I echo the other commenters. Post your hypothesis. That's a basic part of scientific testing in a community setting. It keeps everything honest and level.
The replication crisis means that we essentially have to burn everything we thought we knew in almost all fields, which is taking a while to filter down into praxis. But it also means that we might get some sense out of the useless buggers going forward. An amazingly good thing!
Well, I like to think that some of the things we thought we knew are true. We just don't know which ones, although it seems like expert opinion is actually quite useful, and probably the reason that there's any signal in the medical literature at all (people don't test things they don't think are true).
It's more a case of going over everything carefully than starting completely from scratch.... I hope.
Dude, write your new theory down before you test it! Also I am curious....
My ex150ish trials have involved maybe a kilo or two of water weight shed or regained according to carbs, which is consistent with the idea that you have about 2000kcal/500g of glycogen bound to another kg of water.
You've really gained 17lbs in a week? What on earth is going on? Is that normal?
OK, so presumably the only thing starbucks can be giving you is caffeine. Why is it 'no starbucks' rather than 'no caffeine'?
I drink tea and coffee in buckets and always have. It doesn't seem to have the same effects on me as it does on most people. But it's a powerful psychoactive drug in most people. It could be an appetite disruptor.
But then, the English have been drinking tea and coffee for a long time, so it runs into the 'why no obesity before 1970?' problem.
I don't think it's the caffeine, I think it's the extra 400ml of heavy cream I'd consume on average 1.3x per day :) Pushing 4,000-4,500kcal... if this theory is true, it's a miracle I didn't GAIN weight.
My entire weight problem that I am currently worrying about and trying mad things to fix is that over the last thirteen years I seem to have gained about 10 kilos. How on earth would it be possible to gain that in a week? 10kilos of fat is 70000 stored calories. No one can eat 10000 calories a day for a week. Surely?
Of course not all of it is body fat. If you look at the graph, it's likely that the half I lost immediately was water. So I gained maybe 8-10lbs of fat in as many days, and the rest water/glycogen.
Even then, 8 lbs of glycogen/water? And your off-days are just 'more protein' aren't they? Not much in the way of carbs even in your normal diet as I understand it?
Are you suddenly impossibly starving hungry the minute you let the protein come up? And satiety just stops happening?
It's not that I'm suddenly starving hungry. On keto, I never really am hungry like before.
It's more that if I eat protein, no matter how full it makes me physically, I want to eat more 30 minutes later. Even if I'm painfully bloated.
It's a bit more in carbs too, e.g. I ate a bar of dark chocolate most days of my last refeed. A lot more fiber. Fiber binds water, carbs + protein raise insulin, insulin binds water, muscles fill up with glycogen a bit (probably not much more than a pound).
> It's more that if I eat protein, no matter how full it makes me physically, I want to eat more 30 minutes later. Even if I'm painfully bloated.
This is very interesting! You're not hungry, per se, you couldn't manage another pot of cream, but you are treating protein like I treat cigars; If they're in the house they get smoked. The only option is not to buy the things in the first place.
Sounds like your appetite is twice broken, and your body knows perfectly well that it doesn't need any more fat, but is for some reason desperate for either carbs or protein. I wonder what is going on?
I can see that excess PUFAs could somehow block fat metabolism, leaving you out-of-fuel with a full tank (and hence carb-craving), but I wonder what would cause you to think you're short of protein.
If you just eat protein ad-lib, does the hunger ever stop, or do you just eat to the point of painful bloating day after day?
It's presumably mostly 'water weight' in both his case and mine, but if you can't eat 10,000 calories in a day I don't know what to tell you. My normal dinner approaches 4k. A single gallon of vanilla ice cream has something like 7.5k.
I wouldn't consider myself particularly normal, but 10000 kcal in a day sounds like a challenge! Every day for a week sounds like something you might do for a bet and regret bitterly both during and afterwards.
I feel like I do when I read about pearl divers and ultramarathoners. Very impressed and slightly disturbed.
See, that's what I mean. It's not normal. But it's common here. You'd think a normal/healthy human being would get sick after substantially more than 1,000kcal over daily requirements. That's why I think it's some kind of messed up biochemistry in the body driving this, like a bear preparing for hibernation or something.
