A most confusing month: +0.6lb weight, -4lbs fat, +4.8lbs lean mass, body fat -2% by DEXA
tl;dr:
I did 2 DEXA scans with a little over 1 month in between
Total weight: +0.6lb
Fat mass: -4lbs
Body fat: -2%
Lean mass: +4.8lbs
Of that, muscle mass: +0.9lb (I didn’t work out once)
The other 4lbs was probably muscle glycogen/water retention
-4lbs fat/+1lb muscle per month recomp? Sad!
Serves me right, I guess: shortly after writing about how I use a scale to measure my weight loss progress there’s a whole month of the scale not moving much.
I realize that these stats actually don’t sound that bad and it’s quite a bit of comfort after seeing the scale not budge much for over a month. But in the context of ex150 only losing 4lbs per month is a huge disappointment.
That said, maybe I was previously losing some muscle mass and this is more of a recomp. Since I don’t have DEXAs from before there’s no way to know.
Gaining almost 1lb of muscle in a month w/o exercising at all is interesting. Maybe it’s the secret anabolic effect of heavy cream?
Or maybe it’s just that even DEXA scans aren’t that precise. Since they are apparently the gold standard I guess we just can’t actually know on a fine enough granularity, only over longer time frames and with bigger effect sizes.
With all that said: this month was in many ways the worst since I started the ex150 diet 6 months ago.
I spiked myself 2x (244lbs → 250lbs, 243lbs → 250lbs)
It took 5 days and 11 days to come back down to my pre-spike weight
Daylight savings time happened, which always messes me up
I had a mild cold for a week
Took cough syrup for the cold, who knows what that did (no sugar but sweetener)
Temp weight gain actually preventing fat loss?
One observation: whatever the ingredient in the rapid weight gain spikes is seems to actually block fat loss. If we assume that no actual fat loss took place during spikes plus the subsequent return to previous weight (5 days and 11 days) the number of -4lbs of fat starts to make sense: I was only losing fat about half the time.
I’ve heard similar results anecdotally from readers who’ve tried doing ex150 with somewhat frequent (=weekly) breaks. It seems that real fat loss doesn’t start until about 5-7 days in. Even breaking the diet weekly (with whatever the spike factor is) seems to negate any long-term weight loss.
Currently I’m not convinced that EVERY sort of temporary weight gain has this blocking effect. But until I find the actual factor that makes ex150 work it’s hard to say.
For example: if it’s PUFA, then breaking the diet with tons of butter-cooked ribeye should be fine. If it’s high protein → insulin → fat gain, that obviously wouldn’t work, but you could probably eat other things as long as they didn’t spike insulin much.
DST/sleep deprivation doing damage?
Could DST/sleep deprivation/cortisol be another major confounding variable? I’ve always had severe issues with the DST switch.
The pernicious thing about DST is that it doesn’t just steal an hour from you once. It steals an hour from you every day until the sun has adjusted to rising at the previous time, which doesn’t happen until 1-2 months later.
Of course it gets slightly better every day as the sun rises earlier and there’s more time to entrain your circadian rhythm to your wake up time.
Looking at the above graph at the ex150choctruffle experiment, everything went swimmingly until the DST switch. Shortly after that came the DST/spike weekend. My current experiment (ex225lean) is also dragging its feet a bit.
I do feel like I’m not sleeping as well as during standard time and am often tired during the day, which I wasn’t before.
So maybe sleep deprivation → cortisol is just ruining anything right now and invalidating all my experiments? Food for thought.
My current experiment will be over in a few days. I might just throw in a round of ol’ ex150 for good measure to calibrate. If that’s not working I might just have to ignore any experiment results until my sleep is better, which should hopefully not take longer than 4 weeks at that point.
Why is science so hard? :D
Visualizing the temp vs. fat weight loss
The somewhat surprising recomp result of total mass staying almost exactly the same while losing a decent amount of fat and gaining a decent amount of lean mass made me ponder the temporary vs. fat weight changes again.
Here is an attempt to visualize what I suspect happened. Of course this is pure speculation. I’d have to do a DEXA scan every single day to get this sort of data and I suspect even then we would just discover the DEXA isn’t that precise either.
In this graph we see an upper and lower boundary for the range of temporary fluctuations (e.g. water retention, glycogen stores). It’s a total guesstimate of course - I just used the lowest weight as the lower boundary and added 4lbs (the difference in fat mass) to make the top boundary.
An ex150-style diet like ex150deli (first 2 days) or ex150choctruffle keeps me at the lower boundary of weight fluctuation. When I spike myself the temporary weight shoots up to pretty much its maximum.
When I got a sunburn my weight fluctuated up by 2lbs for 3 days and then came back down. This is also when my cold started.
The second large spike is the weekend I overate unlimited BBQ meat (no sauce, no sides) and some cheese. The cold was kind of subsiding here but still present. I also took cough syrup during this time, another confounder. It’s also after a whole week of sleep deprivation from DST. Maybe that weakened my immune system and gave me the cold or the cortisol finally caught up with me. No clue.
After that weekend I ate somewhat normal-ish (like ex150, just more) for a few days and the temp weight started fluctuating back down.
When I started ex225lean I was already back down 3lbs and I lost another 3lbs very rapidly.
ex225lean contains about 2x the amount of protein that ex150 has. So I expect that glycogen depletion (and maybe water retention?) will be slower and possibly not go down quite as far altogether.
Thus while I have lost 4lbs of fat, indicated by the boundary lines having shifted down 4lbs over the course of the month, my actual current weight is exactly the same as before. But it sits much higher in the range of temporary weight fluctuations whereas before it pretty much was at the very bottom.
Imagine it as the current weight, influenced by things like water weight, stomach content, and muscle glycogen, bouncing around between the two walls of minimal and maximal fluctuation like a ping pong ball.
It doesn’t really matter much if the ping pong ball is high or low within the boundaries as long as the longer term trend of the boundaries themselves moves down.
But I really prefer losing 10lbs a month. It doesn’t feel like I’m in recomp territory yet. If I can give up 1-2lbs of lean mass loss per month and lose 8lbs in fat I think that’s a good trade off while I’m still obese. I’d rethink it at 220lbs.
Lessons
Spiking is bad for 5+ days. More spiking → less fat loss.
Spiking for 2-3 days is significantly worse than just 1 day
If running 14 day experiments avoid spikes in between, there isn’t enough time to normalize
Run an ex150 baseline for 7 (?) days prior to any experiment to normalize temporary weight fluctuation?
Get regular DEXA scans to verify scale weight
Accept that some experiments are inconclusive due to bad design/bad luck
Would be interesting to see some resistance/HIIT sessions with each variation in the diet, and see how much that influences things over time.