Eating 2,294kcal for $5.20/day on the ex150 diet
The cheapest way to feed yourself this side of bulk dried rice?
I recently posted the macro breakdown of the ex150 diet. Out of curiosity I’ve added up the cost of the individual ingredients that I actually pay in the grocery store. I hadn’t really thought about it but found ex150 to be incredibly cheap. Maybe you can go lower if you mainly eat bulk rice. But considering the diet is almost entirely animal products I doubt you can eat much cheaper while getting remotely the same nutritional value.
Cost Breakdown
Main Meal - $2.70
150g of 80/20 ground beef - $4.18/lb or $1.39/meal
60g green beans - $1.48/bag or $0.36/meal
80g tomato sauce - $2.48/jar or $0.45/meal
15g Kerrygold Unsalted butter - $4.18/brick or $0.25/meal
Dessert - $1.00
200ml heavy cream, whipped - $4.98/quart
Cream in coffee - $1.50
300ml - 5 coffees with about 60ml of heavy cream each - $4.98/quart
Heavy Cream is extremely affordable per calorie
Heavy cream provides 75% of the calories I eat in a day but makes up less than half the cost of food. It is an incredibly cheap $1.50 per 1,000kcal. Even the cheapest white rice I found only came out at $1.40 per 1,000kcal. Maybe it’s cheaper if you buy those giant 20lbs bags. But it’s hard to argue you’d get the same nutrition as from dairy.
The average person can eat for <$5/day on ex150 or less than $2,000 for an entire year
I am an obese 6’1 male and I only go 20c over $5/day. That’s less than a latte at Starbucks.
Most people can probably get away with less food and therefore even lower cost.
Imagine your food cost for the entire year looked like this:
$5.20 * 365 = $1,898
I spend far more on coffee than that :-)
Hello. Congratulations on your successful fat loss. I admire the attention you have been paying to various aspects of your diet and the detail you have articulated in this journal. Thank you for sharing it.
You have said that HWC is not the most palatable food and that after consuming just so much you very suddenly realize you want no more than that. You and others have labeled this feeling as satiety.
I'm not sure that I have ever experienced this. I love HWC and could drink quite a bit at any given time, certainly at least a few cups, perhaps more. But that would put put my per meal caloric intake above 2400 and I do get hungry more than once daily. In fact, I could comfortably repeat this multiple times per day.
I've had similar experiences with beef fat trimmings, too. I can eat a lot of beef fat before feeling "full". I'm just not sure if what I experience as "full" is satiety because I have never become "repulsed" by the thought of one more bite of food. I just sort of have a sense that "my stomach doesn't need any more". I eventually become … content, if you will. Is this at all consistent with what you experience?
(I know what glutted feels like, having gorged myself on feasts, from time to time, such as Thanksgiving dinner. But I'm not referring to the feeling one gets from eating All The Food. I don't think you are, either.)
Oh, and it never really kicks in until I've been eating for at least 10-15 minutes. By which I mean that if I eat a whole bunch in less than that time, I feel like I could very easily overeat.
Which is a problem because I *love* HWC. I could guzzle it like water on a hot day. Unsalted butter, not so much. Can't stand tallow. Roasted fat trimmings are good, but mainly the crispy bits, not so much the soft bits, which makes it difficult because I like to nuke it in a sealed container for ease of cleanup (roasting fat is so messy).
I feel like I can't find something that I will neither under consume, because it's not palatable enough, nor over consume, because it's too palatable. For a while now, I've been rationing my daily intake to something between 0.75 lb and 1.5 lb chuck roast and 8-9 oz fat trimming per day, split into four meals so as to reduce the per meal amount of protein. But I never really get full / satisfied and sometimes increase the fat by 50-100%, or try adding pats of unsalted butter (which I really don't enjoy, but sometimes don't have enough fat trimmings handy). (And also I get busy and it's not always convenient to break as many as four times.)
This just seems like a lot of intake for a sedentary person such as myself. And yet it never feels like I get enough.
I'm really struggling to break a plateau at around BMI 27. Though I'm trepidatious about lowering my protein intake below 100g daily, my real worry is that ad libitum fat seems like a recipe for eating 5k+ kcal/day, which, being quite sedentary, I imagine would not result in a net "deficit".
Could it be that dairy, or at least HWC, just isn't satiating for me as it seems to be for you? Could it be that I just need to consume more energy to induce my body to ramp up my metabolism? What are possible explanations for why I haven't been able to experience satiety in the way you and others have described it?
I reduced my BMI from 35 to 27 over the past year or so, but I didn't adopt keto / carnivore until very late in the year. Most of my 50+ lbs weight loss was probably due to caloric intake reduction, which I estimate was below 1800 kcal/day prior to adopting keto / carnivore. Not sure how relevant that is. I am not super keen about the prospect of having to gain back an indefinite amount of that weight. But my intuition suggests that if I adopt a truly ad libitum fat intake and keep my protein at ~100 g/day, that's exactly what will happen. And there doesn't seem to be any guarantee that I will eventually induce my body to ramp up my metabolism and start sending me reliable satiety signals.
Do you have any thoughts about this?
Thanks for the update, I live in Brazil - here there's no heavy cream, it's not common at all. Do you think you could trade it for milk and still have similar results?
Also, any changes in terms of mood/sleep/"energy"?