I’m sure you’ve analysed this to death but I find a couple of things interesting. Your weight usually spikes after ending a diet but doesn’t always recover when starting the new one. Do you know why or have a theory? I associate water loss at the start of a diet with the water that’s bound to glycogen being released as you burn down the store and vice versa. Are you eating enough carbs to replenish your store when you end diets? The example trash keto diet you gave above doesn’t have much cards (depending on how much chocolate you ate) or is the water weight being gained lost in a different way?
I certainly do eat more carbs, but largely in the form of chocolate and dairy (e.g. yogurt) as I still eat a ketogenic diet between diets. On the other hand, I eat very high protein during those periods, so maybe that's just being converted to glycogen? I can also imagine that my body has become extremely efficient at carbs/glycogen after nearly 8 years of keto and nearly 1 year of this diet.
I do think that elevated insulin per se causes more water storage, not just glycogen. So the extra protein would cause both water retention and, longer term, fat gain.
My main theory right now why I used to "recover" very quickly: I was accidentally adding way too much cream from Starbucks, taking in about 4000-4,500kcal daily instead of my previous ~2,300 or so. Due to absence of insulin I didn't gain weight on that (until the protein refeed spiked insulin and caused fat storage), but I also didn't burn any because my system was so flush with FFAs.
That's my theory for now, at least. I'm currently on day 26 of ex150nostarbucks and it's looking pretty good. But will need a longer term trend to see if it "sticks" or is just another minor outlier, I've had those before.
It's changed a bit. In the beginning I would eat a lot more trashy keto junk food (think keto protein bars) and even fried chicken. As I got more into seed oils I've tried to stay away from those. Last time it was mostly more beef (=steak), cheese, milk, and dark chocolate.
Aug 22, 2023·edited Aug 22, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
Great stuff, thanks. Sorry for nagging you into it!
Looking at your graph as a whole, I don't really see a plateau. Up until June it looks like an exponential decay towards a stable point somewhere around 200lbs.
And then suddenly in June there's this gigantic jump of around 15lbs, and then the decay continues.
Exponential decay sounds like the right model for this.
If on ex150 your appetite is working properly again, the 'force' pulling you towards a normal weight might well be proportional to how excessive your systems feel your fat stores are.
So I'm thinking ex150 and all its variants might have been working roughly the same throughout, giving you a properly functioning appetite that's trying to put you back to normal, and it's something that you're doing between bouts that's causing the trouble.
The gap endex150-6 to ex150grassfed-1 looks like the longest yet, could it just be that every time you're not doing something like ex150 your weight shoots up at a terrifying rate?
I mean, that's a bit freaky, and it needs explanation, but it fits the curve.....
And I've always been a bit sceptical that anyone can put on 15lbs of 'water weight'. That effect is there, but it seems to be about 3lbs for me, and that's in line with the amount of glycogen we carry.
Try colouring the diet bits and the non-diet bits and see what the gradients look like?
And what is the smallest change you can make to ex150 that causes the rapid weight gain? If you substitute greek yoghurt for heavy cream when you're already in the ex150 state, what happens?
What I did for the 15lbs June jump wasn't different than what I did e.g. for 14 days in December or so.
The main difference is that, this time, it didn't immediately come back down.
"Not doing ex150" definitely causes rapid weight gain (AND fat gain, not just water), and in the June one I was pretty careful. No chicken, no pork, nothing fried, almost no seed oils (except In'n'out burger sauce a few times). Just really high ad-lib protein. Steak, eggs, the works.
The reason it hasn't come down as fast that time might be that I was unknowingly consuming 4,000-4,5000kcal per day through the heavy cream Starbucks latte. About 1 week left in that experiment and it's looking pretty good as you can tell toward the end of the progress curve, but as always, hard to tell a trend just yet.
Smallest change is a good question; I tried ex225lean a while ago which roughly doubles my protein. But in hindsight I think all those experiments are ruined because I had started adding in significantly more cream through the Starbucks drinks.
