 years!

For reference, 3 pints of cream alone is about 4,600kcal, and that doesn’t include the beef, butter, and tallow from my meal that day, nor the beef franks I used to up my protein! I probably clocked over 6,000kcal that day.

Starting around the afternoon of that day, I began experiencing a profound feeling of “stomach emptiness” and eventually hunger pangs in my stomach, similar to that time on the sugar diet. This usually NEVER happens on ex150, so I was very confused.

In the evening, after battling 3 rounds of hunger pangs, I decided something was not right. I drove to Walmart and bought a 6 pack of beef franks that I ate on the way home.

I experienced 1 more wave of hunger pangs after that, and drank more cream. But then it settled, and I never experienced anything like it for the remainder of the 17 day experiment despite returning to the lower protein intake.

What I conclude is that the Protein Leverage Hypothesis is real, but the amounts required are way, way lower than most people think. This is probably just because most people have no idea how low our protein requirements really are.

As I wrote in Please Eat Less Protein, actual experiments show that most active, young men are in nitrogen balance, aka getting enough protein, around 40g/day. Almost none of them are getting enough on 20g/day.

Ex150 usually puts me around 40-45g/day, and I’m usually not THAT active. But during this experiment, I was more active than usual, and both a viral infection & physical injuries probably somewhat increase protein demands.

In terms of “what should I eat?” the Protein Leverage Hypothesis can probably comfortably be ignored unless you’re running an extreme protein restriction diet, like I am.

I’m usually around 6% protein, which is difficult to even achieve. For reference, white rice and similar starches are typically 8-10% protein, with some wheat flours even higher.

The only real way to go below 10% is to rely mostly on fats (heavy cream for me) or sugars (sugar/honey diet) for your staple foods. These protein-restricted diets are very unpalatable to most people, very “out there” socially, and it’s unlikely that you’ll accidentally do them.

That said, if you experience a “stomach emptiness” & insatiable hunger that goes away upon consumption of 6 beef franks at 9pm in a Walmart parking lot, recognize the signs.

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“Protein → eat less carolies” is stupid

There’s a contingent of gym bros touting the Protein Leverage Hypothesis, saying you should maximize the protein you eat so that you’ll “fill up” on less carolies.

This is pretty ignorant. For one, that’s not at all what the PLH says. But then, none of them have actually read it.

But also, the body can turn up metabolic rate very dramatically in absence of protein. There’s a whole bunch of research out there on FGF21, and it explains why low-protein ketards can eat near-infinite carolies without gaining weight.

“Try eating 5,000kcal on keto and not gaining weight hahahahah!” says the stupid gym bro.

Yea, it’s been done. A lot. I’ve averaged 4,200kcal/day over a month myself and lost a small amount of weight during that time. Plenty of ketards have done periods of averaging over 5,000 or even 6,000kcal/day.

If you believe Total Energy Expenditure is fixed, and if you go above “your” number in any way, that magically causes weight gain, you have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s clearly been disproven many times and contradicts just about all existing metabolic science.

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As always I took notes. Most days, they’re not very interesting - ex150creamsauce was nearly exactly like ex150 w/ alfredo sauce. The only really interesting day was day 8, when I got the weird Protein Leverage Hunger.

Day 3

Almost no difference [to regular ex150]
Not getting any sort of “hit” from the sauce unlike with commercial (high-sodium?) sauces

Day 4

Hm think I might be getting another cold!

Day 6

My cold was really only 1-2 days, immune system kicking butt this time!

Day 7

Today the cream sauce tasted really good, not sure what was different
Funny. Feels like “Dang sure takes a long time to lose that refeed water weight!” But I am actually 18lbs down from the refeed peak.

Day 8

Hm, mild protein cravings?

Sort of like on sugar diet, feeling emptiness in the stomach, despite very high cream consumption today I feel unsatisfied.. this normally never happens on ex150

Wow. Hunger pangs came in waves, similar to sugar diet, really unpleasant. Drove to Walmart at night and bought a 6 pack of beef franks, ate them on the way home. Total of 48g of protein and 3,900mg (!) of sodium.

Also had a little injury a few days ago, maybe healing requires more protein?

A few hours later, no hunger pangs. Seems to have worked?

Guess I am not getting enough protein with the lower amount of cream, or when being more active or getting injured

Nope, 1h later hunger pangs again. Drank a cup of cream. Then immediately another. This might be my highest cream day of all times with 3 pints.

3 pints of cream alone is 4,600kcal. Plus my meal of beef cooked in lots of butter & tallow, plus the 6 beef franks. This has got to be a 6,000kcal day or so. Wtf.

Day 9

Back to normal today, hm. No weird appetite or hunger pangs or anything.

Day 11

Ate a burger patty w/ cheese & a piece of salmon for lunch, did not eat beef for dinner (just fried vegetables in butter+tallow+cream sauce)

Day 17

Really pretty unspectacular, palatability of my dinner is definitely up with the cream sauce, I’d say it’s a 9/10 instead of my old 10/10

But also zero weight loss, am extremely flat for over 2 weeks now

Aborting due to travel & logistics and since it doesn’t seem to work or at least not enough to overcome confounders

Hello Plateau, My Old Friend

Really, experiments not teaching you much is the default in science. The majority of my experiments in the last 3 years did NOT result in weight loss, or I would’ve been done long ago.

But the last 2 months did work pretty spectacularly (nosauce+ACV 1 & 2), and the 2 months before that (ACV, plain white rice diet) worked pretty well too.

