ex150collagen review: +5lbs, hopefully mostly water

Rationale

Low protein was the original hypothesis on which I designed ex150. In order to definitely, positively, get below whatever magic protein threshold overnight, I opted for a hyper low amount of protein daily: Below 50g of protein per day.

Now this is very, very low, and frankly, probably not sustainable on its own. I got my <50g from beef and cream, which are high quality animal sources. But still, at 150lbs of lean mass, that’s <0.3g/lb of lean mass of protein.

You know, when I read it like that, it doesn’t actually sound that low - the maximum demonstrated benefit of protein is no higher than 0.64g/lb of mass. Not lean mass, but those people were athletes and bodybuilders, where the delta between lean mass and total body mass is a lot lower than in those reversing obesity - remember, I started at over 290lbs a year ago!

But still it was somewhat of an extreme thing to restrict protein that much. People regularly yelled at me on Twitter for it. Some claimed I was being irresponsible, and they worried for my safety.

Just to be safe, I did regular refeeds with ad-lib protein from time to time, typically every 30 or 60 days between experiments.

In the beginning, these refeeds also served as a sort of planned “cheat day” or “cheat week” where I’d be able to eat anything I wanted, which at the time was dirty/trashy keto. My palate changed over the first 3-6 months of ex150 and I stopped even wanting to eat those other foods, like keto protein bars, chicken, pork rinds, infinite steak, protein drinks, dark chocolate, and so on.

So while the first few refeeds involved a lot of snack/dessert/fast foods that were technically keto, the last few ones were pretty much as clean as ex150, or close, just with much higher protein.

Sustainability

Long story short, I’ve been wanting to dial up my daily protein amount for a while. Both to make it more sustainable and eliminate the need for refeeds, and to find out how much protein I can actually consume without starting to gain fat. It would be nice to not have to wonder if I’m too low in protein, and as I said above, the original 150g of beef for ex150 were pretty much chosen at random.

I’d done ex225lean before, where I ate half a pound of 96% lean beef. I ended up not losing any weight on that, but in retrospect I know way more about water weight now than I did then, which might explain this on its own. I was also already consuming a lot of hidden calories in the form of Starbucks breve lattes, which might have tainted the experiment.

So I recently decided to add 40g of collagen protein powder to the first 2 coffees (20g each) every day for ex150collagen. I picked Vital Proteins collagen peptides, unflavored.

Warning: Collagen is not a complete protein. If you consume collagen as your only source of protein, you will die.

Why collagen and not e.g. whey? Collagen is lower in BCAAs, which are suspected to be the obesogenic amino acids, mostly isoleucine and, to a lesser degree, valine.

Adding 40g of protein per day puts me at around 85-90g per day, or 0.5-0.6g/lb of lean body mass. That’s on the upper end of the adequate range, if we assume the amino acids in collagen are somewhat equivalent to satisfy my broad protein needs.

The trial

I only ran this for 14 days, for a few reasons:

• I did not do a protein refeed before this one, so no need to lose water weight.

• While I didn’t hate the collagen, I also didn’t particularly enjoy it in the coffee.

• Using protein powder kind of felt stupid. Long term I’d try eating more beef.

• I was only 2 weeks away from my 1 year ex150 anniversary, on which I had planned other changes (more on that soon). So this was a bit of a gap filler trial.

Here are the results:

There was pretty immediate water weight gain. I felt more thirsty throughout the entire trial. On ex150 I’m never very thirsty unless I’m severely dehydrated. With the added collagen, it felt more “normal” like before. I think this is from increased insulin?

It’s hard to tell over just 14 days if the water weight gain plateaued after ~5 days. It certainly slowed way down. I would have to run a full 30 days to really tell.

Variance also increased. I had over 2lbs swings over 2 days, which is more than I usually have on ex150, and without doing anything crazy or getting massively dehydrated.

This makes it hard to tell if I gained or lost any fat. It certainly wasn’t the insane 0.7/lb fat gain I had on ad-lib protein during my last 10 day refeed window. So yay for that.

I will say I felt a little more “filled-out” and “rounded” the whole time. But that would make sense, just extra water in my fat and muscle tissue? Those 5lbs of water weight have to sit somewhere.

High-variance diets are hard to measure

One of the beautiful things on ex150 is that the water weight variance from one day to the next is so low, typically within 1lb. This makes it very easy to detect any changes or trends.

With more protein, this might no longer work. As you can see above, I can barely tell anything over 14 days after the initial gain.

This makes it even more important than usual to run 30 day experiments instead of 14. It also means I’ll have to rely more on the DEXA scan than just the scale. If you remember from my DEXA experiment, while it is noisy, it seems to distinguish water/glycogen weight gain in lean tissue from fat gain relatively well.

Consuming the collagen

First I tried adding the collagen to cold brewed coffee. It didn’t dissolve at all, and made the coffee bitter.

Then I tried mixing it into my evening gelatin cream. This made it goopy and sticky, and not in a good way.

Somebody recommended I heat the coffee slightly for the collagen to dissolve - that worked great, so I ended up doing that after the first few days. You don’t need to heat the coffee much, not even to room temperature. I couldn’t even really tell the difference in temperature, but it completely dissolved all collagen without a problem.

