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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This is Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan has written a few books on food and nutrition. Let’s just say I am not a fan of Michael Pollan.

Maybe the food-related quote Michael Pollan is most famous for is this:

Now I obviously disagree with the plants part, and I think the other 2 are not useful advice. It’s a nice quip but it doesn’t help anyone.

What is “food?” What is “too much” and might there be a reason some of us are eating “too much?” What if it’s not an independent variable?

It’s such an obnoxious little expression that Amber O’Hearn has actually made the counter-quip:

But today, let’s not focus on this saying. He’s said other things that are less obviously useless, though still useless. But discussing some of them is interesting.

Today I want to focus on:

This is the short version, here’s the longer quote:

Sounds reasonable, right? Let’s be Lindy! Our great grandmother wasn’t unhealthy. Or at least, she did not have modern diseases of civilization.

But I think this advice is malarky, to use a word your great grandmother might’ve been familiar with.

UPF I did it again

I have previously written about why I think focusing on/avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods is not the solution. I gained 100lbs on a strict keto diet that was almost entirely devoid of UPFs. I’ve cooked my own meals almost every day for more than 20 years, since I left my childhood home. I cooked 99% or so of the meals that I got fat on from fresh ingredients.

While many UPFs do include many of the “modern horsemen” that we suspect of causing the diabesity epidemic, that’s not baked in - you could just as well make UPFs without them. And you can also consume these ingredients without eating UPFs, as my 100lbs-gain experience proves.

In short: “processing” doesn’t make food unhealthy. Cutting is processing, as is dehydrating, canning, and cooking. It is certain very specific parts of “ultra-processed” foods that make them unhealthy, and we should avoid those instead of using a very vague umbrella term that has tons of false negatives (harmless things it forbids) and false positives (unhealthy things it allows).

If the root cause of metabolic disease is really something like seed oils, then it doesn’t matter if they come in the form of UPF or if you drizzle soybean oil all over your salad or eat slabs of high-linoleic acid bacon for breakfast.

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Would great grandma recognize pizza?

I think this great grandmother heuristic also has both a lot of false positives and false negatives.

Would she recognize.. sushi? Would a Japanese great grandma recognize Pizza? The world was a lot less integrated and travel was much more costly and expensive 100 years ago.

We didn’t have Asian-Mexican fusion restaurants in.. 1890? Or whenever great grandma would’ve been born.

Heck, great grandma might not have recognized pizza anywhere in the U.S. unless she maybe grew up in New York City! I knew grandparents of friends (not “great” grandparents) who considered pizza ethnic food.

If we go back far enough in time, nobody in Europe would’ve recognized potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, coffee, chocolate, pineapple, peanuts, .. these are all New World crops that were brought back after 1400.

Surely this heuristic isn’t supposed to simply filter out ancient, healthy staple foods from other regions of the world?

I suppose there could be an argument made that your ancestors adapted to a certain diet that was relatively regional, and your genetics haven’t yet caught up to globalization.

But the Irish did reasonably well on potatoes when there wasn’t a famine. You could say they thrived. Lots of people in Europe tolerate rice very well even though rice doesn’t really grow there.

Would great grandma recognize ultra processed food?

I’m not sure she would be able, without an ingredient list, to tell it from “real” and “whole” food?

Now there are of course UPF products that aren’t even trying to imitate a real food, e.g. Mountain Dew or maybe Twizzlers. (I’ve previously written about The Strange Attraction of the SAD and UPFs.)

But a lot of UPF is explicitly designed to look, feel, and taste like an old-timey, real food. Except all the ingredients were put together from industrial base ingredients like whey isolate, soybean oil, emulsifiers, dyes, glucose syrup, and so on.

For example, Pollan mentions a “box of portable yogurt tubes.” Sure, great grandma’s yogurt might not have come in a box of tubes. Maybe in a jar. But apart from the packaging, would she be able to tell modern faux-yogurt from real yogurt?

If you let A/B great grandma one of these faux pretend “foods” vs. the real thing, she might notice that they taste or feel different. I suspect that she’d much prefer the flavor of the real item, as often these UPF faux-foods aren’t nearly as good.

But apart from that, how would grandma know just from looking at them? Would she describe them as “not food?”

Would great grandma recognize the fatty acid profile resulting from modern animal feeds?

The biggest source of linoleic acid in the American diet is.. chicken.

Chickens and pigs are now fed soybeans, corn, and often even explicitly soybean oil and corn oil.

Since these animals, like us, are monogastric, they cannot convert those fats into something better and simply store them when they grow.

Then we eat them, and so we eat the linoleic acid indirectly without ever touching a “seed oil.”

This is why I like to say that bacon is just “chunky seed oils.”

Would great grandma have recognized that the chicken she’s roasting, or the bacon she’s frying up for you, contains 20-30% linoleic acid instead of a more traditional 5-10%?

Maybe. If she’s astute, she might notice that the bacon is softer than she’s used to - a common complaint as early as 1900, when some European countries (Denmark, IIRC?) banned American bacon for being too soft, which comes from a higher-than-normal PUFA feed (corn vs. barley or whatever Europeans fed their chickens).

In chickens, it’s more difficult to discern.

Certainly these are changes an experienced great grandma might notice. But would she recognize these chickens and the pork/bacon as “food?”

Would great grandma recognize KFC or french fries?

Fried foods like french fries and fried chicken are commonly cited as the worst of the worst ultra-processed foods and junk foods.

But the first recorded recipe for fried chicken is from.. 1747. It stems from Scotland. (This explains a lot, actually, lol. Hello deep fried Mars bar!) Certainly, fried chicken was extremely common in the American South all throughout the 1800s, possibly introduced by Scottish immigrants.

The Koreans claim to trace their deep-fried chicken tradition back to the 15th century.

While YOUR great grandma might not have recognized the fried chicken of today if she didn’t grow up in the South, there were certainly tons of Southern great grandmas that would absolutely recognize it.

Deep frying other things was common even before than, and was popular in medieval Europe.

The first written record of fried potatoes is from 1529, when Spaniards found people in what is now Chile doing it. Europeans were deep frying stuff before that, but they didn’t have potatoes.

The first modern-style french fries are attributed to a Spanish nun who was known for making them. She died in 1582. It is assumed that Spain was the first European country to eat fried potatoes simply because they were the first to colonize the New World and bring back the potato. It then spread throughout the rest of Europe, as did fries.

So again, it’s quite possible that your great grandma wouldn’t have been familiar with french fries simply because they were somewhat regional, if she didn’t grow up in a region that featured them regularly.

But certainly there would’ve been grandmas as early as 1600 that would’ve absolutely recognized french fries as food.

Of course, what’s the real change between the fried chicken of 15th century Korea, or the french fries of 1529, compared to our modern iterations?

It is largely the oil they’re cooked in. Back then, almost nobody had access to enough high-linoleic acid fat to deep-fry things. The fats used for frying would’ve probably been, depending on the region, beef tallow, lard from pigs fed way less soybeans & corn than today, palm oil (in the tropics), possibly refined olive oil or avocado oil, or clarified butter/ghee.

While many of these (lard, palm oil, olive oil, avocado oil) aren’t quite as low in linoleic acid as tallow or butter are (2%) they can often range from 8-12% instead of the 50% in soybean oil or 60% in corn oil.

Meaning the same fried chicken or french fries now have 5x the linoleic acid content or more than what the traditional recipes contained.

And, again, it’s possible that great grandma would’ve A/B tested traditional fried chicken vs. modern ones, or french fries, and determined that she preferred the taste of the tallow fries over those of the soybean oil fries. Or noticed that the latter went rancid more quickly.

But she almost certainly would’ve recognized these very old foods as .. food.

The Food of Theseus

The Ship of Theseus is an interesting thought experiment about what constitutes an identity, dating back to the Ancient Greeks: If Theseus sails his ship around the world for decades, and slowly replaces every single piece of it during repairs, is it still the same ship? At which point does it stop being “Ship 1” to become “Ship 2?”

This is the situation we have with some faux-UPFs like modern “yogurt” but also, even more subtle, with modern pigs & chickens. Are these the same chickens and pigs? Almost certainly not, especially if we look at qualities we think are at fault: the fatty acid content of their fat. But they are clearly still pigs & chickens, and great grandma would certainly recognize them as such.

And the faux yogurts.. they contain whey, they contain sugars, they contain proteins and often fats.. but what is the definition of “real food” or “yogurt” that makes them unhealthy but great grandma’s home made yogurt “healthy?”

Sorry great grandma, but you’re FIRED!

Pollan’s quip about your great grandma is therefore, like the other Pollan quip, mostly useless as a heuristic to tell “healthy” from “unhealthy” food.

She would probably throw out a lot of things that are fine to eat. And she would keep a lot of what are the most potent modern obesogenic and unhealthy “junk foods” as well.

A lot of modern faux UPF “foods” might be recognizable as “food” to her, even if she would’ve considered them terrible tasting and not particularly fresh. But in absence of showing her the nutrition label, she would probably not have been able to tell the UPF imitation from “food.”

And the nutrition label was introduced almost 100 years after great grandma was likely born, so she would never have seen one in her life. Back then, you simply didn’t need nutrition labels.

Once again, the brief quippy heuristics sound cool on book covers, but they don’t actually produce good results.

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You might’ve noticed that I don’t use people’s titles or credentials. There are plenty of doctors, PhDs, Masters, and who knows what else in the nutrition space.

