ex150coconut1000 & ex150_iler_valr reviews

2 failed experiments in only 15 days, regained 4lbs

coconut trying to kill you

I just did 2 experiments of 7 days each, almost back to back. Both failed, in that I didn’t even get back to my starting weight.

ex150coconut1000

This one was kind of a joke. A bodybuilder on Twitter, Thermobolic, posted about consuming large amounts of coconut oil:

My buddy Matt was posting pictures & recipes of his “coconut chocolate” cups:

I guess it had been too long since I’d tried a pure chocolate truffle diet. So I decided to do ex150coconut1000: regular ex150 but with about 1,000kcal of coconut oil added daily.

What is up with coconut oil?

Coconut oil is infamous among ketards and Peaters because it has “weird” fatty acids. It is extremely saturated, more so than any other non-hydrogenated fat at 82%. It is extremely low in PUFAs.

But whereas most typical saturated fats like butter, beef tallow, and cocoa butter contain many long-chain saturated fats like palmitic & stearic acid (C16:0 and C18:0), coconut oil is largely medium-chain fatty acids. These are the “MCTs” (medium-chain triglycerides) that get refined into MCT oil.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_oil

These MCTs are used very differently from the longer-chain fatty acids. Some of them go straight into the liver to make ketone bodies.

People don’t agree what exactly they do, and if it’s good or bad. Peter from Hyperlipid, probably THE expert on fat metabolism in my opinion, says it’s “complicated.”

Peaters love to add a bit of coconut oil to their carrot salad. Peat praised coconut oil for being so saturated, but I don’t think he ever advocated it as a major energy source.

Coconut Chocolates Recipe

The recipe I used was slightly different from Matt’s:

• 3 parts extra virgin coconut oil

• 1 part 100% cocoa powder

• (second batch: 1 part heavy cream to mellow it out/make it creamier)

To do this I’d melt the coconut oil in the microwave, briefly stir in the other ingredients, and pour the resulting mix into an ice cube tray that I also use to portion rendered beef tallow.

Then just put it in the fridge and it’ll harden very quickly, yielding bite-sized coconut chocolates. They actually tasted pretty decent, although I’d hit my fat tolerance quickly. You know, that feeling when you suddenly become nauseated from all the fat.

First time: Crazy Coconut Energy

Here’s my reaction the first time I tried some of these:

(The 28 push-ups were in one set, just mentioning it cause somebody on Twitter asked.)

It was nuts! Reminded me of some of the first few times when I got cement-truck satiety on ex150, and suddenly felt the extreme need to go outside for a walk. Except this time, walking wasn’t enough; I had to run.

Overall impressions

I ate 100g of these coconut chocolates per day, which was 4-5 pieces. I do realize that’s not quite 1,000kcal; even 100g of pure coconut oil would only be 900kcal. Because of the cream and cocoa, it’s even less. Sue me.

Unfortunately (?), I never got that crazy burst of energy again. I even tried eating my entire portion of 100g in one sitting, which was way more than what I ate for that first crazy energy flash. But no dice.

My temperature was elevated the entire time. Before this on ex150, I’d be low to mid 98°F during the day, and maybe 97°8F before bed.

On the coconut, I hit over 99°F regularly every day. I only hit 100°F that first time though. But, on average, my temperature was about half a degree higher. Basically high 98s to low 99s instead of high 97s to mid 98s.

I was slightly worried about digestion: coconut oil is infamous for its .. negative digestive properties .. when eaten in high amounts.

But it wasn’t that bad. I’d say it was definitely worse than normal; my digestion on ex150 is a solid 10/10. I like to brag that I fart confidently in the pool, but the truth is I barely even fart on ex150. Probably because there’s so little fiber.

With all that coconut oil (and fiber from cocoa!) added, it was more a 8/10. I went #2 more often and it just didn’t feel as great overall. Sometimes, my stomach felt rumbly and weird as if it wasn’t super happy, which I’m not used to any more.

Here are some notes I took during the week:

Day 1

Been kinda nauseous all afternoon/evening

Didn't eat dinner cream

Day 2

Slightly upset digestion

Slight acid reflux (from the cocoa powder/fiber?)

