*they intuitively preferred a sub-variant that, while not specified by the diet, happened to solve their problems*
I think people need to try out everything until they find their problem.
It looks that for people who do not have success with one way or suddenly gain weight back etc. That they might have a another problem that was not adressed yet. Or that noticed they can't process "xyz" properly.
Sure people can loose weight now knowing what to avoid. They may get healthier, hopefully. But unless they fix the issue which isn't always possible by not eating something in my opinion. They might be just as broken afterwards. But now they are at least thin, right?
So the spiral begins again or they follow the diet until it does not work anymore. And than get fat again.
So adding another step of fixing your body might be more important than choosing diet alone.
Maybe telling people how not to get sick is better? (i know its that easy ;P)
2.
*as much as necessary, as little as possible* (hope it translates well)
The best explanation is the one you can easily teach children (elemantary school age).
I think most adults who are 'broken' for a long time will never recover from it. They will always somehow need to control food/diet etc. At worst they will teach their kids all the wrong things. So if you are able to teach children what to look out for or even avoid things than you are on the winning team.
Otherwise most people who are "healthy" or not acutally sick/fat just won't care. I feel explaining things more detailed should be left for those interested in it. For the majority of people a small, easy to understand flyer that can be read within less than 5 minutes is all i can see to be honest. The rest is just noise.
3.
I want to expand this part but i don't have time now.
I know this post was about diets. But anyway i think it does fit.
What i miss here is behavior and the pychosogical side of things. Which is in my opinion almost as important or even more important than diet alone.
Without fixing your relationship with 'food/yourself/others/anything really' it almost does not matter what you eat (i.e. emotion/stress/eating patterns/timing etc.).
I especially want to include those "branches/groups" within any diet that will recreate a SAD-diet but with low/high-carb/fat stuff.
They recreate the same shit that made them fat. But now it is xyz-free. So its good now (taps forehead). They still shove 15 xyz-free muffin(insert anything here) into their mouth every day.
They have not changed at all. How do they expect change when they do the same thing.
Maybe this explains my view a bit better. They never moved on, they only look in a different direction.
Yes, it does not affect everyone.
---
I might have lost track while writing this. Multiples times sry
1. Do we know what sickness people have? I'd argue a lot of sickness is caused by diet, and so diet is also at least a huge part of the solution. You need to at least stop eating the things that made you sick to begin with.
2. Yea, I largely agree. Most people don't have time to read about the science. They just trust people they see, on the internet or in real life. Trust me, when you lose 75lbs people are suddenly very interested in your diet. But the flyer needs to be correct, at least for a large % of people. I'd argue keto works for maybe 15-25% of people, carnivore maybe 30-35%. Most are way lower. I think any diet that worked for even 75% of people would take the world in a storm. Imagine that success rate. It would be "most people" not "my cousin's friend's mailman has heard of a guy."
3. I think of it the other way around. What people describe as "psychological" or "relationship with food" is a consequence of malnutrition/starvation. You can't "fix your addiction to water" and neither can you "fix your addiction to energy" and the vehicle for energy is food.
I've been big into psychological explanations for overeating for ages. They are many and varied and fascinating and worthy of attention. All can, in theory, be healed. I encourage everyone to do this work if relevant. However, the foods that people overeat that make them fat contain fructose or seed oils, (or both, or gluten). Turns out that fructose and seed oils (and, at least for folks with celiac, no research on others yet, gluten) do something or other to the endocannabinoid system - without this, would they be comfort foods? Without this, would people who are traumatized or anxious or bored consume them? Some folks who have psychological problems turn to opiates or alcohol or cannabis, some to food-signaled endocannabinoids. Some to exercise-signaled endocannabinoids. Some to both these last ones, or some combination. Point is that addicts aren't confused about what substances feed their addiction, and neither are self-identifies food addicts.
100%. After reading Carl Hart's work on drug addiction, I basically don't believe in "addiction" any more. Even hardcore drug addicts aren't "addicted" in the colloquial sense. They just don't anything better to do because their life is in the shitter. This idea that the drug magically takes control of you is not accurate, even for crack and heroin.
You forgot the Energetic/Mitochondria/Ray Peat diet that is having its day: Orange juice, fruit, well cooked potatoes, rice, ruminant meats. Honey, chocolate, carrot salad and ice cream. No PUFA's. I have been able to adjust my calories up to 2400 (a bit more than double) without gaining weight. But is my metabolism healing? Hard to say. The frustration is real.
Yea, I did indeed forget :) It's maybe an interesting one because it's on the far end of the spectrum. It's nearly impossible to describe "The Peat Diet" because it has an infinite number of rules.
