ex150honey review: gained 5.4lbs lean mass, no fat loss

But some interesting tidbits

After I recently discovered that I can eat carbohydrates without bringing my Non-24 circadian rhythm disorder back (a feat that I ascribe to 2 years of strict PUFA avoidance), I decided to attempt Anabology’s Honey Diet protocol.

If you haven’t heard of the Honey Diet, it’s not just a honey/high-sugar diet, although that’s part of it.

What is the Honey Diet?

Anabology designed the Honey Diet in a clever way that attempts to mimic both a low-protein/low-fat diet and a low-carb diet within the same day. To achieve this, he does some inter-temporal trickery:

• From waking until 3pm, you eat only sugar: fruit, honey, table sugar, juices. No starch! This part of the day you’ll eat almost zero fat & protein.

• From 4-7pm, you fast. This should bring your blood glucose back down to baseline, since that only takes ~2h, maybe 3h, in non-diabetics.

• Optionally, you can exercise during this fasting window, which would help you deplete glucose/glycogen stores. (I didn’t exercise, except going for the occasional walk.)

• At 7pm, you eat a single low-carb meal of protein & fat. The exact macros of this meal aren’t specified, but Anabology says he likes to keep it low-carb, and he eats 1lb of lean beef with lots of vegetables.

One design goal of the Honey Diet is to help even lean people achieve fat loss. There are a bunch of people on Twitter, including Anabology himself, who report having lost impressive amounts of fat doing this for a few weeks or a month.

I stuck to the plan pretty closely.

Caffeine Situation

Since this diet does not allow any fat except exactly at 7pm, I knew I couldn’t drink my usual coffee w/ cream. I hate black coffee, so I planned on drinking lots of full-sugar Red Bulls throughout the day until around 3pm. I prefer other energy drinks (Monster), but several Peaters online recommended Red Bull as it is one of the few energy drinks not containing any L-Carnitine, which is apparently bad for purposes of this diet.

I quickly discovered that 1. I hate black coffee w/ honey just as much as plain black coffee and 2. I don’t particularly like Red Bull. It just doesn’t taste very good compared to Monsters.

This resulted in vastly reduced caffeine intake during my first 3 weeks of the Honey Diet. Even when I had a six pack of Red Bull in the fridge, I’d rarely want to drink more than 1 per day. I averaged around 1 per day for those first 3 weeks.

The last week I got sort of loose with the diet overall, including the energy drinks, and I branched out to Monster Fruit Punch drinks, which taste exactly like the Monster Zero Carb ones I’m used to. I also had some Rockstar Punched Fruit Punch, which has an insane 61g of carbs per can. That’s twice what most other energy drinks or sodas have per serving. It slaps, as the kids say.

One thing I noticed quickly: since full-sugar energy drinks like regular Red Bull contain, well, sugar, they are actually satiating. Zero Carb energy drinks are just flavored water, and you can drink as many as you want until you’re over-hydrated or over-caffeinated.

With these sugared energy drinks, I quickly reached satiety if I’d eaten recently, which put a limit on how many I wanted to drink.

Imagine that. Satiety from literal sugar water.

During the last week, when I had Monsters and Rockstars, I probably averaged 2 cans a day.

Dinner Slop

My original plan was to simply move my daily lunch slop meal to 7pm:

• 150g of 80/20 ground beef

• 60g of vegetables

• 80g of alfredo/marinara sauce

• Cooked in copious amounts of butter + tallow

Since Anabology calls for lean meat, I was originally going to go with leaner beef than I usually do. Anabology himself uses 90/10. I ate that a few times, and I tried even leaner variants including venison and bison, which are super lean.

I also decided to reduce my cooking fat, and use only 10g of combined butter/tallow instead of my normal 40g.

In the instructions for the Honey Diet, Anabology recommends you add non-caloric vegetables to this meal if you want to lose more weight, as they will keep you “full.” I decided to basically go ad-lib vegetables. I didn’t eat a whole pound of vegetables, but I’d say I averaged 1/2lb instead of my usual tiny 60g portion. I scaled up the sauce to match.

After about 1 week of doing this low-fat version of my dinner slop, I began to experience some weird distress. I was hungry before, during, and after dinner. Getting hunger pangs WHILE EATING and DIRECTLY AFTER EATING was strange. The next day, I got no satiety from any of the fruit/honey I ate, and in fact I didn’t feel like eating any of it.