It’s extremely common to see them post their fancy title abbreviations in their Twitter handle, on their blogs, and on their YouTube channels to really play up their credentials:

Plenty of these people even cosplay their profession/credentials in YouTube videos or other appearances by wearing lab coats or medical scrubs on camera:

As you can probably imagine, I HATE appeal to authority. Humans (like you and me😬) are tribal creatures, and we like hierarchies if we feel that they are a fair structure our tribe approves of.

This is why you’ll often times hear carnivores refer to “Dr Baker” or “Dr Chaffee” or vegans to “Dr Greger” and so on.

I’m not claiming nobody should get a PhD or an MD, and I’m not claiming nobody should use these titles when referencing their favorite diet influencer.

But I’m claiming that the arguments must stand on their own.

I don’t see anyone’s PhD or MD as “social proof” that their hypotheses are correct. If anything, it’s the opposite: I suspect people who got these titles are yes-men, because the system filters for people who go along with the (PhD) program and don’t rock the boat. I automatically counter-weigh the arguments of people who promote their credentials in an ostentatious way.

In fact, the most interesting hypotheses, and the best arguments in nutrition, seem to come from non-PhDs and non-MDs.

Grant Genereux, who discovered the Vitamin-A-toxicity theory of disease, is an engineer. Engineers are trained to take a problem and solve it. I have yet to see Grant wear a hard hat in any of his videos, or promote his personal credentials instead of his arguments.

Amber O’Hearn, one of the OG carnivore and keto researchers and influencers of this generation, doesn’t even mention any of her education. I do believe she has a degree in Computer Science from a very reputable university, but it’s not even mentioned on her page. She has published several papers relating to ketosis, sleep, and other things. Her arguments stand on their own.

It’s a bit harder to pin down MPT (Modern PUFA Theory) because there are more players, it seems to me, and some of them do have medical credentials:

Chris Knobbe, who has written The Ancestral Diet Revolution, has an MD, and boy does he want you to know it:

Knobbe’s book was the first book I read about PUFAs once people drew my attention to the relevance of this hypothesis. It’s a great book, and I recommend you read it.

But plenty of other big players in this field don’t have any degrees.

Tucker Goodrich, maybe THE authority on MPT in our day, doesn’t even have a degree in the profession that was his day job for decades: IT/software engineering. He ran large software groups on Wall St and became a CTO for a hedge fund, and was entirely self-taught. His arguments (& and presumably IT success) stand on their own.

Almost the entirety of nutrition debate and discussion revolves around non-arguments like which side has the better credentials, which status quo bias makes up the null hypothesis, and so on.

Naturally, I am very allergic to any of that. If you tell me you’re right because you have credentials, I’ll probably downgrade your likelihood of being correct substantially.

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Piled higher & Deeper

Growing up, many of my best friends ended up pursuing PhDs. Most of them in physics, widely considered a “hard science.” Some of the credentials you wouldn’t believe, from very regal institutions that carry far in Science Land.

I never had the impression I was cut out for true science work. I liked to actually get stuff done. Science seemed like an intellectual circle jerk.

After a few years, almost all of my starry-eyed science friends became cynical. Getting your PhD takes long enough, but then you are “encouraged” to work for a pittance on your “post-doc” which is where you already have your PhD but they pay you like an intern.

Since each scientific field is such an in-group clique, it’s basically just Mean Girls. You could of course quit and go to work elsewhere, but word would get around, and you’d be bullied for the rest of your scientific career.

So most of my friends, now cynical of science as an institution, went into industry.

Luckily, if you’re good at math and you have fancy credentials, you can just get hired as a management consultant. McKinsey & Co. is very happy to rent your useless PhD title out to big companies that need an excuse to fire people. Nothing like a 26 year old physics PhD, hot off the presses, to tell a CEO whom he needs to lay off.

And while many of my friends were quite enthusiastic going into their PhD training, by the end of the thesis, they were all dismayed: it was clear that nobody was ever going to read their dissertation. There were typically only a handful of people on the planet who even had the context to understand it or care for the topic. These people were either already their peers in the program, and would thus have talked with them about it anyway, or competitors. The competitors would rather be caught dead than reading/referencing/promoting a “competing” thesis or theory.

Science is said to be so petty because the stakes are so low: when you file your PhD thesis, that’s probably the last time anyone sees it.

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tHe wOrSt thEsiS eVer

I am reminded of all this because of a bit of internet soap opera that is currently going down in the bodybuilding/fitness world. I don’t usually care for such drama, but this one is fun because I dislike the main protagonist.

If you’re on the fitness side of the internet at all, especially bodybuilding or lifting weights, you’ve probably heard of this guy:

This is Dr. Mike Israetel, who goes by “Dr. Mike” in his videos. You’ll quickly notice that he starts off pretty much every video by introducing himself as “Dr. Mike.”

To say that his PhD is a MASSIVE marketing instrument for this guy is an understatement.

He’s also one of those guys who promote themselves as “evidence-based” or “science-based,” which I think is both really dumb and really uncouth - he is of course implying that other people are NOT following the evidence or the science.

Enter stage left: Solomon Nelson

Two weeks ago, a young Australian guy named Solomon Nelson started sort of a take-down campaign of “Dr. Mike.”

From what I can tell, Nelson is a law student? I’m not even sure, as he doesn’t usually mention his credentials. A large portion of his YouTube channel is trickjumping and other video games content. This nerd-cred immediately elevated his opinion in my mind.

Anyway, here’s his YouTube video “takedown” of Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis:

Now what Solomon Nelson did was actually hilariously simple. He read Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis. These are all publicly filed with the universities, I suppose, because they are all about “furthering the science” and “creating knowledge to be shared.”

Nelson found a lot to be desired in “Dr. Mike’s” PhD thesis. If you don’t want to watch his 1 hour video on it, here’s a brief summary:

• Tons of typos, grammar & formatting errors

• Lots of copy & paste incl. of errors

• Many tables contain impossible values which obviously represent carelessness when dealing with the statistics. E.g. athletes that would’ve had to be negative years old or weigh 3 pounds.

• Nelson thinks that Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis doesn’t produce anything in science, is extremely low in value, & generally not worthy of a PhD

• Nelson implies that Mike Israetel is thus not a “real” PhD or at least not worthy of it

Because Mike Israetel is extremely cocky and frequently criticizes/mocks other people in his space, lots of people dislike him. The video clip about his PhD being shit thus went viral and got millions of views.

Israetel (to my knowledge) didn’t address the topic directly on one of his own channels, but he did go on somebody else’s channel and talk about it for a bit.

He basically explains away the issue with 2 main arguments:

• The version of his PhD thesis downloaded & reviewed by Solomon Nelson was just a draft version, not the final PhD version, and it got uploaded to the university server by accident

• Regarding the actual scope, content, & quality of the PhD thesis: this was not his favorite topic, but at this point he knew he didn’t want to become a researcher, but work in the industry instead.

• His professor told him to pick a small scope so it’d be easier to concentrate instead of getting lost in the complexity.

• That many studies are just “repeats” trying to revalidate earlier findings, and that reproducing (or invalidating) prior findings is a pretty valuable thing in science.

• And that, at the time (12 years ago) exercise science wasn’t yet quite as confident in some of these things.

If you’re curious, Israetel’s study compares muscle mass & fat mass in college athletes and measures their strength, jumping ability, and sprinting performance.

The thesis largely concludes that athletes with more muscle mass and less fat mass perform better at sports.

In a way, duh, right?

I think they’re both correct, and there’s an inconvenient truth that explains it:

Most PhD work is shit

The only reason people are even mad at Israetel here is because we think of PhDs as very smart people that have proven to have done invaluable work. That’s the entire myth that wearing an effing lab coat on YouTube is built on.

And it doesn’t help that he’s being so cocky and constantly mentioning his PhD and credentials.

If people knew how the PhD sausage was made, they’d laugh or cry or both. Maybe I just got “lucky” that so many of my friends ended up going that route; I was exposed to the whole scam in my early 20s when they went through their programs.

We revere Science (tm) and Scientists (tm) and PhDs and Doctors because we associate legitimate authority with them: we imagine them to be Very Smart and Very Knowledgeable and, because we humans (😬) are silly creatures, we infer that they must be morally righteous as well. I mean, could an asshole even WEAR a lab coat?!

But this is largely wrong. Maybe it was true in the past, I don’t know. Certainly not in my lifetime, I’d say.

Academia nowadays is a meat grinder, turning starry-eyed young scientists into cynical management consultants.

The #1 lesson these guys learn is “What’s in it for me?” because they just spent the better part of a decade being taken advantage of.

A lot of them just want to get done with the PhD. Finish it any way possible. They know nobody’s ever going to read it. As long as they get the credential, that’s it.

Actually finding out something true, or new, or valuable, is not very important.

And Israetel is right about one thing: a lot of science is actually just very “boring” and bureaucratic stuff like his own thesis.

They say “measure twice, cut once” and that’s even more true in science. Measuring takes the form of a PhD thesis. That means many of these are just a re-run of an experiment somebody else already did, potentially hundreds of times. If you’re lucky, you get to change one slight variable and explore that part of the problem space.

It’s just not this romantic Indiana-Jones-in-a-Lab-Coat activity people imagine it is.

It’s not Dustin Hoffman staring into a microscope and going “By God… we’ve cured cancer!”

It’s mostly just sitting around for 2 years designing an experiment, waiting for 2 more years for some lab tech to finish it, and then opening Microsoft Word and typing “Nothing happened, as expected. More research is needed.”

