ex150-9 review: Down 4lbs, broke through 220lbs

I believe that's <100kg now :-)

Rationale: stick to the plan

Exploration vs. Exploitation

In decision making, there’s a concept known as the Exploration vs. Exploitation dilemma. You might have a favorite Italian restaurant. Do you go there every time? Or do you explore new restaurants, hoping to find one that’s even better?

This applies to many different realms of decision making, and it’s typically impossible to perfectly solve.

For me personally, the dilemma is this: do I just keep doing ex150, the diet which has worked every time so far, and on which I’ve lost about 73lbs so far?

Or do I experiment, trying to find new diets, improved diets, or maybe even tweaks? After all, I wouldn’t ever have found ex150 to begin with, had I not explored.

The downside of exploration is, of course, that many of the experiments won’t be as effective as your existing local maximum. Unless you’re at the very beginning phase, say moving to a new town and never having visited any restaurants there.

But if you’ve lived in a town for a couple years, and you’ve explored most of the restaurant scene, it’s a good bet that your favorite is your favorite for a reason, and most things you try won’t be as good.

Another dilemma for me is: my goal isn’t just to lose weight. I also want to understand the mechanisms behind weight loss. Why? Because last time I lost 100lbs, I thought I knew: just do keto! Then I gained nearly all of it back.. still doing strict keto. So, obviously, keto wasn’t “it.”

I’d rather this not happen again. Maybe this time I think it’s “seed oils + protein restriction!” and then, I keep doing that, and gain the weight back. That would really suck.

More experimentation gives me more confidence in what’s actually working here. That biases me a little more toward the “exploration” side of things.

Plus, I like shiny new diets & experiments. Honestly, I love buying shiny gadgets to try new experiments, too. Cool, quality stuff makes me happy. Call me a mindless consumer and see if I care.

But still, sometimes you gotta exploit..

The downside is, of course that a lot of exploration + most experiments not working leads to… me not losing much weight. I did this last summer: I experimented almost every month, and I didn’t lose any weight for pretty much 6 months straight. While it was fun, and I loved the experiments, it was also a waste of time, and not losing any weight was very frustrating. I might be 30lbs lighter now, had I just stuck to exploitation.

In light of this, I am currently trying to consciously bias myself more toward the exploitation side of things. Basically, do at least 1:1 in terms of “do what is known to work” and “try shiny new experiment.”

So I did a regular old run of ex150 beginning of the year, and then ran a 14 day fat fast experiment last. That led to 2lbs of weight loss, but honestly it was disappointing. The whole reason I tried a fat fast was that I wanted to lose weight faster than ex150, not slower. Plus, I knew that 1-2lbs were likely just muscle glycogen loss, not fat loss. I declared it a failure.

Hence, back to the roots. Stick to the plan. Anticipate. Don’t improvise.

And I just did ex150-9 (i.e. the 9th run of ex150) for the last 30 days.

Results

I ended the last report with this:

If all goes well, I’ll report being below 220lbs in 30 days. Wish me luck.

Well, here we are, and here I am: 218.55lbs this morning. Your wishing me luck seems to have worked!

I also said this:

But, honestly, if these 2lbs just came back when I ate normal ex150-style protein again for a week, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

This also came true. It seems I didn’t lose much if any fat on the 14 day fat fast, and spent the first 7-10 days on ex150-9 just regaining that glycogen weight.

Play by play:

1. Starting off at 222.5lbs, I slowly gained weight until I reached 224.5lbs about 7 days in, where I stayed for about 5 days. This was likely just muscle glycogen. There’s also a chocolate confounder during this period, which I’ll address later.

2. Rapid weight loss ensued, taking me from 224.5lbs to just under 221lbs in about a week.

3. Then Daylight Savings Time happened (my old nemesis!) and I also bought a grounding mat for my mattress. 2 days after that, I broke through 220lbs.

4. I messed up with spicy tomatoes for 1-2 days, which gave me a temporary water weight gain (probably from salt) back up over 221lbs.

5. Luckily, that temporary weight came off nearly immediately. I lost another pound, waking up at 218.55lbs this morning, putting me solidly <220lbs I think.

Workouts

As expected, my x3 workouts got much better w/ protein back up from 10-20g to 45g or so per day. I broke a couple of PRs, and recovered my performance in nearly all the exercises that had suffered during the fat fast.

I also noticed that I looked way more buff about 7-10 days in. My biceps looked pretty small and weak on the fat fast, I had thought, but now they were back to their normal shape, which isn’t too bad if I say so myself.

New DEXA record

A DEXA showed my lowest body fat percentage ever, at 31.9%. I also gained most/all of the lean mass back that I “lost” during the fat fast - it was just glycogen and water.

In addition, my visceral fat dropped by a huge amount, by far the lowest it’s ever been. Visceral fat is apparently a big deal, according to Some People on the Internet. So I was happy about that.

The DEXA technician said “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

I have all my DEXAs and weight over time charted on my Current Progress page, if you’re interested.

My metabolic rate is unchanged

As I wrote in The Definition of Diet Success, I don’t think losing fat by any means is necessarily a success.

Sure, you can starve yourself by locking yourself in a basement for 6 months. But it’ll be very unhealthy and tank your metabolism as your body goes into starvation mode. People who do this tend to gain all the weight back rapidly, especially if they haven’t fixed their underlying metabolic issues.

