Compared to what?

How to compare diets in the correct context

A delicious can of Cake

I have done a lot of very different diet experiments over the last 3 years. Over that time, I’ve noticed various patterns that can make it tricky to compare diets 1:1.

Let me just give you some obvious examples:

1. Starting weight: You’ll almost certainly lose more absolute weight the more body fat you have, especially the very first month. It is difficult to compare a diet that made you go from 290→270lbs in one month to one that makes you go from 230→223lbs in one month.

2. Water weight: Some diets (heavily ketogenic ones, fasting, low-salt) will dramatically lower your water weight. That’s fine, but you do need to consider it when comparing them to other diets that lead to higher water retention (high-carb, high-protein, high-salt). You could be staying weight stable, but gain 5lbs of water and lose 5lbs of fat. Or you might gain 10lbs, but it was all water weight.

3. Maxed out mechanism: A diet might work by a particular mechanism. But if you’ve already maxed out that mechanism via another diet, it might seem like this diet does nothing. For example, both my ex150 heavy cream diet & the honey/sugar diets rely on protein restriction and FGF-21. Since I was already protein restricted and FGF-21-maxing on the heavy cream, it’s not very surprising that the honey/sugar diets didn’t do much for me.

4. Other people: some diets work much better in some people than others. This can be due to genetic differences, epigenetics, how metabolically messed up someone is, and who knows what else.

Sequence effects

Let’s look at my own weight loss since I began experimenting nearly 3 years ago:

In the beginning (orange phase) I lost weight incredibly rapidly. Clearly, ex150 was working very well.

But I also did the exact same diet almost the entire year of 2024, and yet I was seemingly plateaued, bouncing around the 220lbs mark.

This type of exponential decay/asymptotic curve is very typical in fat loss. Almost everyone starts out losing rapidly, but then weight loss slows down and eventually you plateau. Of course you do want to plateau at one point, or you’d disappear. The question is just: when do you plateau?

My plateau weight of ~220lbs is a lot less than the 292lbs I started with, but it’s not anywhere near my normal weight by BMI (which starts at 188lbs!). I was still around 30% body fat.

If this is “the end” it certainly feels a little premature. I sure was hoping to plateau closer to 20-25% body fat. But I don’t know exactly why I plateaued around 220lbs.

But the point for this post: Since I had plateaued even on a previously-working heavy cream diet, for any diet that I then tried (in the green phase) and it didn’t work - what does that really tell me?

Not necessarily much. The same diet might have worked phenomenally, had I started it at 292lbs instead of ex150.

Say the sugar diet or honey diet work by protein restriction, which I wasn’t doing at 292lbs. Maybe, had I stumbled upon this idea then, I would’ve lost 55lbs in 8 months on high sugar? Maybe I would’ve plateaued around 220lbs like I did with cream.

It’s very likely that the cream diet then wouldn’t have helped me lose more weight at 220lbs. But in this hypothetical scenario, the cream & sugar diet work the same way and lead to the same outcomes. It’s just that I happened to try one of them first, and only tried the other once I was stalled out.

A bizarro-world exfatloss-1 from an alternate universe might have had the exact opposite experience, as I described above.

He might’ve started out on the sugar diet, easily dieted down to 220lbs, and then see some cream fad on Twitter. After trying it 1-2 times, he might conclude that cream doesn’t work.

But really, it’s just that whatever buttons the sugar & cream are both pushing was already maxed out, and pushing it again didn’t do anything.

Both would work great compared to the SAD or even high-protein, high-PUFA keto in my case, but one doesn’t work better than the other. “Compared to what?” is an important question.

Relative Diet Comparison

While it is pretty natural (or cultural?) to hope that there’s a solution for everything, it might not be true. I’m open to the idea that, after a lifetime of obesity, there just isn’t a way for me to get down to 188lbs, or whatever BMI-normal is for me.

Of course I want to believe it’s possible, but there’s no guarantee. Maybe there’s a limit to how much of a beating our bodies can take before incurring permanent damage.

Or maybe there is another button I need to push. Maybe several things are wrong with my metabolism, and protein restriction/PUFA restriction only fixes one of them. Maybe, until I find and push the other button, nothing will work.

Or maybe I just have to wait out the PUFA depletion of my adipose tissue, and it’s just going to take 2-6 more years.

Or maybe my adipocytes are messed up, and I have to wait 8-10 years for them to turn over.

In any of these cases: if I try a new diet and it doesn’t result in weight loss, that doesn’t mean “the diet doesn’t work.” It doesn’t even mean “the diet doesn’t work for me.” It just means that it doesn’t work any better than what I was already doing.

Maybe it would’ve worked great if I had done it at 292lbs, before trying protein restriction and PUFA restriction.

