ex150-15 review: lazy & traveling

Lots of noisy data, no clearly identifiable fat loss, but ex150 is great for travel

there’s not enough m******n cream on this m******n plane

After doing a 30 day experiment of plain white rice and then binging on Japanese food on vacation and gaining 19lbs there, I was excited to do another month of good, old, boring ex150 - my heavy cream diet.

This would be iteration 15 of ex150, and nearly all of them were 30 days, meaning I’ve eaten this diet for almost 15 months out of the last 3 years.

Why do ex150 again?

First, it’s sort of a known-good reset. After gaining 19lbs in just a few days in Japan eating Japanese food, I suspected that it was mostly water retention from increased salt intake. Ex150 is pretty low in salt, and I tend to not gain any fat on it even when making quite a few exceptions and using less-than-optimal ingredients.

Second, I was starting this while still in Japan, would have to do it while traveling back to the U.S., and then I had some more travel planned and wouldn’t be able to reach a 100% optimal diet-testing environment for most of the 30 days.

Ex150 makes sticking to a diet while traveling super easy - you can just get plain burger patties at any McDonald’s in the world, or you can buy roast beef or beef sticks in grocery stores. Japan has delicious roast beef!

You can also just buy heavy cream in any store and drink it in your hotel room. Whipped cream is great, but I’ve done plenty of drinking liquid dream and I’ve never gained weight doing the diet this way.

It doesn’t lead to quite the knockout cement-truck satiety as whipped cream, but it works.

In addition, you can ask any Starbucks in the world to make you a latte with heavy whipping cream, or, worst case, half-n-half. This makes it super easy to fuel up between flights at the airport Starbucks.

Because ex150 is a heavily ketogenic diet at 90% kcals from fat, I am never really hungry on it. Long flights are not an issue. During the rice diet, this actually turned out to be much more difficult - filling up on rice before leaving for the airport was not enough. On a high-carb diet, I tend to be hungry every 4 hours, and just traveling to the airport, checking in, waiting for a delayed flight.. and the 4 hours were over before I’d even boarded the plane.

I ended up using the “hack” of eating rice before leaving for the airport, and then again eating a heaping plate of rice in an airport lounge just before boarding my flight. But still, any flights significantly longer than 4 hours can still be tricky.

Ketosis makes this very easy - you just don’t eat. If you really need to, you can get a Starbucks HWC latte. On a less strict diet you could also do dark chocolate, which is very high in (saturated) fat and available at most airport convenience stores. But that’s not part of ex150 and I didn’t need to reach for that solution anyway.

I wasn’t counting, but I suspect that I spent at least several entire days during this experiment on planes and in airports, where I was totally unable to cook. Additionally, I drove thousands of miles, during which I theoretically could stop somewhere and cook on some sort of camp stove, but generally I don’t - I just bring some beef jerky or roast beef and buy cartons of cream as I go.

That way, this was the biggest stress test of ex150 yet, and I’ll say it’s extremely resilient to the inconveniences of airport & car travel, both long distance and frequent short trips, both abroad and back home.

Of course, it helps that I’m nearing my 10 year keto anniversary - I have a lot of experience eating like this when traveling.

Possibly the trashiest run of ex150 yet

Almost no home-cooked meals

Today is day 30 of this experiment, and it’s quite literally the first time I’ve cooked my normal ex150 “slop” meal of ground beef, tomato sauce, and vegetables. Every other meal this month has been roast beef, beef sticks, burger patties, beef jerky, or similar.

No whipping (sorry Walter)

Last night was the first time I actually whipped my cream this month. The previous 28 days I just drank liquid cream to satiety.

Cheating

In addition to that, I did cheat on the diet quite a bit this time, mostly due to social occasions: I ate at a Cracker Barrel once (steak & steamed vegetables), I tasted the local cheese curds in the Midwest a few times (sticking to small portions), and once I even ate a few meat balls, a huge steak, and some sorbet at a fancy dinner.

Vegetarble Cravings?

One thing I started noticing about 2-3 weeks in: possibly due to the lack of vegetables and tomato sauce in my “roast beef & beef sticks” diet, I began craving strong flavors. Several times I ended up buying a bag of baby carrots or pickles, drenching them in mustard, and eating them with my roast beef or beef sticks.

