ex150hclf: I ate carbs and got obese

Otherwise, it went very well!

Yea ok, clickbaity headline, but it’s technically true.

Still, I consider ex150hclf a huge success. How come? Well, I wasn’t exactly expecting to lose weight doing this. It’s much less of a restrictive mono diet than nearly all the experiments I’ve done in the last 3 years. It’s much higher in protein than ex150. I hadn’t lost any weight on much more restrictive high-carb/low-fat diets.

ex150hclf

High-Carb/Low-Fat with 150g of beef.

Here’s what I actually ate:

• Almost the same ex150 meal once a day: 150g of ground beef (although I used 93/7 to keep total fat down), some non-starchy vegetables, cooked without butter or other added fat

• BUT, mixed with ad-lib white rice or pasta, and also some lentils or beans, ~1/2 cup (dry) per day

• Ad-lib homemade bread made with a bread maker: white flour, whole grain flour, or a 50/50 mix. All flour organic and unenriched. Often times I ate an entire loaf in a day. Sometimes I put beans on the bread. It tastes really good, surprisingly.

• 1-2 servings of oats, usually 1 for breakfast, but a handful of times 1 for dinner or other times, too. I think I only ever had 3 servings a day a single time. I weighed the oats once and it was about 90g for a serving. Made with cold tap water. Delicious!

• No coffee, no cream. I made up for the missing caffeine by drinking energy drinks and diet soda (well, Zero type, not Diet). I think I averaged about 2 energy drinks a day, and I drank an unholy amount of soda. I think this might’ve been a problem, and will discuss it later.

Author, on the way to purchase yet more Dirty Mountain Dew Cream Soda Dew Zero

Tale of the Tape

I gained weight like Hemingway said: Gradually, then rapidly.

Right off the bat I gained about 5lbs, coming off the ex150 cream diet. That was expected, and is likely mostly water and digestive weight. My muscles looked much fuller a few days in. My biceps are actually insane, given I don’t even work out. They look normal on ex150, but on high-carb diets they look absolutely bombastic. Glycogen.

Then, about 5 days in, my weight stabilized. It was shockingly predictable. No matter how much I stuffed my face with infinity starches, the weight was back down the next morning. In fact, let’s look at the first 25 (TWENTY FIVE) days of ex150hclf:

If I had stopped the experiment on day 25, I would’ve concluded that I had gained 5lbs of glycogen/water/digestive weight, and then had been flat happily ever after. Case closed!

(I don’t know about that 2-day dip 2 weeks in. Maybe a fluke?)

But on day 25, I had ONE cheat meal. It was a pretty mild cheat meal. Instead of my regular ground beef & starch dinner, I had dinner at a friend’s house. He’d made fancy steaks and I ate some. I didn’t even eat a whole steak, although it was probably more than 150g. I’d estimate about 2x that.

I brought pasta and ate that with the steak, but I also added some (seed oil free!) tomato sauce. And I ate some of his mashed potatoes, which were incredibly salty.

Oh yea, just because it might not be clear: I use NO salt on this diet whatsoever.

After the cheat meal (not cheat day, a single meal) my weight jumped up by 3lbs.. and stayed there for 6 days.

Then, only 2 days from the end of the experiment, I cheated again. This one I called “cheat day” because I ate food at a BBQ on top of my regular day’s ground beef, and I ate some homemade cake as well. Overall it was still relatively moderate, but not as moderate as the previous cheat meal.

My weight jumped up by another 2lbs! I was now up 10lbs total, pushing me over the 226lbs that are considered the “obese” cutoff for my height (6’1) by BMI.

You can see the weight gain after the 2 cheat days very clearly on the graph:

Overall I don’t consider this weight gain towards the end that bad. The first 5lbs of water weight were expected anyway and will likely just go away within a week of doing ex150 again.

And while the second 5lbs might be real fat gain, I’m confident I could just lose them by doing ex150 if I wanted to. Or is it just retained water from the salt in normal food? Who knows.

I’m just hoping this doesn’t keep happening lol. On ex150, I typically lose “cheat meal” weight within a few days. Here, with the timing & spacing towards the end, it’s hard to say, but it didn’t seem to come down in 6 days after that one mild cheat meal.