I don't grasp nearly all of it, but from what I can tell I agree with almost all of it - except that he doesn't like ketosis, which I think is based more on the Standard American Keto type diet high in PUFAs and excess protein. Probably kind of like the ketards looking at the SAD and saying "See, carbs are bad!"
Very cool that you were able to scale up your kcals! 1,200 seems insanely low lol.
In terms of "metabolism healing" it certainly sounds good. Have you done an RMR (resting metabolic rate) test? Those can tell you if your metabolism is low, high, or just as expected for your height/age/lean mass.
I have increased my body temperature from a 97.3 "normal" up to 98.5 new normal but body fat isn't moving. I think the increase of calories brought on the increased temperature. I'll have to look up RMR test and try it. You're right about the Peat "diet" it doesn't really exist. Jay Feldman has pulled together an energetic type Peaty diet that does seem to be helping my healing, but still not losing any weight. I know the healing has to come first, but dropping a few pounds would increase my outlook.
So to compare notes I've tried pretty much all the diets out there and didn't find any to be sustainable or long term productive. Probably the best one was the original Dr. Atkins. I went on eBay to find an old 1972 Dr Adkins paperback as his low carb approach worked well for me back in the day. I think the original diet was actually pretty interesting as it was changed in later versions. Eggs, bacon, cheese, turkey or ham, steak with a small salad with lemon juice and olive oil. Macadamia nuts for my nut addiction. Mod to high fat (unless riding the bacon heavy then HIGH fat), super low carb (broccoli, lettuce), mod protein. But you could sauce the hell out of anything and that was really amazing for satiety. Béchamel, Hollandaise, oh my. OMAD was never easier. Take out the PUFAs and maybe it has a chance.
Yea AFAIK the original Atkins was pretty rad and ketogenic. But it seems that they softened it up more and more and now Atkins is just a protein bar brand.. :-(
I'd definitely be super careful with the PUFAs. Sauces is a big part of what got me, I think. Nuts too, although macadamias are fine. But almost no other nut is fine.
The "body healing" thing is always a bit too wooey for me. What are we talking about specifically? I'd like to see some measurement change that indicates when I'll start losing weight.
That's why I love ex150. I think I'm "healing" my body in that bioenergetic sense, but I also started losing weight right away. It sure as heck is more motivating if you can see it work, not just speculate and hope that what you're doing will eventually have an impact.
Apr 16·edited Apr 16Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
I hear ya. I don’t mind a little Woo but after a few months I expect some very tangible changes. The thing I forgot to mention about the old Atkins book is he never advocated low carb forever. It was just the induction phase, a few weeks at most, then you add some carbs back in and see how you tolerate them. At the end of his diet, you knew your carb quantity to maintain. I had forgotten this part, and I believe that didn’t continue on the “new” Atkins.
Oh yeah. Cooked a beef tendon last week. Played with how to eat it , ended up in trash yesterday. Got to meet my local butcher ordering it, so a plus for meeting an awesome new person at least. I boiled it 4 hours so must be something I m missing
Not so much forgot as ignored -- he's discussed (and dismissed) that on twitter.
I'm sure it works great for people who aren't obese, but find me an obese person who can consume even 1/5 that much fructose and do ok. I'm a pretty normal weight and I can't. I tried Peating and it fucked me over for a whole month.
What I'm experimenting with right now is a glucose-only version. Coffee with cream and dextrose until 10 am, then fasting until an early dinner. I'm very hungry right now and absolutely furious (this has happened every day so far). I'm about to work out. I feel like a 225-pound hummingbird who has chosen violence. If I experience a midday home invasion in the next hour you'll hear about it on the national news.
In fairness, I did forget it when writing this article ;) I was banging out a bunch of rants and suddenly realized I was at 4k words already lol.
I actually think Peat is right on a ton of stuff, just not on ketosis necessarily being bad (though SAK can be very, very bad).
> I feel like a 225-pound hummingbird who has chosen violence. If I experience a midday home invasion in the next hour you'll hear about it on the national news.
:D lol that sounds... different ;) I thought the carbs were supposed to calm you down haha.
The fructose thing really seems a bit precarious. I'm not entirely sure but it really doesn't seem to work for certain people. Maybe it's like BCAAs on the carb side, where some people are more sensitive than others?
