ex150-10 review: Only lost .4lb fat, gained 4.5lbs lean mass

The Summer Malaise again?

yours truly, getting ready for delicious whipped cream meal w/ side of heavy cream

Why another run of the original ex150?

ex150-10 is the 10th run of my originally formulated ex150 experiment. The first diet I had major success on when starting to experiment almost 2 years ago, and on which I lost 20lbs in the first month.

Why a 10th run? For one, I had never had a single instance of this exact plan on which I didn’t lose at least 4lbs in 30 days. Whenever other experiments failed, this one always delivered. Maybe that was lucky timing or whatever, but it was somewhat of a “safe haven.”

In addition, it was kind of fun to think I’d done the exact same diet for 10 months total. I guess I like round numbers.

And as of late last year, I had made an informal rule for myself: don’t fuck around. Stick to the plan. Do what works.

The previous salmon experiment felt like fucking around: I gained 1lb in 30 days instead of losing 4lbs; I got a massive sunburn for the first time in over a year from some very moderate sun exposure, and I had a bunch of tiny little aches and issues that I had gotten used to not experiencing on ex150.

ex150-10 seemed like the obvious, safe choice.

Weight

Imagine my surprise when I also didn’t lose any weight at all on ex150-10! In retrospect, could it be that ex115salmon already fell into the “summer malaise” period?

Last summer I plateaued for most of 6 months, pretty much no matter what I did. Then, once winter arrived, I magically started losing fat again.

I have no idea why, but the pattern seems to repeat itself this year; at least so far.

My weight on ex150-10

As you can (barely) see, I started out below 220lbs. The protein refeed pushed me to 223.5lbs, and I spent most of the month around 220-222lbs, actually trending a bit higher at the end.

There’s a little bit of a confounder at the end: one day I skipped my regular ex150 ground beef lunch, and instead spent my protein budget on some brisket when going out for dinner. One could interpret the following 2 day spike as being caused by this. But I had plenty of spikes w/o changing up my diet before that, and I didn’t eat that much brisket, although it might’ve been more than my usual 150g.

I also ate half a steak at a friend’s grill party, although it was half of a porterhouse - so pretty big. But I seem to have dropped down to 221lbs again by the next day.

Since these were nearly at the end of the experiment, and I had plateaued/even trended up the whole time, I didn’t think these would taint the experiment much.

Workouts

Some notes I made during the experiment:

Crushing workouts, 2 new records in 1 day

Totally crushing workouts, getting crazy pumps

Visually think I got leaner

This was one of the crazier things, and also a reason I wasn’t particularly mad about the plateau/weight gain.

On previous rounds of ex150, my workout performance after the first week or so would steadily drop, until my reps using the x3 bar would drop in half. Then, 2-3 days after the next refeed, my performance would go up again.

I have speculated that this is muscle glycogen, which isn’t being replenished enough due to lack of carbs or protein. Or maybe it’s creatine? ex150creatine would be an interesting experiment.

But, somehow, ex150-10 was different. I didn’t ever lose workout performance. I set new PRs in almost every exercise the whole month.

I’ve now only got a single exercise (overhead press) left on the level 1 white band, and have made a bunch of progress on the others as well:

White band: overhead press
Light gray band: biceps curl, bent row
Dark gray band: front squat, triceps press
Black band: chest press, calf raise, deadlift

This is after about 8 months of training with the x3 bar pretty consistently. Here’s a screenshot from my workout tracking system:

Green means I worked out that day, red means I didn’t. The “?” means I haven’t yet worked out today. These are the last 3 months.

Low-volume, high-frequency x3

I’ve modified the x3 workout plan by running super low volume, and spreading it out as far as possible. That means I usually only do 1 set of 1 exercise per day, but I work out nearly every day (per plan, at least).

The only day with 2 exercises is the last day of the circle, in which I combine calf raises & biceps curls. I put them at the end & combined them because I think these are the most useless exercises, so if I do worse at them due to being fatigued, it’s ok.

Since my #1 exercise is the deadlift, and I’ve put that at the beginning at the cycle, I tend to take 1 whole day off between cycles now. That’s because the x3 calf raise requires you to get into a locked out deadlift position first, and even 1 rep of black band deadlift had a pretty big impact on the next day’s actual deadlift workout.

