e150-8 review: New low weight, left obesity!
Now entering the overweight zone...
So, ex150-8: What’s the dealio?
Goal: not fuck up
If you remember, I messed up a lot with crazy diet experiments in November of 2023. I experimented with fat fasting, which worked great at first but left me craving tomato sauce for some reason. This resulted in binging on probably 5-7lbs of pretty much calorie-free salad and a subsequent (water) weight gain of 15lbs in as many hours.
(Lean mass, yo!)
I hence pledged to:
Stick to the plan
Anticipate
Don’t improvise
In short, do things I knew worked well for me (ex150) in getting me to my ultimate goal of reversing obesity. Not do shiny new things that sounded fun, but were sabotaging me.
Since then, I just ran 2 months of ex150, as I conceived of it originally, without any modifications.
And, as predicted, the pounds began melting off again.
I lost 4-6lbs on ex150-7, depending on how you count, putting me at a new low of 226lbs.
ex150-8: still effective
Over the holidays I took a few days off, and gained some weight, some of it water and some probably fat. I started ex150-8 exactly on New Year, and within 14 days, was back at my old low.
Then, an 11 day plateau. I think this is actually my longest plateau on record. Luckily I’ve had many 7-10 day plateaus before, and didn’t lose faith in ex150. I did briefly wonder if this would be the first time where I didn’t lose any weight (on net) on an OG month-long run of ex150. Then, 3 days before the trial was over, the pounds began dropping like crazy.
I basically went to bed with my waking weight most nights. Because of water loss from breathing & morning pee, that meant waking up 0.7-1.2lb lighter.
Interestingly this allowed me to go to bed, knowing I’d hit a new low weight the next morning. Very cool feeling.
Plateau factors?
A few days into every plateau, I begin wondering if I’m messing something up. Did I change something by accident? And since life’s not a lab environment, there’s always SOMETHING. Even for me, eating the same meal every day.
Hypotheses I came up with:
I had begun drinking a lot of tea (black & herbal) because it was cold.
My favorite brand of 80/20 ground chuck was out of stock, so I had to eat another brand for about a week. Maybe this ground beef had more protein in it?
I had once again rendered my own beef tallow from suet, and had begun cooking with it instead of merely using Kerrygold butter, my usual staple. Maybe the fatty acid composition made a difference?
I had changed my workout from 2x/wk (4 exercises each) to 7x/wk (1 exercise each). This kept the volume exactly the same (each exercise 1x/wk) but now I never had a full “rest day.”
The only thing I actually stopped doing out of these was the different beef brand. The store had my favorite brand back in stock, and I switched back. I drank a ton of tea every evening, and cooked my meal in a mix of suet tallow & Kerrygold for the rest of the month.
Side note: If you haven’t tried it, cooking in tallow + butter is amazing. It’s somehow even better than cooking just in tallow or just in butter. You get that savory, ranchy beef flavor, but also the golden brown buttery flavor and crispy burned butter solids. I highly recommend it.
Maybe plateaus & whooshes represent some fat loss mechanism
Or maybe it was all in my head and The Other Beef did nothing wrong. After all, I’ve had plenty of these plateaus before, often over 1 week long, without changing any of these factors.
I wonder if there’s just some mechanism where the body needs to “reorganize” things in fat storage and get ready to release more fat.
I’ve heard a popular theory that the body replaces fat in fat cells with water, and only at a certain point “flushes it all out” to have you see the scale weight drop.
That kind of sounds wrong, but it sure feels like something of a similar nature is happening. I’m just about the strictest dieter I’ve ever heard of, and still these plateaus & whooshes are pretty common.
In any case, I’m happy the whoosh began a few days before the experiment ended. Had it happened exactly at the end of the experiment, I would’ve probably concluded that ex150 stopped working and my new experiment did all the work!
This is another reason to go with 30 day experiments. If you only do 14 days, and you plateau for 11 of them, what signal are you really getting? I’ve yet to see a plateau that could invalidate a 30 day experiment.
I beat obesity, yo!