The days of people attempting to induce Essential Fatty Acid Deficiency in themselves or starving people on purpose or sneaking corn oil into a Veterans’ home are over. Modern “science” is a desk job, you’re pushing papers like anyone else.

After Israetel went onto that podcast to defend himself and his PhD, people inspected the alleged “corrected” and “final” version of the PhD. Some claim that the timestamps don’t line up and that he’s been lying in his defense. Whatever.

This is exactly why I don’t put any value in people’s PhD or MD credentials to begin with.

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Science is clearly Systematically Biased

And maybe the biggest reason I don’t respect, or actually even disrespect, credentials from mainstream institutions: the paradigm they just learned is clearly wrong!

We have more than doubled obesity rates in the U.S. since 1990. Does anyone here get the impression that our mainstream nutrition scientists & doctors are doing a great job?!

If 75% of all flights crashed, and 45% of all flights killed everybody aboard, I ABSOLUTELY wouldn’t trust any aviation engineers with mainstream credentials! Heck, if we trusted those, we wouldn’t have invented planes to begin with.

Human flight was largely “known” to be impossible by experts right before it was demonstrated.

Modern nutrition science has maneuvered itself into a convenient corner in which they believe in an impossible paradigm (hard CICO) as the fundamental & only mechanism relevant in obesity.

It’s a corner because they have systematically barred themselves from ever testing & proving their own assumptions. All interesting studies (like those old school ones mentioned above) are now impossible to get past ethical review boards.

And good luck getting the funds approved for a study that attempts to test & disprove CICO, or that PUFAs aren’t actually heart healthy, or anything else that questions the mainstream paradigm.

“There are no studies!” shout the adherents of this paradigm. But it’s a career-ending move to even attempt those studies, and when they actually exist, they are buried or ignored.

The only n that matters is YOU

One final thing that’s always funny is the alleged “Hierarchy of Scientific Evidence.”

This, of course, has nothing to do with science. Here’s one example of such a pyramid. (Note that, hilariously, this one is apparently from Procter & Gamble, according to Wikipedia.)

We can see that meta-analyses and systematic review sit at the top, right before “a knowledge” should make it into the clinical practice guidelines, aka what your doctor learns to tell you.

Case reports or series are the second lowest level, the only thing worse is animal and lab studies.

But of course, in yourself, n=1 “case report” studies or anecdotes are all that matters.

What do I care that “protein produces more satiety with a p-value < 0.05” when it’s clearly the opposite in myself?

What do I care that “keto does this/that” when it’s clearly not happening in myself?

If you’re telling me that meta-analyses have PROVEN that the sky is green and water is dry, I’ll just shrug my shoulders and make a note to ignore you - you’ve clearly lost your mind to believe this. And it discredits meta-analyses and the entire field of “nutrition science” as well.

You’ll thus excuse if this is my mental image of the average scientist:

Short Update on ex150nosauce+ACV

In case you’re wondering, I updated the title from “ex150nosauce” to “ex150nosauce+ACV” cause, well, I am taking the Bragg’s ACV tablets (1 serving/3 capsules a day).

And boy, is it working.

It’s day 19 and I’m down over 7lbs from my lowest weight from last month, i.e. it’s not just water weight.

Even if I don’t lose another pound, this is already the 4th best fat loss month I have ever had since starting ex150, only beaten by the first 3 months of 20, 10, and 10lbs lost if memory serves.

I do think the ACV is structural in this.

Ever since I did ex150vinegar, almost every experiment has worked. I lost 4-6lbs that experiment. ex_plainrice left me 5.5lbs down. On ex150-15 I didn’t clearly lose much fat, but it was a very chaotic travel month and I was definitely down overall, although there were a lot of water weight ups and downs.

Also, at that point it had been over a month that I’d taken any ACV, and the studies show the effects sort of taking several weeks to 2 months to fully spool up, so maybe it wound down during ex_plainrice or the beginning of ex150-15, who knows.

And now, with the ACV capsules at much lower dosage, this. Would be a weird coincidence.

Still, taking away the sauce seems to make it even more potent. If this pace continues I might break my old all-time low of 217lbs. But even if not, I was less than 2lbs away this morning, which is still one of the best results I’ve ever had with any experiment.

Effin’ Jaromir.

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There are a lot of people out there who love to talk about obesity or weight loss. A lot of them don’t know the first thing, and there are easy signs that give it away. I immediately stop listening to those people if they send more than 1 or 2 of these “ignorance” signals.

Sometimes I still argue with such people, even if I don’t see a high chance of them changing their opinion. That’s because arguments, for me, aren’t necessarily about convincing the other person - you could be sharpening your own arguments, clarify your understanding, and you could convince bystanders if the debate is in public (which it is, on most of the internet).

Here are some common “ignorance signs.”

Note: this is about reversing obesity. Getting on a bodybuilding stage or Men’s Health cover is very different, and those people might be very good at achieving those goals. I am merely concerned with reversing obesity or severe overweight and reaching a healthy & comfortable body fat level while eating “normally,” i.e. ad libitum carolie intake.

"Full"

If you confuse physical fullness with satiety, you’ve disqualified yourself from obesity talk. It’s often used as a shortcut and that’s fine if you don’t want to say “satiated” all the time.

But the sensation of being physically full and the state of metabolic satiety are so different that I prefer not to ever muddy up the waters.

Many people seem to unironically believe that “being full” is in some way positive or related to satiety, and then they (logically) conclude you should eat high-fiber, low-carolie foods.

Of course this it total nonsense; physically distending your stomach doesn’t do anything for nutrition. Taken to the extreme, this would lead you to eat tree bark and rusty nails, both of which are VERY low in humanly digestible carolies and provide lots of “roughage.”

Maybe you can trick yourself into feeling like you’ve had any nutrition by eating a “big ass-salad” with near-zero nutrition in it, but let’s not pretend this will solve the obesity crisis.

For the record, I hate being “full.” I’d much rather be satiated on an empty stomach.

If being full is the same as being satiated for you, that’s evidence that you’ve never experienced what most obese people experience every day - being physically bloated, often to the point of pain, yet ravenous.

It’s sort of like starting basketball advice with “First, be 6’9 tall.” It’s not wrong, but it’s also not helpful - it just shows us you have a (genetic?) predisposition that makes your advice largely irrelevant to the rest of us.

Lean people just eat less

Yea, and rich people just make more money, duh. You’re just moving the mystery to the next level. WHY do some people “overeat” and some don’t? And how come they only started doing that about 150 years ago? And how come more and more of us are affected by this mysterious overeating condition, and more so every year?

If your answer is any variation of “because fat people are more hungry” then.. again… why.

Any real root-cause analysis of obesity must explain the Mysteries of Obesity, as laid out by Slime Mold Time Mold. For example, I think that seed oils explain these mysteries quite well.

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“Boring” advice

This brings us to the next sign: claiming that there are no mysteries at all. If you take a look at the obesity epidemic and you’re not mystified, you need new glasses.

There are a lot of people out there, typically “evidence-based” gym bros, who claim that “there is no magic trick” and no “single thing that explains it all” and that you just have to “do the slow, boring work.”

Sometimes I can’t even get them to define what they mean by work, and I find it difficult to do something when I can’t know what it is.

But typically these guys mean “counting carolies” by which they mean eating less and exercising more - which has, of course, been debunked thoroughly, and which every obese person has already tried.

This is just rhetorical framing, there’s no argument: CICO is also “just one thing” and “monocausal” and “simple” and I could flip the argument around, and in fact I often do.

We all want obesity to be easily fixable with a simple, monocausal intervention like carolies, but biology is just more complex than that, and you have to do the slow, boring work of actually figuring out what’s wrong.

Suggesting ideas that have already failed

This is of course a big one. Because I’m relatively active on Twitter, Reddit, or in the comments here, people give me “weight loss tips” as if I hadn’t tried everything under the sun.

Of course they probably just don’t know what I’ve already tried since they just encountered me. But the advice is typically pretty inane and wouldn’t work for anyone with a seriously messed up metabolism, which is *checks watch* 45% of the United States at the time of this writing. (Probably 46% by the time you read this.)

People are very confident in their tips though, either because “everybody knows” or because it worked for them.

If it worked for them, that’s great, but clearly not everything works for everyone. I’m not telling everyone to drink heavy cream all day long.

If you already tried strategy X and someone is suggesting X as The One Solution, you know he has nothing to contribute to your fat loss experiments. You can conveniently ignore his advice.

Here are some common examples people throw at me which they just “know” are the be-all, end-all to fat loss & obesity:

CICO

This is one of the big ones, of course. People just KNOW that the laws of physics cannot be broken, and thus I must be lying when I said that I’ve done more CICO than them and more strictly and it hasn’t led to sustained, if any, fat loss.

Most of these people cannot correctly state CICO, and they typically keep changing up their definition throughout the argument, sometimes within the same sentence without even noticing it.

When you point out this inconsistency, they either don’t understand it, or they get angry and shout “SEMANTICS!” or some other word they don’t understand either.

CICO is like flat earth theory; it doesn’t attract smart people.

Exercise

We now know why, but anecdotally most obese people have tried various forms of exercise over time. It is quite common to see near-zero weight loss from it, but often appetite goes up and if people don’t then eat more, they start getting into overtraining/lack of recovery/lack of energy scenarios. If they do eat more, it’s common to gain even more weight, at which point the people who shouted “EXERCISE!” to begin with roll their eyes and shout “OF COURSE you got even fatter, you should’ve not eaten when the exercise made you hungry!”