I decided something was afoot and increased both the protein and the fat content of my dinner.

On my normal ex150 diet, about half the protein comes from my ad-lib cream intake. By replacing it with (temporally restricted) ad-lib sugar intake, I lost all of that protein, leaving me with only about 20-25g per day.

In studies of nitrogen balance, 20g of protein per day wasn’t enough for almost any young man to stay in nitrogen balance, whereas 40g was enough far almost everybody.

I might’ve skirted a little too low there. Maybe 45g/day is fine, but 20g/day is not?

It might also have been the extremely low fat intake.

Just in case, I basically went back to my normal slop of 80/20 beef and 40g of butter+tallow, but I upped the beef to 1/2lb (225g instead of 150g) to reach the same ~45g of protein/day I knew to be sufficient.

This put my total dinner macros at about 45g of protein and 90g of fat. 90g of fat is 810kcal just from fat. I never counted total carolies consumed on this diet, but if I assume the ~3,300kcal/day I previously measured on both the rice diet and ex150, that’s about 1/4 total kcals from fat. Hardly low-fat.

I asked Anabology about this and he said it should be fine. I checked and 1lb of 90/10 beef also has around 90g of fat or even a bit more, so it wasn’t outrageously high. In addition, the whole point of the temporal trickery was to temporally separate the sugar intake from the fat+protein intake, right?

But I do want to mention it in light of the fact that I didn’t lose any fat on this diet.

Marshmallows

In the Honey Diet post, Anabology says that “if you must have protein during the day, have collagen/gelatin.” On Twitter, he encouraged some people to do marshmallows during the day.

I couldn’t find any high-quality marshmallows in the store, they all came with HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) or tapioca starch.

When I complained about this on Twitter, people were quick to point out that you can easily make your own marshmallows. It takes a few minutes and is trivially easy.

I ended up doing this nearly every day, using about 180-200g of honey and 2tbsp of Vital Protein gelatin from Whole Foods.

I got the marshmallow-production routine down to as simple & quick as I could:

• Dump 2tbsp of gelatin in 1/2 cup of water, stir for 10 seconds until well mixed. Let sit for 5 minutes.

• During the last 1-2 minutes of that 5 minute wait, pour ~180g of honey into a small saucepan. Sometimes I did 180g, sometimes 200g, they both worked.

• Heat the honey on medium heat for 1-2 minutes. You don’t even want to see a difference, but if you turn the pan, you’ll notice the honey becomes very runny.

• You don’t need to heat the honey up very much, but it does need to be warm when you pour it into the gelatin - if it isn’t, the 2 won’t emulsify and you’ll end up with a 2-layer mess of terrible gelatin and terrible sugar.

• Once your honey has become runny, pour it over the now-hardened gelatin. Immediately use a stick blender to blend the 2 together.

• When the emulsification happens, a noticeable shift in color & texture/viscosity of the liquid happens. It turns from slightly beige into bright white and from gunky to thick liquid, almost like heavy cream.

• (If you use darker honey, e.g. some wildflower variants, the honey won’t quite turn bright white. I mostly used clover honey for the marshmallows, which is mild and turns very white.)

• Once you have your emulsion, either continue blending for a while, or change the stick blender to a whisk and whip it for a minute or two. Once it’s fluffy enough it won’t change anything, but it does need to be fluffed up for a little bit to get that airy marshmallow texture. Otherwise, your marshmallows will have the consistency of gummy bears.

• Once you’ve reached a certain level of fluff, pour the white emulsion into a suitable vessel. I used a stainless steel ice cube tray w/ the dividers taken out, which essentially just makes it a tiny cookie/baking pan. Fit my daily amount of marshmallow-emulsion perfectly.

• Put into the fridge overnight. It’s set after an hour or two, but I’d just always make my portion for the next day after I was done cooking dinner.

This whole process sounds way more complicated than it really is. The entire ~25 times I did this, it only went wrong maybe 3 times, including the very first time, one time when I tried not heating the honey at all, and one time when I didn’t fluff/whisk enough. Even then, you end up with a layer of gelatin covered in a layer of sugar, so it’s not the end of the world.

The recipe is really quite forgiving. You can whip it for 30 seconds or 7 minutes and it’ll probably turn out similar. You can heat the honey just barely or until boiling and it’ll turn out similar. You can whisk out all the bubbles or not. You can use 4tbsp or 2tbsp of gelatin and it turns out similar.