Gelatin cream

In line with the collagen, I thought it’d be fun to make gelatin cream for the duration of the experiment. I’d tried this a few times before: add a 8g packet of gelatin to a bowl of cream, warming it up slightly for the gelatin to activate, and let it set in the fridge for a couple hours.

This creates a solid, pudding-like consistency.

Unfortunately, the gelatin cream didn’t seem to provide nearly the same level of short-term satiety as whipped cream. I did it for the first 5 days and never got cement-truck satiety once. Several times I felt hungry right after eating it.

Just to make sure it wasn’t the 8g of gelatin, which is also 8g of protein (gelatin is just cooked collagen), I tried mixing 8g of regular collagen into a bowl of whipped cream without heating it or letting it set, so normal whipped consistency. While it made it bitter, it didn’t impact satiety negatively at all.

Twice I made TWO bowls of gelatin cream, which meant doubling my evening cream consumption from about 250g to 500g. I easily finished the double portion both times, and didn’t hit cement-truck satiety.

Next, I tried just making whipped cream again instead - and hit cement-truck satiety the very first day, and the one after.

So there’s definitely something wacky about short-term satiety where whipped cream differs significantly from the solidified gelatin cream, and likely from liquid cream.

I accidentally discovered that I could make “gruel cream” by pouring about 50g of cold brew coffee into the gelatin before letting it set, or after if I then mixed it in with a spoon.

I much preferred the gruel consistency to the pudding consistency, and it provided better satiety, too, if not as cement-trucky as whipped cream did. I didn’t get hit by the cement truck once while doing gruel cream, but I did get to “slowly eats 1 spoon every couple of minutes and/or forgets about bowl of food in front of him” most days.

Not sure what’s up here. Could be that the fat density/texture level of whipped cream is just special. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

This is why I don’t recommend drinking the cream liquid on this diet, but whipping it.

Effects

During the entire collagen experiment, I did kind of feel more hungry, thought about food more or earlier, and so on. Not exactly sure if this was placebo, or due to higher total protein, or because I was now consuming a significant bolus (>40g) of protein twice a day (morning + noon) instead of just once (noon).

If I ignored the feeling or got distracted for a couple of hours, it would go away. This kind of plays into my hypothesis that protein just makes me hungry for 30-90 minutes, and for that reason I can’t have ad-lib protein, ESPECIALLY not split into multiple meals.

Lower body temperature

Another interesting observation: the last few days, I recorded somewhat significantly lower body temperatures than usual, around 97.xF instead of 98.xF.

I got an infrared forehead thermometer after the r/SaturatedFat people recommended body temperature for diagnosing hypothyroid, and I’d always been e.g. 98.1F in the morning, 98.6F during the day, and maybe 98.8F after a meal. A few times I’d been below 98F, and would wake up maybe at 97.8F. A few times, I went into the low 99s.

The last few days, I consistently woke up low 97F and barely made it to 98F even after a meal.

Huh, curious.

What’s next? ex225 and resistance training!

As I mentioned above, ex150collagen was just a 2 week gap filler.

It’s been a year now since I first started ex150. Ever since I hit 240-250lbs, an area in which I’ve been yoyoing a lot the last half year, I’ve wanted to take up exercise.

Due to Circumstances and in order not to diet experiments even more, I set myself the 1 year anniversary as the goal: I was going to experiment purely on diet for 1 whole year, no exercise besides going for lazy walks or the like.

But now I’ve started resistance exercise again, which I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with.

In order to facilitate this I’ll try to slowly titrate up my protein intake from the aforementioned ~0.3g/lb lean mass up to what I consider adequate, which is 0.5-0.6g/lb lean mass.

So next up: ex225. Not lean, same old 80/20 ground chuck. Except now I’ll be eating half a pound (225g) per day instead of 1/3 of a pound (150g). I hope to work up to about 1lb/day, which would roughly give me 95g of protein per day, almost exactly the 0.64g/lb lean mass from my favorite meta analysis.

Hopefully I will gain some lean mass, and hopefully, it won’t hinder my fat loss.

Honestly, I’ve been feeling great in the 240lbs range for months. Obviously I’d love to get back to a normal BMI, but after a year of crazy experiments I feel like doing things a bit more sustainably in terms of protein, and focusing a bit more on exercise for a while.

If I up my beef intake to 1lb/day, build some muscle, and don’t gain any fat, that’d be a win. If I maintain muscle and lose fat, that’d be a win. If I build muscle and lose fat, well, that would be fabulous!

So, for the foreseeable future, consider all my experiments done in parallel with resistance training. I hope it works out and I can stick to it, as I got a pretty nasty joint tweak the last time I tried lifting weights, but I’m going slow this time and hopefully won’t get into any trouble.

I do expect another few pounds of water/glycogin weight just from the exercise, as the body combats the inflammation caused by training.

I’ll continue the regular DEXA scans and maybe we’ll be able to see my lean mass increase there? I’m not sure what to expect, I guess best case would be a handful of pounds a month. That’s within the noise of water/glycogen retention, so it’ll likely be a few months to see a clear trend.

In any case, I’ll see you seen. Wish me luck!