Pontzer’s book Burn shows us why this doesn’t work; burning calories via exercise doesn’t burn any calories.

What that means it that if you choose to exercise, for most people, that does not increase total energy expenditure. It just re-routes energy from other places like the nervous system, immune system, digestive system..

Interestingly, Pontzer says there is a small sliver of the population for whom it DOES increase TEE by quite a bit.

He isn’t sure why because his studies only show correlation, not causation, but he speculates it could be genetic.

But this would explain why exercise DOES work for a few select people, and those people then yell at the rest of us.

But for most people ever tested, additional exercise typically does not raise TEE and typically leads to zero or near-zero fat loss, ever.

No, that other type of exercise

Duh, of course you shouldn’t do weight lifting/jogging/cycling/swimming/zone 2/hiking/walking, it actually makes you fat!

You need to be doing weight lifting/jogging/cycling/swimming/zone 2/hiking/walking!

Everyone knows this…

Unfortunately there is a near-infinite number of types of exercise people “know” is the only one that works.

Like most obese people, I’ve tried a lot of different variants of the years, and none of them led to any fat loss at all. Not even a tiny bit temporarily. With weight lifting, I even gained a huge amount of weight, probably because it made me super hungry and I ate a ton of protein then.

Counting carolies

I am always confused as to what the counting of something could possibly do to my fat loss, but these people typically just mean..

Eating less

Ah, yes, eating less. I mean, have you even TRIED IT?!

Yes, yes we have. Trust me, every obese person has tried eating less. Most have tried counting the carolies too, and neither of them led to any sustained fat loss, if there was any loss at all.

People somehow think this is breaking the laws of physics, but this just shows you they don’t understand CICO (or the laws of physics).

CICO is perfectly compatible with “I ate less and I gained weight.”

If you disagree, you don’t understand CICO. Which is 99% of CICO advocates.

There’s a reason no serious nutrition scientist advocates naive CICO. Don’t take my word for it, this was told to me by a serious nutrition scientist.

“So you’re saying you broke the First Law of Thermodynamics?!”

Incredibly stupid. This implies both misunderstanding of CICO, of thermodynamics, and bad faith. Next.

Fasting

I used to be big into fasting. I still think fasting can have some therapeutic benefits, and I also think it’s a good measure of your metabolic health.

If you’re metabolically healthy, you should be able to fast for at least a few days. Think of a well-functioning caveman or hunter gatherer: there would’ve been plenty of lean times. At the least, hunting down a mammoth all day wouldn’t necessarily give you an opportunity to snack on protein bars every 30 minutes.

But I no longer believe that extended fasting is a great solution, or any solution, to reverse obesity. I just haven’t seen it.

I’ve tried it myself and it didn’t work, and I haven’t seen it work in anyone I know personally, even over the internet. Obese people tend to simply not be able to fast, which is why I think it’s a better sign of metabolic health than an active ingredient.

If you’re obese and you’re starving by day 2-3 of a water fast, you should probably quit. Forcing it won’t help. You’ve already arrived in a metabolic state known as Phase III Starvation in which your body cannot cover energy expenditure from adipose tissue and is starting to catabolize your lean tissues. This is very, very bad.

People often claim that if you just willpower through the starvation symptoms, it’ll get easier & become “effortless” and this is of course “known by everybody.”

The thing is that it does not seem to be true. It’s never worked that way for me when I fasted a lot, and I don’t know of anyone else, personally, for whom it’s gotten easier again.

I think this phenomenon just appears in people who aren’t on keto. If you’re on a high-carb diet, aren’t used to ketosis at all, and start a fast, you’re jumping into the deep end of keto - fasting will put you into ketosis like nothing else.

So you’ll have a few days of keto flu and then you’re in ketosis and you’ll feel better. This has nothing to do with fasting.

Most of the people I know in diet circles online are ketards, or at least have experimented with it, and so they wouldn’t experience the first timer keto flu. And therefore, I likely wouldn’t know anyone whom it got easier for after “powering through” the first few days of a fast.

There is 1 guy, EVER, who fasted off hundreds of pounds, Angus Barbieri. Fasting proponents keep citing him.

But if you can only ever produce 1 guy for whom it worked, and he did it in 1960s Scotland… what are the chances he was just way less PUFA’d than we are today?

Keto

I get it to this day. People suggest that if I really want to get lean, I should just try cutting the carbs!

Bro, I’m 2 months shy of my 1-decade anniversary on keto. I’m pretty sure I would've figured it out if just cutting carbs was the solution.

Carnivore

The carnivore people are even more zealous than the ketards, and there are also way more variations of it than just keto, it seems. So, like with exercise, there’s always that 1 special way in which they “just know, duh!” carnivore must be done and it WORKS FOR EVERYBODY.

But while I actually think carnivore has probably the best result rate of any mainstream diet I know of, that’s still only 25-35%. Of course there are no real numbers on any diet for this, but that’s my impression from interacting with people online.

Because of that, carnivore is actually a diet I would totally recommend people try. I mean, 30% hit chance isn’t bad. If it doesn’t work, keep looking - but you were going to keep looking anyway, right? Just give it a shot for 30 days.

But if we can’t admit that it does NOT work for everyone, it’s just zealotry.

Have you tried the Ray Peat diet

This one is almost a trick question. I’ve been reliably and rePEATedly informed by various high-level Peat gurus that there is no such thing as “the Ray Peat diet.” As such, I can’t possibly try it.

There are of course certain rules that most Peaters go by:

• PUFA very bad

• Keto bad

• Starch relatively bad (cause it can give you digestive issues)

• Sugar good

• Excess muscle meat bad

Now I agree with the PUFA and excess muscle meat parts, and I’m doing those already. But I strongly disagree with the keto and sugar parts, and vaguely with the starch part.

I’ve found no diet variation in which any significant amount of sugar allowed any amount of fat loss for me, and in various combinations, it seemed to drive extreme fat gain. 5lbs in a week, making me overeat by 1,500kcal/day or so.

I also just hate the quality of life off keto. After 10 years, I’m just used to almost never being hungry, the ability to take a 18h flight and not worry about food the entire time, the calm & sleep benefits.. I just feel better on keto.

When I went back to high-carb diets for the first time in years, late last year, I discovered that I needed to eat every 2-4h or I’d become hungry & hangry, that fruit and honey are super expensive, and many other downsides.

I found out that for many Peaters, this is just “normal” or a trade-off well worth it. Well, for me it’s not. If I see zero upside, it better not be way more expensive & inconvenient.

It’s possible that there is a variation of the non-existent “Ray Peat diet” out there that would work for me, but I suspect it’d be so twisted that no normal Peater would voluntarily eat it.

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Proving too much

Proving too much is a common thing not just in diet arguments. It basically means the argument doesn’t just prove your point, it also proves a lot of other things that are clearly not true.

In nutrition arguments, this typically means the argument picks up on a reason/mechanism that is way too broad to explain the obesity epidemic as it happened, and typically would “prove” that everyone from the year 1600 out was obese the whole time.

There is then often a whole bunch of confabulating about how we “just didn’t diagnose it as much” as if diagnosing obesity was difficult. Heck, children can do it!

Here are some common diet claims that prove too much:

We just have too much food now

Maybe compared to Grok the caveman, but compared to 1970? Real wages have actually stagnated or dropped; if anything, shouldn’t that produce a drop in obesity for the average person?

And in what sense do we have more food than in 1990? How come obesity in the U.S. has more than doubled since then, and the same pattern is seen in many other countries?

People used to live in caves & hunt mammoths every day

My grandfather didn’t hunt a single mammoth in his life. He was a sedentary office worker and his hobbies involved stamp collection and listening to the radio, both of which he accomplished from his armchair.

He was the most sedentary man I ever met in my life, and he was skinny as a rail the entire time. He also drank beer every day, never exercised that I know of, and lived until 95, when he just got bored and decided to die.

If people were only thin because they hunted mammoths and starved all year long, you’d expect everyone from the agricultural revolution on to be obese.

Or at least everyone after the industrial revolution, right?

But we don’t see that: people had almost unchanged obesity rates until around the mid-1800s (in America, where we seem to have the best records). And since then, obesity has grown slowly but steadily, which also contradicts this theory.

People used to get more exercise

Not true, people exercise more than ever. The fallback is “everyone used to be a farmer and that’s exercise” but that also doesn’t hold up. There were tons of non-farm people in 1970 and 2000, yet obesity has risen steadily since.

Plus, we know from Pontzer’s Burn that exercise doesn’t actually lead to fat loss in almost anyone.

People used to eat less

Or way more. Nobody knows. This is because we don’t have good records on this. You can sort of estimate it, but people disagree on which estimate is right. Just as we have estimates saying “zomg carolies went up!” we also have reports of average office workers in 1920s NYC eating 4,500kcal/day including cake with every meal, and being rail-thin.

Our modern food is just too palatable

There is sort of a flip-flop on this one, because most people just mean “tastes good” by palatable. In obesity research, palatable means “makes you overeat.”

I’d argue that our modern food is in no way better-tasting than the food my grandma cooked at home, or what people ate throughout most of human history.

Oreos are worse tasting than my grandma’s butter cookies. Domino’s tastes way worse than an Italian grandma’s home-made pizza. American fast food isn’t exactly revered around the world for its amazing culinary qualities.

My mom’s cooking wasn’t that phenomenal, but it was better than most fast food today for sure.