It therefore feels like a huge disappointment to stay flat for 17 days.

Then again, staying flat for 17 days despite pretty insane food intake of up to 6,000kcal/day, with pretty much the most energy-dense foods possible (tallow emulsified in heavy cream w/ beef and butter) on ad-lib intake is not bad.

What’s next?

I’m currently on day 3 of my new experiment, acv_fast. I fasted twice for 5 days each about a year ago. The 5 days were easy, but on the evening of day 5, it was like hitting a wall - hard. There was 0 chance of willpowering through, it just switched from “no issue at all” to “impossible” within the span of a few hours - similar, actually, to that weird hunger pangs/emptiness feeling of the protein hunger I experienced this time.

But I have since discovered the Magic of Vinegar, and maybe that’ll help me fast longer?

I suppose I’ll find out.

The smart money would probably still be on just being able to fast for 5 days or so again, or at least not MUCH longer.

After that, the scientific thing would be to just re-run ex150nosauce+ACV for a 3rd run - will it get me to a new low again, even directly after a fast? Or has my settling point simply shifted down from 217lbs to 209lbs after another year of low-PUFA eating, including some pretty weird stunts like the plain white rice diet?

The stupid thing, on the other hand, would be to triple the amount of protein, lift hard for a month, and see if I gain fat doing it - ex450acv+x3.

It’s such a stupid idea that my friend John proposed Intentional Yo-Yo Dieting to Deplete PUFAs Faster merely to spite me, knowing I can’t possibly resist it.

Hrm. We will see.

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Oops, I did it again

After last month’s experiment was a huge success, during which I lost 10lbs and just barely poked through my old weight plateau of 217lbs for 1 day toward the end, I just repeated the exact same experiment.

The experiment is called ex150nosauce+ACV-2:

• 150g of beef a day

• no sauce, unlike my normal ex150 diet

• ~1tbsp equivalent of apple cider vinegar a day

• all other carolies from ad-lib heavy cream intake, much of it in coffee

The results were quite good. I didn’t lose 10lbs this month, but just over 7lbs - and it happened very rapidly and linearly toward the beginning.

Not everything went perfectly. At one point I added mushrooms and hot cocoa (from 100% cacao powder) and stalled for about a week. After I quit those, the weight loss resumed and I hit 209lbs for the first time since 2016.

In this graph, the red line helps me track when I previously weighed as much as I do now. This shows that even when trying to fast in early 2017 and more recently in fall of 2025, I didn’t quite make it below 210lbs. The last time I was below 210lbs was in late 2016, almost 9 years ago.

Cheating

On several occasions during this experiment I cheated with extra beef or venison, and that might’ve arrested further weight loss for a few days. Or maybe not.

The “nosauce” part definitely makes this diet way less delicious than it is with the sauce. I’d say the meal goes from a 10/10 to a 8/10 in terms of flavor. It does seem like I have more cravings and cheat more often than on my regular, high-sauce variant. I’ll try to address that in the next experiment.

Hitting 209lbs was still an amazing milestone.

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Differences vs. last month

A few things were different this time:

• I moved my one solid meal of beef & vegetables from lunch to dinner

• No whipping the cream - I drank all my cream, most of it in coffees from morning to about 3pm. A few times I made hot cocoa with 100% cacao powder, or had decaf tea after dinner. A handful of times I even drank cream straight when I didn’t feel quite satiated after dinner.

• Due to no whipping, I didn’t get true cement-truck satiety even once this month. I don’t really get it from drinking cream, but my cream intake still doesn’t go higher on average. It’s a bit less like “running into a wall” in terms of satiety, and more just adjusting day to day. Some days I tend to drink a lot of cream, and then the next day I’ll just end up drinking less automatically. It averages out to about the same amount.

I’ve done no whipping, or almost no whipping, for longer periods before, but not sure I’ve ever done it for an entire month. Some speculate that the whipping is what really makes my heavy cream diet work, but it seems to work pretty decently even when all cream is consumed in liquid form.

I continued limiting my sodium intake in the forms of energy drinks, which means no Monsters. I mostly switched to Ghost energy drinks, which are very low sodium (30-40mg instead of Monster’s 380mg per can). Still ~2 diet sodas many (most?) days, which are 75-100mg of sodium each.

Tale of the Tape

Let’s look at the weight graph:

The yellow line is the 7-day rolling average. You can see that I ended last month’s nearly identical experiment around 218lbs. I spiked up to 227lbs on the refeed, which only lasted one day.

After that, it took me about 5 days to drop back to the 219lbs, and then I kept going rapidly until I settled in around 212-213lbs for a longer period.

During this period I had actually started adding lots of mushrooms to my daily meals. Mushrooms contain almost nothing except water, I thought, not even fiber. And they made my sauce-free meal taste much better.

But it turns out they actually contain significant amounts of protein, up to 7% by weight. And they’re also very high in glutamate, similar to tomatoes. That’s why they make the meal taste so much better I suppose, lol.

As soon as I dropped the mushrooms, my weight started dropping again and I dropped below 210lbs for one day.

That same day and the next I cheated: friends of mine shot a deer and we skinned & processed it, and found ourselves with 100lbs of delicious, fresh deer meat that we turned into steaks, stew meat, and jerky. Unable to resist, I ate a bunch of steak & jerky.

Still, my average ended around 211lbs for a loss of around 7.5lbs.