Didn't eat dinner cream

Day 3

Didn't eat dinner cream OR fourth piece of coco chocolate

But was a chaotic day and had 2x SB HWC lattes

Despite running objectively hotter (upper 98°F instead of lower), think I'm sweating less

Day 4

Allegedly 99.4°F waking temp (IR forehead)

First coconut day that I actually managed to eat dinner cream

Although possibly cause yesterday was confusing/possibly low carolie

99.3°F at night

Temp def higher than before by 0.5-1°F

Day 5

Hit 99.x again and many high 98's

Ate normal amount of cream

Day 6

Ate all 100g of chocolates in a span of 15-30 minutes, just to try it

Got slightly nauseous about halfway in, but not too bad

Temp briefly went up to 99.75°F, then dumped down into 97.x°F

Surprisingly, no particularly strong cement truck satiety

Day 7

Last few days, sleep rhythm slipped way late? Not sure if coincidence or coconut oil

Kinda glad its over, annoying having to eat that much fat

Never got that manic energy high again, huh

Weight

What was I expecting weight-wise? Honestly, not much. Thermobolic reported losing 10lbs in 7 days, but I didn’t expect that. Although it would’ve been cool lol. Let’s take a look.

Oh boy, that’s not great. I was around 220-221lbs when I ended my last experiment, ex150ffinduction. I did only a single day of high-protein refeeding, and it wasn’t even that much.

But while I rapidly lost a bunch of water weight initially, I bottomed out about 2lbs higher.

On the one hand, this wouldn’t be super surprising from a CICO perspective: I purposefully added nearly 900kcal/day to the diet.

On the other hand, I consumed an extra 1,500kcal/day or so of heavy cream for 4-6 weeks last summer, and I didn’t gain any weight from it. Hm.

Sleep got messed up?

Maybe the strangest thing was that my sleep got very bad. A few days into the experiment, my normally very stable sleep pattern got worse and worse. I almost didn’t notice it, until I stayed up until 4am one night although I had a work meeting at 9am the next day. I spent hours in bed after going to bed around my usual bedtime (midnight to maybe 1am). I just couldn’t fall asleep!

This is what the beginning of a Non-24 cycle feels like. You’re kinda tired, you go to bed. You can’t really fall asleep. You toss, you turn. You think a lot of thoughts, if only you could stop your mind from racing!

You check the watch, and realize you’ve been in bed, in the dark, for 2h and still can’t sleep.

So.. did coconut somehow start inducing my Non-24 again? Very strange since it’s just fat, but then again coconut fat is screwy.

It’s not the extra carolies, and it’s not the cocoa powder, I’ve run both those experiments before many times and my sleep was rock solid.

After 2 days off the coconut, my sleep seemed to normalize.

Very curious.

Conclusion: treat coconut oil as medicine

I wouldn’t use coconut oil as a major energy source. Something about it just doesn’t feel right.

I find it to digest ok, but not as well as dairy. It does seem to make me run hotter, although maybe that part was the extra calories?

It’s probably fine if you’re doing a spoon a day, like in the Peat carrot salad. But something about these middle-chain fatty acids doesn’t strike me as right.

Experiment 2: ex150_iler_valr

What be this abomination of an experiment name?!

IleR: isoleucine restriction
ValR: valine restriction

Isoleucine & valine are 2 of the 3 BCAAs (Brain Chained Amino Acids). In mouse studies done by Lamming Lab, these were identified to be the “active ingredient” in protein restriction, leaving the mice ripped & shredded & non-diabetic even when faced with the evil Western High-Fat Diet.

Unfortunately, pretty much all natural protein contains relatively similar amounts of all amino acids. Some are lower in overall BCAAs, but none are low specifically in isoleucine & valine.

So I made my own custom protein powder.

Making my own custom protein powder mix

There are 22 amino acids (in humans). To get protein without getting isoleucine/valine would require mixing all the other ones together and leaving these 2 out.

I decided to just do the essential amino acids (EAAs) instead. All 3 BCAAs (isoleucine/valine/leucine) are essential, so I’d just mix 6 instead of 8. (Or 9: histidine has been declared a somewhat essential amino acid, it’s the Pluto of amino acids I suppose.)

