ex150-7 review: Down 4-6lbs despite Holidays

Hitting a new lo, lo, lo, lo...

Previously on ex150

As detailed in my last post Massive Fuckarounditis, Briefly Dipped <230lbs, I ran a fat fast that worked well in terms of weight loss, but not so much psychologically. I had massive cravings for savory/salty/tomatoey foods and pretty much derailed myself on a weekly basis.

As you can tell from the title, I briefly dipped below 230lbs on the fat fast, a new low weight since 2017.

ex150-7: Same old, same old

This time, back on good old ex150 (run #7), I dipped another 4lbs from the previous low to 226lbs. 6lbs if you count from the recent top. It’s hard to make up your mind as to how to count it, but I’m happy either way.

And that despite initially gaining weight for about 10 days, and wasting the last week eating delicious holiday meals cooked by well-meaning relatives who wouldn’t know isoleucine if it mugged them in broad daylight wearing a name tag.

My friend John from The Heart Attack Diet calls this The Xmas Mom Test, and I have to admit even I am having a hard time being a psychopath and rejecting my mom’s home-made Christmas foods.

Tale of the Tape

• For the first 10 days I actually slowly gained weight. This makes sense if we consider that I’d been on a hyper-low protein (20g/day) fat fast, and going back on ex150 more than doubled my daily protein intake (45g/day).

• I had experienced hypoglycemia-like symptoms during very strenuous workouts on the fat fast, e.g. tunnel vision creeping in from the edge of my field of view. I had to abort 1-2 workouts during that time. High-rep deadlifts were particularly bad.

• These symptoms entirely went away back on ex150. This leads me to believe that the 20g of protein on the fat fast were not sufficient to maintain muscle/liver glycogen for heavy lifting, whereas the 45g on ex150 are. Or, at least, much better.

• Hence I am not very worried about the initial weight gain. It was probably just increased muscle glycogen, with each glycogen molecule binding 4 of water, increasing muscle fullness - but also weight.

• An alternative theory: I bought a very nice cayenne pepper and some Italian herbs at the end of the fat fast. This was also when I started messing up and gaining weight on ad-lib tomato cream soup. I kept using the pepper and herbs on ex150 for a few days. It is kind of a weird coincidence that the fat fast stopped working once I started the pepper/herbs, and ex150 didn’t work until I stopped them.

• I also ate a can of spicy salsa once, about a week in, and my weight shot up dramatically the next day. That might be water retention from extra salt, as salsa is very salty. Or maybe pepper is doing something crazy? There is a theory out there that pepper and other compounds can cause gut inflammation issues leading to all sorts of stuff. The spicy flavor is, of course, basically a neurotoxin.

• To be safe, I threw out the fancy (delicious!) cayenne pepper and Italian herbs. Shortly after, my weight began dropping very regularly, like old-school ex150.

• There’s a predictable spike in there from when I traveled, eating both dark chocolate (because it’s easier to bring than heavy cream) and some salad. The weight came right off again, and 4 days later I was lower than before the travel.

• I bottomed out on Christmas Eve, a day after I accidentally ate a canola oil. It was likely just a few grams, hidden in a pepper stuffed with “cream cheese blend” which apparently isn’t actually cream cheese. Read the labels, people!

• After that, I partook in a lot of home-cooked family meals. I typically limited myself to 1 portion of the (usually modest) meat, but often times I ate more than 1 meal per day. I’d suspect that, on average, I doubled or tripled the 45g of protein I usually eat on ex150. A couple of times I had cheese or eggs for breakfast when they were offered, but never ad-libitum.

• I stayed keto the entire time. After 8 years, keto is just “built in” and everybody knows not to serve me bread.

• Interestingly, I think that historically social eating norms prohibited ad-libitum intake of protein. In “mom’s home-cooked cuisine” there will be a fixed amount of meat/eggs/cheese to be shared by everybody. It would be a social faux-pas to take the entire roast for yourself. There is near-infinite carbohydrate in the form of potatoes, rice, bread, etc. which I obviously didn’t eat on keto. So historically, you wouldn’t have overeaten protein unless you were ready to buy & prepare your own meat.

• I observed most of these meals being cooked by persons much more skilled at food preparation than myself and I could visually observe no secret seed oils were used in preparation of any of the meals. Since these were all traditional, “grandma’s recipe” type meals around the holidays, everybody defaulted to traditional cooking fats anyway.

• Once I tried greek yogurt, and got cement truck satiety after 150g, not having eaten for 16h. Normal yogurt is my kryptonite, I have literally eaten 2lbs in one sitting and been more hungry than before. Here, I stopped mid-container. It was only an n=1 and I’m not super excited to try it again, to be honest. Greek yogurt tastes fine but I don’t exactly miss it.

• I also tried mascarpone, which is even higher fat than heavy cream. It also gave me crazy cement-truck satiety, but it was maybe an n=3 and not exactly reliable yet. It’s also very difficult to get, like creme fraiche, and I don’t want to spend my whole salary at Whole Paycheck. Apparently mascarpone is a cheese, huh. It feels more like eating clotted cream to be honest. The macros are more creamy than heavy cream and there’s practically zero taste to it.

• If greek yogurt and mascarpone are fine, but regular (sour tasting) yogurt and (sour tasting) creme fraiche are not, that’d be interesting. If so, what about the sour foods makes them break satiety? The sour taste? Fermentation? Histamines? Some other aldehydes or weirdness created in the process?

• Another observation: Single meal exceptions didn’t make much of a difference in the weight loss trend or satiety. But several days of higher protein/several meals per day in a row, and things that were previously very satiating didn’t satiate me at all any more. Maybe it’s more of a mid-term effect than just acute satiety from a certain food? I.e. if my body is flush with BCAAs, it can’t experience satiety until they’re cleared out after 1-2 days of low-protein? Makes me wonder if I should start future ex150 trials with a short fat fast.

Going forward

After ex150-7, I did spend a few days eating tons of holiday foods, totally off plan, and bounced back up to 233lbs at one point.

Then I went straight back on ex150, run #8 this time.

My hope is that I’ll drop down back to 226lbs in about 5 days, worst case 10 days. Then, hopefully, fat loss will continue as it did the middle portion of this trial. And there won’t be any holiday meals to tempt me. Hurray?

If all goes according to plan, I should be very close to 220lbs by the end of ex150-8.