Plus, it wasn’t “just” re-losing pounds that I’d lost earlier. If one believes in either set points or settling points, getting back down to e.g. 220lbs was always pretty easy for me in the past. It was breaking significantly through those 220lbs that gave me trouble in the past.

But not this time. My set point has been changed (I don’t believe in set points), or the settling point is different on nosauce+ACV (my money is on this), and I easily blasted through my old plateau and kept going, seemingly settling at a comfortable 212lbs even with the mushrooms, and then going slightly below.

Another variable was hot cocoa. I made quite a bit of hot cocoa this month, mostly in the evenings, with lots of 100% pure cacao powder and heavy cream. But I did it intermittently. Intuitively, I actually did extra much cocoa on at least a few days and woke up to a new low the very next day, so it’s not as clear as “cocoa blocks fat loss.” But it could be a variable.

Had a cold

I completely forgot about this, but upon reading my notes: I got a cold around day 12. Sniffles, runny nose, coughing. It went away after 3-4 days, but I had a latent dry cough and a bit more runny nose pretty much the exact time the plateau lasted. So maybe it was that?

Of course, it’s also possible that the plateau would’ve happened anyway, and neither mushrooms nor cocoa nor cold had anything to do with it.

As always, sciencing is hard!

Summary

The nosauce+ACV strategy kept working very well. I lost almost as much as last month, despite having 10 less pounds of fat on me, and plateauing for about 7-10 days, maybe due to the mushrooms. All this in previously uncharted weight territory, and breaking through to my lowest weight since 2016.

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Is nosauce sustainable?

I keep wondering this: is the lack of sauce making the diet unsustainable in a way? Did I get cravings because I’m missing something that my usual sauce provides?

Or is it that nosauce+ACV drives my cream consumption down far enough that I’m missing something from the cream? After all, at 3,300kcal on regular ex150, I get about half my daily protein from the cream, about 20g. By roughly halving my cream consumption, is nosauce+ACV driving me under the thin blue line of getting enough protein in? Am I craving mushrooms, deer & jerky because while 40g of protein is enough, 30g isn’t?

I’ve thought about upping the beef content a little to make up for this. On the other hand, the cravings don’t seem very strong and only appear after a few weeks. So maybe it’s fine, and cheating a few times with some extra protein is how it goes. I think I’ll just have another go at it, and if I persistently get cravings or cheat, I might up the daily dose a bit.

Notes

I took some notes, but honestly it was pretty boring. It’s almost entirely like ex150, which is just “normal eating” for me now.

Day 2

Pretty unspectacular, just more of the same
Basically already forgot I am doing a diet
Drank very little today despite being quite active, probably absorbing all that water weight heh

Day 7

It’s really pretty unspectacular so far
Added mushrooms last 2 days cause they make it more delicious; hopefully no
other effect

Day 10

Had 2 cups cacao w/ heavy cream after dinner

Day 12

Got a calf cramp upon waking up, think I had a smaller one a few days ago
Usually never get cramps on ex150, so extra low sodium might be doing that?
Think I’ve been getting a bit of a cold the last few days, sniffling & irritated chest

Day 13

As an example [of reduced appetite]:
- It’s 7pm, I’ve had 2 creamy coffees this morning and no other carolies yet
- I’m not particularly hungry
- Haven’t finished a diet soda I started.. 2h ago?

Day 14

Pretty uneventful, feels normal like I’m not even doing an experiment
Still doing mushrooms, pretty good addition and don’t seem to hurt
Had half a deviled egg
Pretty much over that cold, started as sniffling & sore throat, maybe a light fever one night, now gone except for a dry cough & runny nose

Day 20

Really not much to write about
Especially with the mushrooms (which I add most days) it tastes like a 9/10 again even w/o the sauce
Feels like I’m not doing a diet at all
Keep slowly but pretty linearly losing weight
Ate 170g beef sticks, extra protein and 7 * 400mg of sodium... oh my
After that, pretty thirsty but diet sodas all taste like salt water
Really funny how the salt perception changes on low salt
Even hours later, mouth is almost painfully dry & feels salty, ugh. Like after
ex_plainrice w/ my first salty rice ball

Thought: on nosauce+ACV I consume significantly less cream than before, and half of my daily protein comes from cream. Could it be that my cheat days w/ beef toward the end of the 1st and now 2nd experiment are me slowly walking into protein deficiency and intuitively making up for it?

Day 23

Been drinking quite a bit of hot cocoa with 100% cacao the last few days
I think all that fiber is making me gain water & digestive weight

Day 25

I think the last few days (weeks?) I’ve been drinking more cream despite ACV intake, reached new plateau?
Ate deer tenderloins w/ some salt & pepper instead of usual dinner

Day 28

Binged on deer jerky. Jerky is just like crack for me, if I eat one piece I eat it all.
Also had cocoa (didn’t last few days)

Day 29

Cheated again: deer steak, jerky, cheese, a bit of liverwurst

Wondering if I’m lacking something to cause all this cheating, or just cause I feel like it’s already in the bag at 209lbs

Next Up: ex150creamsauce+ACV

Honestly, the daily ACV supplementation might just become a core part of ex150. I see little downside to it: ACV is ubiquitous, cheap, and especially with the Bragg’s capsules, easy & convenient. They cost 50-75c per day depending on where you buy them. The fact that it’s not an extreme mega dose but just the normal 1tbsp equivalent makes it very easy.

I am noticing that my daily meal is quite a bit less delicious without the sauce. I was adding the mushrooms to make up for it and that helped, but those might’ve blocked the fat loss - they are not as macro-inert as I had thought.

