ex150-13 report: Man discovers food

Is protein uniquely bad, even compared to swampy sugar?

As the name implies, this was the 13th time I did straight up ex150. That means I’ve eaten the exact same meal for 13 months now :)

The ex150 part of this was just more of the same. I had zero notes written down because it’s just so routine at this point.

Almost all of the interesting stuff happened in the refeed this time

Results: 2-3lbs down

Here’s my weight during that time. I started off above 226lbs and ended up averaging around 224-225lbs, even dropping into the 222.x range briefly.

I had the flu about a week in, which I think caused the 1 day of very high weight spike to nearly 230lbs. Maybe fever/inflammation.

There was a long plateau, and then about 1 week from the end, there was sort of a whoosh.

I ate pork by accident for one meal. This marks the 3rd time I’ve eaten pork in the last 1.5 years, since I learned about Modern PUFA Theory. Chicken only once.

NAC

I did take N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC) for 10 days toward the end. A friend saw great results and said I should give it a try. I didn’t notice any difference, and so I stopped after 10 days. I took 4 of these pills daily for a total of 3,600mg/day.

The NAC roughly coincides with the whoosh, except for the first day (when my weight went up) and the last 2 (when it went back up). Coincidence?

Trend since rice diet

Let’s take a look at the last 4 months:

Sure looks like I gained 4-5lbs of fat during the rice diet that didn’t come off right away after going back on ex150. From around 223-224lbs to 228-229lbs.

And ever since, on ex150, I’ve been steadily sliding back down.

Could be it was the rice per se. Could be that it was the combination of a high-protein refeed directly before, and then going straight into the rice diet.

“Man discovers food”

After the rice diet showed me that I don’t seem to need keto for my Non-24 circadian rhythm disorder any more, I already tried a bit of (seed oil free) swamping during the last refeed.

This time, I decided not to do a “high-protein refeed” at all, but instead a “moderate-protein/swampy” refeed.

This involved eating a lot of things that I haven’t eaten in a decade (9 years of strict keto), and some even a decade and a half (keto + paleo before that).

Very curiously, I didn’t get many of the bad metabolic (or other) effects that I cut them out for back then.

Astonished with my newfound ability to do ok on these foods, I kept tweeting about it. One commenter wryly remarked “Man discovers food” - which is not wrong, lol.

After 9 years of strict keto, there are just a lot of things I’d forgotten the taste of.

Honestly, most of them were pretty underwhelming, if not bad haha.

Here’s what I ate during the refeed:

• Cheese: Ok, this isn’t new, I just like cheese. The majority of my protein during this refeed came from the cheese.

• Walker’s ginger shortbread: Scottish cookies with 4 ingredients (flour, sugar, water, salt) and some ginger. Crazy how you can make delicious cookies from just those 4 ingredients, without any of the chemicals that are present in American cookies.

• Whole grain bread: I hadn’t had bread in about 15 years, having to give it up around age 25 because it gave me insane heartburn and I couldn’t fall asleep at night. This was when I was doing paleo. I didn’t get any heartburn or discomfort from this bread. I made sure to get a fancy, organic bread w/ no “fortification” or added seed oils in it. Although whole grains do contain some PUFA (they are seeds, after all), I’m not planning on making this a regular thing, and I probably got around 3-5g PUFA from this bread in total. I used the bread to make butter, egg, cheese, & avocado sandwiches.

• Milk chocolate, chocolates: what people mean when they say chocolate is unhealthy. Very sweet, lots of sugar, swampy as heck just on their own. Surprisingly, I got very strong satiety both from the milk chocolate and, a day later, the chocolates. Imagine that - walking away from sugary chocolates cause you’re too satiated. Impossible!

• Avocado: overrated

• Eggs: made scrambled egg sandwiches. They were ok, not amazing.

• Fruit: Apple, kiwi, peach, pear. I hadn’t had fruit the entire 9 years of keto, I think, maybe with the exception of some berries here or there. To my surprise, the apple was my favorite, whereas I didn’t enjoy the peach or the pear much.

• Beef stew: I made this cause I had made some bone broth with beef bones I’d had in the freezer forever. Someone told me that the added glycine from the broth gave him much higher satiety despite the high protein content from the beef. I didn’t experience any such satiety, and 30 minutes after a bowl of stew found myself very hungry for more. So I threw it away. Froze the broth for another time.