Maybe ex150 prevents fat gain through hyper-low insulin, and enables fat flux from adipose tissue, but then you still can't consume 4,500kcal of heavy cream per day and expect to lose much?
Aug 23, 2023·edited Aug 23, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
> but then you still can't consume 4,500kcal of heavy cream per day and expect to lose much
For sure; calories in, calories out!
But what stops the cream being satiating for you?
We have to believe that:
Whipped cream is satiating
Liquid cream is satiating (have you tried this? the first time I drank two 600ml pots down in two swills, and I'm never hyperphagic, but ever since I can only drink a bit before I lose interest and the thought of any more is revolting),
I suspect that we need to qualify "cream is satiating" better.
Satiety is so nebulous and undefined.
In my experience: cream is satiating, but you still need to allow it time to hit some switch down in your system. You can definitely chug a ton of cream before you hit satiety, especially if it's coffee flavored. Whipping the cream slows down the rate of consumption, pretty much forcing you to hit the satiety switch before finishing a bowl.
Also, maybe the satiety from cream only works within a certain window of time. For many people, OMAD or other IF frameworks (like 20/4 or 16/8) work because they limit how much they can take in. So maybe it's a structural part of ex150 that you don't literally eat infinite cream, and usually this would be mediated by my "coffee window" of waking up to 3pm, and the fact that even I can't drink much more than 5-7 coffees per day without getting the jitters, plus the one whipped cream dinner of about 215g or so.
So basically, maybe even cement-truck satiety only lasts for a few hours, and if you set your mind to it, you can still consume a lot more cream after that? And if your insulin is low enough (like in my case) you won't put on any fat, which seems impossible in absence of insulin, but you also won't lose any or much.
Aug 24, 2023·edited Aug 24, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
In case you need to know what it feels like for me (I think a rather more normal metabolism than you, even though I'm pretty broken these days):
Cream, like all other foods, is satiating for me without qualification.
The first time I tried it I drank a whole 300ml pot down in one, and it tasted so nice that I did it again immediately. (Or maybe they were 600s, I can't remember, comes in two sizes). Either 5400kcal or 10800kcal in ten or so seconds.
And I spent the whole day and part of the next day feeling like I couldn't eat a bloody thing.
And ever since, cream's been instantly satiating in small amounts. I can sip it, but after a few sips, I don't want any more, and I have trouble imagining what it would be like to want more. If I'm really really hungry then I might manage 300mls and then the hunger's gone. Something in the part of me that I can't access learned something, unconsciously and fast.
Evidently that's not how it works for you. But that's a loose thread. Experiment on it. Pull on the thread and see where it leads you. Which bit of the satiety mechanism is broken? What works, what doesn't? What's the smallest change you can make that breaks it?
edit:
On thinking more carefully, it *was* two 600ml pots, but that's "only" 5400kcal because cream is half water. Still two days food in a few seconds.
Hm, interesting. Yea it might be learned. Despite being "the cream guy" I almost never actually drink the cream on its own. Either it's a generous shot in coffee, and I sip coffee, not chug it. Or I whip it, 98% of the time or so.
But a few times I've just had my dinner cream liquid, mostly because I came home late and was too tired to whip it up. So maybe I just haven't really "learned" that association with liquid cream yet (I do actually have an experiment lined up for that, but I have an infinite number of experiments lol..)
Last night I did actually drink my cream in milkshake thickness, on purpose. I was feeling weird hunger pangs (which I haven't had on keto in... years? except when fasting, but which started when I went on ex150nostarbucks, presumably my metabolism going "Hey dude, I thought we agreed on 4,500kcal/day?"). So last night I decided to just drink my cream just to make sure I could actually get all of it down, because the past few days I usually wasn't able to finish the whipped cream.
So maybe "satiety" really is a somewhat shorter term thing for me than for you, or for normal people. Maybe it'll get fixed once I'm leaner?