Therefore I’ll just use heavy cream as my sauce for the next experiment. Since this experiment was already ad-lib heavy cream, I don’t suspect this will change anything in terms of it working. I’ll see if it improves the meal.

The meal isn’t terrible without the sauce, but it’s more a 8/10 than the 10/10 it was with the sauce previously.

I shall call this next experiment: ex150creamsauce+ACV.

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Brief Update - down 80lbs!

Before I begin: as you might know, I’m currently doing a repeat of last month’s ex150nosauce+ACV experiment.

It’s going phenomenally well. I’m on day 20 out of 30, and I’m down another 6lbs or so, which puts me at 80lbs lost total since beginning ex150.

Of course this also means I immediately smashed through my old plateau low of 217lbs and have been sitting around 211-212lbs for the last week.

With a little luck, I might break through the 210lbs mark before the end of the experiment.

Fun times!

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

What is Nutrient Sensing?

This isn’t the official name, I think, but I don’t know a better one.

The idea is that your body is “very smart” and will intuitively sense when it’s missing nutrients. It then proceeds to induce a craving for foods containing this exact nutrient.

In short, you should eat what your body tells you to.

Unfortunately, I think this is mostly unhelpful for several reasons:

1. Plenty of people have completely ruined appetite/craving systems, as there are various pathways that can be broken. These people sense that they should eat more fried chicken.

2. Our appetites and cravings are pretty vague. Most people can’t tell them apart well, and we don’t have good language to describe them. It’s therefore both difficult to read for the individual, and also difficult to communicate, which desires are caused by a lacking nutrient, and which ones aren’t.

3. There appear to be plenty of nutrients that we can lack and never get any cravings for, silently dying on the inside without a clue. Or at least, without a clue until major symptoms appear. For example, I am not aware that animals or people deprived of certain vitamins (A, B, C, D, K) develop cravings for foods containing them.

4. The people arguing in this fashion tend to make up just-so stories and only argue for their favorite things. If someone’s arguing that your appetite for candy means you’re sugar-deprived (Peaters) or protein making you ravenous means you’re protein-deprived (gym bros), he’s unlikely to turn around and accept the idea that obese people are lacking in whatever’s uniquely found in KFC.

That said, there seems to be some evidence that we can sense SOME nutrients, for example sodium, and our appetite for it increases when we lack it. But that system is more complex than it sounds.

In addition, I’ve experienced various “something is wrong” symptoms on extreme diets, but my cravings or appetites didn’t necessarily point me in the right direction.

For example, when I eat less than ~40-45g of protein per day over several days, I start to get issues - but I don’t necessarily get cravings for steak or chicken breast or protein powder.

My body seems to know “something is wrong” but not how to fix it.

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Plenty of known breakages in our appetite system

First, let’s just observe that CLEARLY many modern people have broken appetite systems in many ways.

If someone is morbidly obese, it’s likely that he is actually more hungry than his lean equivalent would be. You could argue that he only got to be morbidly obese because something, anything, was wrong with his appetite regulation system.

In a metabolically healthy person, appetite should diminish rapidly once enough food has been consumed. If he somehow got fat, his appetite should be decreased until he used up those extra fat reserves, at which point it should return to previous levels.

This was observed in early studied on overfeeding: it was extremely difficult to fatten up prisoners, and they had to stuff themselves with 5,000-10,000kcal/day, which was a painful chore.

Once the prisoners were allowed to eat normally again, they rapidly lost all the weight until they had returned to their pre-overfeeding weight.

The mere presence of obesity thus tells us that our appetite regulation system cannot be trusted fully.

Endocannabinoid System

One concrete example is the ECS, or endocannabinoid system. It’s called this because it is the same pathway that cannabis triggers, giving you the “munchies.” It’s “endo-” because it is triggered endogenously, aka from within your body.

Over-stimulation of the ECS is one way in which seed oils and their omega-6 PUFA linoleic acid can cause obesity: omega-6 oxidation products like 4-HNE activate the ECS and give you the munchies.

I believe this explains that weird experience of bliss/disgust with modern SAD fast food like fried chicken: the first few bites are absolute heaven, but only a few bites in, you feel disgusted with yourself and almost sick. It’s a biochemical roller coaster.

Ever since getting off the PUFA train and eating a pretty stoic heavy cream diet, it’s been interesting to observe the phenomenon of “food pleasure” or “food satisfaction” in myself on refeeds, or in others.

Watching other people eat crappy fast food, especially fried foods, is almost like watching a junkie shoot up.

There is clearly a bliss thing going on: eyes rolling back, pleased moaning upon every bite. There is an itch being scratched, the food is giving relief to something. Then, only a few bites in, a visible feeling of revulsion starts to set in. Often times, this causes people to practically inhale their food, trying to relive that same sensation of the first few bites before the disgust sets in.

I am now convinced that this is not what eating food should feel like - this is a drug/junkie experience, not a fuel/feeding experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I like it when food tastes good. In fact, I love my diet to this day, even over 3 years in. But I neither crave things too much, nor do I get the relief from an “itch” that fast food junkies seem to get.

Plain White Rice as a reference point

This is actually a good reason that everyone should try eating only plain white rice for a month (no salt, no sauce!)

Rice tastes pretty decent, but it’s not exactly a feast for the senses, and it also doesn’t stimulate the ECS or probably other, similar systems.

