For God's sake if you start dreaming about steaks eat some. "You need a certain amount of protein" is not one of those made-up things about which there is doubt. But you can probably rely on your unconscious to notice if there's a shortage.
I'm currently finding that if I try not to eat too much protein then my desire for cheese keeps me at around 50g/day 'by magic'.
What do your experiences look like through my "PUFAs fuck up leptin signalling and excess protein interferes with PUFA destruction" idea? So that your set point comes slowly down as you clear the PUFAs but varies wildly with excess protein intake.
I.e. Your 'protein refeeds' are not causing water weight gain, they are spiking your set-point up way high and you really are putting on a bucket of fat in a few days and then losing it again?
I think that it's a % thing, there's certainly water weight in there that comes off just as rapidly and I feel and look bloated. But there is undeniably also fat gain even over the course of a few days. Every time I've gained week on one of these for 3 days or more there was a % of that gain that didn't immediately come off.
This is basically my thinking, except for the leptin/set point part. But yea, if I binge on protein, I gain fat as well as water weight, no doubt.
> This is basically my thinking, except for the leptin/set point part.
I'm wedded to the set point thing, and I still don't understand why you disagree. I'm not necessarily wedded to the leptin bit.
But leptin sure looks like a 'total fat sensor hormone', and there are several unconvincing studies that show that PUFAs do interfere with leptin signalling, so if that's true that's all we need to explain obesity as a consequence of PUFA poisoning.
If we can nail "PUFAs compete with excess protein in some elimination pathway" I think we've got an explanation for almost everything we've seen.
The thing is, we already have several other things that also independently are enough to explain PUFA poisoning -> obesity. We don't need leptin at all. Maybe it plays a role, not sure.
Do we? Obesity is the one I could never do, because for some reason I thought that leptin as the 'total fat sensor hormone' had turned out not to be true!
Cool, and is that accompanied by a sudden loss of appetite for the first few days as you lose it all, followed by a return of appetite once you're back to your ex150 weight?
No, not the way you describe it. I'd describe it like this: on the protein refeed, I am back in insatiable ravenous hyperphagia mode after 1-2 days. Probably more 6-12 hours, actually.
Then 1-2 days back into ex150, I'm back in "normal" mode where I just eat cream intuitively and magically hit my carolies to within ~100kcal or so.
That's one of the reasons I don't really believe in a set point; it just behaves nothing like a set point.
Protein refeed: excess protein disposal somehow blocks PUFA clearance, PUFAs build up, leptin is blocked, homeostat can't see fat stores, decides you're starving, takes action. You become hungry and eat. Left to its own devices it would keep you hungry until you got to whatever weight will provide enough leptin to get through. Which might be infinite.
ex150: very little excess protein to clear, disposal machinery can get to work on free PUFAs, PUFA levels fall, leptin gets through, homeostat can see fat stores, decides you're overweight, appetite goes away. Your weight falls until it reaches the point where just enough leptin is getting through the PUFA-blockade to keep the homeostat happy.
And the strength of the PUFA-blockade is determined by the equilibrium between PUFA-release and PUFA-disposal.
I'm not saying this is the answer. But I am saying it's very plausible and mechanistic and can be expressed in terms of differential equations and has great explanatory power and a lot of the variables are directly measurable.
Another easy test would be to try taking an omega-3 supplement (so healthy!). That should block the leptin signal directly and cause weight gain, which will go away when you stop taking the supplement.
I'd also predict that PUFA clearance will happen fastest if you keep your protein intake as low as you can tolerate. (Because low blood levels mean that PUFA is leaving your fat stores but not going back in).
And that if you keep very low protein you should be able to eat carbs without too much trouble. (Because the lowish PUFA levels will not be blocking glycolysis much)
And that if you keep eating carbs and raise your protein level then your weight will rise and you'll get low temperatures, brain fog, fatigue, tiredness and possibly other interesting mental and blood sugar effects and "low thyroid symptoms".
An easy test would be if you alternated ex150 and ex115 on a weekly basis. I'd predict that your weight would go up and down a few pounds in response on timescales of a few days, layered over a long term trend (timescales of years) of slow drop due to PUFA clearance.
I had a similar experience as you. Awful sleeping, etc. I did near 100 hours in 2024 and it killed my muscle mass so I won't be doing it again. I'm still not recovered from all the strength I lost.
Really, wow. I didn't notice much strength loss back when I did it. In fact, I'd be better for a while, probably because the adrenaline was making me more resistance to exhaustion. But after a few days of fasting, my performance would go way down. But after a refeed and a few days, back to normal IIRC. I didn't keep great records though.