I couldn’t tell you if this was just a psychological effect from lack of flavors, or if I was becoming deficient in some mineral, vitamin, or who knows what. I suspect it wasn’t lack of salt, because there was plenty of salt in the beef I was eating.

Physical labor

I spent half the month on a friend’s property, helping out with some construction and similar stuff. During that time I spent nearly the entire day out in the sun sweating and carrying/lifting heavy things, or bent over/squatting/twisting myself to get those dang screws in.

You might know that I am usually quite sedentary: I’m a programmer who works from home.

If you’re curious, I had zero issues working pretty decent hours of physical labor outdoors in the heat. Despite not adding any salt since 2022 or so, I’ve never gotten any cramps/electrolyte issues even in very hot summers.

Not to brag, but I’m generally one of the more physically strong people around, and I was pretty proud of myself in terms of strength, work capacity, and so on. For someone who doesn’t have a physical job and basically never works out, I think I did quite well.

I can also report that CrossFit’s clean & jerk prepared me perfectly for lifting heavy rafters overhead. It’s funny to see others struggle when you know the perfect technique for getting any weight from dead hang to overhead, and you can just quickly show them.

This was the first time in forever I not only spent the majority of the day outside for weeks at at time, but also did quite a bit of physical labor.

Nonetheless, I never got any of the common electrolyte issues that people cite from lack of salt.

I suspect that The Bear of carnivore fame is right: if you’re well-adapted to a low-sodium diet, your body reaches a new homeostasis of minerals in the body, and even sweating a lot doesn’t really do much.

I ended up getting a brief calf cramp one morning, but it was days after I was done with the outside labor and it was probably from binging on pickles and other salty foods the days before. This was the first cramp in.. years? I don’t even remember the last one. Back when I ate keto with a lot of added salt, I would get cramps nearly every day.

No sunburn, obviously

The “no seed oils, no sunburn!” thing is a total meme at this point, but it continues to be true for me. I never put on any sunscreen, and I spent 8-10h in the sun some days, including around noon.

I never got sunburn once. One or two days I got pretty pink, but by next morning it had turned a deep brown. I have a farmer’s tan now. Never any burn, pain, or peeling.

It’s truly astonishing. I used to burn within 30 minutes.

Apple Cider Vinegar

Oh, one other thing: after experimenting with vinegar a few months ago, I finally got around to trying Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV) capsules. I started taking Bragg brand ACV capsules 14 days into this experiment, and have been taking one serving (3 capsules, 750mg acetic acid) every day. That should be enough to elicit the effect referenced in that blog post and the studies mentioned therein. I can’t say I’ve noticed an effect, but it might take a few weeks to set in, so I’ll continue taking them for now. It’s MUCH more convenient to take 3 capsules every morning compared to chugging vinegar all day.

In total, here are the confounders I can see:

• Ate a bit more protein than on regular ex150 many times

• Ate A LOT more protein a handful of times (e.g. a whole steak)

• Almost all of the beef I ate was processed & salted heavily (roast beef, jerky, beef sticks, restaurant food)

• Ate a portion of sorbet (sugar water ice cream) once

• Almost never whipped my cream and drank it all liquid

• The quality of my cream was way worse, often containing carrageenan

• Dramatically increased my sun exposure

• Dramatically increased the amount of physical labor I did

• Started taking ACV capsules halfway through the experiment

Overall this is less a textbook execution of ex150, and more a demonstration of how suitable ex150 is for travel, stressful situations, various environmental & physical conditions, and how it’s quite resilient to all of those variables.

Tale of the Tape

With all that said, here’s the weight graph:

I’ve included the last few days of my ex_plainrice experiment in the beginning for comparison, and also the huge 19lbs spike during my Japanese food excursion.

As you can see, the lowest I ever got on ex_plainrice was just over 222lbs. I jumped up to 241lbs in Japan, and when I started ex150, I lost 8lbs in 2 days. I suspect that was entirely water retention.

The weight loss quickly levels off, but weight keeps dropping slowly, bottoming out about 2 weeks in at 227lbs.