This is super high frequency training, yet super low volume: I’m doing 1 set of each exercise every 8 days, less if I skip days. The x3 beginner plan has you do 2 sets of each exercise per 7 days, and after 4 weeks it ramps up to 3 sets per 7 days. For reference, I typically work out less than 60 seconds per day.

I’ve cut the beginner’s plan volume in half and then some.

Muscle growth on hyper-low-protein

But, apparently, I’m still gaining muscle on this, so yay me. Maybe I’m leaving some potential gains on the table, just like with my low protein consumption. But muscle gain is not my main priority right now, it’s just a nice-to-have.

Anyway, what was different this time around? Why didn’t my workout performance tank, and why did I see new records across the board instead?

And why did I not lose much fat? Are the 2 related?

No idea. But it certainly could be; I feel like I just “came into my own” with x3 the last 2 months. Before that I was learning to use the bands, getting re-acquainted with lifting, and maybe returning to my previous strength/muscle levels.

The last 2 months I’ve gotten crazy pumps, broken PR after PR, and, visually, I’d say I look more muscular than I ever did doing CrossFit or lifting weights.

Maybe all that anabolic activity is interfering with fat loss?

DEXA: 30.2% body fat, lowest ever

Similarly to the end of ex115salmon, I went into the DEXA somewhat anxious.

While my weight had plateaued/gone up, I felt visually leaner, and I knew my strength had improved markedly. So any gain would’ve likely been mostly lean mass.

And the DEXA confirmed this. I got my lowest body fat % ever at 30.2%. My fat mass decreased by .4lb, and my lean mass increased by 4.5lbs.

Hopefully I’ll break into the 20s next month :) That would feel like a milestone.

Looking good in the mirror

I’ve really filled out some muscle these last few months. My arms look pretty huge, both biceps and triceps.

I’ve gotten comments on my calves. Apparently this is a normal fat-guy thing; all fat guys have big calves underneath just from carrying the weight.

Presumably I’ve now lost enough fat on my legs that my calf muscles pop out.

Pretty much the only thing that still looks chubby is my stomach and love handles, I’d say. If I lean out in the middle, I think I’ll be the leanest & most muscular I’ve ever been. Maybe another 10-20lbs or so.

Random notes

Feeling good

Day 8:
- Vaguely feeling better in every way than on salmon
- Not as crab-red after very hot magnesium bath
- First day of the trial I didn't finish evening cream

About 1 week into ex150-10, I felt “just like on ex150” again after the salmon experiment made me feel… I don’t even know, “kind of sub-optimal in many small ways?”

I felt like I could take hot magnesium salt baths again w/o getting red skin. I got hit by cement-truck satiety hard on that day.

1 week to uncoupling?

1 week to UCP-1 uncoupling study

I’ve seen a researcher say that it takes mice on a protein-restricted diet about 7 days until UCP-1, the mitochondrial uncoupling protein, starts being up-regulated.

This would mesh nicely with the experience on the ex150 trial, in which it took people several days to “get over” a cheat meal, and up to a week if they cheated for more than just one meal.

It really does seem like ex150 has an “on-ramp” in which you mostly lose water weight, and after that it’s firing on all cylinders. But getting out of that mode has a big switching cost; you’ll waste another week to get back up to operating speed.

That means if you cheat weekly with high protein, you’ll probably never lose any weight.

Downsized my underwear

Size M boxers down from L, were too loose around legs

On a long walk, my boxers began to chafe on my legs. I decided to order new ones at size M and they fit well.

I’m now wearing size 34 pants, size L t-shirts, and size M boxers.

For someone who was ~300lbs not too long ago and could barely walk a block without breathing heavily, this feels amazing.

The fact that I went down in clothing size also made me pretty confident that the plateau/weight gain on ex150-10 wasn’t fat, but lean mass.

Drinking liquid cream is tricky

One night drank 2 cups of cream w/ coffee, 30 min later sickening sense of satiety

On my way out the door to see the movie Civil War with a friend, I realized that I’d be getting home past midnight, and would likely be too lazy to whip up some cream then. Plus, eating directly before bed is lame anyway.

So I decided to just drink a cup of heavy cream straight. Despite being on a heavy cream diet, I actually do this quite rarely - my cream is usually mixed into coffee, or whipped, or at the very least I whip it briefly into milkshake consistency.

Then, I decided I would have another cup. So I drank about 400-500ml of cream in the span of a minute.