This blog is called ExFatloss, not ExReversingObesity, but that’s what it’s really about. I don’t have any advice or experience getting lean people to a Men’s Health-cover abs physique.
What this blog is really about is reversing obesity, and the obesity epidemic. I simply can’t believe it should be that difficult for a normal, everyday person to not be obese and diabetic.
It can’t be that hard. People have done it for millennia, and “they didn’t have cArOliEs” sounds like a pretty lame hypothesis. Have you seen what people used to eat in the 1940s?!
BMI: <30
Obesity in BMI terms is defined as a BMI of 30 or above. At 6’1, that means I’m obese at 225lbs or higher, and morbidly obese at 301lbs.
As you can see on this graph of my weight since I started ex150, I started off nearly morbidly obese (obese class 3). I quickly left the category of obesity class 2 behind me after only 2 months of ex150.
Confident I would have shredded abs in the summer, I posted that I can’t wait to be overweight.
But it would take an entire year to cross the obesity (class 1) category. The spring of 2023 went well, but I basically plateaued the entire summer, from June to October.
People were telling me ex150 had stopped working, I was drinking too much cream, this proved cArOliEs were important.
But I also experimented a ton that summer, including many versions of higher protein diets, not a single one of which worked.
I couldn’t believe it. Had I really just accidentally hit the necessary level of protein restriction with ex150? Even ex225 didn’t work?!
Apparently so.
But, finally, I hit 224.7lbs a few days ago and am now officially “overweight.”
Feels good.
Little x3 update
I posted about a month ago how I’d started resistance training using the x3 bar and bands, and how my first 12 weeks of that had gone.
I’ll say that, since then, the x3 has really taken off a bit for me.
Over the holidays I traveled, and took the x3 bar with me. No biggie, I could even work out in my hotel room! Just amazing.
Visually, I think I’ve gained quite a bit of muscle in the shoulders, arms (especially triceps) and lats. Combined with my new low weight, this actually seems to give me the beginning of a little V taper.
It’s more of an X taper really, with broad shoulders, the lats kind of a V shape, and then my spare tire expanding again, hah. But man, does it feel great looking in the mirror :-)
Around 230lbs or so I noticed that I no longer “looked fat” to myself in the mirror. My waist is now narrower than my shoulders, and, viewed from the side, I can barely see my belly.
I mentioned that I fit into my high school prom suit again, right? I’m actually surprised how well that thing held up. Will probably outlive me.
Anyway, I’ve also made quite a bit of progress on many of the x3 lifts, although not on all of them.
I’m still on the white (level 1/5) band on the following 4 exercises:
Biceps curl
Front squat
Bent row
Overhead press
But on all the other exercises I’m now on the dark grey band (level 3/5), and with calf raises (the easiest exercise due to the very limited range of motion) I progressed to the black band (4/5), which is the highest difficulty that comes with the x3 set. You can then purchase the orange “Elite” band (5/5) for an extra $100, but since I’ve only just touched the black band, I haven’t bought that yet.
Fun story: last time I did deadlifts I was distracted and accidentally put the black band on the x3 bar. I couldn’t even stand up to begin a single repetition, that’s how darn strong the thing is. I nearly fell over.
I’ll probably keep you updated on my x3 progress from time to time.
Next: savory fat fast
So surely I’m going to do another run of OG ex150, right? ex150-9, anyone?
WRONG!
After 2 months of sticking to the plan, I guess I’m getting itchy feet again and want to try something new.
For my next trial, I’ll attempt to do a fat fast, but this time stick way closer to my normal ex150 plan.
My last 2 fat fasts were cutting out the entire lunch meal, replacing it with dark chocolate ganache. The big issue I had during those trials was that I was somehow craving tomato sauce, sometimes eating a whole jar in one day.
So for this attempt, I’ll stick as close to ex150 as possible: I’ll just leave out the beef. This makes my lunch basically tomato or alfredo soup.
I’ll also add 1 scoop of Fortagen essential amino acid powder in the morning, like I did during those fat fasts. That should ensure that I don’t go entirely without protein while working out with the x3 bar.