Yes about that. The ordinary size container in the freezer section is only a half gallon, but they don't last long in the hands of the chronically overfed. The bulk tubs are a gallon, or at dairy outlets, three gallons. Also, remember that people who eat too much usually eat quite steadily and I have seen people make an alarming amount of progress through a three gallon tub of ice cream over the course of 16 waking hours.
I'm going to have to try this. I don't often eat ice-cream, but my intuition is that a couple of bowls would be enough. I'll try and find a large tub of PUFA-free ice cream and see what happens.
With double cream, when I drank an experimental 600ml pot my immediate reaction was 'wow! that was nice', and I drank a second pot. Then I felt pretty unwell for some hours and didn't eat again for a day or so.
The second time I tried it, I managed about half a pot before I just became unable to drink any more. It wasn't a physical problem, I'm sure that if someone was pointing a gun at my head I could have drunk a load more, I just really didn't want to.
I wonder if what's going on is that whatever mechanism says 'high calories! careful!' is just broken somehow. I wonder what could break it?
"I actually have a new theory. This one is much easier to test than some of my previous malaise-related hypotheses... 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."
Hypothesize first, then experiment, then report, right? Inquiring minds wanna know...
Can you do a graph of your weight back to your first ex150?
I get the impression that you've kind of stalled out at a BMI of around 34 since your early successes. Is that just because you keep trying variants that don't work or has the effect stopped?
Is that right? You're about 6ft and currently 245 pounds when not ex150ing?
So (245/2.2)/(6*12*0.0251)/(6*12*0.0251)=34.09
Your methods seem to have got me down to BMI 30 with very little effort, and there's clearly more to come, so I'm confused!
You said you couldn't wait to be overweight....
I think that the most interesting and effective thing you could be doing for science at the moment is ex150ing yourself down to something reasonable like 27 and then working out how to stay there.
6'1, yea. When not ex150-ing, it adds 5-15lbs of water weight, so a big range :) But I woke up 240.4 today (on ex150) so if I don't way overdo it, yea, roughly 245-250 probably. My BMI scripts tells me 31.9, so very close to what you calculated, exactly.
That is what I'm trying to do - I have mainly given up on the crazy experiments quite a while ago, and am just trying to find my "mojo." Trust me, if I knew how to get to a 27 BMI, I'd have been there 3 months ago ;)
My current Starbucks experiment is one of the possible "why did it stop working?" things, but it's too early to tell. Hopefully I'll be back down at 235lbs (my low from a couple months ago) in 2 weeks lol, then I'll know it worked..
I am still confused about how you can possibly carry 15lbs of 'water weight'. That's a lot of water. I would say 'a gallon and a half', but that's imperial, it's 1.8 gallons US.
My rapid losses and gains at the ends of ex150ish bouts were more like 3 lbs, and the internet confirms this as a normal amount of water-bound glycogen. We're not built *that* differently, surely.
Yea, not sure. Some of the participants have had very different reactions to "cheat days" as well, with some barely noticing a difference and others setting themselves back for a week.
I'm not exactly sure what this means or what the clue is, though :(
Attaboy, I'm sure you'll be fine.... It was optimized for you, but it worked fine even in a weakened form for me, and I started off roughly where you are now. Just stick with the og ex150 for a bit and see what happens.
Oops I got inches to cm wrong, an inch is 2.54 cm, not 2.51cm, the value I have known since childhood, and I'm apparently 178cm tall, not 176cm. Yay! Damned Dutch don't look so clever now.....
Do you have any thoughts on how you would adapt this diet for a vegetarian? Sub eggs for meat? Three or four eggs probably gets you about to the protein level of 1/3 lb of beef (but also gives you way more cholesterol than the beef)
I think cholesterol is great, so I don't mind eggs :) I think protein-equivalent pretty much anything is fine, although some plant sources apparently have less bio availability so you might have to adjust higher. But e.g. if you did eggs or fish it should be fine.
Super unscientific and not really tracking anything: I just overeat protein until I'm sick and then go back on the next trial. I basically just eat lots of meat, cheese, eggs, yogurt, that sort of thing. The occasional bar of dark chocolate (not really protein, but I like dark chocolate and it's not part of regular ex150).