I'm on day 2 right now and don't feel a thing. Sometimes I mentally reach for "Oh I should make lunch- oh right, we're not eating right now." My stomach grumbled at my usual lunch time :)
I definitely also get the pavlovian meal responses from my body at the expected times. On my 2024 fast I had a day when I was high on ketones (I recall it being around the 72-hour mark). I felt superhuman for a good 4-6 hours. It was rough and bumpy before then and then rough and bumpy after hour 80 or so.
I suspect that some of our differences in experience stem from the fact that I'm really skinny; my main goal in doing these fasts is to stimulate autophagy of any cancer cells circulating around. And to generally detox. It may not be a great idea for someone to fast so long if they've got a BMI of 21 compared to 29. 🤷🏼♂️
Oh yea, that would make a difference. I still have 62lbs of body fat, in theory, I should have plenty of energy to walk around just from that. I think the number I've seen in a study is each pound of body fat releases 32kcal/day, which would give me nearly 2,000kcal/day. Of course if you're very skinny, you'd only get a pittance.
I think we can run quite a while on glycogen and GNG, which is probably how you make it through the day on IF with some fat. But glycogen depletes really quickly, like hours to days, especially if you're active. We only carry a pound or so of glycogen total. If we assume there's 4kcals to a gram of it (not sure about that, is it like glucose?) that gives you 1,800kcal and then you're done.
Half a pound or so of glycogen - sugar - in the liver, which is easy to use for everything and binds a pound and half or so water. Another half-pound or so in the muscles, which is used locally. So running out of liver glycogen is pretty easy.
This is almost certainly true, but since he's eating ad-lib it shouldn't make any difference. Any calories saved will just be made up by extra cream consumption.
Good one! Left to my own devices I'm a half teaspoon-of-salt-a-day guy, but a buddy gave me a box of chocolate LMNT; I put a packet in a quart of cold-brew, pretty good: https://drinklmnt.com/
In my experience, it makes fasting much less unpleasant.
This time I'm much less used to salt, since I don't add any except what's in meat and the sauce I buy. Hopefully that'll reduce the need for electrolytes during the fast.
Given that I'd been in constant ketosis for over a year at that time, not sure keto flu would've been it. Electrolytes might very well be, but also could just be starvation symptoms.
That your appetite would adjust so that your weight naturally stayed the same short term, with a set point which moves around for mysterious reasons which may be related to protein intake and stored PUFA levels?
Your set point fell because were eating less protein and that reduced the effect of the PUFAs you're releasing from your fat.
At that point your homeostat can see more of your fat stores because more leptin is getting through, and decides that they're too high, and now you're going to burn fat one way or another unless you use willpower to override your autonomic systems/subconscious mind/appetite.
But also you were eating fewer calories in your normal meal. Presumably fewer than you needed to maintain your new lower set point. So you got peckish to make up and swilled some extra cream.
After a while, you arrive at your new set point and everything is stable.
> Your set point fell because were eating less protein and that reduced the effect of the PUFAs you're releasing from your fat.
Ok that could technically be true, but seems to really stretch it. Imagine we drove on the highway and we saw a car zooming past us, then braking, then speeding up again.
Is it possible he set his cruise control way down, then way back up? Sure, it's possible. But the much simpler explanation is that he let off the gas, braked, and then got back on the gas. It certainly isn't evidence FOR cruise control.
Depends on your priors I think. If cars only have gas pedals then the gas pedal explanation is best. If cars only have a speed control dial on the dashboard then likely someone's twiddling it.
So you need to know how the car works to work out what happened.
Ramadan is actually associated with a surge in obesity and diabetes because they don't actually fast in any meaningful way, but rather, too many people gorge themselves on a Thanksgiving-size meal twice a day during all of Ramadan, once before sunrise and then after sunset.
Haha and people say intermittent fasting is good for you :) I do think it can lead to exactly this, which probably explains why I never lost much weight fasting. I would end the fast and binge on high-protein, high-fat, and probably back then high-PUFA meals. Easily gained all the lost weight back during the first meal.
During the pandemic I let myself go in terms of what I would eat, but kept my strict 20:4 or even 23:1 fasting schedule. But that one meal would include things like Domino's pizza, PUFA-laden Lofthouse sugar cookies, PUFA-soaked chips, etc.
Ended up gaining 5% of my body weight in a matter of months. I'm lucky it wasn't worse than that.
Man I went to Domino's with family recently. Of course I didn't eat anything. The "pizza" they received and ate stank of seed oils. It didn't even have pizza consistency. I mean I haven't eaten pizza in a decade and maybe this is normal now, but it was just this weird, greasy, grimey situation. Like the entire thing was laced with soybean oil. Even the leftovers were half liquid the next day.