I’d typically add the marshmallows into my fruit salads the next day for added variety & texture.

Maybe eating marshmallows with their 2tbsp of gelatin nearly every single day was too much.

Restrictions

There were some restrictions from Anabology, and I put some additional ones on myself.

1. No starchy fruit (bananas, dates.. maybe apples?): from Anabology. I didn’t realize apples were starchy until I told him about eating some, and he said they’re a no-go. I didn’t buy any more, so I only had them the first 3-4 days.

2. No HFCS, just in case it's bad somehow. I don’t think Anabology is against HFCS per se, and I don’t know if there’s definite proof that it’s bad in any way. But just in case, I was going to minimize it. I think I had something with HFCS a handful of times, e.g. I tried buying commercial marshmallows that had HFCS and they tasted like shit, but I only had ~5 of them.

3. After I used fruit preserves/jelly for the first week, Anabology told me to avoid those cause they have other ingredients that are sketchy, like stabilizers. I used them heavily the first week, and then I think once in the 4th week again, but avoided them most of the time.

4. No starches like corn syrup/tapioca syrup, since Anabology explicitly said only fruit, no starches. This excludes most gummy type candy, and commercial marshmallows.

5. Besides the home-made marshmallows, I didn’t eat any “candy.” I mean it’s all sugar, but I didn’t buy anything from the candy aisle after trying the shitty commercial marshmallows once. Oh, one exception: Trader Joe’s has these vanilla meringues that are whipped sugar w/ a tiny bit of egg white and super good. I had those 4-5 times.

Oh yea, one more thing: Anabology recommended I take 100mg of thiamine each morning to help sugar metabolism. I did this. The very first time I got super hot and recorded over 99°F. Then, I never again noticed anything from it, but kept it up for the entire trial.

How it went

In a way, very similar to the rice diet: the first 2-3 days were very confusing and terrible, then it was fine. About 2.5 weeks in, it became noticeably better yet again, similar to the rice diet.

My standard meal was a bowl of cut up fruit, drizzled in honey. When I had marshmallows, I added a few into the mix for variety & texture. Sometimes, when the flavor was too sweet, I’d add a shot of OJ to mask the sweetness.

Days 1-2 - The Ugly

I just felt terrible, bloated & starving at the same time, nauseous from the sweet taste of everything. I had constant hunger pangs but felt sick of eating at the same time.

Phase 2 - The Good

Day 3 until about the middle of week 3, I felt mostly ok, ate about 3 fruit salads + honey a day, but was very hungry 2h on the clock after my last meal. I’d get actual hunger pangs, which is a very strange feeling after 9 years of keto. I swear I didn’t have hunger pangs in years on keto. I can go 5 days water fasting and not as much as “be hungry” in that same sense as I am 2h after eating carbs.

In this phase I was still quite bloated immediately after eating a big meal of fruit + honey.

I also drank quite a bit of OJ in this phase.

During this time, I would still get very hungry 2h after a meal, and had frequent hunger pangs. I would also sometimes postpone or cancel hanging out with friends, just because I know it’d fuck up my eating window.

In that sense the diet was actually super restrictive, more so than some of my other trials: the very strict eating windows were a pain in the butt.

There was a weird phenomenon during this phase where I knew that if I didn’t eat enough until 3pm, I’d get painful hunger pangs in the evening. To prevent this, I’d try to guess how much I’d need to eat, which sometimes led to overeating.

It felt kind of stupid, eating too much for my current appetite in the knowledge that under-eating would haunt me for hours later.

Phase 3 - The .. Great?

Week 2.5 until the end, I felt much better. I rarely got hunger pangs any more. Instead of every 2h, I’d get them maybe once or twice a week. I went down to about 2 bowls of fruit salad per day, although I think I made up for it with more sugar-dense things.

I noticed that my higher energy drink consumption from Monsters & Rockstars during this phase largely displaced the OJ. Whereas I’d buy & drink a quart of OJ a day during much of phase 2, I probably had less than 2 glasses on average during this phase.

I could also go for many hours without eating. I remember one day when I left home and got a Rockstar around 2pm, and then didn’t come home until 6pm or so, and wasn’t hungry at all the entire time.