In PUFA theory, this would actually make sense: flooding my system with saturated fat would block out the bad "always hungry" signal from the PUFAs. A few hours later, most of the consumed fatty acids would be cycled through the system, and now my serum FFAs would be roughly equivalent to my body fat, which is likely still heavily PUFA'd.
So heavy SFA consumption could be a "protective satiety blanket" for a few hours. Maybe longer if you consume an extra quart at Starbucks by accident than when not :)
Yea, I've never liked when people make "satiety!" a corner stone of a program (like Satiety per Calorie) or others. For one, they never bother to define it, or they use some sloppy definition like "Duh, satiety is the absence of hunger, lol." Ok, then I've been satiated for the past 8 years on keto except that 1 time I accidentally ate some sugary sauce. This definition is not useful in an operational sense.
I do like the cement-truck satiety I sometimes get on ex150, or just the "normal, not wanting to finish the cream" satiety I almost always get on it. And I do think it's related. But it just seems like a nice side effect or a symptom of "something is working," not a crucial cornerstone or even measurement to go by.
Aug 24, 2023·edited Aug 24, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
I think it's crucial. I think it's the feeling of your homeostat saying "that's enough, any more would be bad". Which is what *has* to happen lest any animal with a sufficient food supply quickly become a helpless target.
It's not 'I'm not hungry any more'. It's a positive revulsion at the thought of eating.
I've never really distinguished between the two before, they're almost the same thing for me, and I think that's why there's only one word. But introspecting now they're different feelings.
Hunger is the thing that will make me seek out food. The feeling I'm talking about is more than the absence of that. It's the thing that will make me push away a plate of good food half-finished.
Aug 23, 2023·edited Aug 23, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
> I think all those experiments are ruined
I am sceptical. It looks to me like all those experiments worked fine! Try colouring the background very dark for all the non-ex150 bits and I think we'll see you lost weight on all of them, proportional to how far away you were from normal at the time.
I think you might be looking in the wrong place. It's the bits where you're not doing ex150 that are the problem.
The water weight loss and gain is real, but it's only about 3lbs for me. I can believe 5lbs for you, you're a bigger man than I am, but I can't believe 10lbs, 15lbs. We're not made of different stuff.
Next time you finish an ex150 bout, try adding non-ex150 foods in one by one. Maybe a bit of sugar in the cream for a few days? Or a few boiled potatoes every day? Ketchup on your steak? That should put all the water weight back on quickly, but does it also cause hyperphagia and massive fat gain?
P.S. Beware of the "refeeding syndrome", carbs after a couple of weeks of no-carbs has twice knocked me flat for a day, and the "lots of carbs cause tiredness" thing seems to last for at least a week. Easy does it....
Well, what else do you think made me gain 16lbs in 2 days if not water weight? :D Can you gain that much fat in such a short period? Even the .7lb of fat per day I seemingly put on seems.. hard to achieve, from a biochemical perspective. Then again, bears..
I think I got the "why does non-ex150 make me balloon up" part down, that's expected. The unexpected part is that going back on ex150 made it all rapidly come off, not just the water weight part. And that stopped happening. So instead of ratcheting down, I began ratcheting up, leading to a sort-of-plateau net over time.
Well, yea, ok. Let me rephrase it: I have found a way to cut it out, whatever it is, by going on ex150. But apparently there are some factors that I accidentally hit in ex150 in the beginning, and then accidentally stopped doing. Current hypothesis: avoiding an extra quart or so of heavy cream per day.
You're right that this does not explain what factor causes my normal satiety/fat metabolism to not work.
I’m sure you’ve analysed this to death but I find a couple of things interesting. Your weight usually spikes after ending a diet but doesn’t always recover when starting the new one. Do you know why or have a theory? I associate water loss at the start of a diet with the water that’s bound to glycogen being released as you burn down the store and vice versa. Are you eating enough carbs to replenish your store when you end diets? The example trash keto diet you gave above doesn’t have much cards (depending on how much chocolate you ate) or is the water weight being gained lost in a different way?