If you don’t want to eat plain white rice, are you really hungry?

Just like fasting teaches you that it’s ok to not eat for a few days, eating only an extremely plain food for a month teaches you the difference between actual hunger and the stimulation of various pleasure systems via food.

Now that I think of it, the potato diet might do the same thing if you prefer that.

Sensing vs. Craving

So how do we tell if a desire to eat a certain food is caused by a lack of certain nutrients, or by over-stimulation of the ECS or some other malfunction of the appetite regulation system?

One heuristic might be: does the desire reliably go away, for a reasonable amount of time, when followed?

For example, protein makes me ravenous. Not instantly, but within 45-60 minutes of eating a high-protein meal, while I might still be physically full & bloated from the protein, I am ravenous and want to eat again. Maybe more of the same protein food, or something else - doesn’t matter.

Gym bros tell me that this means I’m deficient in protein - if I had enough protein, the protein would be satiating!

I see several problems with this argument:

1. How come I’m not craving protein BEFORE eating any? Did my body forgot it was deficient in protein until it tasted some, and then remembered?

2. Why does this craving/hyperphagia effect not go away eventually? Shouldn’t I eventually regain satiety from eating protein? After hours, days, weeks, years? Last time I followed this long enough, I gained 100lbs.

If I was really deficient in one nutrient and my body could sense it, I would expect the craving to go away once I’ve ingested enough of that nutrient, for long enough.

Salt is a good example.

Sodium

Salt is an interesting one because the ability of at least mammals to sense its lack is pretty well studied.

We’re so accustomed to sensing sodium that we have an entire taste bud category dedicated to it in the middle of the tongue. Animals have been observed traveling long distances to seek out salt licks. Goats are known to lick cars in the winter, to get the salt picked up from the street.

Unlike the malfunctioning protein dis-satiety I described above, our desire for salt quickly and acutely goes away. Ever try adding more salt? If you add a tiny bit too much, the food becomes revolting very quickly, and you’ll be unable to get it down.

Our bodies are clearly very astute at sensing that we’ve replenished our sodium reserves.

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The Unbearable Saltiness of Diet Soda

I actually had a very curious sodium experience today on ex150nosauce+ACV-2. This diet is quite low in sodium ordinarily: no salt added to the food, no sauce (which was previously one of my main ways of getting sodium in). No Monster energy drinks, which are very high in sodium.

My appetite quickly adjusted and I didn’t miss salt much or at all.

But today I cheated a little, and ate some locally made beef sticks, roughly the same amount of beef I’d ordinarily eat on the diet. They contained 400mg of sodium per stick, and there were 7 servings in the box - meaning almost 3,000mg of sodium in total.

While the beef sticks themselves didn’t taste overly salty, they seemed to totally oversaturate my desire for sodium for hours: I bought diet soda a bit later, the same type I drink 1-2x nearly every day on this diet.

Yet today, it tasted like salt water. I could barely get it down, despite being quite thirsty (from the salty beef sticks).

It seems that my appetite for sodium had adjusted to the new, very low level, and getting so much of it in via the beef sticks got me near the point that anything with sodium in it was unpalatable.

Adjustment to different levels

At the same time, it’s not as simple as “salt tastes good if you need more” and “salt tastes bad if you’ve had enough.”

You can clearly adjust your palate for salt over time, and your body can get used to pretty extreme differences in salt intake.

During my early keto stages, I was a huge salt maniac, like many ketoers. I would sprinkle salt on my steak to dry it out. I would sprinkle more salt on it when cooking, and then after cooking, while eating. I was a huge salt bougie. I had the wooden salt pot with the wooden salt spoon and everything. I went through several of these buckets of Maldon sea salt flakes:

And these very high amounts of salt tasted great. I certainly didn’t make my food unpalatable with that much salt.

Then, later when doing carnivore, I discovered that I had to cut out all the added salt or I would get latent, increasing headaches on carnivore.

I stuck to carnivore for 90 days, and while I never ended up really adapting to or liking carnivore, I noticed that I stopped missing the salt.

Now this took several weeks - I really missed the salt for the first few weeks. Both in terms of hydration, flavor, headaches, and cramps, things got worse for a while.

But then they got better, and they kept improving - and after the 90 days, I stopped carnivore, but I didn’t add the salt back in. I simply stopped missing it. I had fewer headaches and cramps than before on the high-salt keto variant, and my palate had adjusted.

Now, food tastes good with much lower amounts of salt. And adding the same amount I was eating previously, during my Maldon phase, would completely ruin food for me now.

So which level is “correct?” I think neither one. I think our bodies can be in a stable equilibrium at various levels of salt intake. It’s huge variation from our accustomed salt intake that’s giving us issues, and that’s probably what our sense of taste is pointing to.

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Pica, I choose you!

Pica is a mental condition that you might’ve seen on one of those weird TV shows. It’s basically an appetite for things that are non-nutritious. The people featured in these TV shows typically eat nails, screws, plastic shavings, bark, or the foam filling of their couch.

But what I want to highlight here is that, while our body can sense lack of salt & pinpoint the solution by inducing salt cravings, it doesn’t seem nearly as good in solving lack in other nutrients.

I’ve done several experiments now that induced weird cravings within 4-7 days. What’s so weird about these cravings is that they don’t appear to point to foods that would solve the problem.

One example is tomato sauce. On several super-low protein diets (significantly less than 45g/day) I’ve gotten super strong cravings for tomato sauce.

