ex150hclflp review: Gained 6lbs on super low-fat diet

Crabs are just not for me I guess

The roller coaster of low-fat

Why even do another HCLFLP experiment? You didn’t lose any weight last time, right?

I’m glad you asked! Yes, that’s correct, I didn’t lose any weight on a nearly pure white rice + marinara sauce diet. I also didn’t lose any weight on the Honey Diet, although that wasn’t as low-fat.

In fact, I seemed to have gained weight during/around both these diets, and it previously took me 2 months of ex150 (my heavy cream diet) to get back down to 220lbs.

So why would I do it?

The idea is to deplete the linoleic acid in my adipose tissue. Anecdotally and based on some mechanistic speculation, doing a very-low-fat diet could be more effective than even a very-low-linoleic acid but high-fat diet like ex150.

In short, I’m trading some moderate fat gain for, hopefully, much more rapid LA depletion.

The hope is that, once I’ve depleted my LA more, fat loss will then be easier. And if not, it would still be very useful to know: depleted LA doesn’t equal magic goal weight would still be a great finding.

Plus, if we knew a definitive way to deplete our LA more rapidly, that would be very helpful for testing/refuting the whole Modern PUFA Theory hypothesis.

Say that 4-8 months of VLF (very-low-fat) dieting depletes your adipose LA, whereas it would take 4-8 years on a high-fat or mixed low-LA diet like ex150, The Croissant Diet, or strict Peating.

That would be amazing! We could confirm or refute our predictions in under a year instead of half a decade to nearly a decade.

ex150hclflp implementation

My original goal for this was very different. First I thought I’d do glass noodles, then rice noodles. Neither of them agreed with me.

Then, I thought, I’ll just do ad-lib rice, 150g bison a day, and honey/fruit ad lib. I chose bison as my meat because it’s extremely lean. A serving of ground bison is listed as having 7g fat at 112g, so my 150g portion should still be under 10g of fat. I was hoping this would be low enough in total fat to still induce the linoleic acid-depleting properties of a VLF (very-low-fat) diet.

Week 1: mix of ad-lib fruit/honey and ad-lib rice + 150g bison

This went VERY badly. I gained nearly 10lbs in the first week and even when I stopped it, the weight stayed on. And it couldn’t all have been water weight - I was doing the honey diet before this, which contained tons of carbs and fiber. DEXA confirmed I was up 6lbs of fat mass since the Honey Diet.

For some reason, I seemed to have entirely separate appetite/satiety categories for sugar and starch.

I would eat an entire 3,300kcal of rice + marinara sauce, which is what I’d eat ad-lib on an exclusive rice diet.

And I’d eat 1,500-2,000kcal in fruit and honey on top of that.

Somehow I could get sick of sugar, and I could get sick of rice, but the 2 signals were completely separate from each other.

Week 2 & 3: rice + marinara + 150g bison

I decided to drop all fruit & honey. I essentially changed to my previous rice + marinara (+ some green vegetables) diet, with 150g of bison added.

This kept me weight stable for one week. Then, the weight started slowly creeping up again. Not as rapidly as with the sugar, but I noticed my ad-lib rice consumption went up. I’d eat my usual 6 cups of rice and still be hungry, and make 2 more.

I ate 8 cups of rice for a few days in a row until I hit 240lbs. That’s 20lbs up from when I last ended ex150 just 2 months ago, and I decided to drop the marinara sauce.

Week 4: plain rice + 150g bison, no marinara

When I wrote about Walter Kempner and his rice diet after reading a book on him, I speculated why the rice diet worked when he did it, but not for me.

One piece was the huge amount of marinara I was consuming. During my original rice diet, I was eating about 2 jars a day. Each jar is over a pound. Now the marinara is fat free, but it’s a HUGE amount of salt, spices, and concentrated tomato.

Tomato sauce is like crack to me, it makes everything hyper-palatable. I joke that I could eat rocks if they had sufficient tomato sauce on them.

So, on a whim, and because I was almost out of marinara anyway, I decided to do the remainder of the diet w/o any marinara or other sauce.