I certainly do eat more carbs, but largely in the form of chocolate and dairy (e.g. yogurt) as I still eat a ketogenic diet between diets. On the other hand, I eat very high protein during those periods, so maybe that's just being converted to glycogen? I can also imagine that my body has become extremely efficient at carbs/glycogen after nearly 8 years of keto and nearly 1 year of this diet.
I do think that elevated insulin per se causes more water storage, not just glycogen. So the extra protein would cause both water retention and, longer term, fat gain.
My main theory right now why I used to "recover" very quickly: I was accidentally adding way too much cream from Starbucks, taking in about 4000-4,500kcal daily instead of my previous ~2,300 or so. Due to absence of insulin I didn't gain weight on that (until the protein refeed spiked insulin and caused fat storage), but I also didn't burn any because my system was so flush with FFAs.
That's my theory for now, at least. I'm currently on day 26 of ex150nostarbucks and it's looking pretty good. But will need a longer term trend to see if it "sticks" or is just another minor outlier, I've had those before.
What do you eat in between controlled diets?
It's changed a bit. In the beginning I would eat a lot more trashy keto junk food (think keto protein bars) and even fried chicken. As I got more into seed oils I've tried to stay away from those. Last time it was mostly more beef (=steak), cheese, milk, and dark chocolate.
Great stuff, thanks. Sorry for nagging you into it!
Looking at your graph as a whole, I don't really see a plateau. Up until June it looks like an exponential decay towards a stable point somewhere around 200lbs.
And then suddenly in June there's this gigantic jump of around 15lbs, and then the decay continues.
Exponential decay sounds like the right model for this.
If on ex150 your appetite is working properly again, the 'force' pulling you towards a normal weight might well be proportional to how excessive your systems feel your fat stores are.
So I'm thinking ex150 and all its variants might have been working roughly the same throughout, giving you a properly functioning appetite that's trying to put you back to normal, and it's something that you're doing between bouts that's causing the trouble.
The gap endex150-6 to ex150grassfed-1 looks like the longest yet, could it just be that every time you're not doing something like ex150 your weight shoots up at a terrifying rate?
I mean, that's a bit freaky, and it needs explanation, but it fits the curve.....
And I've always been a bit sceptical that anyone can put on 15lbs of 'water weight'. That effect is there, but it seems to be about 3lbs for me, and that's in line with the amount of glycogen we carry.
Try colouring the diet bits and the non-diet bits and see what the gradients look like?
And what is the smallest change you can make to ex150 that causes the rapid weight gain? If you substitute greek yoghurt for heavy cream when you're already in the ex150 state, what happens?
Yea exponential decay seems like a good model.
What I did for the 15lbs June jump wasn't different than what I did e.g. for 14 days in December or so.
The main difference is that, this time, it didn't immediately come back down.
"Not doing ex150" definitely causes rapid weight gain (AND fat gain, not just water), and in the June one I was pretty careful. No chicken, no pork, nothing fried, almost no seed oils (except In'n'out burger sauce a few times). Just really high ad-lib protein. Steak, eggs, the works.
The reason it hasn't come down as fast that time might be that I was unknowingly consuming 4,000-4,5000kcal per day through the heavy cream Starbucks latte. About 1 week left in that experiment and it's looking pretty good as you can tell toward the end of the progress curve, but as always, hard to tell a trend just yet.
Smallest change is a good question; I tried ex225lean a while ago which roughly doubles my protein. But in hindsight I think all those experiments are ruined because I had started adding in significantly more cream through the Starbucks drinks.
Maybe ex150 prevents fat gain through hyper-low insulin, and enables fat flux from adipose tissue, but then you still can't consume 4,500kcal of heavy cream per day and expect to lose much?
Sad if true, but not crazy ;)
> but then you still can't consume 4,500kcal of heavy cream per day and expect to lose much
For sure; calories in, calories out!