But eating lots of tomato sauce doesn’t get rid of the craving at all. Not even acutely for 45-60min, as I described with protein. At one point I found myself eating an entire jar of tomato sauce, with appetite for more.

Whatever my body wanted, it wasn’t in tomato sauce - yet, somehow, my body thought it would be. Somewhere, down at the bottom of that jar of marinara sauce, I would find the golden ticket. If not, maybe in the next jar?

One candidate is protein: while tomato sauce isn’t particularly high in protein, it’s quite high in umami/glutamate, which is typically associated with protein-rich foods. Think seared meat.

Was this a pica? Not that the tomato sauce was a non-food item like foam fillings or nails, but it wasn’t the solution to the lacking nutrient at hand.

This it not the technical meaning of “pica” of course, but I think it’s an interesting phenomenon - a misguided craving for a real lack of a nutrient.

Another candidate would be sodium - but of course the tomato sauce is quite high in sodium, and so you would’ve expected that craving to go away after eating a whole jar. I certainly wasn’t eating a whole jar of it on my regular diet, during which there were no such cravings.

After quitting these diets and returning to ex150, the cravings mysteriously disappeared. Clearly, something was lacking - maybe protein, but I can’t say for sure.

Spurious Nutrient Sensing

I am therefore not particularly convinced of a general capability of the body to sense lacking nutrients, or of strategies to “listen to your body".”

While it seems pretty well studied & anecdotally sound for sodium, even that story is more complex.

Plenty of cravings seem misguided and not solutions to the problem at hand.

On top of that, we’re operating in an environment that made 94% of the U.S. population unable to correctly regulate their appetite to begin with.

It just seems unlikely that we’re going to get good data out of this unless we’re extremely careful.

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This time was crazy.

I’m down roughly 10lbs from the lowest weight of the last experience to the lowest on this one. That’s the fastest weight loss I’ve seen since.. I think since the 2nd or 3rd month of doing ex150, when I was still 260-280lbs This might be in the top 5 of my most rapid fat loss months ever. And I started it at 226lbs, not at 290!

I (briefly) reached a new modern low of 216.7lbs, breaking (a little bit) through my previous plateau of 217lbs, which I hadn’t been able to break through since April 2024.

The most dramatic difference was an incredible reduction in appetite. As always, this experiment was ad-lib, meaning I was eating as much cream as I wanted to.

It’s just that I wanted significantly less cream, and I often got cement-truck satiety after half my usual portion, or even less.

I actually started ordering medium (!) Heavy Whipping Cream lattes at Starbucks instead of large. I don’t think I have EVER ordered a medium coffee before in my life.

But even those would give me cement-truck satiety halfway through.

The Thought Behind It

In short, I wanted to combine the vinegar theory with the polyol pathway theory I recently discovered.

To briefly recap:

Vinegar theory posits that acetic acid in vinegar can help rejuvenate senescent (broken) fat cells and help them correctly react to the body’s signals.

Hence, I was taking 3 capsules (=1 serving = 750mg acetic acid) of Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar capsules each morning. That’s a relatively modest dose compared to the insane amounts of vinegar I consumed during the vinegar trial. 750mg acetic acid is about what you’d get from one tablespoon (15ml) of vinegar.

Polyol pathway theory says that high salt or umami (glutamate) intake can cause the body to endogenously create fructose from glucose, which can have certain detrimental effects (in some people) and prevent fat loss.

Hence, I cut out all sauce from my lunch meals. Previously, I was alternating marinara and alfredo sauce, which are both high in sodium. The marinara is also high in umami/glutamate.

(By the way, the sauces I was using were free of seed oils and even olive oil, which is often adulterated. The marinara from Whole Foods is fat free, and Rao’s Alfredo uses cream.)

And boy, did this work.

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Muh Palatability

“Duh, of course!” replies the skeptic, “You cut out the sauce! Sauce is delicious, and cutting it out would obviously make you eat less!”

But aha! The experimental design explicitly disproves this as causal. How?

The sauce was previously only added to my single lunch meal, which is fixed in terms of size and carolies.

I was (obviously) not eating heavy cream with tomato sauce, and therefore the sauce was never part of an ad-lib meal before.

And so the sauce wasn’t removed from any ad-lib food in this experiment.

Here’s a visualization of my typical eating times:

Coffee cups not to scale; I just mean that I drink ad-lib creamy coffee from wakeup until 3pm, breaking it up with lunch. Then nothing from roughly 3pm until dinner, when I have whipped cream.

Still, cutting sauce from my fixed lunch meal (and taking ACV capsules) drastically reduced my appetite for cream hours later, and even the next morning.

If tomato sauce at lunch makes whipped cream at dinner more palatable, that’s some quantum entanglement stuff if I’ve ever seen it.

I therefore conclude that this is a metabolic effect, not simply one of “sauce makes food more palatable.”

What Are You Drinking On?

Ever since I did a few 48h dry fasts a while ago, I have tended to drink a bit less on the margin. I realized I felt fine not drinking very much, and I was thinking that drinking a little less, or “intermittent dry fasting” if you will, might help accelerate fat loss.

According to polyol pathway theory, though, the signal (you want to avoid) is actually not caused by total salt intake, but by salt concentration in the blood. That means you can lower it by drinking water when you consume salt.

In that spirit I decided to marginally overdrink instead of underdrink. I didn’t chug a ton of water, but when in doubt I’d drink some water, whereas previously I would not.