Of course, if the diet makes me lose fat beyond the previous plateau, that might indicate that it does something else or works better than my previous diet. Or it could just mean another chunk of PUFAs from my adipose tissue got depleted, and my new plateau level is now lower.

On the other hand, I could gain weight on the new diet. If this is mostly a few pounds of water weight and it plateaus slightly higher, that’s probably fine and to be expected when e.g. going from a very ketogenic diet to a high-carb/high-protein diet.

If I keep gaining weight and it’s a continuous trend that doesn’t stop after 1-2 weeks, that could be a problem. This might be actual fat gain, not a one-time plateau effect from water weight.

How to tell if it’s a plateau effect?

DEXA scans can help with this. They’re not granular enough to detect day-to-day changes reliably, but if you gained 10lbs or more, the DEXA will be able to tell you if it’s mostly fat or mostly “lean mass” (=water).

I particularly like looking at the “fat mass” part of the DEXA report. “Lean mass” contains water, glycogen, creatine, and who knows what else. It fluctuates a lot day-to-day. But I’ve seen the fat mass fluctuate way less and consider it a more reliable measure.

It’s thus not trivial to tell if you lost/gained “real” lean mass or just “water weight” but it’s pretty reliable to tell if you lost/gained fat mass.

I have also developed a pretty good intuition at this point. There’s just a way that fat-gaining diets make me feel. I don’t feel good. I feel bloated. I am insanely thirsty all the time.

It’s a bit similar if I eat a lot of salt, but with salt my body usually adapts after a few days and then it feels normal.

Eating high-protein I can gain fat very rapidly, 5-7lbs in a week is not rare for me. I’ll be thirsty all week, drink what feels like a gallon a day and never pee.

I also typically get a sort of bad/headache-adjacent feeling from high protein. Less acute and painful, more like that brain fog feeling that sleep deprivation tends to produce. I just want to lie down and do nothing all day.

Being sick with a cold and having a fever feels kind of similar.

Don’t compare yourself to other people

This was funny when the Sugar Diet received a lot of hype recently. Just for shits and giggles, I tried it myself. Naturally, it failed spectacularly: I didn’t lose that much weight, it wasn’t that rapid, and after day 4 it really went off the rails and I crashed hard on day 7.

To this day, people tell me I must’ve been doing it wrong because it worked for them. When I point them to the post with a detailed write-up of what I did, they often come up with just-so explanations: I ate too much fruit. I should’ve used coke, not sprite. I probably snacked too much.

But the most obvious solution: this diet, like almost every diet, works for some but not for others.

It would be silly for me to expect a diet to work for me just because it worked for somebody else, especially if that somebody else was never very obese and just went from normal/slightly overweight to shredded.

Reversing (morbid) obesity & getting shredded are very different metabolic states and require radically different solutions.

Expectations

So how would I expect or not expect a diet to work, right now, in this context? Let’s briefly review my current context:

1. Metabolically messed up from a lifetime of whatever causes obesity (PUFA, western diets, cafeterias, ..)

2. Down to 220lbs plateau with 90% fat heavy cream diet, restricted in PUFA and protein

3. Regained ~10-15lbs after messing around with carbs for the last 6 months

And is are how I would judge a diet, e.g. my current ex150vinegar experiment, based on this context:

1. Rapid weight gain trend: very bad. Diet is obesogenic.

2. Small weight gain, plateaus after ~5-10lbs: diet increases water retention, but is not obesogenic.

3. Weight loss through my ~230lbs “carb plateau” down until around 220lbs: works well, like ex150, but possibly not better (unclear).

4. Weight loss well through the previous 220lbs plateau to say 210lbs: diet works better than ex150, at least in the current context. (Maybe only due to PUFA depletion since I last tried ex150. This would mean the context has shifted, but in a way that’s difficult to measure.)

In short, a diet is only better than ex150 if it helps me get lower than ex150 ever did. Until I reach my previous ex150 plateau, there’s no way to tell.

There are symptoms. I do feel naturally less hungry with my current addition of vinegar, and I eat less (though I don’t count carolies). I drink very little and pee a lot. I get small whooshes every 2-3 days.

These are all pretty subjective, not like the objective marker of breaking through a previous, very persistent weight plateau.

But if I had to follow my intuition & go by how the diet makes me feel, ex150vinegar feels like a winner so far.

As you can see, my weight has been dropping very steadily so far, 18 days into the diet. If it keeps going like this, it will be a very impressive weight loss month, and would leave me at around 224-225lbs. That’s still a bit over my previous long-time plateau of 220lbs, and quite a bit over the 217lbs that were previously my sustainable (1 month) low on ex150.

In order to tell if ex150vinegar truly works beyond what plain old ex150 can do, I’d have to do at least 1 more month of it to reach & break through the 220lbs and even the 217lbs.

Before that, it’s a maybe.