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.
Interesting. It could be that there are 3-4 pathways to "satiety" (not fullness) and they work differently in different people. Maybe some are just inactive or broken in some people. I get 0 satiety from any amount of carbs whatsoever, I think. Protein satiety is also very low. With heavy cream it hits me like a truck.
I've definitely thought about the 10-15 minute issue you reference. I actually timed myself the other day: from first spoon of whipped heavy cream to "oh no I can't take another bite" in 4 minutes. Another day it was 6 minutes, but I was reading at the time and eating more slowly because I was distracted.
So maybe the whipping cream is the secret because it stretches the cream out over a few minutes of eating and you can't just guzzle it down?
One thing you could try: if you know your satiety takes about 10-15 minutes to hit, drink your cream in small sips with pauses between them. E.g. take 1 sip, wait 2 minutes. Another sip, 2 minutes. Or whatever works.
If after 10-15 minutes of this the satiety sets in, then you know that a) the satiety per se works but b) you're capable of "outdrinking" your satiety signal. So then you could try just pacing it, either with the timed sip method or maybe whipped cream works for you as well?
Btw I think one of the secrets to the satiety here is that whipped cream is already basically pre-digested. There's no fiber or anything else. It gets to your stomach and can go right on through. Other foods take half an hour or even hours to digest and then your satiety might not even begin after 2h in! I can eat an infinite amount of food in 2h and will burst before I am satiated.
Like you, I separate between "satiety" and "fullness." They're kind of equated colloquially but for me they're 100% separate phenomena. I hate fullness, I love satiety.
Btw, tallow I'm still divided on. I've gotten organic, grass-fed tallow that was so cow-dung-ey I couldn't even stand it for searing steaks in, haha. Just eye-watering cow stench. And then recently I got a tallow that was so neutral I couldn't believe it. I swear to god it had no flavor at all. I don't know how these can be so different lol. It had a really great texture too, it was basically like a candy brittle minus the sugar and very neutral in taste.
I'm more than a little inclined to suspect my satiety signaling may be broken. I'm going to try consuming my cream more slowly, though, so thanks for that suggestion.
Last night, I tried mixing a stick of butter with a 1/2 cup of cream and chilled that over night. (I tried 100% cacao chocolate mixed with cream, per your description, and, while decadent and I could eat that all day, I want to give my carnivore diet a chance and I've only been on it a few months, so I'm reluctant to continue with the chocolate.) The butter & cream mixture didn't solidify, but the flavor was almost as good as the chocolate, ever so much better than plain butter.
I estimate that my mixture was 1200 calories. I sat down to eat it while I was browsing some videos and waking up, this morning, and it didn't even occur to me to stop. I think it took me 5 to 10 minutes to eat at a leisurely pace. I ate the whole thing and was hungry for more. Surely my body, were it properly signaling sufficient energy reserves, would be content on that much energy in a single meal?
Incidentally, it just occurred to me that tallow, at room temperature, is much more solid than butter. I wonder if mixing that with cream would yield a less runny texture, when cooled, similar to that of the chocolate ganache. And I wonder if the mixture might make it sufficiently palatable. As it is, it is just too darn waxy for me to tolerate when solid, and when liquid it's even worse without the juice from a steak to temper it.
So I did a few experiments. I made "Buttercream" as you described it. OMG it was so buttery. I ate it as a dessert in the afternoon, maybe 1-2h after my lunch. It was extremely satiating, almost painfully so. Basically more so than whipped cream but I had a hard time stomaching it, haha. Maybe I used too much butter.
I also tested just making my cream into a thick milkshake. I whipped it halfway up and then let it sit in the fridge, creating an extremely thick milkshake. It was delicious. It gave me satiety in pretty much exactly the same time (4-6 minutes) as whipped cream did and I could not even finish 1/3 of it.
Then I wanted to test if consuming the cream in the evening was the secret. So I left the remaining 2/3 of milkshake in the fridge overnight and drank it first thing in the morning.
It did hit satiety, but significantly later. It took about 20 minutes until I started noticing it, and about 30 until it really "hit" me like that cement truck I keep mentioning haha.
Given that I hadn't eaten anything that day and not even had coffee, with my last meal over 12h past, I suspect it could be connected to the morning cortisol response?