I kept the 150g bison and upped the green vegetables a bit. Typically, this was spinach, okra, or fajita mix.

To my great surprise, this left the rice still tasting great and I also rapidly dropped weight.

So rapidly, in fact, that I wonder if it was just from the sodium. Eating over 2lbs of this marinara sauce left me at 2.5g of sodium per day, which is a lot. Without the sauce, plain white rice and green vegetables are nearly sodium-free.

Interestingly, my appetite for rice dropped back down to about 6 cups again.

After a few days of very strict rice w/o sauce, I started adding a little bit of fruit again, here and there. But I treated it sort of like dessert: I’d have 2 pears in a day, or a small portion of pineapple/cantaloupe. No ad-lib fruit, and no honey.

One of the last few days I had 4 bottles of Mexican Coke because someone on Twitter had mentioned it using cane sugar vs. corn syrup. I couldn’t taste the difference. I have to say, I’m not a huge Coke fan. Just doesn’t taste nearly as good as your average energy drink. Interestingly, I was less hungry for rice after those cokes, so that seemed to work ok in moderation. Weight also didn’t skyrocket the next day.

The one exception was the second-to-last day of the experiment, when I said “fuck it” and got a whole bunch of fruit & dried fruit. You can see a brief spike in weight, but it seems to go back down the next day, so probably lots of digestive matter from the dried fruit.

I find dried fruit weird. It’s convenient to get more fruit in more easily, but it’s also very easy to overeat and make yourself sick. I guess I don’t recommend it as a staple.

Tale of the Tape

Dear Lord! That’s nearly 10lbs gained in the first week, eating sugar + rice!

Then you can see the slow rise on rice + marinara, and the sudden drop after cutting out the marinara sauce. After that, it seems mostly weight stable for the last week. Maybe a small gain.

It’s so weird to me because I was mostly weight stable for an entire month of a pure, ad-lib rice diet, and for an entire month of the honey diet, which involves TONS of fruit & honey.

I wasn’t coming to this from ex150, completely devoid of muscle glycogen or digestive matter.

For some context, let’s look a little further back in the past:

You can see I was roughly at 229-230lbs for the last 2 weeks of the Honey Diet. Spikes here and there, but mostly stable and even dropped below 229lbs on the last day of the Honey Diet again.

Then a brief spike on a refeed, but it comes right back down to just under 229lbs after a 2 day dry fast.

Maybe I just can’t carb good?

It seems to me that high-carb diets aren’t very good for my weight. It seems like a ratchet up - the best case is weight stable. But if I do anything slightly sketch, like mix sugar + starch, or even too much marinara sauce, it’s either a slow gain or a rapid gain.

I also don’t seem to lose the weight from refeeds as fast, or at all, like I’m used to from ex150.

Let’s look at my entire, brief history of high-carb diets. As a reminder, this history is relatively short because I only found out I can eat carbs again about 6 months ago. 3 of those were spent doing high-carb diets.

Oh my! ex_rice jacked me up by 10lbs immediately, or rather, totally stayed at the refeed weight that I’d expected to drop again.

Then I spent 2 months on ex150, slowly going back down to the low 220s.

ex_honey immediately jacks me back up to 230lbs, although most of the weight gained (by DEXA) was lean mass. Yet no fat lost during the entire period (by same DEXA).

ex150hclflp, unfortunately, did put a bunch of fat on me: DEXA confirmed I gained 6lbs of fat on it.

It seems that the very best I can do on even pretty intense high-carb diets is to not gain any fat. But any misstep and I immediately do gain.

As a reminder, those 6lbs of fat came on in ONE WEEK on a diet with ~10g fat per day, which is 2% or less of total kcal intake. After that, I mostly maintained.

Tell me again how one can’t possibly gain weight on a low-fat, high-carb diet, lol.

Observations

I had tons of notes, but I’ll spare you the majority. A lot of it is just reflection on the first week not working out, being surprised that cutting the marinara made such a difference, and trying Mexican Coke haha.