I also tried limiting my soda/energy drink intake to 2-3 a day, and I switched away from Monster Energy Zero because they have incredibly high amounts of sodium (380mg/can). Some other brands and most sodas only have 70-100mg, and Ghost energy drinks only have about 30mg.

I therefore mostly switched to Ghost when available, or just diet sodas like Dr Pepper Zero or Mountain Dew Zero. (I much prefer the Zero soda taste over both “diet” sodas and regular HFCS or sugar sodas. Yes, even Mexican Coke or Red Bull.)

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Tale of the Tape

For context, I’m including the second half of the last experiment, ex150-15. It got me down to about 226lbs.

I followed that experiment with a 3 day refeed mostly consisting of a giant stew of beans, rice & vegetables. Also some shortbread, a bit of chocolate and some other things. By day 3 I was really tired of the refeed and threw the rest of the stew out, excited to go back on an ex150 style diet.

That refeed made my weight jump up to 238lbs (+12lbs) in the 3 days.

The water weight came down almost immediately, and I was below the previous low of 226lbs on day 4 of ex150nosauce+ACV.

Then, the weight loss continued rapidly. After the water loss, I lost nearly a pound a day for a week straight. There’s a bit of a slowdown later, but I broke through my old plateau of 217.2lbs only 3 days before the end, hitting 216.7lbs.

The weight gain on the next day is probably because I actually cheated on that same day, eating a lot of brisket for lunch.

Overall, the weight loss was very linear for the whole month after the initial water weight loss. That seems to indicate this isn’t just a shift in water weight/salt balance, but actual fat loss.

Going from 226lbs to 216lbs is a 4% reduction in total weight.. in a single month.

As a reminder, a 15% reduction in 72 weeks is considered a “huge success” for GLP-1 drugs, and even 5% in 72 weeks is considered a success. I just lost 4% in 4 weeks, and 226lbs is actually the border of obesity for me. I.e. I lost this weight from just barely being obese, not from morbidly obese.

How was it?

Overall, it was just mostly ex150. The lunch meal is definitely less delicious without the sauce. The marinara sauce especially would normally give me an incredible “hit” (dopamine?), almost like crack. Maybe that’s a sign.

Without any sauce, the meal tastes a lot more buttery, but still pretty good. I’d give it a 8/10 instead of the 10/10 that it is with sauce added.

Quite sustainable, and only a handful of times did I ever even think about the sauce.

As mentioned before, my appetite was drastically reduced. I think I only finished my usual whipped cream dinner portion once. Several times I couldn’t even finish it over 2 days, and had to stretch it to a 3rd day.

I also drank dramatically less coffee. On ex150, much of my ad-lib cream intake is added to coffee. I’ve been known to drink 10+ coffees with cream a day. This time, I could barely do 4. Some days I only did 1-2.

Heavy whipping cream lattes from Starbucks would almost knock me out, and I would finish half and then let the rest sit for 2-3h, even on a long drive. There were a couple of hilarious moments in the car where I looked down and reached for the coffee, and part of my brain made me instinctively pull back. Almost like a flinch.

In general, I think I experienced something akin to food anhedonia. Food of any kind, be it my lunch or heavy cream, or coffee, just didn’t excite me as much any more. I think it’d be wrong to say that they “tasted worse,” they tasted just the same. But the same tastes and flavors just didn’t give me as much of a “hit” any more.

I keep saying “hit” because I don’t know if it’s dopamine or something else, but something in the emotional reward system just seemed.. turned down. Interestingly, this also happened when I first went on keto a decade ago. Before keto, nearly all food I ate would be like crack. Some call this food addiction or food noise, but I don’t like those terms.

But call it addiction or noise or something else, lots of foods would give me incredible emotional highs, and none would give me any satiety at all. Keto made this much better, but later I figured out ways to still get huge “hits” on keto: high-protein foods like meat, cheeses, and lots of added tomato sauce. Dark chocolate.

On ex150 my food choice is obviously extremely reduced, and I’d mostly get “highs” from creamy coffee and my saucey slop lunch.

Without the sauce, and with addition of the ACV, not only was the “high” of the sans-sauce-lunch reduced, but also the coffee and the whipped cream.

Incredibly, even diet sodas and energy drinks didn’t feel as rewarding. I’d still have some, but not nearly as many, and they weren’t nearly as exciting.

I found myself taking 1-2h to drink a single diet soda - pretty unheard of before. On a few occasions, I noticed that the diet sodas tasted quite salty. I didn’t get this consistently though, so I’m not sure.

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Notes

As usual, I took copious notes. There are a lot of notes because this experiment was so wild, so I’ll condense them thematically.

Cravings

Lunch much more plain tasting w/o sauce, but still good

MAN do I miss the sauce. Uncanny. Probably a sign.

Got sudden “Uhh I should buy salsa & tomato sauce & jalapenos” thoughts when at the store, cravings!

Anhedonia

I think without the sauce I am .. drinking less coffee? I just sort of don’t crave it much

Sitting next to creamy coffee for 30 min at a time, forgetting to drink it
Just a strong disinterest in coffee & cream, it seems

Ok only had 3-4 coffees today, not even with that much cream, and for dinner the first time this experiment I was actually quite hungry

One thing that’s super different, I’m drinking creamy beverages super slowly. Usually I just inhale coffee & tea with cream. Now, I forgot the cup is sitting right next to me. This seems like a sign of disinterest in more carolies aka satiety.

