ex150choctruffle mod review: confounders, probably only lost a bit of weight
The Stupidest Diet Ever (tm) so of course I had to try it
tl;dr:
Ate 1 small meal of beef/vegetables/sauce per day
All other calories from ad-libitum chocolate truffle (heavy cream, 85%+ cocoa chocolate)
A bunch of confounding events happened, so I lost either 1lb or 2lbs or 7lbs in 7 or 14 or 17 days, depending on how you count
I’m of mixed feelings to report about another mod experiment. This one I call ex150choctruffle. It stands for chocolate truffle, if you didn’t guess.
The idea came from a blog post by Fire in a Bottle in which he describes encountering a home-made layered chocolate cake at a party. A lady explains how she made it:
..that layer is whipped ganache, which is just dark chocolate and cream melted together..
Wait a second. My diet already mostly consists of cream. Dark chocolate is extremely fatty and I had 10 or more bars of 85-95% cocoa bars sitting around since Christmas that I couldn’t eat because there’s no chocolate on ex150.
So you’re telling me I can just melt one of these into my whipped cream dessert every night and that makes chocolate truffle, the most palatable substance known to man? A quick visit to Wikipedia confirmed this: French style chocolate truffle consists solely of cream and chocolate, whereas the Swiss put some butter in it too (I tried this and couldn’t tell the difference).
You know chocolate truffle. It’s the thick, creamy part of the chocolate cake. The part that they try to dilute with the spongy dough and the fluffy whipped cream. Your grandparents would describe it as “rich” and once you eat it you’ll know why.
I’ve always been a massive chocolate fiend. As a kid I never liked potato chips and similar savory snacks that much. Always went for the chocolate.
When I went keto 7 years or so ago, I was delighted that the dark chocolate I already loved was perfect for keto. I could eat a whole bar of 85% cocoa chocolate every day and easily stay in ketosis. Anything much lower in cocoa than that and it’d start to mess with me as the sugar ratio climbs quickly when you approach 70% cocoa.
Of course I had to try this diet. It was just too stupid not to. Losing weight on an all-you-can-eat chocolate truffle diet..
Making Chocolate Truffle is Easy
Real quick: chocolate truffle sounds really fancy but making it is trivially easy. In a way it’s easier than making whipped cream. You don’t even need a blender or whisk.
Microwave 200ml cream on low (I use the “melt” setting for 2-3 minutes)
While it’s heating up chop a bar of 85% chocolate into small pieces (doesn’t need to be super fine, but the smaller the easier it’ll melt)
Dump the chopped up chocolate into the warm cream
Wait for 2-3 minutes until the chocolate has melted
Stir for 30-60 seconds using a spatula. It should emulsify immediately.
Done. Put it in the fridge to cool down.
But don’t take my word for it. Watch this nice chef explain it to you.
Note: I think he’s using milk chocolate in the video. I found that, with dark (85%+) chocolate, I had to cut his chocolate ratios in half. E.g. 1 part cream/1 part chocolate was almost inedibly hard. 2 parts cream/1 part chocolate was so thick you could literally bounce a spoon off of it. 3/1 was where it was getting a little softer, like pudding. I usually stayed between those two.
One fun trick: because it’s just cream and chocolate, you can just re-heat it and add more ingredients. Your ganache isn’t soft enough? Heat it, add cream, stir, cool down again. Too soft? Heat, add chocolate, stir, cool down. I did this quite a bit in the beginning until I developed an eye for the right consistency.
Technically this only makes chocolate ganache. To make truffles, you would take the cooled down, hardened ganache and form it into little chocolate balls.
I did this twice and hated it. So I just ate the chocolate ganache out of the bowl with a spoon. Like a barbarian. Sue me.
Chocolate ganache has the consistency and energy density of plutonium. Eating it is like swallowing a small nuclear reactor. It sits in your stomach pulsating with energy. Unlike the cement-truck satiety that I get from whipped cream ganache gives me a slower, pulsing sensation that lasts for hours.
It takes longer for satiety to set in, maybe 10-15 minutes. It also takes very long to digest. I would see the sugar from the chocolate slowly release on my continuous glucose monitor for several hours.
Just like with whipped cream I’d often be unable to finish the bowl. Luckily you can just put it in the fridge and finish it the next day.
A few times I made a very thin ganache that was cream-like in consistency and I’d whip it into chocolate whipped cream. Surprisingly, this wasn’t that great. I mean it was exactly what it sounded like. But I somehow like both regular whipped cream and the pudding-consistency ganache better. I think the chocolate just took some of that fluffiness out of the whipped cream and at the same time it wasn’t that thick and rich.
Confounding Variables: I don’t know if it worked
Why mixed feelings to report? Because, as an experiment, this one kind of failed. It’s not that the diet necessarily failed, it’s that I can’t really tell. There were quite a few confounding variables. But first, let me just show you the weight graph.