• Pemmican: I made a few batches of pemmican, just to try making my own. I ate about 70g of it just to try it out, and froze the rest for another day. If you haven’t tried making your own pemmican, it’s super easy & fun and I recommend it. I’ll write a post about it at some point.

• A serving of coffee flavored skyr: skyr is like yogurt. High protein, zero satiety.

Swampy sugar satiety

What was super crazy to me: I got VERY STRONG satiety from 1. very swampy food, and 2. essentially sugar candy. Maybe not cement-truck satiety, but very close.

I remember eating so much chocolate & candy in college that I threw up. I’m talking my roommate and I would go spend $100 at the store just on candy and eat all of it in one evening. There was never any satiety. Nada.

This time, I walked away from a bar of milk chocolate halfway through.

First I thought that maybe it was just the first meal, or first day of the refeed. I’d previously experienced very strong satiety during the first meal of a high-protein refeed, but only a few hours later, and definitely the next day, all satiety was gone - the same exact meal would make me ravenous!

This time, that didn’t happen expect once very briefly with the beef stew, but I threw that away instead of continuing to eat the protein.

On day 3 of the swamp refeed, I went to the kitchen with the express purpose of eating chocolates. Once there, I took one look at the chocolates sitting on the kitchen counter, and turned around.

I just couldn’t eat any more.

I can not repeat enough how INSANE that is to me. I spent my entire childhood and the first half of my twenties constantly craving chocolate & candy. Then I spent over a decade abstaining from sugar and carbs pretty much completely, with dark chocolate (85%) and heavy cream being just about the sweetest things I’d eat.

And now I’m getting lasting satiety from a mere 4-6 pieces of sugary milk chocolate, or a similar amount of chocolates?

What is this magick?!

Protein uniquely bad?

Even a few months ago, probably until I ran the rice diet trial, I would’ve speculated that protein destroys my satiety because it “turns into sugar.”

That is now hard to believe. Apparently, I can not only get satiety on a pure glucose (rice) diet, but also on a mixed, swampy diet very high in sugar, as long as the protein is pretty moderate.

Are the Peaters right about sugar?! At least in the context of moderate protein/low-PUFA?

And it wasn’t just the chocolate. I also got strong satiety from cheese sandwiches. At one point I made 2 cheese avocado sandwiches and finished them. The next meal, I made 3 - but I couldn’t even touch the 3rd and put it in the fridge. Despite it having delicious cheese on it!

As a kid, I’d routinely eat an entire loaf of bread for breakfast, given enough time. The usual constraint was the impending arrival of the school bus.

On my previous high-protein refeeds, satiety would always be gone on day 2 at the latest, but usually halfway through day 1.

This time, satiety never really left. Even late on day 3, candy would give me satiety.

Another explanation could be that my linoleic acid levels are finally dropping, and I’ll experience more satiety overall going forward.

Swamp/Sugar Glucose

Blood glucose wasn’t that terrible either: now admittedly I wasn’t drinking OJ on an empty stomach, the sugar was usually mixed with fat and at least a bit of protein (e.g. in the cheese). And sugar is half fructose, which doesn’t raise blood glucose as much.

But the highest blood glucose I ever tested the entire refeed was 153mg/dL after 2 whole grain sandwiches, half a bar of milk chocolate, and some shortbread cookies with tea.

I will say that I tested above 100mg/dL (but below 110) fasted on day 2 and day 3, which is bad. Could be that it was the lacking 1st phase insulin response due to coming off a 90% fat keto diet. Or maybe the swamping delays either digestion or the glucose spike. Or maybe my dawn effect was just higher. Since I’m currently not wearing a CGM, I can’t really say.

But given how my peaks were never particularly high, I wasn’t worried much. On the pure rice diet, my fasting glucose was typically in the 80s or low 90s. And I’ve passed every OGTT (oral glucose tolerance test) I’ve ever taken. So I know I can handle glucose on its own fine.

Surprisingly, I had ketones of 0.3mmol/l on day 3 of the swampy moderate protein sugar refeed, and it even rose to 0.7 after a walk! Anything over 0.5mmol/l counts as “ketosis” and so I managed to be in (mild) ketosis on a swampy sugar diet with bread, cookies, and chocolate.