There’s a brief peak around 2.5 weeks in, and I believe that’s when I started missing strong flavors and indulged in entire jars of pickles drenched with mustard and similar silliness.

That weight also came off relatively quickly, and I weighed in below 227lbs the last 2 days of the experiment, which is a (small) new low for this month.

So, was this run a success? It’s really hard to say. It was a success in the sense that water weight came off rapidly, I didn’t gain any fat during the experiment, it was very easy & resilient during travel and stressful/physically intensive periods.

But it’s hard to say if I lost any actual fat, or how much, both because of the crazy 19lbs Japanese food spike and because this was the laziest implementation, with the saltiest foods, and the most cheats that I’ve done yet on the diet.

How much of the 19lbs was water retention vs. fat gain? The answer would heavily influence what we’d expect to see on this subsequent ex150 run.

In addition, the ex_plainrice is near-zero in sodium, so some of the weight loss on that could also be water retention even when compared to ex150, which is low in salt, but not as low.

The final tally of ex_plainrice vs. ex150-15 is 222.2lbs vs. 226.7lbs. Are those 4.5lbs pure water retention, or are there 1-2lbs of actual fat that I gained in Japan? Hard to say.

Latest OmegaQuant Complete

Once I got back from Japan and settled in for a few days, I took another OmegaQuant Complete.

One of the reasons I keep doing silly near-zero-fat experiments like ex_plainrice is that I believe it could accelerate the adipose depletion of linoleic acid by forcing the body to use all the linoleic acid in the bloodstream for “essential fatty acid” purposes.

Here’s my linoleic acid graph with the latest point added:

It’s at 16.6%. That’s the exact same value I tested a few months ago when coming out of another extreme high-carb, low-fat experiment.

As a reminder, here are the factors in play that I can think of:

• VLF (very low fat) rice diet → depleting LA

• Binging on Japanese food w/ foreign nutrition labels → my highest LA intake in years

• Weight loss (during ex_plainrice) → adipose LA dumping into red blood cells (RBCs), which should eventually come back down within 3-4 months, the lifetime of RBCs

I’m hence not sure what exactly this says. At least my binging on Japanese food with mysterious labels, and likely the highest LA intake in years for me, didn’t raise my LA% above what it was a few months ago.

Maybe the rice diet worked, I incorporated some LA into RBCs, and it’ll drop back down to 15%, or even 14%, in a few months’ time. That’s what happened last time I did the rice diet:

Or maybe nothing happened at all.

I’m not sure I’ll take as many regular OQCs going forward. So far, I think I’ve uncovered/discovered a lot of interesting stuff - inspired by a few VLF (very low fat) dieters we had, I began comparing my OQCs on high-fat vs. VLF diets, and teased out the big differences that exist there. That should help me interpret tests going forward.

Overall, if you start looking from when I started taking the OQCs in a fasted state, and if you ignore the VLF values, my LA% seems to have trended down slightly:

But it moves at a glacial pace, nearly a year and a half for a 4% decrease. The common numbers going around are that it takes 4-8 years to go from SAD levels down to safe, ancestral values, which I’d expect to be in the green range on my graph even on a high-fat diet. My progress is therefore consistent with this very long time frame.

So is it worth paying $100/mo going forward? I currently don’t have any super interesting ideas to experiment with, like the VLF/HF difference. I might just take an OQC every couple months, or if I do something interesting that I suspect would impact it.

Even if I test only every 6 months, the pace of progress is slow enough that it should easily capture it.

The Refeed

One very curious phenomenon that happened after the last month of heavy cream and continues now: I am once again craving… legumes.

For my refeed tomorrow, I was mostly thinking of a hearty stew of beans, legumes, onions, beets.. I’ll put some leftover ground beef into it, too, and some tomato sauce.

I did buy some cheese and chocolate as well, and other things, but really more “just in case” or because I’m sort of used to liking & refeeding on these things.

Curious how tastes can change. When I started ex150, I would refeed on steak, tons of dark chocolate, and massive amounts of cheese.

Now I seem to be leaning toward nearly vegan food, lol, almost akin to CriticalMAS’ Peasant Diet.