One of the things that makes us get more energized and get up in the morning is that the body's hormones change from the sleeping state to a more active state. One of those changes is that cortisol (a hormone managing stress) rises.
Many people, including myself, see a spike of blood glucose in the morning w/o eating or drinking anything, and this is attributed to this cortisol rise. It is called the "dawn phenomenon" among diabetics.
So could be that my satiety didn't kick in as fast because my satiety switch was turned down from the cortisol rising or associated glucose release? Who knows.
In any case: if in your experiments you find that you repeatedly cannot reach satiety at all w/ heavy cream then I recommend you do not incorporate it into your routine. It probably means that the addition of cream is not what causes satiety, at least not without removing something else.
My suspects are high insulin (from carbs or too much protein?) or seed oil PUFAs, but unfortunately that's speculation at this point :(
Btw the 2/3 cup of cream milkshake was so satiating that I've been sitting in front of a cup of coffee w/ cream for about 30 minutes now, unable to touch it. That is inconceivable to me. I am an absolute coffee junkie. But I can't fathom the idea of another sip of cream.
Ha! Yes, it's a good feeling when you feel so sated / full that you have perfectly appetizing food in front of you and zero urge to consume it!
I think I might still like HWC more than butter-cream. Other than to eliminate the plant-based chocolate, the reason I tried it was to increase the fat:carb ratio. I wasn't sure how much effect the cream's carbs would have and I know I can chug an awful lot of cream at one time (thus raising the total carb intake). I thought that if I added a bunch of butter it might slow me down, i.e. make me consume less cream and hence less carb.
If I can find it within me to consume less protein during the day then I'll definitely experiment with not eating protein until after midday.
As for experimenting with different fats, etc., I'd like to be able to experiment without having to gain 5-25 pounds just to find out what works. I know that I won't be able to tolerate only fat trimmings for the rest of my life (boring!). If I hadn't stalled out, my plan was to achieve a non-overweight BMI and then begin to experiment with different foods and still remain within my desired weight zone (I'm aiming for anything between 150 and 170, currently I'm still over 190). But as long as I'm still struggling just to lose the weight, it's very difficult to try something different only to see the scale numbers go up sharply.
That's what's so striking about your journal, for me. You have a fairly tight control over your variables, it seems to me, and they really seem to be achieving results for you. One thing I'm particularly interested in seeing is what may change as you pass through the over-weight BMI zone.
When I was in the obese BMI zone, I feel like maybe the weight came off more easily. Admittedly, I wasn't tracking things systematically and in fact wasn't even doing low-carb for the first large chunk of it (tried vegan for a couple of months are the beginning, before deciding I didn't enjoy being nigh-starving all the time). But by the time I settled solidly on keto, and, very late in the year, 2022, carnivore, my weight loss had slowed to a crawl.
I'm really hoping that your strategy continues to payoff strongly as you near your target weight.
Unfortunately I think the 5-25lbs (maybe more on the 5lbs side) are just what it takes to run these experiments. I messed myself up 10 days ago with a single meal - and it was largely meat, and largely beef (though some pork). Didn't eat any of the sauces or sides. But I went up 5lbs and only today (10 days later) back down to 245.
Combined with the last +5lbs thing, the uncertainty/illness during ex150choctruffle etc. I basically haven't lost any weight in weeks :( Very frustrating.
Luckily it seems to be going down again. The last few days have been quite steady.
1,200kcal is definitely a lot for one meal to not stop, especially if it's coming from all cream. It is possible that 1,200kcal just really didn't satiate you. Your total daily expenditure is probably quite a bit higher than that and if you didn't eat much the day before it's possible you'd hit satiety at e.g. 1,800 or so? But of course could also just lead you to infinite cream consumption, so careful, ha.
It could be that your satiety is broken in a different way from mine. Maybe cream doesn't work great for you.
Or it could be that it just takes a little longer than 5-10 minutes.
You could try spacing it out, eating a few spoons of your cream/butter mix, waiting 10 minutes, and then returning to it. Just to see if you can still eat 1,200kcal or if it just takes a few minutes for satiety to hit.