Lately I've found it useful to go to my local pizza joint and get a ball of dough from them and then make the pizza myself at home so I know exactly what's in it. I'm sure the crust they give me has some seed oils but hopefully not too many compared to Domino's or Pizza Hut.
Yup, go in the pakistani supermarkets - and even the 'normal' ones in pakistani areas - round here, and during Ramadan they are promoting sweets and treats like crazy. People gorge in the evenings.
Ha, that is interesting indeed! It's pure speculation tbh, I have no good explanation. But clearly there's a phenomenon, and I'd love to be able to explain it ;)
My one idea is that in a sense sunlight & more spontaneous activity (which most people have in summer) are good for you. But good in the sense that it increases mTOR activation and makes you more anabolic more of the time.
But to lose weight, with the protein restriction, part of it might be not activating mTOR as much, and be catabolic more of the time.
In evolutionary times, it might have been the case that our ancestors would exercise & hunt all summer long, build some muscle, maybe build a little bit of fat. Definitely built fat in the fall by eating high-PUFA nuts and stuff like that. Then, in the winter, times would be catabolic and they'd be less active and lose a bit of muscle while drawing down their fat reserves.
These evolutionary speculations of course don't prove anything, but it does kinda make sense. Especially if your ancestors lived in a place with pretty extreme seasons, I guess. If your ancestors lived at the equator, the seasons might not have played such a big role. But in Northern Europe, where my ancestors are from, it's a huge difference in sunlight, temperature, and food environment. I doubt many carbs would've grown in the winter, so you better make muscle & adipose tissue while the sun shines, if you will.
For God's sake if you start dreaming about steaks eat some. "You need a certain amount of protein" is not one of those made-up things about which there is doubt. But you can probably rely on your unconscious to notice if there's a shortage.
I'm currently finding that if I try not to eat too much protein then my desire for cheese keeps me at around 50g/day 'by magic'.
What do your experiences look like through my "PUFAs fuck up leptin signalling and excess protein interferes with PUFA destruction" idea? So that your set point comes slowly down as you clear the PUFAs but varies wildly with excess protein intake.
I.e. Your 'protein refeeds' are not causing water weight gain, they are spiking your set-point up way high and you really are putting on a bucket of fat in a few days and then losing it again?
I think that it's a % thing, there's certainly water weight in there that comes off just as rapidly and I feel and look bloated. But there is undeniably also fat gain even over the course of a few days. Every time I've gained week on one of these for 3 days or more there was a % of that gain that didn't immediately come off.
This is basically my thinking, except for the leptin/set point part. But yea, if I binge on protein, I gain fat as well as water weight, no doubt.
> This is basically my thinking, except for the leptin/set point part.
I'm wedded to the set point thing, and I still don't understand why you disagree. I'm not necessarily wedded to the leptin bit.
But leptin sure looks like a 'total fat sensor hormone', and there are several unconvincing studies that show that PUFAs do interfere with leptin signalling, so if that's true that's all we need to explain obesity as a consequence of PUFA poisoning.
If we can nail "PUFAs compete with excess protein in some elimination pathway" I think we've got an explanation for almost everything we've seen.
The thing is, we already have several other things that also independently are enough to explain PUFA poisoning -> obesity. We don't need leptin at all. Maybe it plays a role, not sure.
Do we? Obesity is the one I could never do, because for some reason I thought that leptin as the 'total fat sensor hormone' had turned out not to be true!
What are the other possibilities?
ROS, ECS..
Cool, and is that accompanied by a sudden loss of appetite for the first few days as you lose it all, followed by a return of appetite once you're back to your ex150 weight?
No, not the way you describe it. I'd describe it like this: on the protein refeed, I am back in insatiable ravenous hyperphagia mode after 1-2 days. Probably more 6-12 hours, actually.
Then 1-2 days back into ex150, I'm back in "normal" mode where I just eat cream intuitively and magically hit my carolies to within ~100kcal or so.
That's one of the reasons I don't really believe in a set point; it just behaves nothing like a set point.
Protein refeed: excess protein disposal somehow blocks PUFA clearance, PUFAs build up, leptin is blocked, homeostat can't see fat stores, decides you're starving, takes action. You become hungry and eat. Left to its own devices it would keep you hungry until you got to whatever weight will provide enough leptin to get through. Which might be infinite.
ex150: very little excess protein to clear, disposal machinery can get to work on free PUFAs, PUFA levels fall, leptin gets through, homeostat can see fat stores, decides you're overweight, appetite goes away. Your weight falls until it reaches the point where just enough leptin is getting through the PUFA-blockade to keep the homeostat happy.