ZOMG, down 7lbs in 17 days, amazing right?
Initial 4 day hump losing water weight
Not so fast. That’s why I included a bit of context before and after the experiment. After ex150deli I was at 245lbs. If you’ve read that post, my original plan had been to take 3 days off ex150 and just eat my regular “trashy keto.” Unlimited meat, chicken salad, keto-friendly protein bars, yogurt, some fried chicken.
I didn’t even make it a full day off the diet before feeling terrible. I think after so long on ex150 I was just keenly aware how bloated this sort of food made me feel. I’d eat and eat and eat and not be satiated AT ALL. It was like I’d eaten cardboard with no nutritional value whatsoever. I was physically stuffed and bloated from all the protein and fiber and at the same time had no feeling of satiety at all. After an eternity of whipped cream’s cement-truck satiety this just wasn’t going to do.
So I decided to cut my diet break short and just go directly to ex150choctruffle the very next day, with only about 8h (2 big meals) off the diet.
But even after only 2 meals off diet I had gained 5lbs the next morning. They came off quickly over the first few days on ex150choctruffle. But still, confounding. Do I count them? Doesn’t seem right, since it’s probably just some muscle glycogen and water retention. But where do I cut it off? And it had come out of the 14 days I had allocated. I decided to just extend the experiment a few days and not count the days until I’d reached 245lbs again.
Ok, not quite as cool, right? Only 1lb lost in 11 days? It’s not nothing, but it might as well be a fluke. Certainly nothing like the 0.3lb/day I am used to losing on ex150.
But wait, there’s more!
Sunburn/Daylight Savings Time/Cold
Between the Saturday/Sunday of that week, only 7 days after I’d come back down from the water weight, daylight savings time happened. This cut an hour from my sleep, which left me severely sleep deprived and feeling crappy for most of that week.
I also stayed in the sun too long that Sunday and got a pretty massive sunburn. Just the sunburn alone seems to have increased my weight by 2lbs for 3 days, after which it dropped back down to 243lbs. But I’d also gotten a cold, which got worse over the course of the week. It was never more than a pretty runny nose and some mild coughing but I felt unwell all day and my weight went back up 1lb.
So another 5 days are basically gone from the experiment. And then, the following weekend, I had a hard stop to ex150choctruffle because of long-standing dinner plans with friends. Since I’d originally planned for ex150choctruffle to only be 14 days, this wouldn’t have been a problem. But now it’d already been 17 days and I don’t think I have enough data.
If I cut off the 4 days in the beginning due to water loss and the 5 at the end due to sunburn/DST/cold then we’re left with the middle, in which I lost a pound after 4 days and another after 3 days for 2lbs in 7 days. That’s pretty much textbook ex150.
But the time frame feels much too short. I’ve had plateaus for 12 days before. We’ve excluded more days of the experiment than we’ve actually included.
Just doesn’t feel right.
So while that 7 day period of everything going right certainly seems positive, I’d say that I cannot tell from this experiment if ex150choctruffle is as effective at weight loss as regular ex150 is.
Didn’t Gain Fat on Ad-Libitum Chocolate Truffle
On the other hand, I think it’s fair to say that the experiment shows ex150choctruffle, which to repeat features AD LIBITUM EATING OF CHOCOLATE TRUFFLE, THE MOST PALATABLE SUBSTANCE KNOWN TO MANKIND, didn’t make me gain weight over the 17-day period.
I’ve previously done 14 days back on my regular trashy keto and gained 12lbs before going back on ex150. Yes, some of that was water/muscle glycogen like the 5lbs at the beginning here. But 4-5lbs stayed on long-term and I had to re-lose them. Not so on chocolate truffle.
Not only did eating AD LIBITUM CHOCOLATE TRUFFLE not make me gain 12lbs, it actually made me lose those 5lbs of water weight in the first 4 days. And even if we still include the sunburn/DST/cold period at the end, I still lost 1lbs in 11 days, which honestly is better than most diets can claim after the initial water weight loss (of which we had 5lbs here).
Honestly, sick of chocolate
I didn’t go back on ex150choctruffle after the weekend plans were over. Not just because I have other experiments to run. I’m honestly a little sick of chocolate.
Unlike the whipped cream and cream in my coffee, which I can apparently eat for months at a time, the thick, rich chocolate got pretty old. It takes longer to make, longer to eat, you have to prepare it ahead of time, and cool it down in the fridge. The satiety doesn’t hit you like cream does, although it does come within a few minutes.
So while it’s kind of a funny troll diet, and it’s impressive that I didn’t gain any weight eating ad libitum chocolate truffle for 17 days, and even lost 1lb or 2lbs or 7lbs (depending on how you count), I don’t think I like it day-to-day. Maybe something to throw in for variety once or twice a week.
"So while it’s kind of a funny troll diet..." If this a funny troll diet then I am clearly a funny troll.
Have you tried adding cocoa powder to the cream?