brief ex150-5 update: worked as expected, finally hit -50lbs
Took long enough. Good old ex150 got it done.
First up, welcome Slate Star Codex readers!
Origin Story
If you haven’t really dug into the blog yet, here’s the back story:
Pretty much always been very obese, usually 250-290lbs (m/37/6’1)
I lost and regained 100lbs on keto (it’s complicated)
Briefly hit morbidly obese at 301lbs in 2021
I think CICO is a useless tautology
Inspired by slime mold time mold, I started running 30 day experiments
I came up with ex150, a diet consisting of 88% calories from fat. Largely in the form of heavy cream. I mostly whip it and eat it like a dessert, mostly.
Consistently lost ~10lbs/mo on ex150 for 4-5 months
Started doing more experiments, had some major confounders, resulting in me barely losing any weight the last month (but some fat, according to DEXA, and even gained some muscle despite not working out? Madness!)
I missed the weight loss, so went back on OG ex150 for 14 days
..and just hit the -50lbs total weight lost since September, for an average of 0.23lb lost per day including time off diet and failed experiments. Not too shabby.
I honestly don’t know why ex150 works, but I have a few hypotheses, like the diet being low-protein or minimizing PUFAs
ex150-5 in detail
By the way, the -5 just means it’s the 5th iteration of ex150 that I’ve run.
I was actually kind of panicked after my last 2 experiments (ex150choctruffle and ex225lean) both started off great, but then stopped working. See my weight going down, and then back up, in the yellow shaded area above? Sad!
Had I lost my cream mojo? Had the diet stopped working?
I have no clue if the 65g of protein from ex225lean were too much, or if something (Daylight Savings Time?) just messed me up for a month. I have marked both ex150choctruffle and ex225lean as invalid experiments. Maybe I’ll repeat them later.
So I decided to go back onto the original ex150 and just re-establish a baseline.
Thank the Science gods, it worked.
In 14 days of ex150-5, I’ve lost a total of 5lbs
That’s 0.35lb/day
Finally hit the -50lbs mark. Yay!
1-2lbs of the gain on ex225lean/loss on ex150 is probably water/muscle glycogen.
Still, the trend reversed from an up direction to a clear down direction.
The Thin Cream Line
If plain ex150 works so great, why don’t I just keep doing it?
Because I want to know how it works. Do you know how frustrating it is to do something successfully without understanding it?
The big danger is that you will accidentally stop doing the critical part, and it’ll stop working. That’s what happened to me on keto. I thought I’d figured it out, lost 100lbs, wore a tailored suit - and then I rapidly gained it all back. Still on keto. Clearly, I was doing keto differently.
Plus, I strongly suspect ex150 isn’t even close to the Efficient Frontier of Fat Loss. Maybe I can find and extract the one part that makes it work?
I have a total of 24 experiments lined up right now. That’s why I’m always eager to try something new as soon as I’ve proven to myself that ex150 still works. So many experiments, so little time. But of course I still have a lot of fat to lose, so when the scale doesn’t budge in a month, I get a little antsy.
Next up…
In line with that, I’m now doing an experiment that is pretty much the smallest change to ex150 you could possibly think of: ex150monkfruit.
This is technically not even an addition. I’ve been taking a magnesium supplement for a few weeks now, after a reader suggested it. After receiving the package, I realized it was sweetened to hell and back with monk fruit. Monk fruit is one of the few sweeteners I actually think are fine (besides stevia, and maybe allulose).
Point being: I’ve taken the sweetened magnesium in a glass of water every morning for a few weeks now.
The change in ex150monkfruit: I will, instead, put it into my nightly whipped cream. I’ve tried it once and it makes the cream disgustingly sweet. Since sweetness (and fat content) of food are a major component of the palatability hypothesis of obesity, this should be able to provide a nice data point.
And it really doesn’t add anything to my diet, it merely shifts the timing - I’ll now get a dose of sweetness with my main caloric meal of the day, instead of in a glass of water.
Prediction: It will make no difference, and I’ll continue to lose weight at around .3lb/day.
Hold my cream.