How literally do you mean this? I'm surprised you're not getting the same satiety from the fat in cheese as from the fat in cream. Could it be that you're short of protein and so you're guzzling cheese even though you don't need the energy *per se*. And isn't yoghurt pretty carb-heavy?
My hypothesis is that it's not so much that fat is providing me satiety, as much as carbs AND protein are spiking insulin or similar, preventing satiety.
I mean it quite literally. I've thrown out the remaining fatty brisket because I was already painfully bloated but would return to eat more every 30 minutes. Quite a ways beyond "sick" yet threw it out before I had to puke. Win!
I doubt I'm short of protein, because I've always had that, even when eating extremely high protein keto.
Yogurt is relatively carb heavy, yes. But also casein and whey, I think.
> Apart from that, it really wasn’t different in any way.
The difference is not in the taste. The difference is in the not being MRNA beef
> 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.
Good luck!
I echo the other commenters. Post your hypothesis. That's a basic part of scientific testing in a community setting. It keeps everything honest and level.
I love the way we've hit on the idea of pre-registration organically. It's taken the soft "sciences" a century.
Hence the replication crisis.
The replication crisis means that we essentially have to burn everything we thought we knew in almost all fields, which is taking a while to filter down into praxis. But it also means that we might get some sense out of the useless buggers going forward. An amazingly good thing!
It explains why we don't know anything :) Now we have a chance to start. Not even start over, just start.
Well, I like to think that some of the things we thought we knew are true. We just don't know which ones, although it seems like expert opinion is actually quite useful, and probably the reason that there's any signal in the medical literature at all (people don't test things they don't think are true).
It's more a case of going over everything carefully than starting completely from scratch.... I hope.
Dude, write your new theory down before you test it! Also I am curious....
My ex150ish trials have involved maybe a kilo or two of water weight shed or regained according to carbs, which is consistent with the idea that you have about 2000kcal/500g of glycogen bound to another kg of water.
You've really gained 17lbs in a week? What on earth is going on? Is that normal?
It's normal for me. Not sure about other people. I've always had pretty extreme weight fluctuations.
New theory is to cut out starbucks.
Crikey, how do you take your coffee?
With lots of heavy cream.
OK, so presumably the only thing starbucks can be giving you is caffeine. Why is it 'no starbucks' rather than 'no caffeine'?
I drink tea and coffee in buckets and always have. It doesn't seem to have the same effects on me as it does on most people. But it's a powerful psychoactive drug in most people. It could be an appetite disruptor.
But then, the English have been drinking tea and coffee for a long time, so it runs into the 'why no obesity before 1970?' problem.
I don't think it's the caffeine, I think it's the extra 400ml of heavy cream I'd consume on average 1.3x per day :) Pushing 4,000-4,500kcal... if this theory is true, it's a miracle I didn't GAIN weight.
Wow really? You don't get your cement-truck satiety from coffee with (stunning) amounts of cream in it? And you didn't notice?
That's really freaky if true! And a big clue...
(Thin and bitter, like my women.....)
I'm pretty sure I once gained over 20 pounds in under a week.
My entire weight problem that I am currently worrying about and trying mad things to fix is that over the last thirteen years I seem to have gained about 10 kilos. How on earth would it be possible to gain that in a week? 10kilos of fat is 70000 stored calories. No one can eat 10000 calories a day for a week. Surely?
Of course not all of it is body fat. If you look at the graph, it's likely that the half I lost immediately was water. So I gained maybe 8-10lbs of fat in as many days, and the rest water/glycogen.
Even then, 8 lbs of glycogen/water? And your off-days are just 'more protein' aren't they? Not much in the way of carbs even in your normal diet as I understand it?
Are you suddenly impossibly starving hungry the minute you let the protein come up? And satiety just stops happening?
It's not that I'm suddenly starving hungry. On keto, I never really am hungry like before.
It's more that if I eat protein, no matter how full it makes me physically, I want to eat more 30 minutes later. Even if I'm painfully bloated.
It's a bit more in carbs too, e.g. I ate a bar of dark chocolate most days of my last refeed. A lot more fiber. Fiber binds water, carbs + protein raise insulin, insulin binds water, muscles fill up with glycogen a bit (probably not much more than a pound).