Another idea is: what if you eat it as dinner instead of after waking up? Maybe it works better when it isn't the first meal of the day? I eat it for dinner but hadn't really considered the meal timing. Maybe that's an important part. Then again I drink plenty of cream in my coffee throughout the day, too.
The mix sounds delicious tbh lol I should try that, what do you call it? Buttercream? Creambutter?
Sounds like experimenting with the tallow could be fun. If you find a good mix that produces satiety for you please share. Maybe different people just do differently on different sorts of fats?
Addendum: so, curious about your milkshake experience, I made my 200ml of heavy cream only to a thick milkshake consistency. Smooth enough I could easily fill it into a cup and drink, although tbh it's difficult to get at the bottom 1/4 without a spoon.
And man, it still worked. I didn't time myself but I'm like 75% in and I don't think I can finish it.
So it could be that it's not the cream per se that causes satiety, or not on its own. Maybe something else needs to happen (e.g. cut out something specific?) for the cream cement-truck satiety to hit?
Two suspects I have are (even minimal) PUFA exposure in the last few days (even from commercial chicken/pork) or high insulin in the last few hours. It's been over 4h that I last ate so my insulin would be back to baseline by now. Maybe the cream satiety only works when your insulin has reset? I also haven't had any pork/chicken/PUFA since.. I want to say Saturday? So over a week.
Just speculating, so far. But yea the milkshake form definitely still works for me.
I wish I could articulate how I'm feeling. Sometimes I think I might be satiated because I could definitely stop, comfortably, and feel good for hours (or even most of the day). But even at that point I'm not feeling strict aversion to eating.
I like to batch prep my meals (have been doing this for years, even before attempting to lose weight). It's ever so much easier to deal with things during the work day when I can just grab a meal and go.
Add that to my seeming inability to find that intuitive sweet spot eating carnivore for health-improvement purposes (which I regard as synonymous with weight loss in my case), and I arrived at a convenient Sunday ritual of portioning out whatever I think I might want to try for the next week. For a few months now, this has been portions of beef (generally chuck) ranging from 1/2 lb to 1 lb, and portions of beef fat trimmings generally around 8 to 9 oz.
Yesterday, I nuked and ate an entire day's worth of fat just to see what would happen. For breakfast. Along with roughly a quarter of that day's "lean" allotment (I know that chuck isn't precisely lean, but I disregard its fat content just as I must disregard the bits of lean that remain attached to my fat trimmings), a quarter being 1/4 of ~1.5 lb chuck steak.
I confess that I lost my nerve after consuming fully 8 oz of fat and 3/8 lb steak. I tried to go ad lib at least on the fat, but it just seemed like too much. More than 30 minutes later, I felt quite full. I don't know what word to use, here. Obviously, that low volume didn't actually fill my stomach, certainly not to distention. But neither was I averted to eating more, even then. I simply felt good, like I knew I wouldn't need food for a while.
Alas, a few hours later I was sort of hungry so I experimented with a batch of tallow-cream I'd prepare the night before, 1/2 cup HWC with 3 Tbsp tallow. First, I would like to say that I have always had trouble whipping or emulsifying anything. If whipping is what it takes to trigger satiety then I'm likely in trouble. It took me, I estimate, more than 30 minutes to get the tallow to sort of emulsify in the cream even after rewarming it twice (it kept reseparating). Even the next day, it was still sort of wet, as if it were "leaking" cream or something. Anyhow, the whole thing was still a bit waxy, though the cream tempered the ick of the tallow considerably. Sorry, that was a bit of a side-track. Back to my point: I ate the whole thing without a twinge of aversion.
And for dinner, I ate almost another full 8 oz package of fat before finally feeling averted to more. Mostly, it just stopped tasting good. If I had to guess, I think my mouth stopped watering. It was subtle. If that be satiety then I don't like it. Oh, and I went on to eat another 3/8 lb of chuck, just to get in a little more protein, bringing my daily protein to around half what some say is minimum healthy intake.
Oh, and over the course of the last few days, I've gained more than 2 pounds, by the scale. That's accounting for variability, too. I know that's not necessarily all new fat, but I don't understand how it could be all water retention either. (P.S. There were a couple of sugar-free Italian sausage links, a few slices of pepperoni, and a small cheese wedge, too - not yesterday, but over the last few days. All of those foods are salted, which I've been avoiding over the last few months. Not sure how confounding they might be.)