Why I still consider ex150hclf a huge success

Remember, you’re reading the blog of someone who just got done doing 1 decade of keto. The fact that I was able to even do this, especially being weight stable for the first 25 days eating AD LIB CRABOHYDRATES, would’ve been unthinkable to me for most of the last 10 years, which is 25% of my life.

In addition, in terms of quality of life, it was amazing. Almost zero issues.

I had predicted just a few days prior to starting this experiment that eating OMAD (one meal a day) HCLF was physically impossible, because carbs weren’t energy dense enough to deliver all of a day’s energy in one meal: you’d be bloated & explode before getting enough food in.

But I quickly learned that I could easily eat 2,000kcal in one sitting and not be particularly bloated. This is a marked improvement over my previous HCLF experience.

If you read some of my earlier HCLF experiment reports, e.g. ex_rice in late 2024, I was struggling with bloating while eating so many carbs. It’s very possible that, after a decade of keto, I just had to rebuild the gut microbiome and maybe enzymes to digest lots of starches. I kept that adaptation alive by refeeding on high carbs almost every refeed the last year, I think.

So this time, upping the starches tremendously gave me zero issues. I wasn’t particularly bloated after eating a literal loaf of bread, or a literal dry pound of pasta or rice. I mean, it wasn’t that same “full on an empty stomach” feel you get from ex150, but it was by no means uncomfortable or bloated.

Digestion was largely great & efficient. It’s obviously not as amazing as on ex150, but if ex150 is a perfect 10/10 then this was maybe 7/10 or 8/10 depending on the day. I do think the beans made me fart quite a bit more than the lentils, and it might depend on how you cook them. I soaked them overnight and pressure cooked in the Instant Pot for 10 minutes. Still, more farting than on ex150 (where it’s about 0).

Really good satiety

With a small number of exceptions (only 1-2), satiety was outstanding. I never got cement-truck satiety like from heavy cream, but I got exactly what you’d expect: eating more starch made me less interested in starch, and eventually I’d get bored eating even though the food still tasted delicious. It was a slower sensation than from a 90% fat diet, and sort of coincided with becoming physically full of food, so I get why people say “x fills me up” as if that means something.

There was one day, about 2 weeks in, on which I didn’t seem to get any satiety. I’m not sure why exactly. At the time I blamed it on the pasta brand I’d just bought for the first time, and maybe there was something to it. But I ate what must’ve been over 4,800kcal that day. The switch was just off.

Curiously, that was a full 10 days before I gained weight towards the end of the experiment. If you look at the weight graph, you can’t see it at all.

Blood glucose

I didn’t wear a CGM, but I poked my finger a bunch of times. I only tested below 100mg/dL a single time, at 99, including fasted overnight. Yet I only tested above 120mg/dL one single time either, at 121, including after huge meals.

So apparently eating infinity refined starches somehow never spikes my blood glucose much, which I’d sort of expected from routinely eating 1,500kcal of carbohydrates in a sitting.

On the other hand, my glucose mostly didn’t go down below 100 after fasting overnight. I’d consider this a bit bad.

Not bad enough to worry, though: given that I was also never spiking crazy high, I just blame it on the starch digesting or being absorbed very slowly. Given that I never felt like I had a huge ball of cement bloat in my stomach, maybe it isn’t really digestion here but something downstream. Not sure.

Some people suggest it could be related to “resistant starch” which appears if you let your starch cool down. I did let my starch cool down a lot, usually cooking a big pot and then eating the meal in 2-3 servings, spread throughout the day or evening. But I don’t know if this resistant starch thing would explain this.

One month might also not be long enough to fully adapt to HCLF, so I wasn’t worried very much about it for now. If I were to do HCLF for 6 months and still got a 100mg/dL fasted glucose, I’d be worried more.

Then again, at this pace I would’ve gained 60lbs by then, which would worry me way more!

I sort of confirmed the “slow starch” theory after the first refeed day. Having eaten way less starch but quite a bit of sugar and swamping with fats that day (lots of chocolates), I woke up the next morning with a glucose of 93mg/dL - the lowest I’d recorded the entire month.

Bread. Wheat. Gluten.

One mind-boggling thing: I didn’t get acid reflux a single time during the entire month.

I went Paleo at age 25 because of crippling acid reflux from eating bread, pasta, or any other type of wheat. Like many Paleo people at the time, I suspected gluten or something else in the wheat.