Straight glucose is not hedonic, and doesn't even cover the bitterness of the cheap coffee I drink. It changes the flavor but doesn't change my desire to drink coffee over coffee with just cream. It does provide energy and makes me feel warmer, but at about 1030 (half an hour after last glucose coffee) I feel very hungry. This is supposed to be a good sign -- the thought is I'm ramping up my metabolism with FGF21, then leaving it high for a couple of hours while I don't eat (i.e. when I'm out of the swamp), then eat enough to end the day without any caloric deficit.
This is different than putting regular sugar in coffee, which makes me want to consume more endlessly, and then leaves me craving sugar the whole rest of the day even after eating real food.
Interesting. I remember taking dextrose tablets a few times as a kid (it was supposed to give your brain more energy for studying or something) and it tasted extremely sweet. But maybe they added something to make it more palatable for kids.
Given that you had no trouble staying on SAK even as the LA blew up your ECS maybe you're not a fructose addict. I couldn't gain 10 pounds on seed oil keto without just breaking and eating sugar, let alone 100. Glucose tastes 'sweet' to me in the sense that obviously I can identify it as a sugar by taste. But it isn't -sweet- the way real sugar is. I hear crystal meth tastes bitter. Theobromine is also very bitter. But no methhead would EVER mistake the one for the other. Similarly, a fruithead like myself is never going to mistake one sweetness for another.
Hm I guess my palate just shifted. I think 85% chocolate tastes really sweet. Pure heavy cream tastes very sweet to me. Even green beans taste pretty sweet, I often snack on them while cooking before putting them in the pot.
I chuckled at "binge on nuts all day". I am confident that I could gain a ton of weight on WFPB. I think i've eaten an entire square costco tub of raw cashews in a single day.
Maybe we can do better on terminology, though. The diet you'll be eating when you're done losing weight can almost be described by a single word: 'yamnaya'. Low-protein keto yamnaya (LPKY) is what you're doing right now.
Yea I'm similar, nuts have no off switch. Pork rinds the same. I suppose some people don't have that issue, not sure, and for those people it's probably fine.
The original steppe horse people, also known as the Proto-Indo Europeans. You're probably between 40 and 50% steppe by ancestry, with most of the rest early neolithic farmer and some assorted hunter-gatherer.
Early pastoralists, the first to bootstrap up from agriculture and abandon planted crops. They exported their culture east (the ancestors of the mongols acquired it by being btfo by them), west, and south (shortest summary of the Rig Veda would be 'prayers about cattle'). Their diet was dairy and the flesh of ruminants, and mead from presumably wild-gathered honey (if there were beehives on their wagons no trace of this remains in the archaeological record). Some recently try to claim that cattail pollen in their sites show they were eating cattail tubers but I don't believe the potsherd residue supports this directly.
Ha funny that you mention it, I just listened to Harry Serpanos (did we just talk about him?) mention that. He says about 1/4 of the population have these pastoral genes, and that they can't extract sufficient calcium from pretty much anything but dairy, because they overadapted to the abundance of calcium in it.
Ok, the issue is resolved. Capybaras are officially Bad Fish: don’t eat them. We sentence exfatloss to community service of hunting down and dissecting one (1) capybara for scientific and nutritional purposes.
No no omega 3 is the good one. In theory exfatloss could do a ex150capybara trial when he's done with fatty salmon. I'd suggest he wait until the winter and take a month-long vacation to Venezuela when it's cold here.
"Severely limit at least 1, but likely 2 of {protein,carbs,fat}. You probably want to pick 1 of the energy macros (carbs/fat). You’ll likely also need to restrict protein to a certain degree. In short, don’t swamp your macros."
Can you explain the reasoning behind this a bit more? Is this only relevant for people who are overweight? Or is it potentially also important for people trying to reduce inflammation?
Being blunt, volumetric dieting helped me drop 20kg. Who needs self control when you can just Eat More Salad? It ended up being vegetarian light in the end, and I found most my “cravings” disappear as it forced me to learn the difference between full vs satiated.
Interesting. Maybe some people really do respond to volume. For me it's a joke and a painful one at that; I'll be bloated and in pain AND I'm still starving..
My mantra is avoid NOTHING. Eat what you want, when you want - IN MODERATION. Stay away from sugar and fast food for the most part, but other than that, eat less than you burn. Simple.
Apr 16·edited Apr 17Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
It also occurs to me that like "Standard American Keto" we're starting to get to the "Standard American Carnivore". While the early ZIOH crew said to "eat whatever meat you enjoy and can afford" ... they also repeatedly said that you should view bacon and eggs as a condiment.
In four years of trolling carnivore groups, very few people eat significant amounts of chicken (or fish) because you just can't enough fat. Which really just leaves pork as the problem ...
Yea, and since most US pork has been bred to be disgusting and tasteless, almost nobody eats that either. Except bacon, which many use to bring up their fat ratio..