As for that butter-cream, I agree that it is mighty tasty. Can't recall if I said, before, but I used a stick of butter and approximately 1/2 cup cream. It wasn't exactly pourable, but it did run off my spoon. I liked that consistency.
Oh, and I tried adding a section of the 100% cacao chocolate, with 2 Tbsp tallow and 1/2 cup cream. I thought that if the chocolate was already basically an emulsion, it might aid my own efforts somewhat. I can't say that it took me any less time to get the concoction to homogeneity, but the result was definitely smoother. I'll keep playing with the tallow as appetite and diet permit*.
Some have suggested that there may just be something about dairy that is insulinogenic for some people. I had originally cut all the way back to just beef, fat, and water because I just wasn't sure what might be the case. But since I haven't even achieved satiety on that tight restriction, and have been stalled for a while now, and since I saw your journal, I thought I'd give the dairy another shot (I love dairy!).
I realize it hasn't been that long for me (a week or so), and I haven't been at all systematic about it, not remotely like you have, but I'm just not sure what to think. Honestly, I sort of want to try cutting my protein way back, as you did in your original experiment, and just fill up on fat trimmings and cream. But I'm trepidatious about that. It has always been hard for me to gain muscle and now that I'm in my 50s I'm concerned that I may never recover any muscle that I do lose. So I'm torn between experimenting with potential muscle autophagy and trying to bring my BMI down to the non-overweight range.
Wow, this has been a ramble/rant. Hope it's not unwelcome. I remain happy and excited to see how your experiment / journey proceeds. Thanks again for sharing it.
Not unwelcome at all :D I love talking about this stuff if you hadn't noticed ;)
Like a big puzzle we're all solving together.
Your experience definitely sounds like "just add cream" doesn't necessarily lead to satiety.
On the protein front, it doesn't sound like you're eating TONS of lean meat. When I was eating "ad lib keto/carnivore" I'm talking 3-4lbs of ground beef per day. If you stay under 1lb I think you're very likely to be fine on that front.
I've read that .6g of protein per lb of bodyweight is adequate for almost anybody. I think it refers to "ideal weight" so I'm using 188lbs (which would be "normal weight" for me), not my current 245lbs. If you do that you should be safe. Good thinking on the muscle loss! While I'm not exercising currently I do think it's generally a good idea, so if you're worried about that you could always try strength training.
Your description of satiety sounds kind of halfway there. I know that feeling, too. When you're kind of satiated short-term, like for 5-30 minutes, but then you could eat again. And again. Sort of a weird rebound? What I have with cream satiety lasts much longer.
So I suspect that your satiety mechanism, however it works, is still somehow broken despite adding the cream/fat.
One experiment you could run, and I'm purely speculating tbh, is cut out 100% PUFAs for 2 weeks if you can manage that logistically (not easy I know). E.g. NO eating out, no prepared food whatsoever, no pork, no chicken. I'm not sure it's really The Thing, but if it is, it seems to mess me up in the tiniest doses. People on the r/saturatedfat Reddit are suggesting as little as 5g PUFA can mess you up for days. So even eating a few french fries or a restaurant salad with their sauce once a week could cause problems.
Now, again, I don't know that this is really true. But you could try it if that fits into your life/prep routine.
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"?
I do think milk would likely be very different, at least for several of the hypotheses. If you get 75-85% of your calories from milk you'd also get a lot of protein and sugar (lactose). It might work if the only reason ex150 works has nothing to do with those factors, but if it's one of them, it wouldn't work.
You could always try it, I suppose.
Do they commonly carry butter in Brazil? You could just buy a high quality butter (make sure it's not adulterated with any seed oils!) and eat a few slices of that. Butter has about 2.5x the amount of fat, so instead of drinking a cup of cream you could just eat a slice of butter, hah :D
It looks like you can buy Nestlé Creme de Leite 300g /Heavy Whipping Cream in Brazil. It is canned so not sure about the flavor. It is quoted at $3.19 per can. On Amazon the ingredients listed are: light cream and disodium phosphate. 4g fat/tablespoon.
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?
Hi!
