ex150-6 review: Down 6lbs in 30 days

Long plateau in the beginning, then pretty good weight loss.

This was the 6th incarnation of just doing good, old, regular ex150. After not losing very much weight the last 2-3 months in what I call The Malaise, I just wanted to set a baseline and see where I was at before running any further experiments.

If I couldn’t even lose weight at a decent rate doing ex150, which I’d seen work the 5 previous runs (ex150-1 thru ex150-5) I knew something was still off - be it sleep, stress, or maybe my body just needed some rest from weight loss?

And I’m happy to report that, after a long initial plateau where I didn’t even lose any water weight (curious), it worked quite well once again.

Long initial plateau

Why was there such a long plateau at the beginning? Depending if you count that 1 day dip to 241lbs and then back up to 242, it’s either a 7 or 9 day plateau, and right at the beginning.

For one, the off-diet period before this was relatively harmless. I “only” gained 4lbs in total between ex150sardines and the beginning of ex150-6. I Mostly ate more meat and vegetables than usual, but almost no processed keto-junk, as I’m more and more turned off by it the longer I stay away. Also avoided any PUFAs this time around, so no chicken, pork, or salads with soybean oil dressing. (I used to eat these things commonly on keto before getting into the whole PUFA thing a few months ago.)

So there wasn’t as much water weight to be lost as there previously had been.

Additionally, I was under quite a bit of personal stress until pretty mych exactly the end of the plateau. There was a bit of sleep loss, too, where I had to wake up at 7am instead of my usual 9am a few days in a row.

So that could have prevented fat loss.

Stearic acid

As marked on the graph, I also began supplementing stearic acid once a day with my lunch meal.

Stearic acid is the longest-chain saturated fatty acid we can still digest (unlike, say candle wax or motor oil). A lot of people on r/saturatedfat are talking about it, especially its ratio compared with PUFAs and MUFAs. One of the reasons beef suet, dairy fat, and cocoa butter (the fat in chocolate) are considered so valuable there is the high stearic acid content.

The stearic acid supplement comes as a white powder. I just mixed 1 teaspoon into the butter I used for cooking my lunch. That way, it mixed in nice and easy.

It’s a bit of a crazy fat. Its melting point is so high that even just putting cold tomato sauce into a boiling pan will temporarily solidify it, and suddenly your sauce is streaked with white bits of fat. A few seconds later, it’s melted again when the sauce heats up.

It’s also almost impossible to clean off. Just the very hottest water out of my tap will melt it, and so cleaning the splatter off the stove is near impossible. I’d have to pour boiling water over it I think, haha. So far I’m just wiping and scrubbing a lot, as physical action can still get it off. But it is far, far more diffficult to clean off than regular butter.

The flavor was undetectable, but due to its high melting point, it made every sauce much thicker, which is kind of nice. It also becomes the aforementioned streaky gel when too cold, so if you take too long to eat, your sauce will turn into a sort of pudding/gel. Oh well.

Did the stearic acid help with fat loss? I’m not 100% sure, but it certainly didn’t seem to slow it. It might be that the combination of sleeping in again and adding stearic acid kick started the fat loss process, as I lost about 4lbs very rapidly around that time.

Or maybe it was just a coincidence.

Conclusion

Losing 6lbs in 30 days isn’t quite the old ex150 standard, but there was that long (possibly stress/sleep-related?) plateau in the beginning. It’s still -0.2lb/day, same as what I got on ex150sardines.

Maybe that’s just the new normal? It would make sense that the rate of fat loss slows down as I get leaner.

I’m certainly not complaining about losing 6lbs in a month.