What about that other, technical meaning of the word “palatable?” Is modern food more “overeating-inducing?” Yes, but then the question is, of course, “why.”

Our modern food is just too carolie-dense

Is our modern food more carolie-dense than a fatty mammoth consisting of 10-15 tons of fatty meat? More than pound cake, which consists of flour, butter, and sugar?

People will then usually slide into “Ok but we didn’t eat mammoth/pound cake every day” which feeds into the “starving caveman” argument above.

I think the idea that carolie-dense foods are inherently obesogenic is clearly false. It doesn’t jive with the obesity timeline, and it isn’t the experience of any ketoer or carnivore who lost a ton of fat effortlessly.

Certainly seems like the opposite of my own experience.

Evidence-based

Maybe one day I’ll write an entire post called “Why I am not evidence-based.”

Evidence-based seems to just mean “I sit in front of the computer and read studies.” I do that a lot, too. I spent several hours the last few days reading studies on essential fatty acids from the 1920s and 1930s.

But I don’t then wholesale import the mainstream opinion of nutrition science (TM) as The Truth And Nothing But The Truth.

Why not?

First of all, because it’s clearly wrong. The things they recommend don’t pass the sniff test and they don’t work in most people. This is easy to see and easy to try.

Second, because there are clearly systemic biases. There are tons of studies contradicting many of the “consensus” points and they are simply ignored in bad faith.

If you swallow the mainstream consensus, but the consensus is systemically wrong, you’ll believe something that is wrong.

At this point, “evidence-based” people like to say something stupid like “Ohhh so you think there’s a conspiracy?!” or “You think you’re smarter than science?!”

No, I just think you’re wrong. The onus is on you to prove how you’re more correct than me. Everything else is appeal to authority.

Evidence-based is just code for “status quo nutrition science.” And the status quo is 45% obesity in this country.

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Confusion about the obesity timeline

A lot of people seem to believe the obesity epidemic began in the 1970s, and that therefore seed oils dindu nothing cause they came out before that. Of course seed oilers know this and think the timeline fits perfectly.

I think this “1970 thing” in many cases (not just obesity) comes from a sort of “optical illusion” in graphs of exponential functions.

Consider this chart of obesity from 1900-2000:

Oh my gosh! There’s a clear inflection point in 1970! 1970 did obesity!

Oh wow! The inflection point was in 1990!

Of course this is the exact same exponential function/data set. We just moved the dates all the way up to 2020. If you graph any exponential function, it’ll look like a hockey stick and the “inflection point” will be around 3/4 through your time frame or whatever you have on the X axis.

This is NOT a feature of the exponential function. The exponential function grew the same every step of the way. It’s just an optical illusion.

What happens if we use the same function but go all the way out to 2070?

Clearly, obesity hasn’t actually happened yet, but will hit us like a brick in 2030!

I believe us Seed Oilers actually have by far the best timeline & understanding of obesity. Let me show you a graph from one of Chris Knobbe’s excellent presentations on seed oils:

This is one of the few graphs where they even went back in time further than 1960 or so. As you can see, there was definitely a rise in obesity starting as early as 1900!

People will claim this disproves seed oils, but of course industrial, chemical seed oil production was invented in the 1850s, and Mark Twain wrote about seed oils displacing butter and olive oil in … 1883.

Check it out in Life on the Mississippi:

That’s right, U.S. fats like butter and even olive oil were being replaced en masse, at an industrial scale, to the point where a famous author reported in in 1883.

It’s no surprise then that we already saw an increase in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease by 1900:

By the 50s, we had an insane amount of obesity compared to the historic norm. By 1970 it was even higher.

But 1970 looks harmless to us now, we remember it as the days when scarcely anybody was obese.

But then again, you could say something similar for the year 2000 - when our obesity was HALF what it is now!

The “epidemic,” as in the root cause that created this trend, has been with us for over 150 years, as Twain shows.

It’s just that at every point in this exponential function (or technically the exponential part of the sigmoid), we always see an inflection point on the right side of the chart.

Claiming that GLP-1 agonists prove CICO

There was a wave of this recently. Andrew F. Huberperson and several others (Crocodile-tears Attia?) went on some podcasts and even TV shows and claimed with a very serious voice that GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic finally PROVE that obesity was caused by eating too much.

Of course this is stupid, and it proves they didn’t understand the argument against it to begin with.

I think I saw Huberperson claiming this on Bill Maher’s show, and I rolled my eyes so hard I nearly knocked myself unconscious. I hate these Very Serious Credentialed People talking absolute garbage. This is the problem in this country; grifting for ego & status instead of being intellectually curious.

Someone on Twitter, I forget who, once said it quite succinctly. I’m paraphrasing:

The CICO idiots will immediately go “Yea but these people on GLP-1 drugs EAT LESS that’s how-” STFU. If you think this proves your side, you’re just demonstrating your ignorance of the other side’s argument, and how GLP-1 works. It’s also showing a distressing lack of curiosity and good faith.

Gosh.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. Let’s figure this thing out, shall we?

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PS: Spoiler alert, I was 222.15lbs this morning, which is lower than I ever got on ex_plainrice 2 months ago. ex150nosauce (+ ACV capsules) seems to be working well.

My all-time low on ex150 style diets was 217.3lbs, meaning I am less than 5lbs away from my all-time low and there are still 2.5 weeks left in this experiment. I am cautiously optimistic.

PPS: Wow, this is my 150th published post on this blog! That’s like publishing a post a week for 3 years! Actually, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.. wow.

If you haven’t read it, you can find that post here: A Metabolically Shaped Hole.

I have since read Johnson’s book, Nature Wants Us to be Fat, and thought I’d provide a quick review.

Not that long; don’t need to read it

The book is only about 210 pages long and is written in a light-hearted and engaging style, and I knocked most of it out in a day.

That said, if you read my post and watched his 3 lectures (part 1, part 2, part 3) on Youtube, you really don’t need to read the book.

Everything technical & metabolic is covered in those lectures in great detail. The book merely lays out some of the cited studies in a bit more detail, answers a few frequent questions, and lays out Johnson’s idea for an ideal “Switch Diet” to deactivate the metabolic “survival switch” as he calls it.

The Sweet, Sweet Survival Switch

One of the reason I called my last post “A Metabolic Hole” was that Johnson’s fructose/polyol pathway theory fits almost exactly into the “metabolic hole” I’m trying to fill in terms of hypotheses and mechanisms, and therefore is extremely similar to Modern PUFA Theory (MPT), my main hypothesis as to what caused the obesity epidemic.

Johnson suspects that mammals have a built-in “survival switch” that causes them to divert food into fat storage (obesity), turns down metabolism to save on energy (lowered metabolic rate), increases foraging behavior, turns up inflammation (heart disease, stroke, cancer) and blood glucose (diabetes).

This is great if you’re a bear hibernating through winter, or a fat-tailed lemur going through the dry season in Madagascar (?). Johnson even shows that penguins and whales have and use similar mechanisms.

That’s nearly the exact same mechanism that Brad Marshall from Fire in the Bottle proposes; something in our modern environment is constantly putting us into “mammalian torpor”.

The only difference: Johnson is 100% convinced that fructose is the signal, whereas PUFA theorists like Brad and myself suspect omega-6 PUFA linoleic acid to be at fault.

What’s funny is that you don’t need to go far to find the similarities. The way in which fructose starts to mess with our fuel partitioning is also related to reactive oxygen species. This happens when the liver starts turning fructose into uric acid via the fructokinase pathway, which eventually can lead to the creation of fatty acids and therefore fatty liver disease.

This process actually consumes more ATP than it creates, unlike most (all?) other pathways dealing with fuel substrates in our body. It can therefore create the necessary “fuel partitioning” problem: we “lose” energy even though we are eating, because all the food is going into fat storage. Eating thus actually makes us hungrier! (In general, not just for more fructose.)

This is an extremely similar explanation to Peter’s protons theory at Hyperlipid, which suggests something very similar when beta-oxidizing linoleic acid.

Johnson even observes a phenomenon often cited by PUFA theorists: young kids and animals aren’t immediately getting obese & diabetic from high fructose intake. Their response is measurably lower than that of fat & diabetic animals or humans, but after enough exposure, they, too, become metabolically messed up.

This is the same phenomenon observed with PUFA, where short-term studies don’t immediately show the issues - it takes “saturating” a person or animal’s body fat for several years (in humans, mice obviously faster) until the bad long-term effects show up.

Johnson blames this on the body being inefficient at activating the survival switch at first, whereas long-term fructose exposure makes it both more sensitive and efficient at it.

I wish these fructose and PUFA guys would talk to each other.. oh well.

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Conflicting Studies

One thing that was weird/confusing when reading the book is that Johnson has all sorts of studies that “prove” his point that fructose is uniquely the bad guy. And he does have a lot of studies.

The issue is that I have been around the low-carb block long enough to know that there are equal & opposite studies.

Just like he “proves” that fructose is the bad guy by blocking fructose metabolism in rats, I know of rodent studies that fed 60% kcals from fructose, and in absence of high linoleic acid, still didn’t cause metabolic syndrome or obesity.

Similarly, Johnson cites a study in which lard, fed in absence of fructose, did not cause issues. But lard is widely cited by PUFA people such as myself as being uniquely fattening, even in absence of high fructose or even carbs.

What gives?

One particularly curious fact Johnson cites is the condition of Fructosuria, affecting an estimated 1 in 130,000 humans, in which the aforementioned enzyme fructokinase is missing.

