ex150-11 review: weight stable for 30 days

Nothing really happened

Having recently done some experiments on fasting, and several months of ex115, I decided to just go back to good, old ex150 for a month. This is the 11th run, meaning I’ve eaten this exact diet without modification for almost a year, on and off. That’s not even counting all the experiments that are very adjacent.

Changes over my last bout of ex115:

• Cooking in suet tallow + butter again (I had cut out the suet, just in case that messed with fat loss.. didn’t help)

• Back to 80/20 ground chuck beef from the grocery story instead of the roughly 85/15 grass-fed beef I’d been using the past few months. Again, just in case, but again, made no difference.

Results

As you can see, I was pretty stable around 218-219lbs before my last protein refeed. On that, I spiked dramatically, and my weight only came down to about 223-224lbs.

It stayed there for the entire month. One time toward the end I saw 225lbs in the morning, but I think it was just a hydration change. After that, I saw 222lbs a few times and the average seems to have gone back down.

The DEXA says that this average gain of 4lbs is about half lean mass and half fat. That means my body fat percentage is only slightly higher (around 32%) this time, because both lean and fat mass moved almost exactly in tandem.

I did make 1 exception to the diet this time, which I haven’t done in forever. A friend invited me to a BBQ, and I had about half a pound of beef there in addition to my lunch portion of ex150 meat slop.

Choice notes

Day 1

Unbelievable how good it feels to eat "normal" again after a protein refeed haha.
150g of 80/20 ground chuck felt like a huge amount of meat after 2+ months of ex115

Eating just a tiny meal for lunch and whipped cream for dinner felt so... right :)

Day 3

Just feeling great all day instead of bloated & painful feels so.. great

Day 6

99.4°F, hours after eating last.
Kinda been hypoglycemic a lot the last few days, weird after 3 day high protein refeed

Day 10

Went to a friend's BBQ for dinner, ate about half a pound of meat on top of my normal ex150 slop lunch that day. Did not eat dinner cream.

Feels like that little protein only once didn't break my satiety or did much else damage, wasn't even up that much weight the next morning.

But was suuuuper thirsty all night, maybe the meat was salted a lot? Came home and drank 3 glasses of water in a row

Day 16

Whipped vs. liquid cream makes such a huge difference. Drank liquid cream last few days, same amount in cup, sipping over 30 min, still massive difference to whipped.

Day 20

Hit 99.1°F a couple times the last few days

Day 23

Broke my 2nd cheap Chinese Amazon stick blender whipping cream.
Amazon next day delivery to the rescue!

Blenders

These cheap Chinese knock-off stick blenders are really poor quality. This is the second time one has failed on me. I’m back on the Braun blender. It was on sale for $75, which makes it almost as cheap as the knock-offs. Its motor is quieter and the pistol-style trigger is much more comfortable for whipping cream, where you have to hold down the button for a minute straight. Allegedly it has less wattage than the Chinese knock-off, but it doesn’t seem to whip any slower.

This means I’m on my 5th stick blender in about 2 years of daily cream whipping. The 2 Chinese ones broke. I threw out the cheap Braun one because it was impossible to hold down the button for a minute without getting finger cramps.

One time I threw out the same, higher-trim Braun blender I am using again now. Not because it stopped working, but because I accidentally dropped the whipping attachment down the garbage disposal. I was able to fish it back out, but it was covered in some pretty nasty gunk and it seemed.. imprudent to just keep on using it.

So far, I like this pistol-grip Braun the best. It has a pretty nifty actual blender attachment too, which I’ve used a handful of times. It has a spring-loaded mechanism at the blade so you can avoid that weird “blender sucking itself to the bottom of your container” phenomenon so common with stick blenders. Overall, it’s a pretty high-quality feeling and comfortable to use blender.

The Refeed: non-0% satiety, that’s great progress!

I’m writing this on day 2 of the protein refeed.

Some notes from high-protein day 1:

First protein breakfast got super cement truck satiety, didn't finish skyr

This will likely go away in 6-12h

Haha j/k, 1h later and protein-induced hyperphagia has set in. Eating 16oz of yogurt with a bar of chocolate and half a bag of macadamias sprinkled in, and cheese, and beef sticks.