I never had such high ketones on the rice diet. I wonder if it’s cause I was eating more carbs (obviously) on a pure rice diet than a mixed, swampy diet, or because there wasn’t enough fat to turn into ketones on the rice diet vs. now, or if it’s the fructose in the sugar. Some people claim that fructose can actually be ketogenic.

Post-rice OmegaQuant - new lowest linoleic acid ever, down by 1-2%

One of the reasons I wanted to try the rice diet was to find out if a HCLFLP diet is uniquely suited for lowering your adipose linoleic acid. I frequently measure my whole blood linoleic acid via the OmegaQuant Complete test.

Toward the end of the rice diet, my linoleic acid was 8% - by far the lowest it had ever been. But, quite clearly, this didn’t represent a similarly massive improvement in my adipose tissue. It’s just that the OmegaQuant Complete, measuring the fat in your blood, also measures the fats generated by your own body via de-novo-lipogenesis (DNL).

I explained this in my post-rice OmegaQuant post.

In that post, I also tried to normalize LA for DNL and speculated that, by my formula, my actual adipose LA should drop by about 4%.

Turns out that was too optimistic. My latest OQC is now in after almost 2 months back on ex150. I think this should’ve given my body plenty of time to stop de-novo-lipogenesis and go back in my normal keto mode, and my numbers should therefore be comparable to those previously measured.

My linoleic acid was 15.27%. That is the lowest I have ever measured except during the rice diet (8%).

It’s lower than even any of my non-fasted OmegaQuants, which could have skewed the number low via massive saturated and monounsaturated fat intake, e.g. if I’d taken the test after drinking a lot of coffee with cream.

It is over 1% lower than even the OmegaQuant I purposefully didn’t do fasted, but after consuming about 1,000kcal of cream, beef, butter, and tallow.

It’s the only time I’ve ever tested <16% LA when fasted. Compared to my last pre-rice test, it is down by 2.3%.

Graphed in the Omega Tracker, I am now touching my self-diagnosed “yellow zone” of people who’ve made some pretty significant progress for the first time.

(Again, the 8% deep in the green zone doesn’t count.)

So while it wasn’t a glorious 4% as my guesstimated formula predicted, it seems to have gone down by 1-2% depending on what you compare, which is still pretty cool.

As I said in the rice post, I found a month of eating pretty much nothing but rice with tomato sauce surprisingly tolerable. If it shaves about 2% off my LA, that means I could be “done” in as little of 3 months of that! They probably don’t even need to be consecutive months. Even if it’s “just” 1%, that’s still pretty good.

The nice thing is that a relatively quick and reliably path to lower adipose LA wouldn’t just be a fun hobby for us LA nerds, but it could actually help verify or disprove Modern PUFA Theory. Am I getting such great satiety on this candy refeed because my LA number has dropped to a new low, and many of my cells over the last 3-4 months were built with, presumably closer to 8% at the time due to DNL?

Of course, it could also be a fluke, or just statistical noise. Maybe my number would just take more than 2 months to trend back up.

But this makes me very curious to try another HCLFLP variant some time soon.

What’s next

I’m not going to jump straight into another month of rice diet. First, I just lost all this weight again and I don’t want to immediately gain it back, heh.

Second, I only just got this OmegaQuant result and had already planned some other stuff - first I’ll try my hands at dry fasting.

I’m actually dry fasting today and, so far, it’s not too bad in the early afternoon. I am constantly low-level thirsty but otherwise feeling fine. ngmi?

Since dry fasting tends to be more intense than even water fasting, and I could only water fast for 5 days last time, I expect this to be a 1-2 day experiment, maybe 3 if I get lucky.

After that, I’m looking to do a Honey Diet trial. This is a high-carb, moderate-fat, low-protein (the way I’m doing it) diet. I’ll be eating fruit & honey in the morning until about 3pm, then fast for 4h and eat my normal meat slop meal for dinner. I’ll use less fat to make it, probably by using lower-fat ground beef and not using as much tallow and butter for cooking.

This is probably not low-fat enough to induce the linoleic acid-lowering effect, but it’s an interesting diet that tries to “cheat” the swamp/protein effect by splitting carbs early, and protein/fat late in the day.

And since it’ll be a swampy diet on average, it’ll be interesting to see if my Non-24 still stays away even when mixing my macros (on average).

Until next time, when I might regale you with the tale of my dry fast lol