> It's more that if I eat protein, no matter how full it makes me physically, I want to eat more 30 minutes later. Even if I'm painfully bloated.
This is very interesting! You're not hungry, per se, you couldn't manage another pot of cream, but you are treating protein like I treat cigars; If they're in the house they get smoked. The only option is not to buy the things in the first place.
Sounds like your appetite is twice broken, and your body knows perfectly well that it doesn't need any more fat, but is for some reason desperate for either carbs or protein. I wonder what is going on?
I can see that excess PUFAs could somehow block fat metabolism, leaving you out-of-fuel with a full tank (and hence carb-craving), but I wonder what would cause you to think you're short of protein.
If you just eat protein ad-lib, does the hunger ever stop, or do you just eat to the point of painful bloating day after day?
It's presumably mostly 'water weight' in both his case and mine, but if you can't eat 10,000 calories in a day I don't know what to tell you. My normal dinner approaches 4k. A single gallon of vanilla ice cream has something like 7.5k.
This. I think normal people don't understand the weight fluctuations and what hyperphagia really looks like :)
I wouldn't consider myself particularly normal, but 10000 kcal in a day sounds like a challenge! Every day for a week sounds like something you might do for a bet and regret bitterly both during and afterwards.
I feel like I do when I read about pearl divers and ultramarathoners. Very impressed and slightly disturbed.
See, that's what I mean. It's not normal. But it's common here. You'd think a normal/healthy human being would get sick after substantially more than 1,000kcal over daily requirements. That's why I think it's some kind of messed up biochemistry in the body driving this, like a bear preparing for hibernation or something.
A gallon doesn't sound like a normal portion to me, but then I don't live in the colonies...
Have you heard of this magical place called Costco?
I think it's part of the plot of the movie "Idiocracy"?
There's something about the phrase 'a single gallon', that implies that if peckish, you might go for a second gallon.
Is this one of those 'freedom unit' things? Are your gallons roughly 5 litres?
I think a US gallon is 3.8 liters. Come on, eating 5 liters of ice cream in one sitting would be crazy.
Yes about that. The ordinary size container in the freezer section is only a half gallon, but they don't last long in the hands of the chronically overfed. The bulk tubs are a gallon, or at dairy outlets, three gallons. Also, remember that people who eat too much usually eat quite steadily and I have seen people make an alarming amount of progress through a three gallon tub of ice cream over the course of 16 waking hours.
I'm going to have to try this. I don't often eat ice-cream, but my intuition is that a couple of bowls would be enough. I'll try and find a large tub of PUFA-free ice cream and see what happens.
With double cream, when I drank an experimental 600ml pot my immediate reaction was 'wow! that was nice', and I drank a second pot. Then I felt pretty unwell for some hours and didn't eat again for a day or so.
The second time I tried it, I managed about half a pot before I just became unable to drink any more. It wasn't a physical problem, I'm sure that if someone was pointing a gun at my head I could have drunk a load more, I just really didn't want to.
I wonder if what's going on is that whatever mechanism says 'high calories! careful!' is just broken somehow. I wonder what could break it?
"I actually have a new theory. This one is much easier to test than some of my previous malaise-related hypotheses... 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."
Hypothesize first, then experiment, then report, right? Inquiring minds wanna know...
Ok, ok: starbucks.
Can you do a graph of your weight back to your first ex150?
I get the impression that you've kind of stalled out at a BMI of around 34 since your early successes. Is that just because you keep trying variants that don't work or has the effect stopped?
Is that right? You're about 6ft and currently 245 pounds when not ex150ing?
So (245/2.2)/(6*12*0.0251)/(6*12*0.0251)=34.09
Your methods seem to have got me down to BMI 30 with very little effort, and there's clearly more to come, so I'm confused!
You said you couldn't wait to be overweight....
I think that the most interesting and effective thing you could be doing for science at the moment is ex150ing yourself down to something reasonable like 27 and then working out how to stay there.
Is there any reason you're not doing that?
6'1, yea. When not ex150-ing, it adds 5-15lbs of water weight, so a big range :) But I woke up 240.4 today (on ex150) so if I don't way overdo it, yea, roughly 245-250 probably. My BMI scripts tells me 31.9, so very close to what you calculated, exactly.