But what stops the cream being satiating for you?
We have to believe that:
Whipped cream is satiating
Liquid cream is satiating (have you tried this? the first time I drank two 600ml pots down in two swills, and I'm never hyperphagic, but ever since I can only drink a bit before I lose interest and the thought of any more is revolting),
but:
Whipped cream in coffee is not satiating?
I suspect that we need to qualify "cream is satiating" better.
Satiety is so nebulous and undefined.
In my experience: cream is satiating, but you still need to allow it time to hit some switch down in your system. You can definitely chug a ton of cream before you hit satiety, especially if it's coffee flavored. Whipping the cream slows down the rate of consumption, pretty much forcing you to hit the satiety switch before finishing a bowl.
Also, maybe the satiety from cream only works within a certain window of time. For many people, OMAD or other IF frameworks (like 20/4 or 16/8) work because they limit how much they can take in. So maybe it's a structural part of ex150 that you don't literally eat infinite cream, and usually this would be mediated by my "coffee window" of waking up to 3pm, and the fact that even I can't drink much more than 5-7 coffees per day without getting the jitters, plus the one whipped cream dinner of about 215g or so.
So basically, maybe even cement-truck satiety only lasts for a few hours, and if you set your mind to it, you can still consume a lot more cream after that? And if your insulin is low enough (like in my case) you won't put on any fat, which seems impossible in absence of insulin, but you also won't lose any or much.
In case you need to know what it feels like for me (I think a rather more normal metabolism than you, even though I'm pretty broken these days):
Cream, like all other foods, is satiating for me without qualification.
The first time I tried it I drank a whole 300ml pot down in one, and it tasted so nice that I did it again immediately. (Or maybe they were 600s, I can't remember, comes in two sizes). Either 5400kcal or 10800kcal in ten or so seconds.
And I spent the whole day and part of the next day feeling like I couldn't eat a bloody thing.
And ever since, cream's been instantly satiating in small amounts. I can sip it, but after a few sips, I don't want any more, and I have trouble imagining what it would be like to want more. If I'm really really hungry then I might manage 300mls and then the hunger's gone. Something in the part of me that I can't access learned something, unconsciously and fast.
Evidently that's not how it works for you. But that's a loose thread. Experiment on it. Pull on the thread and see where it leads you. Which bit of the satiety mechanism is broken? What works, what doesn't? What's the smallest change you can make that breaks it?
edit:
On thinking more carefully, it *was* two 600ml pots, but that's "only" 5400kcal because cream is half water. Still two days food in a few seconds.
Hm, interesting. Yea it might be learned. Despite being "the cream guy" I almost never actually drink the cream on its own. Either it's a generous shot in coffee, and I sip coffee, not chug it. Or I whip it, 98% of the time or so.
But a few times I've just had my dinner cream liquid, mostly because I came home late and was too tired to whip it up. So maybe I just haven't really "learned" that association with liquid cream yet (I do actually have an experiment lined up for that, but I have an infinite number of experiments lol..)
Last night I did actually drink my cream in milkshake thickness, on purpose. I was feeling weird hunger pangs (which I haven't had on keto in... years? except when fasting, but which started when I went on ex150nostarbucks, presumably my metabolism going "Hey dude, I thought we agreed on 4,500kcal/day?"). So last night I decided to just drink my cream just to make sure I could actually get all of it down, because the past few days I usually wasn't able to finish the whipped cream.
So maybe "satiety" really is a somewhat shorter term thing for me than for you, or for normal people. Maybe it'll get fixed once I'm leaner?
In PUFA theory, this would actually make sense: flooding my system with saturated fat would block out the bad "always hungry" signal from the PUFAs. A few hours later, most of the consumed fatty acids would be cycled through the system, and now my serum FFAs would be roughly equivalent to my body fat, which is likely still heavily PUFA'd.