But I do think there are some very interesting observations overall.

I can digest fruit & white rice quite well

After both (sweet-potato based) glass noodles and even rice noodles being such a disaster, I once again found both fruit & white rice are very easy to digest. No troubles at all.

Eating fresh fruit or white rice feels like eating food. When I ate those refined glass/starch noodles, it felt like eating a weird franken-food product. My head wasn’t really believing this was food, and an hour later, my stomach would agree and be unable to digest it properly.

This was consistent across at least 5 different brands and types of noodles including sweet potato starch, mung bean starch, pea starch/protein, and rice starch. Including Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai brands.

Yet pretty much all white rice & fresh fruit just works amazing.

No clue what’s up there.

If I had to rank them, I would say the rice noodles did digest far better than the other types. Sweet potatoes were the worst, mung bean and pea somewhere in between.

I could actually live on rice noodles, they’d just taste worse and digest slower than plain white rice. But the others, I’d probably starve to death before eating more of them.

Mixing sugar + starch is TERRIBLE for me

Anecdotally, some people have reported this on r/SaturatedFat previously, but it was interesting to experience it myself.

I could easily eat half my TEE in sugar, and then be STARVING and eat my full TEE in rice. Easy. 3 days in a row, no big deal. Could’ve eaten more.

Which just seems kind of nuts.

I have recently read about how fructose hits the liver directly and therefore goes through a very different pathway. It seems, based on my Honey Diet experience, that this is fine if fructose is the only thing you’re consuming in that time period.

But if you mix & match fructose with other stuff, it seems to just go haywire. If anything, I would say it has a negative impact on satiety even for other foods. It doesn’t just not count, it seems to make me more hungry than not having it. Similar to protein.

During the honey diet, I would forcefully “cool off” from this effect via a daily 4h fast between the sugar and the fat/protein phases.

This time, without such a “cool off period,” things went very bad very quick.

Plain white rice without sauce tastes really good!

During my rice diet month, I had drenched my rice in marinara sauce 98% of the time. I think I ate a cup of white rice plain maybe 2-3x in total.

This time, I started off doing the same thing, but then decided to drop the sauce for the last week.

To my huge surprise, the plain white rice tasted almost as good. It just tasted really, really good. After almost a month of eating little else but rice. It still tasted really good.

I wasn’t even adding salt to it or anything. One meal a day would have my 150g bison + vegetables, but the rest of the day I was just eating plain white rice with nothing at all.

It still tasted great! I was really looking forward to it, and especially the first few bites would be delicious. Nutty, earthy, crunchy - whatever you want to call it, I loved it even on the last day.

I can see why Grant Genereux has eaten a white rice + bison diet for 10 years straight now. It’s pretty good.

It was, in fact, much more sustainable in a way than ex_rice without the bison. Even on the last day, I didn’t really crave anything else. I felt quite content. I didn’t even pre-purchase foods for my refeed day the day before, as I usually do. Just didn’t feel like it.

I never got any dry skin symptoms or other low-fat issues.

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to eat a HCLF diet for the rest of my life, I’d pick white rice + some form of beef/bison. The occasional apple, pear, or other piece of fruit for dessert, and it’s perfect.

Tomato sauce is sketch

I don’t know what it is: tomato is cursed, nightshade, high sodium, the spices, just the added variety.. but I’d probably not recommend mixing tomato sauce (or any other sauce) into any ad-lib food you’re eating on a diet.

Similarly to how I don’t recommend people add sweeteners or berries to their ad-lib cream on ex150.

Maybe it’s best to have 1 specific meal a day w/ added tomato sauce, and keep it off the rest of the time. That way you still get to indulge, but it’s not going to impact your ad-lib satiety.

Oh yea, my Non-24 is still gone

I actually keep forgetting about this. Non-24 was the reason I did keto strictly for 9 years straight. As late as 2022, eating carbs for a week brought this sleep condition back.

This time, again, I didn’t circle despite an entire month of eating high-carb, including massive overeating, frankly terrible sleep hygiene (think energy drinks at 11pm while watching a horror movie before bed), and 15lbs weight gain.

