ex150-12 review: Holiday Edition

Lost 4lbs of digestive weight, maybe 1-2lbs of fat

This one’s pretty short. It’s the 12th iteration of ex150, my cream diet. I’ve been doing this in same variation for the majority of the last 2 years. It is hence no longer “a diet” and just feels like “normal eating” to me.

glass of heavy cream wearing a santa hat, christmas mood

When I’m back on ex150 for a few days, I forget I’m even doing an experiment, and suddenly it’s day 23 and I’m nearly done. I could probably eat like this forever.

That said, it was The Season and I went relatively loose compared to the rest of the year. That was part of why I just went with ex150 again, I knew that I’d be doing more dietary exceptions than usual, traveling quite a bit, and be in social situations more often.

Any real, new experiment would’ve likely been compromised by this, which is one reason why I wanted to get the rice diet behind me before the holidays arrived.

As expected, almost nothing was new/out of the ordinary. Here’s the entirety of my notes for the 30 days. Remember, this was directly after the rice diet, and many of these comments are in comparison to it:

Day 1
ZOMG whipped cream cement truck satiety lol.. I missed it

Day 2
Definitely woke up earlier on the rice diet, 7:30-8am, now 8:30-9:30am.
Woke up from 9am alarm first time in... 2+ weeks today?

Day 21
Christmas food had more beef than usual, some dark chocolate

Day 22
Christmas food had pork & bacon in it ngmi. Ate a small portion.

Day 29
Been eating pickles & creme fraiche almost every day recently

Day 30
Realized parsnips have carbs, similar to potatoes. Had some over the last days, which would've given me maybe 20-30g of carbs per day.

Activity level a lot higher, walked 45m - 3h a day, sometimes with inclines, seems to have made zero difference

ex_rice vs. ex150

Let’s look at my weight in comparison to last month’s rice diet, for reference. The left green shaded period is the rice diet, the right green shaded period is ex150-12.

I clearly dropped about 4lbs immediately. It’s sort of hard to tell if this is a plateau effect or a trend. The thin yellow line is the 7-day rolling average.

I was ~228lbs most of the days, but had more frequent 226lbs days toward the end. I think this fluctuation was due to my holiday “cheat meals” - while I would eyeball a small portion of meat when invited to Christmas dinners, I probably ate a bit more than 150g during those, and the meals were typically pretty salty. I don’t usually add any salt to my food, and this extra salt might’ve caused a bit of water retention.

Now in isolation:

Uh *squints*, could sort of be a trend continuing downwards? This morning (a few days later) I was 225.75lbs. But we’ll see I guess. If anything, I lost maybe 1-2lbs after the initial, rapid plateau effect. Those 4 plateau-pounds were probably just bloat & digestive matter from a pure starch vs. 90% fat diet.

At this point, around 220-230lbs, I’d previously only lose a few pounds even in a good month. So it would make sense that, if I lost any fat, it wouldn’t be very much. If I drop below a 225lbs average in another month, that’d tell us a trend.

Loosey-goosey

This being the holiday season, I allowed myself more exceptions than normal.

• I ate pork for the first time in exactly 1 year. My last pork was the previous holidays. One small portion, but it was wrapped in bacon.

• I ate a very salty steak. My God it was salty.

• I ate some vegetables that family members had around. One of them was parsnips. I didn’t realize until a few days later that parsnips are relatively high in starch, pretty much exactly the same amount as potatoes. I didn’t eat tons of it, but there were a few parsnips divided among family meals every day for a couple of days, and I might’ve gotten 20-30g of starch per day from it.

• I had access to some pretty decent, high quality creme fraiche. (If you haven’t had it, creme fraiche is basically the exact same consistency as sour cream.) I had previously experimented with sour cream and it had gone horribly wrong: I developed incredible hyperphagia and ate 3lbs of sour cream, only stopping because I ran out and the store was closed. I wasn’t sure why; sour cream does have significantly more carbs & protein than heavy cream, but it’s also… sour. And maybe some of the processing is weird?
  Creme fraiche has pretty much the exact same macros as heavy cream; so the excess carbs/protein would not be an issue. It is slightly sour, I’d say, but less so than sour cream. Eating a portion of creme fraiche with a spoon did not cause any hyperphagia. In fact, it seemed kind of boring, and I mostly finished because I was bored. So while it didn’t create cement-truck satiety, it also didn’t cause any hyperphagia. I’d often eat some instead of whipping cream for dinner.