I didn’t have that “race to eat enough” any more. If I ate not quite enough, I was fine and could make up for it the next morning.

A few times this resulted in me coming home after 3pm, only having eaten once that day. I’d play it by ear, a few times I’d eat at 4pm and delay dinner until 8pm. Another time, I’d just not eat until dinner but not be particularly hungry, and I’d notice increased appetite the next morning.

Tale of the Tape

In short, I didn’t lose any weight on the Honey Diet. In fact, I gained some - but it was mostly “lean mass” aka water weight.

You can see I pretty much depleted myself of glycogen, water, creatine, or whatever makes up these temporary weight swings by dry fasting for 48h before the Honey Diet experiment.

For the first 10 days of the Honey Diet, I slowly gained that weight back, until it roughly plateaued around 228-230lbs.

This probably just represents replenishing my glycogen & creatine stores. I will say I looked more muscular on the Honey Diet than I ever have, I think. My biceps especially were just huge & looked ready to burst.

Around day 20, I did a DEXA scan: I had gained 0.6lb of fat and 5.4lbs of lean mass. Since my weight largely stayed flat after that, I don’t think much changed after the scan.

I guess I’m the lucky one that won’t lose fat on the legendary Honey Diet, lol.

Dental Health

Not having eaten pretty much any fruit, honey, candy, or other sugar for over 9 years, I was afraid that my dental health would be impacted.

My teeth would constantly be sticky and I’d brush several times just to get rid of that feeling.

One lame thing is, you’re not supposed to brush your teeth for 30 minutes after having acidic foods like OJ. I would set a timer for 30 minutes so I could finally brush my teeth.

Considering all this, I went to the dentist after the 30 days were over and got my teeth cleaned & checked out.

Dentist said everything is fine, no issue. Apparently, the 30 days of sugar didn’t do any damage.

My gums continue to get better. I ascribe this to having avoided PUFAs for 2 years now. I used to bleed like hell when the dentist poked my gums, now there’s no bleeding at all.

OmegaQuant

If you don’t recall: I think the OmegaQuant Complete (OQC) test is a great proxy to measure the linoleic acid in your adipose tissue, which I believe to be the root cause of metabolic dysfunction and obesity.

The goal, in people we know to have rigorously cut out dietary linoleic acid, is about 10.5%. I’d say anything under 11% is amazing, and even <12% is great.

Since starting to test about 2 years ago, I’ve always been in the 15-20% range.

Then, last year, I did a month of a pure rice + tomato sauce diet: near-zero fat. And during that time, I tested at 8.24%.

Now, I don’t think that I depleted my linoleic acid from 17.56% to 8.24% in a mere month, that should be physiologically impossible.

The Rice Diet was so low in fat that my body upregulated de-novo-lipogenesis, the process of making fats endogenously from other substrates. The body cannot make its own linoleic acid. The DNL-increased percentages of the other fatty acids therefore make the linoleic acid look artificially low.

This was confirmed when I returned to my normal high-fat diet: another OQC 51 days after the end of the rice diet showed 15.27% LA.

Now 15% isn’t 8%, but it’s the lowest I had ever tested without being on a near-zero fat rice diet. It’s 2.3% lower than my last result pre rice diet.

During the end of the Honey Diet, I tested again: 11.65%. I was honestly very surprised by this, although maybe I shouldn’t have been.

The Honey Diet is not low-fat per se, at least not in the “plain rice diet” sense. I was eating ~90g of fat per day, which should account for about 25% of my total caloric intake.

On my Swamp Visualizer, this puts my Honey Diet in the metabolic swamp, although toward the low-fat edge.

If you told me that a diet containing 90g, or around 25% of total kcals, fat produced enough de-novo-lipogenesis to push my LA number down from 15% to 11%, I would’ve said you’re crazy.

But then again, the Honey Diet is explicitly designed with temporal trickery to mimic both a low-fat diet during the morning sugar phase, and a low-carb diet for dinner.

In reality, you could say that I was eating 2 diets throughout each day. One of 100% carbs (which my visualizer can’t even visualize) and one pretty extreme keto diet:

I assume that the morning state of 100% sugar intake with no fat whatsoever is enough “zero-fat” time for the body to get into decent levels of DNL (de-novo-lipogenesis).

And we can see that on the graph of my individual (major) fatty acid breakdown:

You can clearly see oleic, palmitic, and palmitoleic spiking during the rice diet. All three then return closer to baseline 51 days after the rice diet.