You can buy individual amino acids from Bulk Supplements on Amazon, they’re not that expensive though it does add up. I think I paid about $150 for various bags of the 6 remaining EAAs (sans Ile/Val/Hist).

I went off an amino acid profile called MAP (Master Amino acid Pattern) that allegedly optimizes utilization of the amino acids in the body.

Using this EAA mix instead of all 22 AAs might have contributed to my downfall, let’s briefly compare it to the amino acid profile of regular ground beef in the USDA database:

We can see that ground beef contains 17.1% BCAAs, and 39.5% EAAs. My EAA-only mix obviously contains 100% EAAs, and 28.6% BCAA - since I deleted isoleucine and valine, the only BCAA left is leucine. Leucine is supposed to be the one sending the “muscle growth” signal that turns on muscle protein synthesis, so I was hoping to lose fat & gain muscle at the same time.

Most Disgusting Taste Of All Times

The first time I mixed my custom EAA mix, I just poured all these little white powders into a cup, added some water, and tried to drink it. The smell hit me like a sledgehammer. The taste was even worse than the smell, but the worst was the aftertaste. A lingering, nasty taste that wouldn’t go away even after rinsing out my mouth and brushing my teeth.

These EAAs tasted like gasoline smelled, except stronger. Truly nasty and disgusting.

To improve the flavor, I mixed a larger batch (250g) in an empty protein powder tub and added 50g cocoa and a few sachets of instant coffee to bring it up to 300g. Then I’d take 30g of this mixture daily.

Powder mix instead of beef

I was replacing my beef with this EAA mix: the 150g of 80/20 ground beef contain around 25g protein, and I was replacing it with 25g of my EAA mix (and 5g of cocoa/instant coffee flavoring). This still adds up to around 40-45g of total protein per day, with the rest mostly coming from my heavy cream intake. Since I wasn’t changing my heavy cream intake, there wasn’t a way for me to remove the isoleucine or valine out of that component.

In order not to change the meal timing and leave everything else the same as much as possible, I took the EAA mix with my lunch. I still cooked lunch, although it was just vegetables shallow fried in tallow & butter with lots of sauce.

Experiment aborted after 7 days

I intended to run this experiment for 30 days. I had great hopes. But I aborted after 7 days, because it was not sustainable and seemed to work against me, not for me.

Here are some notes from the 7 days:

Day 1

OMG THIS IS THE MOST DISGUSTING TASTE I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED *GAGS*

Day 2

Prepared 250g mixture with some instant coffee (~5g) & 45g of cocoa powder, take 30g of that mixture daily

Pretty easy to mix up by just shaking it in an empty protein powder tub, color from cocoa gives nice indication of mixing status

Way, way less disgusting, although I still rinsed out my mouth after

If you added sweetener it would probably be pretty tolerable

Feeling kind of heart-racy/manic a few minutes after taking the mix, not sure if I'm making this up but could swear the same happened yesterday. Although it might just be the super disgusting taste lol.

Day 3

EAAs still disgusting as heck

Mixes easier in warm than cold water

99.0°F IR/97.78°F oral temp early evening (weird discrepancy?)

Watch feels loose on wrist

Day 4

Just chugged the protein w/ as little liquid as possible to get it over with

Pretty significantly degraded workout performance - a good sign, glycogen depletion?

Temps still high (98.9°F IR)

Day 5

Kinda missing the beef!

Notice myself eating more sauce

What could it be?

• I'm protein matching, so overall protein shouldn't have changed.

• 150g beef only has like 100mg sodium, my sauce has way more than that

Day 6

Getting used to chugging the EAAs and ignoring the foul taste

Meat-less meal REALLY unsatisfying somehow, weird

(IR) temps continue to be high, high 98s to low 99s

Pretty sure I just finished a jar of Rao's alfredo sauce I only cooked once with

Day 7

Adding an extra 60g of okra to lunch to hopefully give it some crunch

Definitely more meal-like

Super high glucose, 95, 99, 90, 104 (!) throughout the day

But decent high ketones the whole time, 2.0-3.0mmol/L

EAAs basically making me diabetic?!