Interesting. It could be that there are 3-4 pathways to "satiety" (not fullness) and they work differently in different people. Maybe some are just inactive or broken in some people. I get 0 satiety from any amount of carbs whatsoever, I think. Protein satiety is also very low. With heavy cream it hits me like a truck.
I've definitely thought about the 10-15 minute issue you reference. I actually timed myself the other day: from first spoon of whipped heavy cream to "oh no I can't take another bite" in 4 minutes. Another day it was 6 minutes, but I was reading at the time and eating more slowly because I was distracted.
So maybe the whipping cream is the secret because it stretches the cream out over a few minutes of eating and you can't just guzzle it down?
One thing you could try: if you know your satiety takes about 10-15 minutes to hit, drink your cream in small sips with pauses between them. E.g. take 1 sip, wait 2 minutes. Another sip, 2 minutes. Or whatever works.
If after 10-15 minutes of this the satiety sets in, then you know that a) the satiety per se works but b) you're capable of "outdrinking" your satiety signal. So then you could try just pacing it, either with the timed sip method or maybe whipped cream works for you as well?
Btw I think one of the secrets to the satiety here is that whipped cream is already basically pre-digested. There's no fiber or anything else. It gets to your stomach and can go right on through. Other foods take half an hour or even hours to digest and then your satiety might not even begin after 2h in! I can eat an infinite amount of food in 2h and will burst before I am satiated.
Like you, I separate between "satiety" and "fullness." They're kind of equated colloquially but for me they're 100% separate phenomena. I hate fullness, I love satiety.
Btw, tallow I'm still divided on. I've gotten organic, grass-fed tallow that was so cow-dung-ey I couldn't even stand it for searing steaks in, haha. Just eye-watering cow stench. And then recently I got a tallow that was so neutral I couldn't believe it. I swear to god it had no flavor at all. I don't know how these can be so different lol. It had a really great texture too, it was basically like a candy brittle minus the sugar and very neutral in taste.
I'm more than a little inclined to suspect my satiety signaling may be broken. I'm going to try consuming my cream more slowly, though, so thanks for that suggestion.
Last night, I tried mixing a stick of butter with a 1/2 cup of cream and chilled that over night. (I tried 100% cacao chocolate mixed with cream, per your description, and, while decadent and I could eat that all day, I want to give my carnivore diet a chance and I've only been on it a few months, so I'm reluctant to continue with the chocolate.) The butter & cream mixture didn't solidify, but the flavor was almost as good as the chocolate, ever so much better than plain butter.
I estimate that my mixture was 1200 calories. I sat down to eat it while I was browsing some videos and waking up, this morning, and it didn't even occur to me to stop. I think it took me 5 to 10 minutes to eat at a leisurely pace. I ate the whole thing and was hungry for more. Surely my body, were it properly signaling sufficient energy reserves, would be content on that much energy in a single meal?
Incidentally, it just occurred to me that tallow, at room temperature, is much more solid than butter. I wonder if mixing that with cream would yield a less runny texture, when cooled, similar to that of the chocolate ganache. And I wonder if the mixture might make it sufficiently palatable. As it is, it is just too darn waxy for me to tolerate when solid, and when liquid it's even worse without the juice from a steak to temper it.
Hey Audrea!
So I did a few experiments. I made "Buttercream" as you described it. OMG it was so buttery. I ate it as a dessert in the afternoon, maybe 1-2h after my lunch. It was extremely satiating, almost painfully so. Basically more so than whipped cream but I had a hard time stomaching it, haha. Maybe I used too much butter.
I also tested just making my cream into a thick milkshake. I whipped it halfway up and then let it sit in the fridge, creating an extremely thick milkshake. It was delicious. It gave me satiety in pretty much exactly the same time (4-6 minutes) as whipped cream did and I could not even finish 1/3 of it.
Then I wanted to test if consuming the cream in the evening was the secret. So I left the remaining 2/3 of milkshake in the fridge overnight and drank it first thing in the morning.
It did hit satiety, but significantly later. It took about 20 minutes until I started noticing it, and about 30 until it really "hit" me like that cement truck I keep mentioning haha.
Given that I hadn't eaten anything that day and not even had coffee, with my last meal over 12h past, I suspect it could be connected to the morning cortisol response?
