ex115 review: Down 3lbs

Just back down from the 2 previous stupid experiments? I'll take it.

This is going to be a shorter one, since I got way too much other stuff overlapping that I’m itching to write about.

Why even less protein?

I’m currently experiencing what I call “the summer malaise” like last summer, in which I’ve plateaued even with the same strict diet, weighed out to the gram.

One hypothesis is that something about summer (sunlight? higher activity level?) is activating mTOR more, which protein also does. Maybe lowering the protein of ex150 even further would alleviate this?

mTOR is generally considered an anabolic pathway. That’s good for building muscle, but it might not be good for losing fat. Mouse experiments are somewhat conflicted about this; some of the BCAA restriction studies I’ve previously written about explicitly tested for this mTOR hypothesis and found it to not be at work, others seem to think it is or might be. It could very well be that “protein restriction” triggers several pathways, not all of which are at work in all species of lab rodents, or all humans.

So I aimed for even lower protein with ex115, which means cutting a pound of ground beef into quarters instead of my normal thirds.

Other modifications

I had previously been cooking my lunch in grass-fed beef tallow I’d rendered myself, in combination with butter. Just in case it was the tallow, I cut that out this month. I honestly didn’t miss it, butter is great.

All my beef this time was grass-fed, as I’d purchased a big batch from a ranch. They didn’t have 80/20 which I usually buy, but told me their mix is about 85/15. So it’s a bit leaner. But if you look at the difference in protein, it’s actually minimal.

Only about 1/3 of the lean part of beef is protein, most of it being water. So by choosing 85/15 instead of 80/20 I was increasing my lean by about 6g per 115g (ex115), or 2g of protein. Probably no factor. For context, I’m probably getting 20-25g of protein per day just from heavy cream.

On the other hand, the fat part of beef is all fat. So by going down 35g, going slightly leaner, and cutting out the tallow, I was actually eating quite a bit lower carolies in my lunch meal. I’d say about 150kcal less.

I noticed that I intuitively seemed to drink more coffee with cream to make up for it.

10 day plateau, 4lbs drop in as many days

As I often observe, nothing happens for a long time, and then there’s a dramatic drop over a few days. This happens despite me largely eating the exact same foods every day, and certainly averaging the same amount of total carolies over e.g. the span of 10 days.

I wasn’t restricting or starving myself during the 4 days with the big drop, same thing as every other day. If anything, my appetite is reactive to the fat loss, as I’ll talk about later.

Now it could be that this is just coming down from the weight I gained during my last 2 experiments of 7 days each, ex150coconut and ex150_iler_valr.

After all, if you look at a longer time frame:

It even looks like my weight was slightly going up before I started the coconut and iler_valr, maybe they just didn’t arrest it. That was at the end of ex150ffinduction, which just consisted of a 1 week fat fast and 3 subsequent weeks of normal ex150. The idea was to turbocharge myself into low-protein mode by eating almost no protein for the first week. Didn’t help.

Does that mean even the protein from ex150 is too high in the summer, somehow? Or was it just a weird swing due to another reason, and now it’s come back down? No idea.

In any case, I’m happy to be 220 instead of 223-224.

ex115 feels exactly like ex150

On the one hand, cutting 35g of meat, or about 6g of protein, isn’t a huge difference. That’s about 2 tablespoons of beef off my lunch. On the other hand, we’re approaching seriously low total protein numbers here, and I do expect it to eventually make a difference.

Overall, it took me a few days during which the lunch portion felt much smaller. Then, I stopped noticing the difference, and it just felt normal. I wonder if the meal will seem huge when I go back to ex150, haha.

Here are my notes:

Day 3

Just feels normal so far. Slightly smaller lunch portion.

Day 4

Lunch meal feels a bit small
Put on CGM

Day 5

Went hypoglycemic (<70mg/dL) in the evening for quite a while

Day 6

Woke up <80mg/dL, was hypoglycemic for much of the night like it's supposed to be on a ketogenic diet lol
Not like the constant 90s I saw on the EAA mix

Day 9

Kinda been feeling more hungry the last 2-3 days
Not sure since I don't usually measure carolies, but feels like I'm drinking an extra cup of cream for dinner

Day 11

Watch fits consistently "normal" (not loose, not tight) on wrist
Temperature consistently around 98.6°F

Day 17

Meals don't feel "small" any more, got used to the 115g size I guess. Similar thing happened when I started ex150.
Last days dropped 2lbs, lowest since start of EAA experiment now
Really bad workout performance - good!
Barely touched evening whipped cream, only 2 spoons
Notably less desire for sauce

Day 18

Again didn't touch whipped cream for dinner, 2nd day in a row!
Hitting cream satiety suspiciously early with coffee & tea, normally I seem to drink more but now I'm just not capable

Day 29

Pretty uneventful

Very interesting that I had written down that I consume an extra cup (!) of cream in the evenings, as late as day 9, just before the big weight drop. An extra cup just about doubles my evening cream.

During/after the weight dropped, I experienced sharply more satiety than before. I didn’t finish my whipped dinner cream 2 nights in a row, meaning I had a bowl of 2 day old cream sitting in the fridge the morning of the 3rd day.

Dried out cream tastes great, by the way. The water evaporating makes it more stiff and fluffy.

Is ex115 the new ex150?

I don’t know, maybe? Maybe for the summer? I don’t think I’d have huge problems doing another month of ex115, and that would be a viable plan - if I hadn’t already planned a water fast!

People have been asking me about fasting, and I do actually have a pretty significant history with extended fasting.

I could fast decently well when lean

After I’d initially lost 100lbs on keto, I got into fasting for a year or so. I’d regularly fast for 3 days, which was absolutely no challenge at all at the time, when I was around 200-220lbs after the 100lbs drop.

My record water fast was 7 days, and my record “coffee fast” (coffee w/ cream) was 10 days.

The main limitation was that, after 3 days, my sleep would start to suffer significantly. Until, eventually, I didn’t sleep at all, just thrashing around exhausted all night long. I’m sure I got a lot of microsleeps, but it completely lacked any feeling of restfulness, and I hated that feeling. I was a walking zombie. Also, obsessive thought of food and endless doomscrolling of pictures of steak. Basically, starvation symptoms.

I couldn’t fast at all when morbidly obese

Later, when I’d gotten back up to 300lbs eating Standard American Keto, I tried fasting again. This time, I could barely do 3 days without serious symptoms - cramps, getting sick immediately and staying sick for weeks at a time, lethargy, irritability.

It was just crazy - despite having 100lbs more body fat available, I was getting starvation symptoms at the evening of day 3 now, instead of day 5-7 as I’d done at 200lbs.

Linoleic acid stored in adipose tissue is one candidate as to why that could be. Back then, I didn’t know about linoleic acid.

Unfortunately, this seemed to make fasting pretty useless for fat loss: it only worked when I wasn’t particularly fat, lol.

But I’m kind of excited to see how it’ll go that I’ve been strictly avoiding PUFAs for nearly 2 years. I expect the first 2 days to be pretty uneventful, and so far (mid day 2) that’s been true.

But will day 3 be hell, or be fine? And can I make it to the full 7 days I’ve planned for this?

One way to find out.