Bought jar of salsa & can of green chilies, kinda in full knowledge I'd eat the whole thing the same evening

Willpower isn't real, cravings are weird lol

Still super shitty sleep whole time, since coconut oil? Actually thought it was a bit better 2-3 days after quitting that

Body just kinda feels... in turmoil? Not necessarily bad, but certainly feels different

Day 8

Fasting glucose 84mg/dL, ketones 0.9mmol/L

Still, quitting

Observations

There were quite a few mixed signals:

• My workout performance went down, which previously happened when I lost weight and averaged very low blood glucose. I associate this with glycogen depletion.

• My watch became very loose on my wrist, which also previously coincided with weight loss and low blood glucose.

• After a few days, my blood glucose actually began to rise and rise until I was in the 90s all day long, and even over 100. On long bouts of ex150 I’m usually in the 70s or 80s, and have averaged entire weeks below 70. Seeing even a 95 was rare, let alone a 104. Jeez, was I giving myself diabetes here?!

• Like on my previous “fat fasts” (=meatless experiments), I began really craving the beef & finding my meal unsatisfying around day 4-5. By day 7, I bought salsa & green chilies and ate the whole thing with a spoon. Remember, this is coming from someone who just happily ate the same meal, every day, for nearly 2 years.

• I’m really not sure what could be causing these cravings. Previously I ascribed it to lack of protein; but this diet was explicitly protein-matched!

• I’d also suspected salt, since I’d start craving tomato sauce. But 150g beef only has about 100mg of salt, and my portion of tomato sauce has about 5x that. A few spoons of tomato sauce should easily make up for any salt cravings, but didn’t seem to.

• I got a really weird cramp in my neck one night, which left me sore for 2 days. I also suddenly got a cramp in my biceps one day. On ex150 I practically never get cramps even when working out. I ascribe these cramps to electrolyte imbalance, probably induced by changes in insulin - this would also explain my glucose issues.

• My temp was still hotter than normal. Not sure if leftover from the coconut experiment or if the EAA mix had a similar effect.

Weight

First it seemed promising, I dropped below the lowest coconut weight on day 4. With my workouts getting worse and my watch getting loose, I felt on the right way, despite the EAAs tasting so disgusting.

Left green shade: coconut. Right green shade: EAA mix.

But then my weight started going up somewhat rapidly. Up about 2lbs in 3 days. Combined with the sudden increase in glucose, something just felt really, really wrong.

I went back on regular ex150 after, and you can see that the weight gain stopped. I also started feeling better again.

Now 1-2lbs in 7 days isn’t a super strong signal, and if everything else had gone amazing, I would’ve continued. But besides the weight, there were the cramps, and there was the sudden cravings for salsa/chiles/meat, and there was the glucose..

Also, to contrast with the coconut experiment: I gained more doing the EAA mix, and that did NOT have 900kcal/day extra.

Glucose & Ketones

I wasn’t wearing a CGM or CKM this time. If you don’t know, I ran around with a continuous glucose monitor for half a year once, and a continuous ketone monitor for a couple months.

But since I didn’t have these now, I only have the occasional Keto Mojo finger prick data:

The left green shade is the coconut experiment, the right green shade the custom EAA mix.

It starts out pretty normal for me, glucose in the 75-95mg/dL range, ketones 2-3.0mmol/l both before and during the coconut experiment. MCTs are supposed to be very ketogenic, but 3.0 is honestly not particularly high for me. Just doing ex150 for 1-2 months usually gives me higher readings, but it had only been a few days since my protein refeed.

I tested slightly hygoglycemic (<70mg/dL) and over 4.5mmol/l at the very start of the EAA experiment. This could honestly just be that it had now been over a week since the protein refeed. Seeing 4.0mmol/l ketones and low 70s glucose is very normal for me on ex150.

But then, toward the end of the EAA week when I started feeling weird: my glucose suddenly tested high 90s ON AVERAGE! No matter if it’d been 6h since I ate. At the same time, my ketones were still in the 2-3mmol/l range. The combination is weird, I’d expect my ketones to be very low (<1.5 or even <1.0) if my glucose is as high as 99mg/dL or 104mg/dL.