One of the things that makes us get more energized and get up in the morning is that the body's hormones change from the sleeping state to a more active state. One of those changes is that cortisol (a hormone managing stress) rises.
Many people, including myself, see a spike of blood glucose in the morning w/o eating or drinking anything, and this is attributed to this cortisol rise. It is called the "dawn phenomenon" among diabetics.
So could be that my satiety didn't kick in as fast because my satiety switch was turned down from the cortisol rising or associated glucose release? Who knows.
In any case: if in your experiments you find that you repeatedly cannot reach satiety at all w/ heavy cream then I recommend you do not incorporate it into your routine. It probably means that the addition of cream is not what causes satiety, at least not without removing something else.
My suspects are high insulin (from carbs or too much protein?) or seed oil PUFAs, but unfortunately that's speculation at this point :(
Btw the 2/3 cup of cream milkshake was so satiating that I've been sitting in front of a cup of coffee w/ cream for about 30 minutes now, unable to touch it. That is inconceivable to me. I am an absolute coffee junkie. But I can't fathom the idea of another sip of cream.
Ha! Yes, it's a good feeling when you feel so sated / full that you have perfectly appetizing food in front of you and zero urge to consume it!
I think I might still like HWC more than butter-cream. Other than to eliminate the plant-based chocolate, the reason I tried it was to increase the fat:carb ratio. I wasn't sure how much effect the cream's carbs would have and I know I can chug an awful lot of cream at one time (thus raising the total carb intake). I thought that if I added a bunch of butter it might slow me down, i.e. make me consume less cream and hence less carb.
If I can find it within me to consume less protein during the day then I'll definitely experiment with not eating protein until after midday.
As for experimenting with different fats, etc., I'd like to be able to experiment without having to gain 5-25 pounds just to find out what works. I know that I won't be able to tolerate only fat trimmings for the rest of my life (boring!). If I hadn't stalled out, my plan was to achieve a non-overweight BMI and then begin to experiment with different foods and still remain within my desired weight zone (I'm aiming for anything between 150 and 170, currently I'm still over 190). But as long as I'm still struggling just to lose the weight, it's very difficult to try something different only to see the scale numbers go up sharply.
That's what's so striking about your journal, for me. You have a fairly tight control over your variables, it seems to me, and they really seem to be achieving results for you. One thing I'm particularly interested in seeing is what may change as you pass through the over-weight BMI zone.
When I was in the obese BMI zone, I feel like maybe the weight came off more easily. Admittedly, I wasn't tracking things systematically and in fact wasn't even doing low-carb for the first large chunk of it (tried vegan for a couple of months are the beginning, before deciding I didn't enjoy being nigh-starving all the time). But by the time I settled solidly on keto, and, very late in the year, 2022, carnivore, my weight loss had slowed to a crawl.
I'm really hoping that your strategy continues to payoff strongly as you near your target weight.
Ha, I hope so, too :D
Unfortunately I think the 5-25lbs (maybe more on the 5lbs side) are just what it takes to run these experiments. I messed myself up 10 days ago with a single meal - and it was largely meat, and largely beef (though some pork). Didn't eat any of the sauces or sides. But I went up 5lbs and only today (10 days later) back down to 245.
Combined with the last +5lbs thing, the uncertainty/illness during ex150choctruffle etc. I basically haven't lost any weight in weeks :( Very frustrating.
Luckily it seems to be going down again. The last few days have been quite steady.
1,200kcal is definitely a lot for one meal to not stop, especially if it's coming from all cream. It is possible that 1,200kcal just really didn't satiate you. Your total daily expenditure is probably quite a bit higher than that and if you didn't eat much the day before it's possible you'd hit satiety at e.g. 1,800 or so? But of course could also just lead you to infinite cream consumption, so careful, ha.
It could be that your satiety is broken in a different way from mine. Maybe cream doesn't work great for you.
Or it could be that it just takes a little longer than 5-10 minutes.
You could try spacing it out, eating a few spoons of your cream/butter mix, waiting 10 minutes, and then returning to it. Just to see if you can still eat 1,200kcal or if it just takes a few minutes for satiety to hit.