For the Honey Diet test, oleic was once again higher, though not quite as high as during the rice trial. Interestingly, palmitic even goes down slightly, whereas palmitoleic rises slightly.

I’m not an expert on DNL, but it sure looks like the Honey Diet put my body into a state roughly half-way between a 90% fat and a 0% fat diet. Hence, probably, my reading of 11.65%, which is roughly between 15.27% and 8.24%.

In other words, this is another “false reading” though it probably isn’t as false as the last one.

Now, does a diet that induces enough DNL to “mask” LA by 4% actually deplete significant amounts of it from adipose tissue?

If the rest of these numbers are a guide, I’d suspect that it is about.. half as effective as a 0% rice diet?

If so, that’d actually be impressive. After all, a 25% fat diet is not nearly as restrictive as a 0% fat diet. You get to eat a high-fat meal every day! And you might not even want to eat quite as much fat as I did on it, I just reverted back to my normal beef slop. You could easily try to titrate in a fat level low enough that you can still tolerate it.

On the other hand, it could be that it’s not necessarily about the total amount of fat eaten that ends up making this a half-way between 0% and 90% fat. It could just be the amount of time spent in each phase.

Fats tend to stay in your blood for about 12-18h. Since you only eat fat once per day on the Honey Diet, let’s say that there are 6-10h a day in which you are essentially on a 0% fat diet - the late morning until dinnertime.

Maybe reducing the fat in your dinner helps you get closer to the 12h instead of the 18h, I’m not sure how exactly that works.

Non-24

My Non-24 stayed away. If you don’t know, Non-24 is a circadian rhythm disorder that I’ve had my whole life. Even as a small child there are stories about me wandering about the backyard in the middle of the night.

It went into remission within just days of starting a serious keto diet in 2015, and I’ve been keto ever since, just for that reason alone.

As recently as 2022, when I tried the potato diet, my Non-24 came back with a vengeance and ruined my sleep. This was one reason I didn’t dare do high-carb diet experiments for so long.

But as of last year, I could do a 100% rice diet and the Non-24 didn’t come back. I am happy to report that even this diet, which was probably around 25% fat by total kcals, and so quite swampy, didn’t bring it back.

Now it could be that the temporal trickery prevented the swamping effect, even if I was swamping on average. But it’s another pretty good sign, I’d say.

Select & Fun Notes

I took a ton of notes for this one. I’ll try to compress them down into topical chunks.

Rediscovering Foods

Funny to taste certain fruits and honey for the first time in 15+ years
Black coffee w/ honey is terrible
OJ is bitter, yuck
Pouring some OJ onto honey/fruit really helps, the acidity balances the sweetness
Trader Joe's Organic Raw honey tastes MUCH better. This I can eat with a spoon.
Made marshmallows. They turned out pretty decent for a first try, a little too chewy
Only had 1 red bull, don't seem to particularly care for them

Prices are Too High

Man, fruit/honey are expensive! Spent over $100 on stuff

Glucose & Ketones

Day 1:
First sugar meal: Record 249mg/dL blood glucose
91mg/dL less than 1h later, then 79 and 75 within minutes

And some other days:
Ketones 0.3mmol/l before dinner
Peak blood glucose 143mg/dL, 30 min later 113, at 2h 80
Glucose 170mg/dL post-prandial, down to 84mg/dL 2h later
Morning fasted glucose: 80mg/dL
Peak glucose after tons of sugar: 147mg/dL
Before dinner, 0.3mmol/L ketones

After about 1 week, my glucose would typically peak around 140-150mg/dL, and be back to baseline within 1h or so. Contrast with the rice diet, where my glucose was >100mg/dL most of the day.

Oh yea, I had ketones from 0.2-0.3mmol/L throughout the diet. That’s what some high-protein carnivores get, I’m told, lol.