A baseline glucose of 95-99mg/dL is pretty concerning to me, and what I experience when I eat high-protein diets in the long run. My entire glucose curve just shifts up by 20 points or so, indicating that my body is constantly turning protein into glucose via gluconeogenesis.

Interestingly, though, my FASTING glucose wasn’t high this time - usually low 80s. But then I’d drink some coffee with cream and it would skyrocket to 95 or 99mg/dL.

This was actually even more concerning to me than a fasting glucose of 95 that stays at 95. Usually, coffee with cream does absolutely nothing to my glucose.

If fat was now increasing my glucose dramatically, did this indicate I was messing up my Randle cycle? The Randle cycle is a subsystem in the mitochondria responsible for switching seamlessly between glucose and fat oxidation. The infamous “swamping” problem of carbs + fats at the same time likely has its origin in the Randle cycle.

An inability to control glucose while eating mostly fat (cream) is a sign of diabetes! It would indicate that my cells can’t deal with glucose when I take in fat, to such a degree that my glucose becomes almost prediabetic.

That was pretty scary, and the #1 reason I aborted the EAA experiment after only 7 days.

Why was this worse than ex150?

It’d be one thing for the diet to not be better than ex150, but worse?! It was the same amount of protein (on purpose) but lower isoleucine/valine.

Honestly I don’t know, here are some ideas:

• Maybe the non-EAA amino acids are important to balance out the EAAs, even in absence of isoleucine/valine? The Lamming mouse studies didn’t only use EAAs, they used all 22 amino acids and just lowered ile/val. E.g. glycine is supposed to be an important factor balancing BCAAs.

• Maybe it doesn’t matter right now, and nothing works due to the Summer Malaise

• Maybe I was somehow still messed up from the coconut experiment (I only took 2 days off between experiments). Although, in the coconut experiment, I never had unexpected high glucose.

DEXA

But..but… maybe all that weight I gained was muscle, right? Nope, I did a DEXA right at the end of this:

My body fat % rose for the second month in a row. Before the Summer Malaise I hit a new low of 30.2%, now it’s 32.2% again. My lean mass did go up a tiny bit last month, but only .3lb - well below DEXA water weight noise. That’s literally half a glass of water I could’ve had before the scan.

High body temperature, yet fat gain

I consistently hit the highest temps during these 2 experiments that I’ve ever measured, both infrared on the forehead and orally. Hit high 99°F many times, and usually at least high 98°F even orally. I hit 100°F once, as described.

Yet I gained fat.

This confirms to me what seems obvious from the outside: the “high temp revv’d up metabolism” the Peat diet produces is not good for weight loss for most people, at least not people like me (severe obesity phenotype). That’s why very few people lose fat doing the meme Peat diet, I suspect, and some even put on fat. I’d probably put on a lot of fat doing it even for a short time.

Even Peat himself wasn’t recommending these “calorie/heat maxxing” diets for obese people, by the way. If you listen to him on reversing obesity, he recommends limiting your calories and exercising more lol.

The Summer Malaise

So far, this summer is shaping up to be very much like the last one: I can’t lose weight, and even gain some, no matter what.

I’ve speculated previously what it could be:

• Body somehow needs to “recover” from fat loss and restructure?

• Linoleic acid from fat loss PUFA’d me and I need to work it down again?

• Sunlight bad akshually?

• More activity/exercise bad ackshually?

• Who the F knows..

What’s next? ex115

Sigh. Just like last summer, every experiment fails lol. Science! Who made this thing?!

Normally I’d just revert back to ex150, but that didn’t help me lose any weight the last time I did it, less than a month ago.

So I’ll just do very slightly less beef. Cut my pound of beef into quarters instead of thirds.

Hopefully, that’ll still be satisfying and sustainable. And it’ll be slightly less protein; about 18g from beef instead of 25g daily. That also means less isoleucine/valine, yet with the same ratio of other amino acids as before.

Honestly, I was going to do ex225 instead and just see if I could not gain weight and improve my lifts. But since I’m now sitting at 223.5lbs instead of 221.lbs.. I just kind of don’t want to risk it.

2 failed experiments in a row, let’s play this one safe.