And the strength of the PUFA-blockade is determined by the equilibrium between PUFA-release and PUFA-disposal.
I'm not saying this is the answer. But I am saying it's very plausible and mechanistic and can be expressed in terms of differential equations and has great explanatory power and a lot of the variables are directly measurable.
Further research is needed.
Could be
Another easy test would be to try taking an omega-3 supplement (so healthy!). That should block the leptin signal directly and cause weight gain, which will go away when you stop taking the supplement.
More predictions:
I'd also predict that PUFA clearance will happen fastest if you keep your protein intake as low as you can tolerate. (Because low blood levels mean that PUFA is leaving your fat stores but not going back in).
And that if you keep very low protein you should be able to eat carbs without too much trouble. (Because the lowish PUFA levels will not be blocking glycolysis much)
And that if you keep eating carbs and raise your protein level then your weight will rise and you'll get low temperatures, brain fog, fatigue, tiredness and possibly other interesting mental and blood sugar effects and "low thyroid symptoms".
An easy test would be if you alternated ex150 and ex115 on a weekly basis. I'd predict that your weight would go up and down a few pounds in response on timescales of a few days, layered over a long term trend (timescales of years) of slow drop due to PUFA clearance.
For the past two years I've kicked off the new year with a 72+ hour water fast. I wrote about my 2023 one here: https://tyleransom.substack.com/p/my-3-day-fast
I had a similar experience as you. Awful sleeping, etc. I did near 100 hours in 2024 and it killed my muscle mass so I won't be doing it again. I'm still not recovered from all the strength I lost.
Really, wow. I didn't notice much strength loss back when I did it. In fact, I'd be better for a while, probably because the adrenaline was making me more resistance to exhaustion. But after a few days of fasting, my performance would go way down. But after a refeed and a few days, back to normal IIRC. I didn't keep great records though.
I'm on day 2 right now and don't feel a thing. Sometimes I mentally reach for "Oh I should make lunch- oh right, we're not eating right now." My stomach grumbled at my usual lunch time :)
I definitely also get the pavlovian meal responses from my body at the expected times. On my 2024 fast I had a day when I was high on ketones (I recall it being around the 72-hour mark). I felt superhuman for a good 4-6 hours. It was rough and bumpy before then and then rough and bumpy after hour 80 or so.
I suspect that some of our differences in experience stem from the fact that I'm really skinny; my main goal in doing these fasts is to stimulate autophagy of any cancer cells circulating around. And to generally detox. It may not be a great idea for someone to fast so long if they've got a BMI of 21 compared to 29. 🤷🏼♂️
Oh yea, that would make a difference. I still have 62lbs of body fat, in theory, I should have plenty of energy to walk around just from that. I think the number I've seen in a study is each pound of body fat releases 32kcal/day, which would give me nearly 2,000kcal/day. Of course if you're very skinny, you'd only get a pittance.
I think we can run quite a while on glycogen and GNG, which is probably how you make it through the day on IF with some fat. But glycogen depletes really quickly, like hours to days, especially if you're active. We only carry a pound or so of glycogen total. If we assume there's 4kcals to a gram of it (not sure about that, is it like glucose?) that gives you 1,800kcal and then you're done.
Half a pound or so of glycogen - sugar - in the liver, which is easy to use for everything and binds a pound and half or so water. Another half-pound or so in the muscles, which is used locally. So running out of liver glycogen is pretty easy.
Don’t you need less food in the summer because your body doesn’t need to heat you as much.
Maybe? But if my satiety was working in the winter, why isn't it in the summer?
This is almost certainly true, but since he's eating ad-lib it shouldn't make any difference. Any calories saved will just be made up by extra cream consumption.
Did you supplement electrolytes when you fasted?
Good one! Left to my own devices I'm a half teaspoon-of-salt-a-day guy, but a buddy gave me a box of chocolate LMNT; I put a packet in a quart of cold-brew, pretty good: https://drinklmnt.com/
In my experience, it makes fasting much less unpleasant.
This time I'm much less used to salt, since I don't add any except what's in meat and the sauce I buy. Hopefully that'll reduce the need for electrolytes during the fast.
No
“Muscle cramps, fatigue, and irritability”. Classic symptoms of keto flu / low electrolytes.
Given that I'd been in constant ketosis for over a year at that time, not sure keto flu would've been it. Electrolytes might very well be, but also could just be starvation symptoms.
> I noticed that I intuitively seemed to drink more coffee with cream to make up for it.
Not smiling smugly at all...
Were you predicting this?