Haha very cool post, thanks! Loved the French butter video. Mouthwatering :)
It's kinda nuts how they industrialize that stuff and now commercial butter is totally flavorless. Does nobody else notice this sort of thing? I haven't bought normal butter in years.
I know you didn't cover weight yo-yoing in your post, but the following excerpt from *Omega Balance* was excellent in this regard:
"It is [the] constancy of fat cell number that is probably the reason why the common response following major weight loss is a slow return to original body weight. Dieting can shrink fat cells but not eliminate them."
There are various mechanisms that could explain yo-yoing:
1. If you lost the fat by restricting carOliEs, you lowered your metabolic rate, and you're in constant starvation mode. So now you have to starve yourself forever or you'll yo-yo back.
2. If you haven't depleted your adipose tissue PUFA, it'll be like eating PUFA all over again.
3. This fat cell thing, which apparently also takes 8 years haha.
Not that worried. I test my serum levels once in a while and they're not that high, but that also doesn't necessarily tell you about liver accumulation.
I talked to Grant about it and he said the fat might be protective cause it binds the retinol.
I don’t find that very reassuring though ? At one point the fatty acid will be used as energy. Where (and when) does the retinol goes away before this point ?
Yea he worries about this too. It's kinda like PUFAs in that sense, you can store it 'safely' but you gotta take it out of storage at one point.
Unfortunately it's not easy to get a definite answer bc liver biopsies are hard.. I've never had any vA symptoms, and I don't eat much vA besides what'd be in the dairy I think, and I've never used any crazy skin products. So I'm hoping I'm fine?
Apr 17·edited Apr 17Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
2000 kcal of heavy cream (and if I’ve followed right, you’re at more ?) puts you at 8600 IU / 270%DV, so I don’t think "not much vA beside dairy" is much reason for hope ;)
My personal anecdote is trying your "just chug heavy cream" diet (because honestly, it’s so vastly better logistics-wide than… just any over diet) and developing face acne 1 week in… maybe that’s an unfortunate coincidence, but for now I pivoted to trying potatoes/rice diet instead (so far, seems terrible, I have to cook/ingest so much to barely reach satiety… which makes sense, given how it’s poorly calorie-dense).
Apr 17·edited Apr 17Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
Very unlikely to be casein intolerance : I’m generally a big fan of dairy ; prior to experimenting with diets I was drinking a decent amount of milk (~ 1-2 liter / week), cheese (~ 200 gr / day), cooking almost everything with sour cream.
Had pretty severe acne as a kid. Not as medically severe needing treatment, but enough to scar for 1-2 years when I couldn’t keep the "don’t pop the pimples" advice (well, looking back maybe it would qualify for severe enough for needing treatment, but my family was very "doctors are for dying/broken bones/severe bleeding level of emergencies, everything else can be solved by waiting and toughening up").
> you probably need to understand why swamping is a problem, which involves the TCA/Krebs cycle and distinguishing individual amino acids
Can you elaborate on this or point me to a source that discusses these issues? I thought I had everything figured out after reading Omega Balance (i.e. that metabolism depends on cell membrane function, and too much arachidonic acid in the cell membranes leads to problems). Where does BCAA fit in with all of this?
This link specifically goes to the part showing how the BCAAs enter the Krebs cycle as energy metabolites.
There seem to be some genetics that make some people super sensitive to excess BCAAs this way. Brad speculates that this is only because linoleic acid put you into torpor, and that it'll all be fine and you'll be able to eat high protein and swamp your macros after you exit torpor. And I sure hope he's right. But we don't really know yet, I'd say.
1.
*they intuitively preferred a sub-variant that, while not specified by the diet, happened to solve their problems*
I think people need to try out everything until they find their problem.
It looks that for people who do not have success with one way or suddenly gain weight back etc. That they might have a another problem that was not adressed yet. Or that noticed they can't process "xyz" properly.
Sure people can loose weight now knowing what to avoid. They may get healthier, hopefully. But unless they fix the issue which isn't always possible by not eating something in my opinion. They might be just as broken afterwards. But now they are at least thin, right?
So the spiral begins again or they follow the diet until it does not work anymore. And than get fat again.
So adding another step of fixing your body might be more important than choosing diet alone.
Maybe telling people how not to get sick is better? (i know its that easy ;P)
2.
*as much as necessary, as little as possible* (hope it translates well)
The best explanation is the one you can easily teach children (elemantary school age).