Another idea is: what if you eat it as dinner instead of after waking up? Maybe it works better when it isn't the first meal of the day? I eat it for dinner but hadn't really considered the meal timing. Maybe that's an important part. Then again I drink plenty of cream in my coffee throughout the day, too.
The mix sounds delicious tbh lol I should try that, what do you call it? Buttercream? Creambutter?
Sounds like experimenting with the tallow could be fun. If you find a good mix that produces satiety for you please share. Maybe different people just do differently on different sorts of fats?
Addendum: so, curious about your milkshake experience, I made my 200ml of heavy cream only to a thick milkshake consistency. Smooth enough I could easily fill it into a cup and drink, although tbh it's difficult to get at the bottom 1/4 without a spoon.
And man, it still worked. I didn't time myself but I'm like 75% in and I don't think I can finish it.
So it could be that it's not the cream per se that causes satiety, or not on its own. Maybe something else needs to happen (e.g. cut out something specific?) for the cream cement-truck satiety to hit?
Two suspects I have are (even minimal) PUFA exposure in the last few days (even from commercial chicken/pork) or high insulin in the last few hours. It's been over 4h that I last ate so my insulin would be back to baseline by now. Maybe the cream satiety only works when your insulin has reset? I also haven't had any pork/chicken/PUFA since.. I want to say Saturday? So over a week.
Just speculating, so far. But yea the milkshake form definitely still works for me.
I wish I could articulate how I'm feeling. Sometimes I think I might be satiated because I could definitely stop, comfortably, and feel good for hours (or even most of the day). But even at that point I'm not feeling strict aversion to eating.
I like to batch prep my meals (have been doing this for years, even before attempting to lose weight). It's ever so much easier to deal with things during the work day when I can just grab a meal and go.
Add that to my seeming inability to find that intuitive sweet spot eating carnivore for health-improvement purposes (which I regard as synonymous with weight loss in my case), and I arrived at a convenient Sunday ritual of portioning out whatever I think I might want to try for the next week. For a few months now, this has been portions of beef (generally chuck) ranging from 1/2 lb to 1 lb, and portions of beef fat trimmings generally around 8 to 9 oz.
Yesterday, I nuked and ate an entire day's worth of fat just to see what would happen. For breakfast. Along with roughly a quarter of that day's "lean" allotment (I know that chuck isn't precisely lean, but I disregard its fat content just as I must disregard the bits of lean that remain attached to my fat trimmings), a quarter being 1/4 of ~1.5 lb chuck steak.
I confess that I lost my nerve after consuming fully 8 oz of fat and 3/8 lb steak. I tried to go ad lib at least on the fat, but it just seemed like too much. More than 30 minutes later, I felt quite full. I don't know what word to use, here. Obviously, that low volume didn't actually fill my stomach, certainly not to distention. But neither was I averted to eating more, even then. I simply felt good, like I knew I wouldn't need food for a while.
Alas, a few hours later I was sort of hungry so I experimented with a batch of tallow-cream I'd prepare the night before, 1/2 cup HWC with 3 Tbsp tallow. First, I would like to say that I have always had trouble whipping or emulsifying anything. If whipping is what it takes to trigger satiety then I'm likely in trouble. It took me, I estimate, more than 30 minutes to get the tallow to sort of emulsify in the cream even after rewarming it twice (it kept reseparating). Even the next day, it was still sort of wet, as if it were "leaking" cream or something. Anyhow, the whole thing was still a bit waxy, though the cream tempered the ick of the tallow considerably. Sorry, that was a bit of a side-track. Back to my point: I ate the whole thing without a twinge of aversion.
And for dinner, I ate almost another full 8 oz package of fat before finally feeling averted to more. Mostly, it just stopped tasting good. If I had to guess, I think my mouth stopped watering. It was subtle. If that be satiety then I don't like it. Oh, and I went on to eat another 3/8 lb of chuck, just to get in a little more protein, bringing my daily protein to around half what some say is minimum healthy intake.
Oh, and over the course of the last few days, I've gained more than 2 pounds, by the scale. That's accounting for variability, too. I know that's not necessarily all new fat, but I don't understand how it could be all water retention either. (P.S. There were a couple of sugar-free Italian sausage links, a few slices of pepperoni, and a small cheese wedge, too - not yesterday, but over the last few days. All of those foods are salted, which I've been avoiding over the last few months. Not sure how confounding they might be.)