But on this I was pretty much gluten maxxing. The only way you could eat even more gluten was if you left out the rice and ate pasta every day, instead of every other day.

As a reminder, I’d often eat a half or whole loaf of bread ON TOP OF a pound of pasta a day. And I had ZERO acid reflux.

I think gluten was framed.

Now my flour was all organic and unenriched. Maybe it’s the “enrichment” that’s doing the acid reflux. Or glyphosate, which maybe organic farms don’t use. Or maybe it was all seed oils the whole time.

Oh yea, and the Non-24 stayed away, but at this point I have mostly forgotten that this condition dominated the first 30 years of my life lol.

No sunburn

I didn’t tan myself on purpose at all this month, but I probably spent more time out in the summer sun than ever before, or nearly ever.

No sunscreen obviously, but I can be out in the sun for hours on end, pretty much all day, and get ZERO sunburn. I just get a deeper and deeper tan. Quite remarkable for a guy who would burn to a crisp after 45min in the sun just a few years ago before cutting out seed oils.

Energy drinks & Diet Soda

I drank probably 2 energy drinks a day on average to make up for the lack of coffee. I don’t know if I started out drinking so much diet soda, but at one point I noticed that I hadn’t had any water in like a week. I was probably drinking 12+ cans a day. Mountain Dew Zero, Dr Pepper Zero, Coke Zero, Mr Pibb Zero, Sprite Zero, Pepsi Zero..

Now I’ve lost weight in the past drinking energy drinks and diet soda, but maybe there’s a difference between 1-2 cans a day and 12+.

Who knows what the artificial sweeteners do en masse. At the very least, this actually does add up to a significant amount of sodium: each can of soda tends to have around 50mg, as did the Ghost energy drinks I prefer these days. So we’re looking at 700mg of sodium a day, which is not nothing.

There doesn’t appear to be a minimum sodium RDA, but the recommended upper limit is 2,300mg/day. I’m nowhere near that with this, but .. who knows.

Refeed

Interestingly, I craved almost nothing even towards the end of the experiment. This diet is way more varied than most diets I’ve done in the last 3 years, and I did cheat twice in the last week or so of it. Maybe that had to do with it. I was still eating the ground beef and vegetables, which I’d missed on ex_rice.

I didn’t even miss coffee or cream, and on the refeed I considered getting some.. and then didn’t.

The refeed only lasted 1.5 days and was the mildest in a long time. I just mainly wasn’t that interested in other food. Not sure if that’s due to the variety of this diet or something more fundamental in it, but it was very nice. I’ve recently complained about my binge-y refeeds, and this one was most definitely not binge-y.

For example, today (the one full refeed day) I made a NY strip steak with pasta and salsa, ate 2 Twix, 2 ice cream sandwiches, some sour candies, and drank chocolate milk. Then oats with cold tap water a bit later. Yesterday I had chocolates, some hard boiled eggs, and a small bag beef jerky from Love’s on top of my morning bread & oats.

I did gain yet more weight, but this was BY FAR the most harmless refeed in recent memory, and not through willpower - I just didn’t care much for trying novelty foods.

Seems like a good sign. Maybe I should try and find a more varied version of ex150 so that my refeeds are less binge-y.

Conclusion

Despite the weight gain, I consider ex150hclf a huge success. The digestibility, being weight stable for 25 days, just generally feeling good & having great quality of life… even if I still do slightly better on ex150, this is amazing for a recovering ketard. Even after my month-long rice experiments I wouldn’t have expected this to go as well as it did.

It just opens up so many more possibilities. If I ever wanted to or had to live off bread for years on end, I probably could. Pasta! One of my favorite childhood foods that I had to give up 15 years ago due to the acid reflux and indigestion.

The nerd in me loved tuning the bread recipes and making it absolutely dense and delicious.

So I’m starting another month of ex150hclf. The only difference: no energy drinks, no diet soda. I’m only drinking water.

This also means no caffeine: I expect to get a mild headache day 2 or 3, maybe both. But it hasn’t been too bad in the past, even going cold turkey from 10 coffees a day.

I’m hoping that some of the weight goes back down after the refeeds, and this isn’t some kind of vicious ratchet. If the weight thing stays flat or even goes down slightly, I could easily see myself doing HCLF for 3-6 months.