I think most adults who are 'broken' for a long time will never recover from it. They will always somehow need to control food/diet etc. At worst they will teach their kids all the wrong things. So if you are able to teach children what to look out for or even avoid things than you are on the winning team.
Otherwise most people who are "healthy" or not acutally sick/fat just won't care. I feel explaining things more detailed should be left for those interested in it. For the majority of people a small, easy to understand flyer that can be read within less than 5 minutes is all i can see to be honest. The rest is just noise.
3.
I want to expand this part but i don't have time now.
I know this post was about diets. But anyway i think it does fit.
What i miss here is behavior and the pychosogical side of things. Which is in my opinion almost as important or even more important than diet alone.
Without fixing your relationship with 'food/yourself/others/anything really' it almost does not matter what you eat (i.e. emotion/stress/eating patterns/timing etc.).
I especially want to include those "branches/groups" within any diet that will recreate a SAD-diet but with low/high-carb/fat stuff.
They recreate the same shit that made them fat. But now it is xyz-free. So its good now (taps forehead). They still shove 15 xyz-free muffin(insert anything here) into their mouth every day.
They have not changed at all. How do they expect change when they do the same thing.
Maybe this explains my view a bit better. They never moved on, they only look in a different direction.
Yes, it does not affect everyone.
---
I might have lost track while writing this. Multiples times sry
1. Do we know what sickness people have? I'd argue a lot of sickness is caused by diet, and so diet is also at least a huge part of the solution. You need to at least stop eating the things that made you sick to begin with.
2. Yea, I largely agree. Most people don't have time to read about the science. They just trust people they see, on the internet or in real life. Trust me, when you lose 75lbs people are suddenly very interested in your diet. But the flyer needs to be correct, at least for a large % of people. I'd argue keto works for maybe 15-25% of people, carnivore maybe 30-35%. Most are way lower. I think any diet that worked for even 75% of people would take the world in a storm. Imagine that success rate. It would be "most people" not "my cousin's friend's mailman has heard of a guy."
3. I think of it the other way around. What people describe as "psychological" or "relationship with food" is a consequence of malnutrition/starvation. You can't "fix your addiction to water" and neither can you "fix your addiction to energy" and the vehicle for energy is food.
I've been big into psychological explanations for overeating for ages. They are many and varied and fascinating and worthy of attention. All can, in theory, be healed. I encourage everyone to do this work if relevant. However, the foods that people overeat that make them fat contain fructose or seed oils, (or both, or gluten). Turns out that fructose and seed oils (and, at least for folks with celiac, no research on others yet, gluten) do something or other to the endocannabinoid system - without this, would they be comfort foods? Without this, would people who are traumatized or anxious or bored consume them? Some folks who have psychological problems turn to opiates or alcohol or cannabis, some to food-signaled endocannabinoids. Some to exercise-signaled endocannabinoids. Some to both these last ones, or some combination. Point is that addicts aren't confused about what substances feed their addiction, and neither are self-identifies food addicts.
100%. After reading Carl Hart's work on drug addiction, I basically don't believe in "addiction" any more. Even hardcore drug addicts aren't "addicted" in the colloquial sense. They just don't anything better to do because their life is in the shitter. This idea that the drug magically takes control of you is not accurate, even for crack and heroin.
You forgot the Energetic/Mitochondria/Ray Peat diet that is having its day: Orange juice, fruit, well cooked potatoes, rice, ruminant meats. Honey, chocolate, carrot salad and ice cream. No PUFA's. I have been able to adjust my calories up to 2400 (a bit more than double) without gaining weight. But is my metabolism healing? Hard to say. The frustration is real.
Yea, I did indeed forget :) It's maybe an interesting one because it's on the far end of the spectrum. It's nearly impossible to describe "The Peat Diet" because it has an infinite number of rules.
I don't grasp nearly all of it, but from what I can tell I agree with almost all of it - except that he doesn't like ketosis, which I think is based more on the Standard American Keto type diet high in PUFAs and excess protein. Probably kind of like the ketards looking at the SAD and saying "See, carbs are bad!"
Very cool that you were able to scale up your kcals! 1,200 seems insanely low lol.
In terms of "metabolism healing" it certainly sounds good. Have you done an RMR (resting metabolic rate) test? Those can tell you if your metabolism is low, high, or just as expected for your height/age/lean mass.
I have increased my body temperature from a 97.3 "normal" up to 98.5 new normal but body fat isn't moving. I think the increase of calories brought on the increased temperature. I'll have to look up RMR test and try it. You're right about the Peat "diet" it doesn't really exist. Jay Feldman has pulled together an energetic type Peaty diet that does seem to be helping my healing, but still not losing any weight. I know the healing has to come first, but dropping a few pounds would increase my outlook.