This means that fructose cannot activate its special “survival switch” pathway, and these people cannot become fat or diabetic. Apparently, there are zero recorded cases of people with fructosuria having diabetes or being obese.

On the other hand, we have tons of studies “debunking” fructose theory from post-low carb people in rats and in humans, and the timeline doesn’t quite line up with the obesity epidemic…

In other words, “it’s complicated.”

Maybe excess fructose and excess linoleic acid can both activate the switch? Maybe it depends on genetics who responds more to which one?

Certainly, both sugar & seed oils have become way more common in the average human diet since industrialization.

It could be some weird co-factor issue, in which excess linoleic acid makes you more liable to activate the fructose pathway, or amplify its effects.

Or maybe linoleic acid is dry hay, and fructose is the spark?

Sigh. Again, I wish people from different camps would talk to each other. Or even people from the same camp!

Apparently Johnson is good friends with Gary Taubes of low-carb fame. Yet Taubes never seems to mention that eating a high-salt or high-umami diet could activate endogenous fructose production..

Everyone is just super confident in his own “knowledge” and considers everyone else “debunked” and so we never get to the heart of the matter.

I wish these Low-Carb people read the room

It’s almost comical to read this book here and now. Johnson keeps talking about this amazing low-carb diet as if Atkins didn’t come out in the 70s.

Apparently Johnson had written a book previously, The Sugar Fix, explaining why fructose was the bad guy, and how a low-fructose diet would prevent & cure obesity.

With his newfound polyol pathway knowledge, he admits that it’s not as simple as “you eat too much sugar” and how these other factors come into it.

But he still presents the low-carb diet as the solution.

This is funny because all of us on the internet moved on from low-carb to Paleo in the 2000s, then onto keto in the early 2010s, and now most of those have moved onto carnivore or some sort of Ray Peat/Saladino style diet in the late 2010s or early 2020s.

Almost nobody even uses the term low-carb any more as it’s been completely superseded by keto, as far as I can tell.

Certainly people didn’t flee the label because low-carb was working too well?

It’s as if reading a book by someone who hasn’t watched the news for a few decades and just keeps extrapolating from whatever happened in the 90s.

Smear against Stefansson

One thing I particularly disliked was an unnecessary and, in my opinion, idiotic swipe against one of my personal heroes, anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

Stefansson is famous in carnivore circles because he lived with Eskimos for months to years at a time, for a total of 4 years if I remember it right. He and colleagues embedded themselves with families, ate with them, drank with them, slept in the same igloos as them, hunted with them, and so on.

Upon returning to New York City, Stefansson and his colleagues explained the fatty, meat-centric diets of the Eskimos and how they appeared to be perfectly healthy. Mainstream nutritionists were in disbelief, they just “knew” you couldn’t possibly be healthy eating only fatty meat and near zero plant matter.

Stefansson and one colleague therefore conducted a 1 year (!) experiment on themselves, the first few weeks of which were under 24/7 hospital supervision. They only ate fatty meat and they were fine.

Now in Nature Wants Us to be Fat, Johnson cites Stefansson as proof that a high-fat, meat diet is unhealthy: he alleges that when Stefansson and his colleague did this, they had cholesterol levels of 800mg/dL or more and that their blood was a thick, white, milky consistency. Further, he alleges that Stefansson “thought he was eating an Eskimo” diet, but that really, the Eskimo diet was much higher in protein.

I find this to be absurdly dumb. If you just look at Stefansson’s wikipedia page, you will quickly learn that he embedded himself and lived with these people for years.

If anyone should know what Eskimos REALLY eat, it would be him. I don’t know which of the handful of studies on Eskimo diets Johnson looked at to make this snide remark, but I’ve seen a meta-analysis from when I made my Swamp Visualizer and it lists individual studies with wildly different levels of protein vs. fat.

Simply declaring Stefansson to be wrong on this just shows Johnson knows nothing about Stefansson, or the topic.

In addition, I’ve read Stefansson’s book Fat of the Land in its entirety twice, in which he details his travels and the 1-year experiment. I don’t recall any mention of 800mg/dL cholesterol, or of milky, thick blood.

Now it’s certainly possible that this is documented history and I just don’t recall it, or that Stefansson didn’t mention it. But I sure would like to see a source for that claim, and Johnson doesn’t provide one.

I will say this pissed me off quite a bit. It’s just ignorant and dishonest.

Johnson on PUFAs

The entire book doesn’t mention different types of fat until page 175 or so, where Johnson briefly mentions that saturated fats are bad (mkay) because they raise LDL, which causes heart disease.

Of course that view has been “debunked” (if that word still means anything) by low-carb, keto, paleo, and carnivore people for generations now. I personally don’t believe it at all.

Johnson goes on to mention the difference between MUFA and PUFA, and that PUFAs can be omega-3 and omega-6. He just briefly recites the mainstream views on each; in short MUFA is harmless but olive oil is better than canola cause flavonoids, omega-3 is awesome and “can counter fructose” (hmmmm I wonder what else omega-3 counters), and that people disagree on omega-6, with some calling it inflammatory, others saying it’s good, and that the balance between the two seems key.

He recommends upping omega-3 instead of limiting omega-6, a very mainstream view that doesn’t make mathematical sense if you really believe in the Omega Balance. But none of these people ever do the math to find out you need to eat 5lbs of salmon a day to counter the tablespoon of soybean oil in your salad dressing.

The Switch Diet

The Switch Diet is what Johnson calls his own diet, designed to deactivate the metabolic “survival switch” or at least minimize its activation, as he says it is more akin to a dimmer than an on/off switch.

It’s relatively standard fare and you probably couldn’t tell it apart from some other mainstream diets if you weren’t looking for it.

1. Obviously, he thinks fructose is bad, and so he wants you to limit sugar, and eat whole fruit instead of soft drinks and candy

2. He advises a mild reduction in high-glycemic carbohydrates like bread or white rice or breakfast cereals

3. He also advises you to limit salt a little bit, e.g. by cooking at home (typically less salty than restaurant/processed food)

4. He advises you to drink water with salty meals to prevent the dehydration that activates “the switch”

5. He advises to limit red meat to 2x a week because of the saturated fat, and because it’s high in umami (glutamate etc) which can activate the switch

6. Same for shellfish, which is apparently really high in umami

7. Therefore he recommends eating poultry, fish, dairy, and plant proteins like soy/legumes more than red meat or shellfish

8. He recommends moderate dairy consumption if it’s not in ice cream (added sugar), because he thinks the dairy can counter the activation of the switch. One exception is hardened/fermented/blue cheese, which becomes high in umami. Interestingly, he believes that lactose is completely harmless and does not activate “the switch” at all.

9. He actually recommends coffee, because it can apparently counter switch activation. Hallelujah! He says dark chocolate and tea have a similar effect.

10. Alcohol is a total no-go, as it uses almost the exact same pathways as fructose. In fact, he claims that alcohol only leads to fatty liver disease BECAUSE it activates the survival switch via fructose. Apparently, you cannot become alcoholic without fructokinase. This means that alcoholic fatty liver disease is actually non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, lol.

All in all, this is pretty milque-toast dietary advice if you ask me. With a few exceptions (dark chocolate/coffee/dairy) this is probably exactly what your doctor would tell you to do.

Sugar bad, high-glycemic carbs bad, vegetables good, red meat bad, poultry/fish good, alcohol bad, legumes/soy good… shocking.

I’ll say this; I like his polyol pathway hypothesis and I believe it could explain a lot of “huh, weird!” moments in low-carb, in certain high-PUFA contexts, and in my personal anecdotes.

But I think if this diet worked as advertised, we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic.

Legions of people on the internet have failed to lose weight by doing pretty much this. I personally gained 100lbs on a strict keto diet, mainlining coffee, dairy, AND dark chocolate daily, and the only violations of that protocol that I can think of are moderate to high salt consumption and high umami consumption (meat/tomato sauce).

(Also high saturated fat, but he doesn’t think that causes obesity/metabolic syndrome, just heart disease via LDL.)

So if those 2 are enough to counter a hyper-low-carb, near-zero-fructose keto diet with ZERO alcohol in 10 years, extreme dairy, chocolate, & coffee consumption… then that protocol isn’t very effective, isn’t it.

Umami, imami, weallmami

One thought that popped into my head; what if my “reduction in protein” coming from high-beef keto was actually just a reduction in glutamate/umami?

My current ex150 diet is extremely low in protein, but it’s also extremely low in umami except for 150g of beef and the relatively high amounts of marinara sauce I tend to eat.

I also used to eat blue cheese and parmesan-type hard cheeses A LOT on keto. I’m talking several Costco-sized chunks a week, often at least one of them blue cheese.

Maybe I could’ve just switched from beef and blue cheese to beans & chicken breast?

Now there are pretty convincing studies regarding protein restriction, but it is a thought.

Today is day 4 of ex150nosauce, so at least the tomato sauce part is easy enough to test for. I suppose I could try using no sauce and using chicken breast instead of ground beef one day, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I also realized that Monster energy drinks have 380mg of sodium (!) per can, meaning 6 cans alone already put me over the recommended sodium RDA for adult men. I have, at times, consumed 6 cans a day regularly. Diet sodas also contain some sodium, although much less.

Since I don’t add any salt to my meals myself, cutting out diet sodas, energy drinks, tomato sauce & beef is pretty much all that’s left in my diet in terms of Johnson’s “survival switch” theory.