• I discovered that sliced pickles topped with creme fraiche improves both. It’s sort of like a very thick salad with a very thick, creamy sauce. A few times, I chucked in sliced carrots as well. I think I ate this “salad” once a day for a week or 2. I’m sure I ate it twice a handful of days, but not that often. Pickles are quite salty, and I think the salt content + subsequent water retention might’ve messed with my scale weight a bit. As soon as I stopped the pickles + creme fraiche, the scale went down a pound or 2.

• I ate a few squares of dark chocolate over the holidays, but I discovered that I am still quite sick of dark chocolate. For reference, I inhaled dark chocolate for a decade straight until I did a chocolate truffle diet, and apparently made myself sick of chocolate. So I wasn’t even tempted to eat more of the dark chocolate.

• Due to boredom, I went for a lot of walks. Some of them were only 30-45 minutes, but a few times I walked up to 3 hours. A few of these longer ones involved mild hills and I had to breathe a bit, but most were leisurely strolls. None of them I’d really count as “exercise.” This walking didn’t seem to make very much difference in terms of fat loss, if any. It was fun though. I like walking now that I’m no longer morbidly obese lol. It was pretty cold out, often below freezing, and I enjoy the outdoors when it’s all snowy.

2 day refeed

I mostly did the refeed because I’d gotten some dark chocolate for Christmas and didn’t want to throw it away. I wasn’t even able to finish a single bar. I sprinkled most of it into a jar of yogurt and added macadamias, but even that wasn’t super enticing. I almost literally choked it down. I used to love yogurt, dark chocolate, and macadamias!

I’m hesitant to call this one a “protein refeed” because more protein was the last thing on my mind. I ate some leftover beef one day, maybe doubling my meat from 150 to 300g that day.

I also ate 2 blocks of cheese. One, a wine-infused brie type cheese, was quite good. The other, a roquefort, was a huge disappointment. Dry & flavorless. I finished it, but didn’t really enjoy it.

I threw the remainder of that gifted bar of dark chocolate away after the 2 days. Just writing this sentence down seems bizarre to me - I probably ate 1 bar of dark chocolate PER DAY on average for much of my 9-year keto career. That I’ve ruined this very specific flavor myself is sort of funny & curious and I still haven’t fully grokked it.

After learning that I can keep my Non-24 away on a 100% rice diet, I didn't go quite as keto for this refeed: I had some (seed oil free) fancy organic chocolate pudding made w/ sugar and some lower-cocoa milk chocolate with lots of sugar.

All in all, I ate about 80g sugar (milk chocolate + chocolate pudding) in one sitting that day, felt super hyper & my heart was racing. I thought my glucose must be 200+... it was 88mg/dL. I suppose fructose works differently and doesn’t necessarily raise your blood glucose. It didn’t feel great, but passed after about 2 hours.

This was the swampiest I’ve eaten in a while, and the Non-24 did not come back. Then again, 2 days is usually not enough to make a dent and this doesn’t prove much.

I think I probably won’t even do a refeed next time, unless I develop some cravings over the next month. Just didn’t seem worth it at all.

On the other hand, I also didn’t gain much weight, because I didn’t deviate very much from my normal diet, and only for barely 2 days.

Next?

For logistical reasons, I started ex150-13 after the refeed. I am toying with the idea of doing Anabology’s Honey Diet next.

For one, it’ll be interesting to see if my Non-24 stays away like it did on the rice diet.

Second, I want to see if an almost pure sugar diet really works better than a starch one. Since neither honey nor fruit have nearly any protein, this will be a significantly lower-protein experiment than the rice diet.

I’ll probably do ad-lib fruit & honey in the morning until the afternoon, fast 3-4h, and then eat my normal ex150 meal for dinner. Maybe I’ll make it a bit leaner, I’ll have to think about it. People who like the honey diet seem to have slightly different opinions on the amount of fat in there.

Anyway, Happy New Year and I’ll see you next time.