So to compare notes I've tried pretty much all the diets out there and didn't find any to be sustainable or long term productive. Probably the best one was the original Dr. Atkins. I went on eBay to find an old 1972 Dr Adkins paperback as his low carb approach worked well for me back in the day. I think the original diet was actually pretty interesting as it was changed in later versions. Eggs, bacon, cheese, turkey or ham, steak with a small salad with lemon juice and olive oil. Macadamia nuts for my nut addiction. Mod to high fat (unless riding the bacon heavy then HIGH fat), super low carb (broccoli, lettuce), mod protein. But you could sauce the hell out of anything and that was really amazing for satiety. Béchamel, Hollandaise, oh my. OMAD was never easier. Take out the PUFAs and maybe it has a chance.
Yea AFAIK the original Atkins was pretty rad and ketogenic. But it seems that they softened it up more and more and now Atkins is just a protein bar brand.. :-(
I'd definitely be super careful with the PUFAs. Sauces is a big part of what got me, I think. Nuts too, although macadamias are fine. But almost no other nut is fine.
The "body healing" thing is always a bit too wooey for me. What are we talking about specifically? I'd like to see some measurement change that indicates when I'll start losing weight.
That's why I love ex150. I think I'm "healing" my body in that bioenergetic sense, but I also started losing weight right away. It sure as heck is more motivating if you can see it work, not just speculate and hope that what you're doing will eventually have an impact.
I hear ya. I don’t mind a little Woo but after a few months I expect some very tangible changes. The thing I forgot to mention about the old Atkins book is he never advocated low carb forever. It was just the induction phase, a few weeks at most, then you add some carbs back in and see how you tolerate them. At the end of his diet, you knew your carb quantity to maintain. I had forgotten this part, and I believe that didn’t continue on the “new” Atkins.
Oh yeah. Cooked a beef tendon last week. Played with how to eat it , ended up in trash yesterday. Got to meet my local butcher ordering it, so a plus for meeting an awesome new person at least. I boiled it 4 hours so must be something I m missing
Haha I'm sure the tendons are very tough :D Maybe grind it up and mix into ground beef or something. Maybe the butcher can do that for you?
Not so much forgot as ignored -- he's discussed (and dismissed) that on twitter.
I'm sure it works great for people who aren't obese, but find me an obese person who can consume even 1/5 that much fructose and do ok. I'm a pretty normal weight and I can't. I tried Peating and it fucked me over for a whole month.
What I'm experimenting with right now is a glucose-only version. Coffee with cream and dextrose until 10 am, then fasting until an early dinner. I'm very hungry right now and absolutely furious (this has happened every day so far). I'm about to work out. I feel like a 225-pound hummingbird who has chosen violence. If I experience a midday home invasion in the next hour you'll hear about it on the national news.
In fairness, I did forget it when writing this article ;) I was banging out a bunch of rants and suddenly realized I was at 4k words already lol.
I actually think Peat is right on a ton of stuff, just not on ketosis necessarily being bad (though SAK can be very, very bad).
> I feel like a 225-pound hummingbird who has chosen violence. If I experience a midday home invasion in the next hour you'll hear about it on the national news.
:D lol that sounds... different ;) I thought the carbs were supposed to calm you down haha.
The fructose thing really seems a bit precarious. I'm not entirely sure but it really doesn't seem to work for certain people. Maybe it's like BCAAs on the carb side, where some people are more sensitive than others?
Straight glucose is not hedonic, and doesn't even cover the bitterness of the cheap coffee I drink. It changes the flavor but doesn't change my desire to drink coffee over coffee with just cream. It does provide energy and makes me feel warmer, but at about 1030 (half an hour after last glucose coffee) I feel very hungry. This is supposed to be a good sign -- the thought is I'm ramping up my metabolism with FGF21, then leaving it high for a couple of hours while I don't eat (i.e. when I'm out of the swamp), then eat enough to end the day without any caloric deficit.
This is different than putting regular sugar in coffee, which makes me want to consume more endlessly, and then leaves me craving sugar the whole rest of the day even after eating real food.
Interesting. I remember taking dextrose tablets a few times as a kid (it was supposed to give your brain more energy for studying or something) and it tasted extremely sweet. But maybe they added something to make it more palatable for kids.