FAQ me anything

The FAQ chapter is maybe the most valuable part of the book if you’ve listened to the lectures.

You could sort of deduce most of his dietary restriction ideas if you just listen to the lectures. But in the FAQ, he answers a lot of detailed questions that are bound to come up. Let me just briefly give you an overview:

1. What about fruits & vegetables? Vegetables are fine, most fruits are fine, just don’t binge on dates and avoid dried fruits & fruit juice as they are highly concentrated. Some flavonoids and other compounds in fruit may actually be on net beneficial. He recommends you eat 2-4 pieces of whole fruit a day.

2. Are sugary drinks worse than sugary food? Yes, absolutely. Johnson says that the rate of absorption of sugary drinks makes them much more likely to trigger the “survival switch.” Cutting out soft drinks seems much more important than cutting out sweet desserts, so do that first.

3. How come some (e.g. young) people can seemingly eat lots of sugar without any downside? Johnson says that it takes some exposure to fructose for the body to “ramp up” the survival switch, and that the more you activate it, the more sensitive and efficient it becomes. This frankly doesn’t make evolutionary sense to me and hints at some other factor (linoleic acid?) in play.

4. What about artificial/non-caloric sweeteners? Most of them are fine (stevia, monk fruit, sugar alcohols except sorbitol) in the sense that they do not activate the survival switch. There are some issues or potential issues with various sweeteners though, and they keep your “sugar cravings” alive, so he recommends limiting sweetener use or cutting them out if you can.

5. What about “sports drinks” like Gatorade, those contain salt? He says these are fine if actually used, sparingly, during athletic events. But don’t drink them if you’re not actually going to need the electrolytes, aka don’t just substitute them for soda.

6. How about reports that giving sugar can improve performance? This is usually more about the glucose, not the fructose. If someone is low in blood glucose or glycogen, e.g. a child who hasn’t eaten breakfast or an athlete about to run a marathon, filling up with glucose can help - to a point.

7. Are some people resistant to fructose? Very few, but yes. There are those 1 in 130,000 people mentioned above who simply cannot use fructose in that survival switch way. Some people seem “culturally” immune, typically tribes living remotely until they move to the big city - where have we seen this pattern before?

8. Can we block sugar cravings? No, but he’s working on it. Or someone is.

On Uric Acid

Measuring

Now most of the downsides of this “survival switch” seem mediated via uric acid, and uric acid has long been a target of clinical monitoring and control due to gout. Gout is caused by crystallized uric acid in joints, causing pain & inflammation.

Funnily enough, this was one of the first points of contention I learned when I got into low-carb 20 years ago. The mainstream wanted you to believe that red meat causes gout. But we, the smart low-carbers, knew that fructose causes gout!

Funny, 20 years later, it seems they were both right.

Anyway, I obviously looked around to purchase a home uric acid meter. Turns out that’s surprisingly difficult. One website tested several available meters, and nearly all of them were incredibly inaccurate, to the point that the website said they were beyond useless. Think off by 4 points on a scale of 0-6.

The one meter that they rated highly seems out of production, and the website looks like it hasn’t been updated since the 2001 dot-com bubble. I tried to contact them, and their contact form explicitly tells you not to ask about when the meter will be available again. Seems end-of-life.

Some other meters seemed to be available through Indian e-commerce stores, targeted at Indians in India.

Amazon doesn’t seem to carry any uric acid meters at all. Maybe they became regulated out of existence in the U.S. by the FDA?

There are urine strips on Amazon, but the urine strips for keto are total shit, so I suspect these to not be much better, but I ordered some cause why not.

So far, all of my strips have come back as “low/normal” uric acid. Then again, I’m literally doing ex150nosauce to minimize uric acid right now. Maybe I should test again on a high-protein, high-salt, high-umami refeed?

Lowering

There is also allopurinol, a gout medicine that works by lowering uric acid.

Johnson says that people have tried studying it in relation to obesity and metabolic syndrome, but that the studies are inconclusive. He blames poor study design; it would obviously only work in people who have high uric acid to begin with.

There seem to be some studies that he likes, so it’s sort of a maybe I guess. But I suppose I can’t just ask my doc for this in absence of gout.

Unfortunately, I lost my easy & cheap hook-up for any lab test I wanted a while ago, so I can’t just get my uric acid tested real quick like I used to with various other markers.

Sigh.

How to integrate this fascinating new knowledge?

I do think that the polyol pathway can explain a lot of “huh, weird” moments in low-carb, and in general. I do not think it is The One. I think there must be some context to it, and the context might well be linoleic acid. Or genetics.

Maybe it’s just that you can activate this switch by excess fructose OR excess linoleic acid OR both. Or maybe they supplement each other, or your genetics determine which one you’re vulnerable to.

Or maybe Jaromir is right, and LA makes fructose worse?

In that case, low-carb & the polyol theory would be correct IN THE CONTEXT OF LINOLEIC ACID for some people.

Which is still useful.

After all, we knew it would be slightly complicated.

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PS: Shit, this was supposed to be a quick update on the book, and now it’s 3,700 words. I suppose I really enjoy typing.

After 20 years of thinking about obesity and experimenting with various diets and other methods of reversing my own (formerly morbid) obesity, I have formed some pretty strong opinions.

Most of the time when I encounter a new “theory of obesity” I can quickly dismiss it, because it often doesn’t fulfill some criteria that I believe are necessary to explain the modern obesity epidemic.

In short, a valid theory of obesity has to explain all the existent facts, but it also cannot “explain too much.”

An example of “explaining too much” is the thrifty gene hypothesis, which basically claims that we are genetically wired to overeat and store fat because we used to starve as cavemen.

Cool story bro, but how come my grandpa was rail-thin despite living with a fully-stocked fridge his entire life?

How come people didn’t get morbidly obese despite being rich?

In fact, how come the rich are thinner than the poor these days?

What a Theory of Obesity has to explain

This is an incomplete list, but it’s still a relatively high bar, and most theories don’t come close to explaining all of these points:

1. Explain the Mysteries of Obesity (shocker: I believe PUFA explains them)

2. Match the timeline of the obesity epidemic: started before 1900, took a big jump in 1970, but even from 2000-2025 there’s been an immense increase in obesity

3. Explain various ancestral tribes whose dietary patterns & health levels we’ve studied in the modern age (Tsimane, Masai, Eskimos, Hadza, ..)

4. Explain various crazy internet diets that show great success in many people (keto, high-carb low-fat, carnivore, ..)

5. Has to actually show root-cause analysis & a change therein, not merely trivial tautologies like CICO

6. It really helps if there are convincing mechanistic studies to explain the pathway(s) by which this theory works

I realize this is a high bar, and that most theories aren’t up to snuff. But that’s because any valid Theory of Obesity must be at least slightly complicated. If it wasn’t, we would’ve found it by now, and would’ve solved obesity.

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Rick Johnson’s Polyol Pathway Theory

This was all just an introduction explaining why one new (to me) theory of obesity struck a chord immediately.

Richard Johnson, MD went onto a few low-carb channels in 2022 to promote this hypothesis and his book, titled “Nature Wants us to be Fat.”

I totally missed it at the time, maybe because I’ve largely tuned out of the low-carb community. I believe they are mostly a circle-jerk and I think that naive low-carb/keto has proven insufficient to explain the obesity epidemic, as detailed in my post Keto has Clearly Failed for Obesity.

But recently I was posting something about salt and the effects it seemed to have, anecdotally, on my own rice consumption in experiments of eating plain rice with and without (salted) marinara sauce.

Somebody pointed me to this 3-piece video series of Johnson at Low-Carb Down Under. Each part is about 45 minutes, and I recommend you listen to them all.

Nature Wants us to be Fat 1
Nature Wants us to be Fat 2
Nature Wants us to be Fat 3

If you don’t want to listen to Johnson, or if you just want to get a summary before spending so much time on this theory, let me briefly explain it:

• Fructose is bad. In excess (which really isn’t much as concentrated fructose is rare in nature) it is converted to fatty acids by the liver, and can lead to fatty liver disease or just regular fat gain

• Therefore eating large amounts of sugar is bad (so far, this is just low-carb/Dr. Lustig dogma)

• BUT the fructose you eat isn’t the only fructose in your body - there is a so-called polyol pathway, which will turn glucose into fructose endogenously if activated

• The evolutionary explanation for this pathway is likely the ability of animals to get into torpor and accumulate fat reserves for winter or the dry season. Hey, this sounds suspiciously like Brad Marshall’s Torpor theory!

• Switches to activate this polyol pathway include: high salt intake (or general dehydration, think camels storing water reserves in their fatty humps), high glutamate (umami flavor) intake, high-glycemic (i.e. rapidly digesting) carbs in general.

• When activated, this polyol pathway produces uric acid, which can turn NAD+ into NADH (I think), which I won’t pretend to understand but contains the same words that Brad from Fire in a Bottle & Peter from Hyperlipid talk about. In short, my understanding is that this turns the Fuel Partitioning Switch from “burn all the fuel for energy” to “store some of the fuel as body fat,” which decreases the energy available from food intake and therefore causes extra hunger.

• An analogy: say you make $1000/mo from your job and you spend $700/mo on rent, food, and so on. This would allow you to save $300/mo for retirement. But say that you set up a retirement switch that automatically routed $500 off your paycheck into your retirement account. All of a sudden, you wouldn’t have enough money left over to pay your bills! You’d have to get a second job to cover the difference, aka “overeat.”