So heavy SFA consumption could be a "protective satiety blanket" for a few hours. Maybe longer if you consume an extra quart at Starbucks by accident than when not :)
> flooding my system with saturated fat would block out the bad "always hungry" signal from the PUFAs.
I've been thinking exactly this, maybe flooding one's bloodstream with proper fuel keeps the PUFAs out of the mitochondria for a while.
Who knows? And I don't think you work like I work in this regard. But I've got you thinking, and that's what I wanted.
Yea, I've never liked when people make "satiety!" a corner stone of a program (like Satiety per Calorie) or others. For one, they never bother to define it, or they use some sloppy definition like "Duh, satiety is the absence of hunger, lol." Ok, then I've been satiated for the past 8 years on keto except that 1 time I accidentally ate some sugary sauce. This definition is not useful in an operational sense.
I do like the cement-truck satiety I sometimes get on ex150, or just the "normal, not wanting to finish the cream" satiety I almost always get on it. And I do think it's related. But it just seems like a nice side effect or a symptom of "something is working," not a crucial cornerstone or even measurement to go by.
I think it's crucial. I think it's the feeling of your homeostat saying "that's enough, any more would be bad". Which is what *has* to happen lest any animal with a sufficient food supply quickly become a helpless target.
It's not 'I'm not hungry any more'. It's a positive revulsion at the thought of eating.
I've never really distinguished between the two before, they're almost the same thing for me, and I think that's why there's only one word. But introspecting now they're different feelings.
Hunger is the thing that will make me seek out food. The feeling I'm talking about is more than the absence of that. It's the thing that will make me push away a plate of good food half-finished.
> I think all those experiments are ruined
I am sceptical. It looks to me like all those experiments worked fine! Try colouring the background very dark for all the non-ex150 bits and I think we'll see you lost weight on all of them, proportional to how far away you were from normal at the time.
I think you might be looking in the wrong place. It's the bits where you're not doing ex150 that are the problem.
The water weight loss and gain is real, but it's only about 3lbs for me. I can believe 5lbs for you, you're a bigger man than I am, but I can't believe 10lbs, 15lbs. We're not made of different stuff.
Next time you finish an ex150 bout, try adding non-ex150 foods in one by one. Maybe a bit of sugar in the cream for a few days? Or a few boiled potatoes every day? Ketchup on your steak? That should put all the water weight back on quickly, but does it also cause hyperphagia and massive fat gain?
P.S. Beware of the "refeeding syndrome", carbs after a couple of weeks of no-carbs has twice knocked me flat for a day, and the "lots of carbs cause tiredness" thing seems to last for at least a week. Easy does it....
Well, what else do you think made me gain 16lbs in 2 days if not water weight? :D Can you gain that much fat in such a short period? Even the .7lb of fat per day I seemingly put on seems.. hard to achieve, from a biochemical perspective. Then again, bears..
I think I got the "why does non-ex150 make me balloon up" part down, that's expected. The unexpected part is that going back on ex150 made it all rapidly come off, not just the water weight part. And that stopped happening. So instead of ratcheting down, I began ratcheting up, leading to a sort-of-plateau net over time.
> I think I got the "why does non-ex150 make me balloon up" part down, that's expected.
No you don't! The million dollar question for you is 'why does my appetite not work properly unless I'm on ex150?'
Well, yea, ok. Let me rephrase it: I have found a way to cut it out, whatever it is, by going on ex150. But apparently there are some factors that I accidentally hit in ex150 in the beginning, and then accidentally stopped doing. Current hypothesis: avoiding an extra quart or so of heavy cream per day.
You're right that this does not explain what factor causes my normal satiety/fat metabolism to not work.
> Well, what else do you think made me gain 16lbs in 2 days if not water weight?
I don't know. But 'I don't know' is a better answer than 'something something let us not enquire too closely into this even though it seems unlikely'.
Agreed, but I do think it's mostly water (and maybe 1-2lbs of glycogen).
curious though! 1lb of glycogen should bind 2lbs of water (I think. I do not know.)