Given that you had no trouble staying on SAK even as the LA blew up your ECS maybe you're not a fructose addict. I couldn't gain 10 pounds on seed oil keto without just breaking and eating sugar, let alone 100. Glucose tastes 'sweet' to me in the sense that obviously I can identify it as a sugar by taste. But it isn't -sweet- the way real sugar is. I hear crystal meth tastes bitter. Theobromine is also very bitter. But no methhead would EVER mistake the one for the other. Similarly, a fruithead like myself is never going to mistake one sweetness for another.
Hm I guess my palate just shifted. I think 85% chocolate tastes really sweet. Pure heavy cream tastes very sweet to me. Even green beans taste pretty sweet, I often snack on them while cooking before putting them in the pot.
I chuckled at "binge on nuts all day". I am confident that I could gain a ton of weight on WFPB. I think i've eaten an entire square costco tub of raw cashews in a single day.
Maybe we can do better on terminology, though. The diet you'll be eating when you're done losing weight can almost be described by a single word: 'yamnaya'. Low-protein keto yamnaya (LPKY) is what you're doing right now.
Yea I'm similar, nuts have no off switch. Pork rinds the same. I suppose some people don't have that issue, not sure, and for those people it's probably fine.
Lol what's yamnaya?
The big book on the idea is Horse, Wheel and Language. There’s pages and pages of stats about how much horse meat they ate.
The original steppe horse people, also known as the Proto-Indo Europeans. You're probably between 40 and 50% steppe by ancestry, with most of the rest early neolithic farmer and some assorted hunter-gatherer.
Early pastoralists, the first to bootstrap up from agriculture and abandon planted crops. They exported their culture east (the ancestors of the mongols acquired it by being btfo by them), west, and south (shortest summary of the Rig Veda would be 'prayers about cattle'). Their diet was dairy and the flesh of ruminants, and mead from presumably wild-gathered honey (if there were beehives on their wagons no trace of this remains in the archaeological record). Some recently try to claim that cattail pollen in their sites show they were eating cattail tubers but I don't believe the potsherd residue supports this directly.
Ha funny that you mention it, I just listened to Harry Serpanos (did we just talk about him?) mention that. He says about 1/4 of the population have these pastoral genes, and that they can't extract sufficient calcium from pretty much anything but dairy, because they overadapted to the abundance of calcium in it.
Highly likely I have those genetics, yea.
Where does “steppe pony blood” fit in? ;)
I'm taking from the historical european rules on fasting the categorization of blood as a kind of liquid meat.
Is this the same one that has capybaras as fish?
Yes. Given that capybara are reportedly high in omega-3 fatty acids, this seems appropriate.
(Capybara meat not on foods.exfatloss.com, though. Sad!)
Ok, the issue is resolved. Capybaras are officially Bad Fish: don’t eat them. We sentence exfatloss to community service of hunting down and dissecting one (1) capybara for scientific and nutritional purposes.
No no omega 3 is the good one. In theory exfatloss could do a ex150capybara trial when he's done with fatty salmon. I'd suggest he wait until the winter and take a month-long vacation to Venezuela when it's cold here.
"Severely limit at least 1, but likely 2 of {protein,carbs,fat}. You probably want to pick 1 of the energy macros (carbs/fat). You’ll likely also need to restrict protein to a certain degree. In short, don’t swamp your macros."
Can you explain the reasoning behind this a bit more? Is this only relevant for people who are overweight? Or is it potentially also important for people trying to reduce inflammation?
That's a good question, and I'm not sure. I suspect only overweight people, but I'm not 100% sure.
I just wanna eat cheese and drink cream…..
Time to sign up for the ex150brie riff.
Best idea yet!
Haha cheese is too much of a good thing for me..
Tremendous work!
Thanks!
Being blunt, volumetric dieting helped me drop 20kg. Who needs self control when you can just Eat More Salad? It ended up being vegetarian light in the end, and I found most my “cravings” disappear as it forced me to learn the difference between full vs satiated.
Interesting. Maybe some people really do respond to volume. For me it's a joke and a painful one at that; I'll be bloated and in pain AND I'm still starving..
My mantra is avoid NOTHING. Eat what you want, when you want - IN MODERATION. Stay away from sugar and fast food for the most part, but other than that, eat less than you burn. Simple.
Huh, why do you do that? Sounds weird.
It also occurs to me that like "Standard American Keto" we're starting to get to the "Standard American Carnivore". While the early ZIOH crew said to "eat whatever meat you enjoy and can afford" ... they also repeatedly said that you should view bacon and eggs as a condiment.
In four years of trolling carnivore groups, very few people eat significant amounts of chicken (or fish) because you just can't enough fat. Which really just leaves pork as the problem ...
Yea, and since most US pork has been bred to be disgusting and tasteless, almost nobody eats that either. Except bacon, which many use to bring up their fat ratio..