Food anhedonia (?), the opposite of food noise
Never been so uninterested in food

Satiety in Overdrive

Wooo cement truck satiety hits hard. Forgot it after only 3 days of starch refeed lol

I swear to God I am eating/drinking way less cream. Had cement truck satiety almost immediately upon eating whipped cream.

Finished my whipped cream dinner for the first time this experiment I think, although it took a really long time

Seem to drink about 4 coffees a day, and eat typically half my cup of whipped cream at night, maybe a bit more than half on average

Lol, after only 4 coffees and 2 teas (even less cream than a coffee!), I made whipped cream for dinner and managed to eat... a whopping 3 spoons before my brain went “ugh!” and I put it back into the fridge

Only started eating whipped cream dinner around 10:30pm, and again didn’t finish yesterday’s portion, so keeping it for a 3rd day

Measured my cream intake today. Trying to force myself to finish the whipped cream so I’ll get to 500ml but it’s already past 2am and I just can’t will it down lol. Cement truck satiety too strong.

Only managed 414g of cream, which puts me at under 1,950kcal despite literally trying to force feed myself

Just to try hitting the limit again and undereating, tried drinking a ton of coffees with cream. After 2 had pretty strong satiety (but not “cement-truck” as I rarely get that with liquid cream), forced down 2 more for a total of 4, was pretty nauseated tbh
Usually I drink TEN of these a day intuitively!

Had about 6 coffees and 2 teas today; it’s 9:30pm and the mere thought of making dinner cream is nauseating

Ended up making dinner whipped cream after midnight lol.. and managed maybe 5 spoons before giving up

Ordered HWC latte, “f u satiety” after a few sips
Over the course of an hour forced it down, got mildly nauseated for 2h after
Not even a big Starbucks sized cup, just from a local coffee joint
8pm: Still “hung over” from that HWC latte, the thought of finishing the whipped cream I have in the fridge from yesterday is literally nauseating
Ended up not touching yesterday’s leftover whipped cream at all

Only 2 coffees today that has to be a new record

Repeat of the HWC latte phenomenon, couldn’t even finish half (of a medium sized one, not large size!) within several hours

More Starbucks HWC satiety, after half had to stop and finished it 2h later

Random

Wow, Monsters have 380mg sodium, diet soda has ~100mg
My sodium intake even on a “no salt added ever” diet probably fluctuated like crazy

Morning of day 5 and I am below last month’s lowest weight (by .2lb)
Is it just the ACV kicking in?

Feeling really hot & sweaty after lunch & a coffee, even though it’s only 70°F and so not objectively hotter

Feels like fasting lol, almost a pound down every day

Reverse feeling of “stuffed but ravenous” - my stomach is feeling empty and growling, but I don’t want to eat despite literally having food next to me

Feels like my brain/energy sensor thinks “we’re good” but my stomach is expecting something

Ketones 5.6mmol/L, glucose 86mg/dL in the evening

Cheating

Cheated by eating quite a bit brisket for lunch

Cheating & refeeds are less and less satisfying over time. The brisket wasn’t bad, but I basically didn’t get any “hit” from it like I used to. Think over time as ECS and maybe other systems normalize food becomes less and less drug/entertainment and more just fuel

Didn’t make dinner cream to make up for brisket cheat meal

Refeed

Hated the refeed, only did 1 day

Ate a bunch of cheese, chocolate, some butter cookies, beef jerky. By the time dinner rolled around and I made beans & rice, I was already sort of over the refeed and just going through the motions. Didn’t finish the beans & rice, didn’t finish the chocolate, didn’t finish the beef jerky. Threw much of it away.

Wait, but why?!

What caused this experiment to work so exceptionally well?

ex150vinegar worked pretty well, but it wasn’t exceptional. Losing 4-6lbs after going from a high-carb diet to ex150 is just sort of what always happens. I also wasn’t near my previous Magic Number Plateau of 217lbs, and it had always been relatively easy to get back to that.

But this time the weight loss stayed pretty linear all the way to the end, even slightly breaking through the 217 plateau, indicating something was different.

1. Was it the lack of sauce?

2. Was it the ACV kicking in?

3. Was it the combination?

4. Did the recent ex_plainrice experiment lower my adipose linoleic acid enough to enable a new low, breaking the old plateau?

5. Ketone levels were quite high (5mmol/L or above), similar to fasting levels. Not sure if this is a cause or symptom.

Well, the linoleic acid level was easy to check: despite sort of vowing to do less OmegaQuant Completes (OQC) in the future, I ended up doing another one:

It came in at 16.2%, so low LA% doesn’t seem to be “it”.. although it’s down .4% from last month. But certainly not the lowest result I’ve had, even if we don’t count very-low-fat diets, which tend to push it down even more. Previous high-fat results had me at just over 15% on high-fat diets.

On the other hand, the causality might be the opposite: maybe nosauce+ACV caused the weight loss, and the linoleic acid released from my body fat got incorporated into my cells, driving up the OQC?

In any case, LA levels are not a clear-cut signal here.

So I’m not sure what caused it, but the combination of ex150 + ACV + nosauce seems quite potent. I suppose I found 2 more buttons to push.

What’s next?

As we say in software.. never touch a running system. So obviously I’m just doing this exact experiment one more time.

The combination of nosauce + ACV somehow seems incredibly powerful. I couldn’t tell you if it’s the reduced sodium, glutamate/umami, or whatever else it might be about the sauce.

But if you’re currently using a lot of sodium, or sauce, I would suggest you give nosauce+ACV a try.

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