I have to say, overall I got much better satiety than any other protein refeed I remember. I didn’t finish & threw away: 1/3 of a steak dinner, half a bar of dark chocolate, greek yogurt w/ macadamia nuts & chocolate sprinkled in, several organic, grass-fed beef sticks.

This morning I only had 2 cream coffees (!) because I was likely so satiated from the yogurt breakfast.

While “ad-lib protein” is probably still a bad strategy for me, this feels like significant progress. I remember my satiety completely shut off from a high-protein meal, even just a few months ago. This time, it felt like my satiety was 50% of what it should be on a VERY high-protein, high-fat meal. That’s honestly amazing.

I still cut my protein refeed down to 2 days, having originally planned to do (and bought supplies for) 3 days. I just don’t like all those foods that much any more.

The steak was honestly meh. I make a mean steak, having been into carnivore for a few years. It’s just.. not as good as ground beef chuck, lol. I made a filet, then cut it up and mixed it into vegetables & sauce for meat slop lol, recreating my ex150 meal. The slop just tastes better.

Yogurt still gives me a certain hedonic “kick” as does cheese. But they go away very quickly. I did my strategy of buying those tiny slices of cheese the grocery store sells for $1-2, leftovers from cutting normal portions. That gives me 5 flavors and a hedonic hit each time, instead of having to finish a giant piece of cheese that doesn’t taste like much for 3/4 of it.

Chocolate, once again, disappointing. I really ruined chocolate for myself last year when I did the chocolate truffle experiments.

Update: I didn’t finish my 2nd steak that I prepared on day 2, either. It was good, I was just so satiated. I was uncomfortably full, too. What I’m used to is being uncomfortably full but not having any satiety, so this is, again progress.

For dinner on the 2nd protein day I made a 6-egg omelette and it was super satiating. An omelette! Eggs & air! I have never experience ANY satiety from any omelette of any size ever before.

I managed to wolf the omelette down, but it was work and took several attempts. Previously, I would’ve eaten the whole thing and felt no satiety. This felt like another huge win.

What changed for this much-improved satiety from high-protein/high-fat meals? I’m not sure, I didn’t change anything. These are pretty much the exact same foods I’ve eaten on protein refeeds for the last year.

Maybe avoiding PUFAs for long enough has finally started having an effect on my satiety outside of a pure cream diet?

OmegaQuant update

After I recently water-fasted for 5 days twice in a row, my OmegaQuant Complete linoleic acid was the lowest it had ever registered on a fasted test result at 16.55%. That was about 2% lower than a month prior and I wasn’t sure if it was really a dramatic drop, or just a measuring artifact.

This month’s OmegaQuant came back at 17.4% linoleic acid, about 1% higher and exactly between the previous 2 results.

I don’t know what that means, haha.

Conclusion

It seems pretty obvious that, at this point, ex150-style diets with ad-lib cream allow me to effortlessly maintain my weight, but not lose more weight. Last year, that magically changed around this time once winter started, and I have no clue why. Maybe it’ll happen again?

I didn’t measure carolies during this month, but I intuitively think I am consuming more cream than ever. When I started, I was just over a pint a day with around 550g. When I measured for the Doubly Labeled Water measurement, I was closer to 650g/day.

Not having counted exactly, I think I’m now closer to a quart. A few days this month I didn’t whip my heavy cream in the evening, and I can easily drink 2 cups liquid even though I can barely finish 1 cup whipped.

Is consuming more cream a cause or a symptom of something? Who knows.

What’s Next

Spoiler alert: I bought a rice cooker & 15lbs of white rice from Whole Foods.

That’s right, I’ve finally decided to bite the (Non-24) bullet and try HCLFLP, specifically a version of the Rice Diet.

This will almost definitely mess with my sleep, but this is a decent time with work and stuff where I can miss a few days and not cause too much trouble.

I haven’t been out of ketosis since 2022, when I last did a carb experiment for 2 weeks. Wish me luck lol.