And it should also help me finish that tub of Fortagen I had lying around. That stuff’s insanely expensive, and I don’t want to waste it, lol.
ex150savoryfatfast will last 14 days, and I’m excited to see what happens.
Congratulations!! Played for and got. That plateau must have been very frustrating. I am very happy for you.
On a pedantic note, that overnight weight loss does involve breathing out water, but you're also breathing out carbon dioxide. Those are the two combustion products of fat+oxygen. Most of the difference in the amount of mass you breathe in and the amount you breathe out is the carbon.
So you're literally breathing your fat out. That's where it goes.
I have a thought related to the question you asked midway through the article -- "Had I just accidentally hit the necessary level of protein restriction with ex150?"
If you look at the gestalt picture of your weight loss it follows a hyperbolic curve; the pounds started melting off fast at the beginning and then slowed down to a more modest loss over time. The biggest interruption to the hyperbolic curve is the plateau you experienced starting in June, 2023, going to October, 2023.
That plateau started with what looks like a 15-pound spike in your weight over the course of... a week or so? And then, there was a slow decrease in your weight for months afterwards, followed by an actual plateau starting at what looks like the beginning of September and ending toward the end of October, where your weight loss trend was negligible. But the way you've talked about that period of time in some of your articles, it sounds like you're writing the whole summer off as a sort of plateau -- I would imagine because you're looking at your overall weight.
Here's the thing, though--the low you hit toward November? If you sketch the overall hyperbolic curve, your November low corresponds with the exact spot where that hyperbolic curve would have predicted it should be at that time.
There's a way to explain this that's easy enough, and it is in line with some of the things you've discussed here: imagine you have multiple weight "reservoirs" that you have to empty out to get a low weight. One (let's say it's the water reservoir) can empty or fill fast. The other (let's say it's the 'fat' reservoir) empties much slower. Your goal is to deplete both but functionally what you're really aiming for is the fat reservoir since that's the long project and also the bigger reservoir--the water reservoir fluctuates by 15 pounds give or take. If you're a scrawny 160lb male the highest the water reservoir could bloat you to is 185, which is fine. The fat one? That's the one that makes you obese.
Your graph is consistent with the idea that one reservoir (probably the fat reservoir) has been depleting consistently since you started--and was depleting consistently through September. But in June you made a decision that filled up your water reservoir and kept it topped off even as the fat continued burning.
The evidence of that is that the downward trend in your weight from June to September (if you ignore the massive spike at the start) is very similar in slope to the downward trend from March to June. And, by that token, the only real "plateau" you've had in your weight loss occurred between the beginning of September and the end of October, when your rate of loss slowed to an average of zero.
There's a way we could graph this so that I could show my point better and I'm happy to chat about it if you're interested.
A caveat here--calling one reservoir the "water reservoir" and the other the "fat reservoir" is purely arbitrary. I don't know the full mechanisms so I'm giving them names that roughly map to my understanding of weight loss. The principle -- that you have multiple sources of weight, one that fluctuates fast and the other that fluctuates slow, and the fast one can mask the slow one, but the activity of the slow one can still be inferred from the overall rate of loss -- is the same regardless of what you call them.
Regarding your question about your protein level--what if your protein intake affects the "water tank" but not the "fat tank"? So, say you did Ex225 -- you'd experience a sudden spike in weight due to the water tank filling up a bit, but your fat tank would still continue to deplete itself at the same rate. It would look like a plateau but in reality your "fat tank" would still be emptying out at the same rate.
An easy way to test this would be to do identical copies of EX150 but with systematically varied levels of protein. So, say EX75, EX150, and EX225. The hypothesis would be that each one causes a weight spike of a different magnitude, but the overall rate of loss after the spike would remain the same.
That's a long experiment though. Sometimes these things are untenable.
Also, I should note that if my theory is right, the actual rate at which you're burning fat seems like it may have sped up over the last month; your trend is breaking from the hyperbolic pattern in a good way, with accelerating weight loss.
Best,
J