On the drive to the theater, I got hit by cement-truck satiety so hard I felt sick. The first 30 minutes of the movie I felt like I was overdosing on saturated fat, every instinct in me screaming “THIS IS DEATH!”

Then it settled down and I nearly forgot about it. Lucky I wrote it down to remember now.

Civil War

By the way, I highly recommend the movie. Here are some impressions I wrote down that night:

I honestly didn’t expect the movie to be PRO civil war.

The real civil war is the friends we lost along the way.

Civil War, brought to you by the Ford Excursion. Ford - built tough.

Weird to make it a feel-good road trip movie. Good movie though.

The Refeed

The refeed this time was… complicated. Last time I mainly went for steak & more beef, but this time I wasn’t really in the mood for meat much. (Might there be a connection to workout performance/glycogen/creatine?)

Instead, I was craving cheese. I must’ve eaten 3lbs of cheese during the refeed, maybe more.

Also had some dark chocolate, some greek yogurt, and macadamia nuts. I probably hadn’t had macadamia nuts in 5 years prior to this. They’re pretty much the only nut not super high in PUFA, at around 2%. They’re mostly MUFA (77%) with a little bit of SFA (16%).

I had planned for the refeed to be 2-3 days, but then Memorial Day weekend came right after that and I hung out with friends & family a lot. So I chose to delay the beginning of the next experiment a little and just try not to go crazy in the meantime.

On travel days I basically stuck to ex150, getting 2 burger patties at McDonald’s or Burger King for lunch, and drinking Starbucks lattes & some heavy cream throughout the day. This is my franken-road-trip version of ex150. It’s just so convenient when traveling: you can get these things anywhere, they’re fast, they digest well and you don’t have any bloat in your belly when sitting still for hours on end..

After I got back I indulged a little more, and had another giant bowl of yogurt with dark chocolate, more macadamia nuts, and some fresh berries. Plus some roast beef & more cheese.

It was delicious, and I gained 8lbs during that entire period lol.

You can see the rapid gain to 228lbs in the first 3 days. Then I plateau as I stick to road-trip informal ex150 over the long weekend, and gain a little bit more from the yogurt & protein when coming back.

Notes from the refeed:

Probably ate 1,500+ kcals in one meal but got very strong satiety. Feels like my satiety is normalizing?

This was the very first meal I had after ex150-10. I chose greek yogurt w/ dark chocolate & macadamia nuts. I ate a giant bowl, but I also got very, very satiated.

Interestingly, a few days into the protein refeed, that satiety was gone. Maybe a few days of eating high protein eradicates my “properly functioning satiety” again? I’m pretty certain I didn’t eat any more linoleic acid during the refeed than normal.

1 day after protein refeed 0.2mmol/L ketones - by far my lowest reading ever?

This was surprising. I don’t usually measure my ketones regularly, but I had 1 strip left and decided to just go for it.

And I got a BHB level so low, it doesn’t even qualify as nutritional ketosis (0.5mmol/L).

Remember I had levels of 5.5-6.5mmol/L regularly not too long ago.

The high-protein refeed really kicked me out of ketosis for good.

Speculation about The Summer Malaise

Let’s compare to last year:

In 2023, I lost a TON of weight until May. At that speed, I was confident I’d be at 185lbs or so by end of year lol.

Then summer hit. I basically plateau’d from May/June to October/November, depending a bit how you count. For example, you could argue there was a plateau from February to Apil, but then I rapidly dropped 5lbs to a new low end of May/beginning of June.

If we look at my DEXAs from that time, we can see that it wasn’t lean mass I was putting on (and this was before I started working out with x3), it was fat. My body fat didn’t start coming down again until around November/December, just like the weight indicates.

So what would be causing the “summer plateau?” Let’s speculate. Because, honestly, that’s all I’ve got for now.

Excess cArOliEs

Whenever I plateau, people quickly start telling me that it’s “all that cream.” But this explains too much: I’ve been drinking “all that cream” when I lost 20lbs a month, too. I’ve plateau’d before, during, and after eating a lot of cream.

But was I drinking more cream than before? Maybe summer made me more thirsty, and ad-lib iced coffee w/ cream led me to drink way more cream than normal?

This seemed quite plausible, so I decided to measure my cream intake for a day. When I first recorded the cream amount on ex150, it was about 500ml per day.