Why isn’t it working?

Even given all this.. why does HCLFLP not seem to work for me? Why is “Almost didn’t gain any fat” the best outcome, and “gained 6lbs of fat in a week, oops!” not uncommon?

Liberated adipose LA?

This is, of course, the stated goal of me doing this. Maybe my normal heavy cream diet flushes my system with MUFA and SFA all day, statistically washing out any linoleic acid liberated from adipose tissue - therefore preventing rapid depletion?

Since I ate ~10g of fat per day this time around, all the fat from my adipose tissue would have hit my system directly, and presumably a whole lot of that is still linoleic acid.

It would therefore have nearly all the bad effects we would expect from eating it, including lack of satiety.

Too much protein on rice + bison?

Even on ex_rice, I was getting 50% more protein than I’m used to on ex150. Adding 150g lean bison on top of that increased the protein even more. Given how sensitive to protein I seem to be, it is not surprising that I’d be liable to gain weight rapidly on this, or at least not lose any.

Fructose?

The fructose seems to certainly make it worse, but I didn’t lose any fat on a whole month of no fructose previously, so I don’t think it’s sufficient to explain the lack of fat loss.

I do think it explains the rapid fat gain during the first week, as it seems to somehow have its own, completely separate satiety channel, and allows me to massively overeat.

Maybe I can’t carb good?

Maybe it’s just a genetic thing. Maybe I’ll never lose fat on a carb diet for whatever reason.

Refeed

Not that spectacular. As I wrote above, I wasn’t really craving that much on the diet. Especially since I allowed myself small portions of fruit/mexican coke the last few days anyway, so there was quite a bit of variety in small amounts.

But the first coffee with cream tasted amazing. I hadn’t had coffee regularly in 2 months. I tried coffee with only sugar on the Honey Diet, but hated it and opted to drink no coffee instead. This time, I didn’t even try, and just relied on sugar free energy drinks instead for my caffeine.

After that, I ate butter croissants with sliced swiss cheese & roast beef. Both very filling and super satiating. Brad is onto something with butter croissants being just about the most energy dense/palatable food you can come up with.

Similarly to coming off of previous ex150 trials, coming off the HCLFLP diet, satiety was super intense the first few meals. It seemed to slowly disappear the evening of the first refeed, when I was able to eat almost an entire block of cheese.

Cheese was really the only thing I craved strongly after all that rice. Cheese is just my weakness. I always crave it after ex150, too.

Other than that I had some olives, a bar of milk chocolate, and some… black beans, lol.

What’s next?

Well, I’m up 15lbs or so from just 2 months ago when I last did a run of ex150. At least half of it is fat, and I definitely feel & look fatter. Sure looking to get rid of that fat again.

In addition, I want to see if, back on the high-fat diet, my OmegaQuant Complete shows lower linoleic acid.

That’s the whole idea, of course: deplete my LA on the high-carb/low-fat diet. If it just jumps back up to the previous level afterwards, that’s not very helpful.

I just mailed in an OmegaQuant Complete from my last HCLFLP day. I tested 8% LA during the last rice diet. This time I was a little higher in fat due to the bison, but I suspect my LA% will be similarly low, maybe even lower if depletion actually took place.

I also plan to take several OQCs over the next few days, one every 3 days, as I eat a high-fat diet again. Hopefully, this will tell me how long it takes to revert out of the HCLFLP mode, during which de-novo-lipogenesis (DNL) is elevated.

In rodent studies, it seems to take about 7 days. So I’ll take an OQC on day 3, day 6, and day 9. I’m expecting a gradual increase in my LA%, and corresponding decrease in my DNL.

After so much crazy HCLF dieting, I’m sort of glad to be back on boring, old ex150. Not as much drama, not as exciting and shiny.

But I get to have lots of coffee, not worry as much about eating/learning new recipes or cooking techniques, and, if history is any guide, I won’t have to worry about fat gain on it.

I’ll let you know when the results from those OQCs come in.