ex150grassfed review: Disappointing fat loss, probably not the grass' fault

Is grass-fed beef overrated?

Why grass-fed?

Ever since I started ex150 nearly a year ago, the idea of replacing my beloved 80/20 ground chuck with grass-fed ground beef was in the back of my mind. Surely, grass-fed beef was healthier in every way?

So I kept ex150grassfed on the list of experiments to try. It’s honestly so close to regular ex150 that it barely felt like a legitimate experiment. How could that small a change possibly make a difference?

ex150suet trial: huge fail

For the record, I had originally only planned on doing the grass-fed for 14 days, and then switch over to ex150suet, in which I’d replace my evening whipped cream meal with fried beef suet.

Unfortunately, I was unable to eat enough suet and had to abort that experiment on day 4. Eating pure fat like that is somehow quite sickening to me, and I say that as someone who eats a large bowl of whipped cream every day.

My gag reflex triggers after just about every bite. I also tried the suet raw a couple of times, and while it was different in texture and flavor, it wasn’t exactly better.

To give you an idea of how little suet I was able to eat: I would fry 200g of suet in the pan, which would yield 118g of fried suet + some tallow rendered out, which I’d use to cook my next meal in.

I was only able to eat about half of those 118g in one sitting. That’s about 2 small cubes or bites of suet. Of course, 100g of pure fat has 900kcal, so maybe the fat density was just too high for me.

After managing to eat the 118g of suet in several sittings, I experienced insane satiety. It made my usual cement-truck satiety look like child’s play. There was a strong feeling of disgust or nausea, and it was unpleasant. Maybe this is what people on GLP-1 drugs experience, haha, I’ve heard some anecdotes like that.

I tried pouring tomato sauce onto the fried suet to get more down, but it wasn’t able to overpower the strong fat taste and texture.

After eating some suet, my body temperature ran 99.1-99.7F. My thermometer warned me that I had a fever. So it does seem that suet raises metabolism substantially, as I’m usually in the low to mid 98F.

On day 4 I realized I was just not eating enough suet and was basically fasting, so I stopped the experiment.

I wonder what this is. Some sort of gallbladder or bile issue? Can I just not produce enough bile to digest all that fat? Somehow I can eat insane amounts of heavy cream, but I can’t stomach a single bite of pure fat. Maybe it works because the dairy fat in cream is already emulsified, whereas beef fat is not?

Eating pemmican and carnivore felt similar. I was never feeling great, and I both couldn’t eat enough without experiencing nausea or GI distress, but was hungry/starving at the same time. On carnivore it wasn’t as bad, I mostly experienced the feeling when trying to eat more than 1 fatty ribeye at a time.

Maybe I just have issues with high levels of unemulsified fat. I have heard a theory that some peoples genetically overadapted to the high calcium in dairy, and subsequently lost the ability to get enough of it from meat and fat, so I could have that. But pure speculation.

After quitting the suet, unsure of what to do next, I just went back on another 14 days of ex150grassfed. So, technically, the experiment is split into ex150grassfed-1 and ex150grassfed-2, interrupted by 4 days of ex150suet. In effect, the only difference was eating less cream and instead a few hundred grams of beef suet during those 4 days. I still did the grass-fed beef for lunch during the suet experiment instead of regular beef.

Grass-fed vs. grain-fed

Was there a huge difference when switching to grass-fed?

It was largely the same. In the beginning I only had access to 85% lean grass-fed beef, vs. my favorite grain-fed of 80%. The 85% tastes noticeably worse. Luckily, I found 80% grass-fed for a reasonable price ($7/lb) and I bought all they had at the time, which lasted me throughout the entire experiment. (And, in fact, I’m still living off of it, since it lasts me 3 days per pound.)

The grass-fed 80% beef was so similar that I stopped noticing a difference. Maybe I’ll notice something once I go back to 80/20 ground chuck.

Apart from that, it really wasn’t different in any way.

Grass-fed results: first glance looks good? Or does it..

Two 14 day runs of ex150grassfed, interrupted by 4 days of ex150 suet

If you looked at this graph of the experiment alone it might look pretty good, and similar in shape to the graphs of the recent ex150 trial participants: big initial water weight drop, then a slow but steady trickle downward.

You can see the 4-day suet experiment in the middle there, that’s all the red stripes. It didn’t make a very big difference, as you can see.

Nearly 11lbs lost in 33 days, for an average loss of over 0.3lb/day. Sick, right?

But what if I told you..

ex150grassfed in context of previous trial and refeed

Dang it! Over the course of 33 days of ex150grassfed, I didn’t even drop down to my previous low of 235lbs.

The 10-day protein refeed caused me to gain 17lbs, and I only lost a little more than 60% of that. Now I did expect to spend about 2x the time losing that weight again that I gained it in, but that would’ve meant 20 days back down to 235. Instead, I plateaued pretty hard after a quick, initial drop of about halfway, and then it went excruciatingly slow. I basically only lost 2-3lbs after the initial drop, for nearly the entire month.

What’s going on here?

I actually have a new theory. This one is much easier to test than some of my previous malaise-related hypotheses. E.g. previously I’d suspected Daylight Savings Time was messing with my sleep and preventing fat loss. This is hard to test, as DST happens 2x per year and I can’t exactly opt out of it at work.

But this idea I should be able to test in another 30 day experiment. So instead of bloviating, I’ll just try it and report back soon.