That your appetite would adjust so that your weight naturally stayed the same short term, with a set point which moves around for mysterious reasons which may be related to protein intake and stored PUFA levels?
But my appetite increased yet I lost weight. That seems the opposite of a set point.
Your set point fell because were eating less protein and that reduced the effect of the PUFAs you're releasing from your fat.
At that point your homeostat can see more of your fat stores because more leptin is getting through, and decides that they're too high, and now you're going to burn fat one way or another unless you use willpower to override your autonomic systems/subconscious mind/appetite.
But also you were eating fewer calories in your normal meal. Presumably fewer than you needed to maintain your new lower set point. So you got peckish to make up and swilled some extra cream.
After a while, you arrive at your new set point and everything is stable.
> Your set point fell because were eating less protein and that reduced the effect of the PUFAs you're releasing from your fat.
Ok that could technically be true, but seems to really stretch it. Imagine we drove on the highway and we saw a car zooming past us, then braking, then speeding up again.
Is it possible he set his cruise control way down, then way back up? Sure, it's possible. But the much simpler explanation is that he let off the gas, braked, and then got back on the gas. It certainly isn't evidence FOR cruise control.
(Gas is what we call petrolinium in America.)
Depends on your priors I think. If cars only have gas pedals then the gas pedal explanation is best. If cars only have a speed control dial on the dashboard then likely someone's twiddling it.
So you need to know how the car works to work out what happened.
I wonder if anyone in the Middle East has studied Ramadan difficulty with/without Diabesity.
I don't know if daytime fasting would be enough for that to necessarily show up. I don't usually notice anything until 2+ days in.
Ramadan is actually associated with a surge in obesity and diabetes because they don't actually fast in any meaningful way, but rather, too many people gorge themselves on a Thanksgiving-size meal twice a day during all of Ramadan, once before sunrise and then after sunset.
Haha and people say intermittent fasting is good for you :) I do think it can lead to exactly this, which probably explains why I never lost much weight fasting. I would end the fast and binge on high-protein, high-fat, and probably back then high-PUFA meals. Easily gained all the lost weight back during the first meal.
During the pandemic I let myself go in terms of what I would eat, but kept my strict 20:4 or even 23:1 fasting schedule. But that one meal would include things like Domino's pizza, PUFA-laden Lofthouse sugar cookies, PUFA-soaked chips, etc.
Ended up gaining 5% of my body weight in a matter of months. I'm lucky it wasn't worse than that.
Man I went to Domino's with family recently. Of course I didn't eat anything. The "pizza" they received and ate stank of seed oils. It didn't even have pizza consistency. I mean I haven't eaten pizza in a decade and maybe this is normal now, but it was just this weird, greasy, grimey situation. Like the entire thing was laced with soybean oil. Even the leftovers were half liquid the next day.
Lately I've found it useful to go to my local pizza joint and get a ball of dough from them and then make the pizza myself at home so I know exactly what's in it. I'm sure the crust they give me has some seed oils but hopefully not too many compared to Domino's or Pizza Hut.
What's in the dough though :) But yea it's probably an improvement. Some people get into making their own dough.
And some less devout also eat/drink during the day but keep it a secret...
Two big meals per day is how sumos eat.
Yup, go in the pakistani supermarkets - and even the 'normal' ones in pakistani areas - round here, and during Ramadan they are promoting sweets and treats like crazy. People gorge in the evenings.
This is a good thought. I wonder this too.
So you think summer and exercise (or higher activity levels) will block weight loss?
I experience the same atm with all my clients. You have any explanation for this?
Ha, that is interesting indeed! It's pure speculation tbh, I have no good explanation. But clearly there's a phenomenon, and I'd love to be able to explain it ;)
My one idea is that in a sense sunlight & more spontaneous activity (which most people have in summer) are good for you. But good in the sense that it increases mTOR activation and makes you more anabolic more of the time.
But to lose weight, with the protein restriction, part of it might be not activating mTOR as much, and be catabolic more of the time.
In evolutionary times, it might have been the case that our ancestors would exercise & hunt all summer long, build some muscle, maybe build a little bit of fat. Definitely built fat in the fall by eating high-PUFA nuts and stuff like that. Then, in the winter, times would be catabolic and they'd be less active and lose a bit of muscle while drawing down their fat reserves.
These evolutionary speculations of course don't prove anything, but it does kinda make sense. Especially if your ancestors lived in a place with pretty extreme seasons, I guess. If your ancestors lived at the equator, the seasons might not have played such a big role. But in Northern Europe, where my ancestors are from, it's a huge difference in sunlight, temperature, and food environment. I doubt many carbs would've grown in the winter, so you better make muscle & adipose tissue while the sun shines, if you will.