Hunger

Lower-fat dinner not particularly satiating lol
Hunger pangs before & after dinner, but went away about an hour after dinner
Didn't fall asleep until 5am or so!
Eating so much fruit is bloating, but not as bad as rice
Eating enough is a race against time
2h after dinner, hungry again lol
Race against time to get enough sugar in lol
Right on time: 2h after last sugar, hunger pangs set in
Having an eating window is sort of psychologically/QoL bad
Have to time your whole day around the diet.
Ate less today, think I overdid it yesterday
Wasn't really particularly hungry from 5-7pm
What's nice about honey diet vs. rice: you're only bloated half the day lol

When Carbs Stop Giving Satiety

Skin starts feeling a bit dry, similar thing happened on rice
This diet is quite low-fat the way I'm doing it
Lean dinner not particularly satiating
Still hungry hours after dinner
Really sick of fruit
Physical fullness/bloat isn't satiating: case #918930
No amount of sugar seems to give me satiety, PLH?
Digestion somehow worse today
Weird, got hunger pangs AFTER eating again

Would say the increased protein & fat helped, felt better today
Made smoothie from frozen berries & honey, sick of whole fruit
Doing 1/2lb of beef from now on, roughly protein-equated to ex150 total protein
Doing much better since I upped the fat & protein

Kind of a weird dynamic: during the day I'm looking forward to dinner, and shortly after dinner I'm looking forward to eating sugar in the morning. I'm never really very satisfied. ex150 is the opposite, I'm nearly always satisfied or content.

Marked improvement 2.5 weeks in

Very little appetite for sugar today, sort of a baseline satiety. From overeating yesterday?

Made big bowl of fruit & honey salad at 2:45pm, didn't have the appetite to even start it

Not at all hungry between 3-7pm, in fact forgot to make dinner until 7:30

Similarly not that hungry, feels like my glucose metabolism shifted into another gear a few days ago

Same on rice IIRC, after about 2.5 weeks things got remarkably better

Ok diet feels on autopilot now. I don't even know what day it is.

Again only ate 2 bowls of fruit salad, long-lasting satiety, not even hungry at dinner

Something really dramatically changed the last few days

Diet feels pretty "normal" and easy at this point, but still not exactly loving it

Was out all day and not hungry between ~2pm and 8pm when I had dinner
At 11pm, suddenly got hunger pangs. Not enough sugar throughout the day?

Conclusion

Sort of sad that I didn’t lose any fat on the Honey Diet. But then again I’m a hard case, we knew that much ;)

But I think it actually went really well: even more so than on the rice diet, I was afraid I would gain tons of fat, and I didn’t. Almost none.

It also didn’t bring back my Non-24.

And it seems a pretty decent way to deplete linoleic acid. If doing some temporal trickery is all that’s needed, that would be a great option on top of crazy 0% fat Kempner style rice diets.

What is next?

One option would be to do another month of ex150, which is 90% fat, and see what the OmegaQuant says then. Will it have gone just under 15%? That would be a confirmation that the Honey Diet can deplete linoleic acid despite not being particularly low-fat.

But I think I’ll just go for another month of near-zero fat and see how fast I can push my LA down.

If 1 month of the rice diet can deplete me by 2.3%, I might only be 2 more such months away from PUFA nirvana.

I’ll therefore be doing a month of ex150glassnoodle. Glass noodles are made from pure starch, e.g. sweet potato starch, and thus have near 0 protein. I’ll also be eating very lean beef or bison.

Originally I was going to combine this with rice noodles to also be super low vitamin A, sort of like Grant Genereux’ “Prison Food” diet of rice + bison.

But the rice noodles I could find weren’t nearly as low in protein as the sweet potato glass noodles, and sweet potatoes are INSANELY high in vitamin A.

If you were to eat 3,000kcal of sweet potatoes, which is less than what I tend to eat when weight stable these days, you’d be taking in nearly HALF A MILLION international units of vitamin A:

For reference: the FDA’s upper sustained limit is given at 10,000 iU. Hence you’d be doing 50x the upper FDA limit every day.

Now I’m not sure the vitamin A is retained in the sweet potato starch glass noodles. Maybe vitamins somehow get removed during the processing into starch? Unfortunately, none of the packages I found listed vitamin A content.

But just to be safe, I’m not going to imagine that this is going to be a low-vA diet. If anything, I might be megadosing vitamin A on this.

Another slight complication is the “washout”: I did the rice diet after a 3 day protein refeed, and the honey diet after a 48h dry fast.

I am liking the fast better to switch over to a new diet. This way, the weight data won’t be as conflated with whatever happened during the refeed.

My hope is that the bacteria in my gut microbiome that learned to digest all that fruit will survive a few days of fasting, and hit the ground running when I bombard them with glass noodles.