ex150-14 review: More of the Same

Did bring the weight down, but not all the fat gained on high-carb :'-(

man drinking from giant wooden barrel of cream

Motivation: lose the high-carb fat I gained

After gaining 6lbs of fat doing ex_hclflp, I just wanted to reset with a known-good diet. Last time I did ex150, it reliably brought me down from the then-acquired extra rice diet weight.

Monotony

This is the 14th run of pretty much the exact same ex150 diet I’ve done, hence “ex150-14”. Yes, that means I’ve eaten the same meal every day for 14 months, even if not in a row. I’ve also done variations of this diet still including this meal, which aren’t counted here.

You could say that I really like this diet and you wouldn’t be wrong.

That said, there also just isn’t much new to report. At this point I’ve probably written about every aspect of the diet there is.

I have very few notes for this month, and so I present them here in their entirety:

Zomg feels so good to be back
No bloat, don't have to think about/plan eating all day
Just like running on batteries
Pretty unspectacular, this is just "normal" for me now

Mostly liquid cream for about 20 days
Seems to have about the same satiety long-term, at the same time, didn't seem to lose any weight beyond initial water weight loss
Def wasn't "overeating" (drinking) and didn't gain any weight

The only new thing this time: I only consumed liquid cream (as opposed to whipping it up) for dinner for about 20 days in a row due to travel/being busy. It’s just easier to buy a carton of cream and drink from it than bringing a blender everywhere, heh.

I’ve had liquid cream (just out of a cup) for dinner before, but never 20 days in a row. Mostly just 1-2 days per week at most, when I was busy or on the go.

I don’t get the same rapid-onset cement-truck satiety from liquid cream, so I was never sure if doing liquid cream long-term would lead me to consume way more cream, make me gain fat, hinder my ability to lose fat..

In that sense it was an interesting natural experiment.

Tale of the Tape

Not to shockingly, I had gained a bunch of weight during my 2-day refeed between ex150hclflp and this experiment.

As expected, this weight rapidly dropped back down on ex150-14, and I was back down near 230lbs within 6 days.

My weight meandered around the 230lbs area for the rest of the month, dropping below 228lbs a couple of times, but otherwise staying remarkably stable.

To give a little bit more context, this is nearly exactly the weight I was before embarking on ex150hclflp, when I came off ex150honey, my Honey Diet experiment.

Here’s the last 3 months:

Almost exactly 230lbs then, and now.

Was this all just water weight? Unfortunately, it looks like I gained 6lbs of fat mass on ex150hclflp, but only lost 1lb of fat mass during all of ex150-14 :’-(

Very sad! This does not body for my body fat %, which has been steadily increasing ever since I started doing high-carb experiments.

You can see I was almost at 30% for a bit, just about a year ago. Then I stayed around 32% for a while, but ever since late last year my body fat has been going up - that’s when I started doing the rice diet.

It could be that my 2-3 day carb + protein refeeds lead me to gain a few pounds of actual fat every time, not just water weight like most likely on protein-only refeeds. Hard to tell without doing near-daily DEXAs.

Although these HCLFLP diets seem to be working pretty well for others, I just don’t seem to be able to succeed on them, even though I do them more strictly than most.

What’s next?

I am as of this writing on day 7 of ex_sugar, on which I will sugar fast (table sugar, fruit, non-caffeinated soda, honey) until I get protein cravings, then refeed with leanish protein and repeat. The idea is to run this cycle for 30 days and see if that works.

Given my bad luck with high-carb diets, if this doesn’t work, it might be one of my last high-carb experiments for a while.

[spoiler alert from the day I’m posting this: I already quit the sugar diet on day 9 due to nausea, liver pain, and unimpressive weight loss]

Pretty much the only other interesting high-carb variant I haven’t tried is an OG Kempner style rice + fruit + juice diet, without any tomato sauce, and with some fruit and juice added instead of ad-lib rice. Kempner even restricted calories dramatically doing this, but I’m not sure I’m up for that.

It’s fun playing around with carb diets, and frankly, I am still AMAZED that my Non-24 sleep/wake circadian rhythm disorder is gone and I can even eat carbs without creating severe sleep problems for myself.

But I consistently feel worse on these diets, and if I don’t gain any weight but stay the same, that seems the best case so far. If pretty much anything happens, I tend to gain fat.

I am also still open to the idea that HCLPLF diets are better suited to depleting adipose linoleic acid. If that were to be true, gaining some weight temporarily on a high-carb diet might be worth it to hasten the depletion of my adipose tissue.

For example, maybe my HC experiments WERE successful in depleting linoleic acid, and that got incorporated into my cell membranes, leading to the weight gain. In a sense, this is pretty much what MPT (Modern PUFA Theory) would predict if you managed to suddenly liberate a lot of PUFA.

If that’s true, the effect should go away in a couple of months and I should see both my OmegaQuant LA% drop to new lows, as well as reach my previous lowest weight and maybe even slightly below it.

Apart from that, in terms of pure fat loss, high-carb has been a bust for me for about half a year now, trying it from various angles.

See you next time, when I’ll probably tell you all about my failure on the sugar diet.