Now, I measured 725ml. Wow, quite a bit higher! 225ml of extra cream? In a way it made sense; as I lost body fat, there would be less adipose flux available from it. Naturally, I’d expect my appetite to increase. I’d lost about 30lbs since that original post, and an increase in 225ml of cream per “natural appetite” for that amount of fat lost seems reasonable.

Then I noticed the cream I’d been using that week, a fancy $10 no-gum, no-carrageenan, low-temp pasteurized brand from Whole Foods, was much lower in fat than normal heavy cream.

Most heavy cream indicates 6g of fat per serving size (usually 15g). This one only had 4.5g of fat.

=> ((725 / 15) * (6 - 4.5) * 9) / 3
217.5

(725g of cream, divided by 15g serving size, times the missing cream in each serving, times 9kcal/g of fat divided by 3 because this cream is about 1/3 fat (4.5 / 15)).

Lol, dang it. Pretty much the exact number I was eating more would be explained by the missing fat in this other brand of cream. It’s actually astonishing that my appetite would intuitively land at nearly the exact same number without me noticing. An accidental, unknowing blinded experiment, if you will.

I decided to repeat the experiment with my standard store brand cream, which has 6g fat per serving.

I finished that day at 550ml. A tiny bit higher than my original 500ml, but not nearly enough to explain a total plateau of weight vs. the huge drops I got at first, or even the 4lbs/mo I saw on ex150-9.

I even cheated with an extra coffee after my usual 3pm coffee cut-off, and I ate more cream for dinner than I usually do at about 350ml. Normally I’m closer to 200-250ml.

The Sun Is Trying To Kill Me?

The sun is supposed to be good for you! I spent a lot of time in the sun last summer. For the first time in my life nearly immune to sunburn, I tanned and went for walks and did outdoorsy stuff way more than ever before.

Maybe this sunlight is good in a sense; allowing for lean mass gains? But maybe that inhibits fat loss for the same period? Something something mTOR?

Summer coincidental; recovery/restructuring effort?

Maybe it’s not summer per se, maybe it’s just a regular phenomenon that happens to fall into summer for me. I went from 290lbs to 235lbs just before the 2023 summer plateau started.

Perhaps my body just needed some time to “restructure” and “reshuffle” and “reorganize” stuff? It’s a pretty common observation in people who lose a ton of weight, having long plateaus for no apparent reason. Often times these are attributed to “not sticking to the diet” or “losing lean mass” or some other stuff.

But I did none of those things. I stuck to the diet like a m*******er, I didn’t lose any lean mass by DEXA, I actually got MORE sun exposure and MORE exercise in than when I lost a lot of weight initially..

Maybe it’s like decluttering your house: your body just took out a bunch of trash, and it wasn’t exactly 1 item per room, it was somewhat randomly clustered. Now that there’s more space everywhere, the old patterns might not make as much sense, and a few things were rearranged.

Our old friend, linoleic acid?

Or could this effect simply be linoleic acid from the adipose tissue I just lost? Let’s graph some OmegaQuant linoleic acid results vs. my weight:

If you squint right, it seems plausible. When I lose weight, my LA goes up. When I plateau, it slowly goes down.

Ignore that last very steep drop, that was an experiment with OmegaQuants I’ll post about shortly.

Unfortunately, that experiment also means these data points might all contain quite a bit of noise. But it’s an interesting theory, and if you believe in seed oils, it makes a lot of sense.

Or maybe it’s solar flares, or something else completely different.

What’s next?

Unfortunately, not losing much on ex150 means I don’t have a baseline now. If I run any experiment, and I don’t lose weight on it, that doesn’t prove much - people not losing weight is pretty normal.

So, hesitant to try anything risky and then having to throw away the experiment, I decided to do a slight variation of ex150: ex150ffinduction.

It’s ex150 with a fat fast induction. I’ve previously done a few fat fasts for 14 days each, and they led to insane water weight loss, but then not much fat loss after. At least, not more than regular ex150.

But getting rid of the water weight more quickly isn’t that bad.

The plan is to do 7 days of fat fast (just cream + occasional spoons of sauce for flavor), then slide into the remaining 3 weeks as just regular ex150. Maybe this will speed up the mitochondrial uncoupling?

Spoiler alert: I’m already back down to 220lbs after 4 days on this, which means I’ve lost the water weight faster than I put it on.