That is what I'm trying to do - I have mainly given up on the crazy experiments quite a while ago, and am just trying to find my "mojo." Trust me, if I knew how to get to a 27 BMI, I'd have been there 3 months ago ;)
My current Starbucks experiment is one of the possible "why did it stop working?" things, but it's too early to tell. Hopefully I'll be back down at 235lbs (my low from a couple months ago) in 2 weeks lol, then I'll know it worked..
I am still confused about how you can possibly carry 15lbs of 'water weight'. That's a lot of water. I would say 'a gallon and a half', but that's imperial, it's 1.8 gallons US.
My rapid losses and gains at the ends of ex150ish bouts were more like 3 lbs, and the internet confirms this as a normal amount of water-bound glycogen. We're not built *that* differently, surely.
Some sort of mystery/clue here?
Yea, not sure. Some of the participants have had very different reactions to "cheat days" as well, with some barely noticing a difference and others setting themselves back for a week.
I'm not exactly sure what this means or what the clue is, though :(
Attaboy, I'm sure you'll be fine.... It was optimized for you, but it worked fine even in a weakened form for me, and I started off roughly where you are now. Just stick with the og ex150 for a bit and see what happens.
Oops I got inches to cm wrong, an inch is 2.54 cm, not 2.51cm, the value I have known since childhood, and I'm apparently 178cm tall, not 176cm. Yay! Damned Dutch don't look so clever now.....
Chastened by this unforgiveable error, I checked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_and_US_customary_measurement_systems
and miraculously US and Imperial pounds and inches are the same! And your feet even have twelve inches in them, as feet should.
So revised BMI calculations
you:
(245/2.2046)/((6*12+1)*0.0254)/((6*12+1)*0.0254) = 32.32
me:
95/((5*12+10)*0.0254)/((5*12+10)*0.0254) = 30.05
lol did the cm/inch ratio ever change, or why did you learn 2.51 in childhood?
I doubt it very much.... I'll find out a litre of water isn't a pint and three quarter next.
Do you have any thoughts on how you would adapt this diet for a vegetarian? Sub eggs for meat? Three or four eggs probably gets you about to the protein level of 1/3 lb of beef (but also gives you way more cholesterol than the beef)
I think cholesterol is great, so I don't mind eggs :) I think protein-equivalent pretty much anything is fine, although some plant sources apparently have less bio availability so you might have to adjust higher. But e.g. if you did eggs or fish it should be fine.
How big is your protein re-feed, and how are you calibrating that? I'm curious about any complicated mechanisms you're tracking.
Super unscientific and not really tracking anything: I just overeat protein until I'm sick and then go back on the next trial. I basically just eat lots of meat, cheese, eggs, yogurt, that sort of thing. The occasional bar of dark chocolate (not really protein, but I like dark chocolate and it's not part of regular ex150).
> I just overeat protein until I'm sick
How literally do you mean this? I'm surprised you're not getting the same satiety from the fat in cheese as from the fat in cream. Could it be that you're short of protein and so you're guzzling cheese even though you don't need the energy *per se*. And isn't yoghurt pretty carb-heavy?
My hypothesis is that it's not so much that fat is providing me satiety, as much as carbs AND protein are spiking insulin or similar, preventing satiety.
I mean it quite literally. I've thrown out the remaining fatty brisket because I was already painfully bloated but would return to eat more every 30 minutes. Quite a ways beyond "sick" yet threw it out before I had to puke. Win!
I doubt I'm short of protein, because I've always had that, even when eating extremely high protein keto.
Yogurt is relatively carb heavy, yes. But also casein and whey, I think.
And I think that's right. What does your body do when you're not watching it like a hawk?
I wouldn't say "my body is doing" anything. It really depends on the food input a lot.
> Apart from that, it really wasn’t different in any way.
The difference is not in the taste. The difference is in the not being MRNA beef
> 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.
Stop bragging 😝
I await this next experiment!
You know grass fed beef contains mRNA too? All organisms do...
I suspect he means that they'll soon be using the miracle of mRNA vaccines to make animals even more miserable than they already do.
Whatever new horrors are in store, mRNA probably isn't the explanation for our current ills....
Not saying it is. Explaining why one wouldn’t want to eat it nonetheless