ex150 trial case study: 38 y/o female loses 11lbs in 30 days eating 2,700kcal/day
Textbook case of ex150 with a very active subject.
This is the third case study from the ex150trial. If you recall, I put out a post asking for volunteers to try the ex150 diet for 30 days. The first few have finished their trials, and this is one of them.
Previous case studies:
48 year old female loses 14.6lbs in 30 days
26 year old male loses 5-8lbs in 26 days, mostly water weight
I was pretty happy with the results, especially given how
delicious the food was and how little hunger I experienced.
— The Subject
Subject: 38 years, lifts, hikes, bikes, jits
Subject had already experimented with ex150 several times, and got great results in the short-term. She wanted to do a full 30-day run to see if it would be consistent in the long term.
Her goal was to lose 10lbs during the course of the experiment.
Diet history included the Zone Diet (an old CrossFit staple), keto, and low-fat veganism. She reports successfully losing weight on diets in the past, including caloric restriction, but just by “white-knuckling” it, and she’d rapidly gain the weight back.
Subject is very physically active, lifting weights regularly and going for bike rides, hikes, rafting, or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
Experiment: Rao’s and carrot salad, oh my!
Subject gives a description of her daily fare during the experiment:
My usual lunch was 150g 80/20 ground beef, 80g Rao's pasta sauce (either tomato or alfredo), and 60g frozen veggies (either green beans or mixed corn/peas/green beans/carrots). On a couple of occasions I replaced normal lunch with something else roughly similar in macros.
I experimented with various stabilizers for the whipped cream, such as gelatin, cocoa butter, mascarpone, cream cheese, and sugar-free instant pudding. The best was gelatin.
Almost every day, I ate an illegal carrot salad, which may be a terrible deviation from the diet but I did it anyway. This was 100g fresh carrot, ~30g coconut oil, and ~12g white wine vinegar.
There were THREE weekends where I went completely off the diet. My bad. Each took 2-3 days to recover from.
“Illegal carrot salad” :D
I don’t think that the salad would matter a ton. 100g of carrot is mostly fiber and water, with maybe 3g of sugar. The coconut oil is interesting. Coconut oil is the most saturated fat of all at 82% SFA. I have heard some good things about vinegar with regards to weight loss, but it mostly seems like anecdotes. It definitely doesn’t seem to have hurt her progress.
The three cheat weekends did some damage, but the subject still had a pretty good trajectory overall.
She went from 217.2lbs to 206.1lbs for a total loss of 11.1lbs.
It’s pretty obvious when the subject was on-diet vs. off. The very first “cheat” is a ribeye steak with some berries, i.e. extra protein and a tiny amount of sugar. This doesn’t do anything to stop the rapid water weight loss.
But the weekends with beer + bread really bring up her weight again. I do suspect this is mostly water weight, but I also suspect it does block fat loss for that time.
Cheating increases water weight, but also blocks fat loss
We see a pretty clear trend now, which has been present in all 3 trials so far: the diet does work when you cheat occasionaly, but the cheating sets you back 2-3x the time you cheated. I.e. you cheat for 2 days, it’ll take 2-4 days to come back down. You lose 4-6 days in total. It probably depends on the amount of cheating, too.
What this means is that if you cheat half the time, you won’t make any progress.
It’s also interesting because it seems to confirm the idea that water weight loss is correlated to actual fat loss, at least on ex150.
I don’t think water weight loss causes fat loss, or is technically necessary for fat loss. But I think that what allows for fat loss (probably low insulin, or insulin:glucagon ratio, and maybe low mTOR activation) also causes a lot less water retention.
Or, in reverse: whatever metabolic signaling causes water retention in the short term also seems to cause fat gain, or at least inability to lose fat, in the long run.
What I deduce is this: if you’re going to cheat and make exceptions, try to limit it to 1 meal a day, only do it up to 2 days in a row, and don’t do it more than every other weekend.
You’ll set yourself back 4-6 days when having a normal restaurant meal both Saturday and Sunday for dinner. But if you do it all day, every day, for a week, you’ll probably need the rest of the month to get back to baseline.
The subjects we’ve seen so far mostly limited their diet exceptions to social gatherings and holidays. That is a good strategy. If you’re going to go off the diet, make it count.
So far, ex150 seems pretty good at being a “satiating default diet” that doesn’t cause people to crave things too much. Social gatherings are the biggest reason people make exceptions, although the subject notes the extreme restrictions of ex150 might have contributed to her compensating on weekend excursions.
Subjective well-being: manic energy at first, then sleepy, then fine/normal
The subject reports several days of “weird manic energy” in the first few days. This mirrors the experience of the first subject, who reported “insane amounts of energy”.
This might be part of keto adaptation. The subject either adjusted to this, or the manic energy waned after the first few days. Maybe getting all that saturated fat in is a shock to the system at first :)
During the second week, the subject notes feeling tired and sleepy a lot.
Then, about 2 weeks in, she seems to have settled in and is neither particularly manic, nor sleepy.
Interesting quotes
Lifts have been fine and making progress, even on so little protein
This is an interesting one, as low-protein for lifting is one of the concerns with ex150. A previous, active subject reported his lifts not going anywhere on ex150, but also said that he had just increased the weights on his lifts. It’s encouraging to see one can still make progress lifting weights on such little protein, as least for 30 days.