Thanks for these great posts. I gave you a shout-out here (when I say iconoclastic weirdo, I mean it in a good way): https://braff.co/advice/f/ai-and-seed-oil-disrespect
Haha very cool post, thanks! Loved the French butter video. Mouthwatering :)
It's kinda nuts how they industrialize that stuff and now commercial butter is totally flavorless. Does nobody else notice this sort of thing? I haven't bought normal butter in years.
I know you didn't cover weight yo-yoing in your post, but the following excerpt from *Omega Balance* was excellent in this regard:
"It is [the] constancy of fat cell number that is probably the reason why the common response following major weight loss is a slow return to original body weight. Dieting can shrink fat cells but not eliminate them."
There are various mechanisms that could explain yo-yoing:
1. If you lost the fat by restricting carOliEs, you lowered your metabolic rate, and you're in constant starvation mode. So now you have to starve yourself forever or you'll yo-yo back.
2. If you haven't depleted your adipose tissue PUFA, it'll be like eating PUFA all over again.
3. This fat cell thing, which apparently also takes 8 years haha.
Probably more.
Side-question : how worried are you of vitamin A chronic toxicity hypothesis on your heavy cream diet ?
Not that worried. I test my serum levels once in a while and they're not that high, but that also doesn't necessarily tell you about liver accumulation.
I talked to Grant about it and he said the fat might be protective cause it binds the retinol.
I don’t find that very reassuring though ? At one point the fatty acid will be used as energy. Where (and when) does the retinol goes away before this point ?
Yea he worries about this too. It's kinda like PUFAs in that sense, you can store it 'safely' but you gotta take it out of storage at one point.
Unfortunately it's not easy to get a definite answer bc liver biopsies are hard.. I've never had any vA symptoms, and I don't eat much vA besides what'd be in the dairy I think, and I've never used any crazy skin products. So I'm hoping I'm fine?
2000 kcal of heavy cream (and if I’ve followed right, you’re at more ?) puts you at 8600 IU / 270%DV, so I don’t think "not much vA beside dairy" is much reason for hope ;)
My personal anecdote is trying your "just chug heavy cream" diet (because honestly, it’s so vastly better logistics-wide than… just any over diet) and developing face acne 1 week in… maybe that’s an unfortunate coincidence, but for now I pivoted to trying potatoes/rice diet instead (so far, seems terrible, I have to cook/ingest so much to barely reach satiety… which makes sense, given how it’s poorly calorie-dense).
Interesting. I never had serious acne even as a kid. I maybe had 50 pimples, ever, as a teen. Also got no acne from the cream.
Could be that you're a little bit casein (or something else in dairy?) intolerant, or maybe it's the vA? Not sure.
I'd try white rice next time, that is 14% energy density (cooked) or 2x that of potatoes. Also actually very low fiber.
Very unlikely to be casein intolerance : I’m generally a big fan of dairy ; prior to experimenting with diets I was drinking a decent amount of milk (~ 1-2 liter / week), cheese (~ 200 gr / day), cooking almost everything with sour cream.
Had pretty severe acne as a kid. Not as medically severe needing treatment, but enough to scar for 1-2 years when I couldn’t keep the "don’t pop the pimples" advice (well, looking back maybe it would qualify for severe enough for needing treatment, but my family was very "doctors are for dying/broken bones/severe bleeding level of emergencies, everything else can be solved by waiting and toughening up").
> you probably need to understand why swamping is a problem, which involves the TCA/Krebs cycle and distinguishing individual amino acids
Can you elaborate on this or point me to a source that discusses these issues? I thought I had everything figured out after reading Omega Balance (i.e. that metabolism depends on cell membrane function, and too much arachidonic acid in the cell membranes leads to problems). Where does BCAA fit in with all of this?
A decent overview is probably my post on BCAA studies: https://www.exfatloss.com/i/138450287/restricting-branched-chain-amino-acids-within-a-high-fat-diet-prevents-obesity
This link specifically goes to the part showing how the BCAAs enter the Krebs cycle as energy metabolites.
There seem to be some genetics that make some people super sensitive to excess BCAAs this way. Brad speculates that this is only because linoleic acid put you into torpor, and that it'll all be fine and you'll be able to eat high protein and swamp your macros after you exit torpor. And I sure hope he's right. But we don't really know yet, I'd say.
Excellent writing.
Thank you Sir :) What are you up to these days? Feel free to hit me up via email if you have an update on any interesting experiments.
What is the problem with cheese? He said, through the years.
Probably casein :)
Truly heartbreaking news, sir