I had tested my RMR (resting metabolic rate) via CO indirect calorimetry a year ago, and it came out at 2,290kcal/day. That’s me without any activity, e.g. if I was in a coma.

Now I tested again, 25lbs later, and it came out at 2,280kcal/day. That’s obviously way inside the noise of the RMR. Meaning my metabolic rate hasn’t lowered at all after losing another 25lbs, and is plainly in the “normal” range for my lean mass.

That’s what I call success: losing fat, not losing any lean mass, never consciously restricting cAlOriEs, eating to satiety every single day, and keeping your metabolic rate at the exact same level.

Just… not hungry

Nearly 2 weeks in, I started just not being that hungry in the evening. My normal portion of whipped cream is 200-250g, which I just eyeball by filling to a line in my stainless steel milkshake cup.

I noticed that I hadn’t finished that same portion in one day, 4-5 days in a row. I’d always leave half for the next day, and finish it then instead of making a new batch.

Some days I forced myself to finish the cream, afraid I was undereating. But I’m not sure if I should do that, maybe I was just releasing a ton of fatty acids from adipose tissue?

Several days I even skipped dinner entirely because I had simply forgotten and it was already bed time, or because I was out and about, and too lazy to whip up some cream.

This seems slightly counter-intuitive. Shouldn’t I be MORE hungry after 73lbs of fat loss than before? Yet, somehow, it seems the opposite.

Watch fit

This one was kind of funny. I had noticed it vaguely before, but this time the difference was quite obvious.

My watch was super loose during the fat fast to the point that it would regularly dangle around my wrist and slip to the inside, like John Wick wears his watch.

Like knowing the time but hate the back of your hand? Wear your watch on the inside of the wrist!

I even considered tightening it by a notch, but that didn’t feel great, either.

Back on ex150-9, the watch fit perfectly nearly immediately, even feeling slightly tight at times, though not enough to loosen it by a notch.

I don’t think I have much fat on my wrists, and the watch currently sits much tighter while I’m 218.75lbs than it did at 225lbs during the fat fast, so it’s probably a decent measure of my current state of water retention/water weight.

Never went back into obese territory

Maybe my favorite part of this experiment is that I never went back into “obese” territory, which starts at 226lbs for me at 6’1. I never even hit 225lbs! Whole pound of safety buffer, lol.

This made me very happy because it means that I sort of “locked in” being out of obese territory, at least as long as I stay on an ex150-style diet.

After spending 7 years in obese territory, and even briefly dipping into “morbidly obese,” that was a huge relief and confidence booster.

Confounders

As always, There Are Confounding Factors. Sciencing is hard.

• I had planned on running 7 days of chocolate ganache fat fast after the 14 day fat fast, and had bought the required amount of 85% chocolate. After only 1 day, I realized I can no longer stomach chocolate ganache. I just HATE the taste now. Very weird. This meant I couldn’t eat nearly enough to get satiated, and I abandoned the experiment. But now I had 4 bars of chocolate sitting around, so I sprinkled chocolate chips into my whipped cream for the first week or so of ex150-9. That could’ve contributed to the temporary weight gain in the beginning.

• I switched from Rao’s pasta sauce to just buying plain, canned diced tomatoes & using cream instead of alfredo sauce at some point during the experiment. Honestly, I don’t taste any difference at all in the cooked dish. But I did notice a huge difference when “snacking” on a few spoonfuls of sauce in the evening, which I often do when I feel like getting a little flavor “hit.” The plain diced tomatoes gave me WAY less of a hit than the flavorful pasta sauce did.

• At one point I tried getting diced tomatoes with green chilies, and it was an absolute disaster. As detailed in a previous post, I once accidentally induced massive hyperphagia by eating salad with salsa sauce, and sour cream with salsa sauce. Diced tomatoes with green chilies is basically salsa, and I found myself eating an entire can of the stuff before ever getting to cook with it. I experimented some more with this, and will do a write up soon. Luckily, I recognized the issue this time, and only used the spicy stuff for 1-2 days before returning to the plain, flavored diced tomatoes.

Coming up: ex115salmon

With another successful month of exploitation behind me, I’m ready for an experiment again. Plus, I’d be really surprised if this one didn’t also lead to fat loss. (Famous last words.)

I’m talking, of course, about “oily fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids”.

After reading and reviewing the book Omega Balance a while ago, I shifted a bit on the spectrum from “it’s just about avoiding linoleic acid (omega-6 PUFA)” to “the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio matters” and want to try eating a lot of oily fish.

I’m pretty certain it’ll jack up my OmegaQuant omega-3, as that’s what happened when I ate sardines for 14 days. I also lost weight then, if not an astonishing amount. Just, you know, a “normal” ex150-like amount.

I’m honestly not quite sure what to expect, and how to declare the salmon a failure or success. I don’t really expect crazy supercharged fat loss. I’m pretty sure it’ll raise my omega-3.

But hey, Omega Balance was a good book. Maybe I’ll get some unexpected benefits, or at the least it might tell me that I can eat salmon regularly without giving up any of the benefits of ex150.

First order of business is 2 days of protein refeed, then on to ex115salmon. 115g because salmon has more protein than 80% lean ground beef, and I want to protein match it.

Sound fishy?