I tried to eat enough not to feel hungry. This was usually easy. Hunger signals were definitely blunted, but sometimes I would find myself thinking about food and realize I needed to eat some cream, and then I would stop thinking about food.
This matches my experience to a T. In ketosis I’m never really hungry. It’s just.. different. Blunted hunger signals describes it well. It’s like receiving a subtly worded email about hunger instead of a blaring phone call.
The other part is that “thinking of food” or cravings are often symptoms of caloric deprivation. I think the brain just channels the need for energy into any specific thing it has associated with energy.
This subtle signal of “thinking about food” or “noticing food smells” can be tricky at first, but you learn to realize it means you haven’t eaten enough the last few days. This is usually when I make an extra portion of whipped cream so that I will DEFINITELY hit cement-truck satiety that day. If you stop eating in the middle of a delicious meal, you know you’ve hit satiety.
If I ate enough cream not to feel hungry, I would hit about 2500 kCals intake daily.
I tracked all food in MacroFactor, which over the course of the month decided that I seemed to be expending about 3100 kCals daily, based on my kCal intake and weight change.
This is very interesting to me because previously, when I've done calorie restriction, MF has thought my expenditure was in the low 2000s.
Caloric restriction lowers energy expenditure? Nobody knew! Very cool to see this confirmed by somebody who’s successfully restricted calories on diets before.
I really do believe that eating ad-lib saturated fat to satiety while controlling obesogenic factors is a better way to diet. No turning down the metabolism, no reduction in immune and endocrine functions.
I had some success before with an indiscriminate but high-protein keto (slow but consistent loss of 35 lb over about 9 months, without tracking and without regaining the weight later). [..] But during the ex150 experiment, I felt good and made progress even while keeping protein quite low, and I suspect that saturated fat just satiates me much better than the same kCals in protein.
Other things of note
CICOCICOCICO
Let’s do a back-of-the-napkin calculation of the caloric intake + estimated body fat burned, since the subject tracked her calorie intake.
Subject ate an average of 2,700kcal a day. MacroFactor estimates her TDEE at 3,100kcal.
This means she would be running a deficit of 400kcal/day. Over 30 days, this would mean a 30 * 400kcal = 12,000kcal total deficit. 12,000kcal divided by 3,500kcal/lb of body fat means she would’ve lost 3.4lbs of fat, with the rest of the weight loss coming from water weight.
MacroFactor could very well be right. I think it could also be a little more fat loss than that, given that the subject was pretty strict for the first half of the experiment, and subsequent multi-day cheat weekends brought her to lower and lower peaks.
Macro intake
The subject also tracked her individual macro intake daily:
It’s pretty much what we’d expect, except the carb spikes on her cheat weekends are REALLY high. She ate bread, fruit, pastries, candy, and had beer and orange juice that first spike.
Interesting: the subject’s carb spikes decreased with each cheat weekend. Not sure if she started tampering her carb intake because she was seeing how it brought her weight back up or what, but a positive trend whatever the reason.
ex150 is very low protein, very low carb, and very high fat. So on normal days, both carbs and protein linger around 50g. Fat makes up the rest at 200-300g daily. This is fat, not cream, so we’d have to multiply roughly by 3 to arrive at cream consumed for 600-900g daily, significantly more than what I consume (~500g).
The Case of The Illegal Carrot Salad
As subject notes, she ate carrot salad nearly every day. This was not prescribed, but honestly I wouldn’t have expected it to make a difference.
What’s great about this: going forward, we can probably add such “bonus” meals to increase variety and make the diet less restrictive.
Of course that doesn’t mean “everything goes” (or rather, everything goes until it doesn’t), but the Illegal Carrot Salad doesn’t violate any of the hypotheses I have for ex150’s success so far: it contains practically no protein, very low carbs, no PUFAs, and it’s not hyper-palatable in the doritos & donuts sense of the word. So it’s no surprise that it didn’t prevent fat loss.
Carrots are nice and crunchy, and the vinegar adds another flavor and sensation. Pickles would probably also work. Maybe onions?
Quite a few subjects have complained about the diet being boring and restrictive so far. If we can make it easier while still getting results, why not?
Going forward: relax the diet a little, add variety
I would like to stop keeping such obsessive records for a while, and I want to relax the diet a little bit, but also I want to see if I can continue to eat to satiation while losing weight.
My plan is to continue with carrot salads, beef/veggie/sauce lunch (so good), breves, and heavy cream ad libitum. I also want to add in some whole milk and some fruit, and I might add in some more fatty beef, lamb, and eggs beyond 150g.
Possibly conflicting with that idea, I also want to try including a bit more fruit, because it's summer and it tastes good, and I'm being influenced a little bit by some Ray Peat ideas.
I'm not really seeking ketosis for its own sake, and I don't seem to experience subjectively a sharp well-being discontinuity between a day with 10g carbs and a day with 100g carbs from fruit.
I do notice bad changes in mood, energy, and digestion when I get a lot of carbs from grain, and maybe any starch, so I want to continue to limit those pretty severely.
And with that, we have another experiment under our belt. Like some others, this subject is planning to up the protein a little, and add a bit more variety. I think this is a great idea: these 30 days have proven that the strict version of ex150 works for her, and now we can work on making it more sustainable and enjoyable.
Onwards!
Huh. Ever consider replacing heavy cream with coconut oil?