As for that butter-cream, I agree that it is mighty tasty. Can't recall if I said, before, but I used a stick of butter and approximately 1/2 cup cream. It wasn't exactly pourable, but it did run off my spoon. I liked that consistency.
Oh, and I tried adding a section of the 100% cacao chocolate, with 2 Tbsp tallow and 1/2 cup cream. I thought that if the chocolate was already basically an emulsion, it might aid my own efforts somewhat. I can't say that it took me any less time to get the concoction to homogeneity, but the result was definitely smoother. I'll keep playing with the tallow as appetite and diet permit*.
Some have suggested that there may just be something about dairy that is insulinogenic for some people. I had originally cut all the way back to just beef, fat, and water because I just wasn't sure what might be the case. But since I haven't even achieved satiety on that tight restriction, and have been stalled for a while now, and since I saw your journal, I thought I'd give the dairy another shot (I love dairy!).
I realize it hasn't been that long for me (a week or so), and I haven't been at all systematic about it, not remotely like you have, but I'm just not sure what to think. Honestly, I sort of want to try cutting my protein way back, as you did in your original experiment, and just fill up on fat trimmings and cream. But I'm trepidatious about that. It has always been hard for me to gain muscle and now that I'm in my 50s I'm concerned that I may never recover any muscle that I do lose. So I'm torn between experimenting with potential muscle autophagy and trying to bring my BMI down to the non-overweight range.
Wow, this has been a ramble/rant. Hope it's not unwelcome. I remain happy and excited to see how your experiment / journey proceeds. Thanks again for sharing it.
Not unwelcome at all :D I love talking about this stuff if you hadn't noticed ;)
Like a big puzzle we're all solving together.
Your experience definitely sounds like "just add cream" doesn't necessarily lead to satiety.
On the protein front, it doesn't sound like you're eating TONS of lean meat. When I was eating "ad lib keto/carnivore" I'm talking 3-4lbs of ground beef per day. If you stay under 1lb I think you're very likely to be fine on that front.
I've read that .6g of protein per lb of bodyweight is adequate for almost anybody. I think it refers to "ideal weight" so I'm using 188lbs (which would be "normal weight" for me), not my current 245lbs. If you do that you should be safe. Good thinking on the muscle loss! While I'm not exercising currently I do think it's generally a good idea, so if you're worried about that you could always try strength training.
Your description of satiety sounds kind of halfway there. I know that feeling, too. When you're kind of satiated short-term, like for 5-30 minutes, but then you could eat again. And again. Sort of a weird rebound? What I have with cream satiety lasts much longer.
So I suspect that your satiety mechanism, however it works, is still somehow broken despite adding the cream/fat.
One experiment you could run, and I'm purely speculating tbh, is cut out 100% PUFAs for 2 weeks if you can manage that logistically (not easy I know). E.g. NO eating out, no prepared food whatsoever, no pork, no chicken. I'm not sure it's really The Thing, but if it is, it seems to mess me up in the tiniest doses. People on the r/saturatedfat Reddit are suggesting as little as 5g PUFA can mess you up for days. So even eating a few french fries or a restaurant salad with their sauce once a week could cause problems.
Now, again, I don't know that this is really true. But you could try it if that fits into your life/prep routine.
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"?
Hey Fernando,
I do think milk would likely be very different, at least for several of the hypotheses. If you get 75-85% of your calories from milk you'd also get a lot of protein and sugar (lactose). It might work if the only reason ex150 works has nothing to do with those factors, but if it's one of them, it wouldn't work.
You could always try it, I suppose.
Do they commonly carry butter in Brazil? You could just buy a high quality butter (make sure it's not adulterated with any seed oils!) and eat a few slices of that. Butter has about 2.5x the amount of fat, so instead of drinking a cup of cream you could just eat a slice of butter, hah :D
It looks like you can buy Nestlé Creme de Leite 300g /Heavy Whipping Cream in Brazil. It is canned so not sure about the flavor. It is quoted at $3.19 per can. On Amazon the ingredients listed are: light cream and disodium phosphate. 4g fat/tablespoon.