• I.e. it’s not overeating that caused your fat storage, a chemical switch diverted fuel substrate from energy production to storage, decreasing available energy - your increased appetite is totally “correct” in that sense.

• In nature, this “become fat for torpor” mechanic is only switched on to fatten up for the winter/dry season, but in our modern food environment, we are accidentally activating this switch all the time.

• Brad & Peter both think that linoleic acid is the main root cause of this, but Johnson’s polyol pathway theory explains how other things like fructose, excess salt, and even more could also lead to activation of this pathway.

Anecdotal evidence just in myself

One reason why this theory immediately resonated with me is that it would explain several “weird” phenomena I experienced in recent months in my own dietary experiments.

As a reminder, as a scientist you should say “huh, weird!” all the time when you find something that you can’t explain, not “it’s probably just the wind.”

Example 1: ad-lib food intake of rice with and without marinara sauce

If you don’t recall, I started experimenting with high-carb, moderate-protein, very-low-fat diets last year after 9 years of strict keto.

My first such experiment was ex_rice, in which I ate ad-lib white rice with ad-lib fat-free marinara sauce from Whole Foods. This marinara sauce is of course mostly tomato sauce, but also contains delicious Italian herbs & spices and salt (sodium).

During this experiment, I ended up eating almost exactly the same amount of carolies that I measured last time on my ex150 heavy-cream diet: 3,300kcal on average. Given how these are almost opposite diets, one being 90% fat and the other about 90% carbs from rice, this was quite surprising.

I also didn’t lose any weight at all.

Then I read some more about Walter Kempner, the inventor of The Rice Diet. He actually believed that salt was the bad guy, and his diet was often not referred to as “rice diet” but “low-sodium diet” at the time.

Hence I recently tried a pure, plain white rice diet with no added sodium and no sauce at all: ex_plainrice.

And, somewhat shockingly, I lost 5.5lbs. Now it’s quite likely that not all of these were fat, but just reduced water retention from the low sodium. Still, it brought me to my lowest weight in a year.

This experiment was also ad-lib white rice, and I only ate about 2,350kcal/day! A spontaneous reduction in heat unit intake by nearly 1/3?! How weird!

I had no way of explaining this. After all, both diets were quasi fat-free, and therefore equally free of PUFA. Additionally, the marinara sauce, if anything, would have contained a small amount of carolies - in terms of pure energy satiety, I should’ve eaten LESS rice to make up for that?

Huh, weird.

Clearly, it seemed, the sauce was making me eat more. “Of course,” some said, “it was more delicious so you ate more.” But I am skeptical of the whole “delicious food makes us overeat” theory and didn’t fully buy it.

Johnson actually tested the “good taste” theory in mice: he engineered mice that could not taste sweetened beverages at all. The mice still preferred fructose-sweetened beverages over plain water, and became fat & metabolically unhealthy.

There appears to be a metabolic effect of fructose here that is independent of actual flavor or “good tasting food.”

Since tomato sauce is concentrated umami, and this one was dosed with sodium, it would’ve activated the polyol pathway, and my body would’ve converted some of the glucose from rice into fructose.

Example 2: ad-lib food intake on a near-zero-fat diet

Between ex_rice and ex_plainrice I tried another variant, a high-carb, medium-protein, low-fat diet. It wasn’t quite as close to zero in fat, and the protein was higher because I ate lean bison every day.

This was ex150hclflp. Here’s my weight curve from that month:

See that huge spike of gained weight the first week or so? That was when I mixed glucose (rice w/ sauce) and fructose (fruit/honey). My appetite became insane. I would eat my entire 3,300kcal ration of rice + marinara sauce, and eat several huge bowls of cut up fruit & drizzled with honey ON TOP of that. Clearly, the sugar was making me ravenous. Something felt very wrong, too, I felt bad almost the entire time.

After about a week or so, I had gained over 5lbs that would later (by DEXA) turn out to be actual fat, and I stopped doing the fruit & honey, turning this into mostly a rice, sauce, and bison diet.

The weight gain stopped and my appetite normalized.

Curious. Fruit & honey are both fat-free, and therefore PUFA free. It couldn’t be PUFA. Sure, rice + bison contained more protein than ex_rice would’ve, but then why did the ravenous appetite & weight gain stop after I ceased eating the sugar?

Clearly, mixing starch & sugar messed me up in some way.

Huh, weird.

This is of course easily explained by the polyol pathway theory: if fructose has the same torpor-inducing effect as linoleic acid, and shunts fuel substrate from energy production into fat storage, my fat stores would grow and my appetite would increase. A 50% increase in appetite is very dramatic, and so is gaining 5lbs of actual fat in just a week or so.

But I was pretty much maxing out the polyol pathway anyway: 3,300kcal of glucose (rice), with maximum umami (concentrated tomato sauce) and high sodium (also from the sauce) with ad-lib sugar on top (fruit + honey)..

The only thing I wasn’t doing was chugging corn oil with it.

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This explains gaps in low-carb

Low-carb has mostly been superseded by keto and carnivore these days, but the ideas are pretty similar.

I think that these salt/umami/polyol pathway mechanisms can explain a lot of failure cases that naive low-carb (“don’t eat many carbs”) and even the more fructose-based low-carb advocated by e.g. Lustig can’t explain.

After all, it seems that you don’t have to actually eat much fructose - you can convert glucose inside your body into fructose, and of course your body makes its own glucose via gluconeogenesis all the time.

For certain people, therefore, high salt consumption, umami/glutamate consumptions, or something similar could be enough to cause all the ills of excess sugar intake - even on a nominally low-carb, sugar-free diet.

But some people do fine on high-salt?! Sure, and some do fine on high-fructose or high-carb. As usual, there’s probably a significant amount of variation from genetics, epigenetics, or who knows what.

Yet given how low-carb clearly doesn’t work for more than about 30% of obese people, maybe we should look at these other mechanisms. If someone’s doing great eating low-carb with high salt, fine.

But if someone’s failing to lose weight eating low-carb and high salt, why not give low-salt a try? If someone isn’t losing the weight as expected while eating enormous amounts of tomato sauce (like I did on ex_rice), why not try cutting out all tomato products for a month?

These all feed directly into the proposed mechanisms every low-carber already believes in. It would be silly to pretend they can’t be messing things up when eating actual sugar can.

Addenda from Jaromir Janda

I mentioned Jaromir recently when he explained some studies on vinegar, and how the acetic acid in it can have protective effects.

When I posted about Johnson and the polyol pathway, Jaromir linked to some posts he’d previously written on the topic, shortly after Johnson came out with these ideas.

I recommend you go and read both these posts by Jaromir, as they make the connection between Johnson’s polyol pathway hypothesis and linoleic acid:

What does sugar, fruits and juices do with metabolism? And what about beer or wine?

How to make fructose in the liver, but you better not do it!

Interestingly, Johnson doesn’t seem to make any mention of PUFAs or linoleic acid or seed oils. Like most traditional low-carbers, the distinction between different fats seems to completely elude him.

And that despite talking about torpor, and how fructose can induce this in humans. Of course Brad Marshall talks about our modern obesity epidemic being reminiscent of torpor, induced by the consumption of high-linoleic acid foods.

Jaromir’s posts tie these 2 ideas together very nicely. It turns out that these 2 systems influence each other. For example, not just the production but also the excretion of uric acid via the kidneys is important.

And what, according to Jaromir, can block the excretion of uric acid? High free fatty acids in the blood, a common side effect of excess linoleic acid consumption.

In fact, Jaromir suspects that most of the polyol pathway damage in modernity is dependent on a high-PUFA context. After all, we don’t seem to see as much damage in ancestrally-living hunter gatherers that seasonally eat high amounts of fruit or honey, or salt.

Could the endogenous production & negative effects of fructose, as explained by the polyol pathway, be another downstream victim of excess PUFA?

Traditional Diet Advice - in the proper context

When listening to Johnson’s presentation, I realized how this nicely framed a lot of “traditional” diet advice in a certain context.

1. Eat fruit, don’t eat candy/drink soda

2. Eat lots of fiber (to slow digestion of fructose)

3. Eat less salt/drink more water (to reduce salinity in the blood)

All of this advice is sort of made fun of in the keto/carnivore community. But it might be good advice IF you’re in a high-glucose, high-PUFA context, like most of us have been for the last 100 years. And especially coming from a healthier agrarian starch-based but low-PUFA context, like most people ate since the agricultural revolution.

If you’re gonna be mostly starch-based, and you’re already PUFA’d, all of that advice is probably sound.

Now you can totally avoid glucose metabolism to a degree by going keto/carnivore, but you can’t shut off gluconeogenesis completely.

And you can avoid eating fructose, but are you avoiding the polyol pathway, or are you slamming salt/umami/glutamate?

I’d say that if you’re not quite metabolically healthy despite avoiding carbs or PUFAs, and you’re habitually consuming high amounts of salt, umami type foods, or plain fructose or sugar, I’d give this theory a try.

Personally, I’m guilty: I’m a total tomato sauce addict. A friend jokingly calls ex150 “the sauce diet” because I put almost more sauce than meat/vegetables into each meal.

To test out this new hypothesis, I’ll be doing ex150nosauce next: just 150g of beef and a little bit of green vegetables, with ad-lib cream as before.

Knowing that I can deal with plain rice without sauce for a month, this should be a piece of cake in comparison.

Maybe it was the high-sodium, high-umami marinara sauce the whole time?

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