ex150nosauce+ACV-3 review: it works.. when you do it

No, YOU add a subtitle!

man exhibiting massive fuckarounditis

lol ok this AI generated picture has zero to do with the blog post, but it just makes me chuckle so it can stay

tl;dr

I decided to just do the “nosauce” variant of my ex150 diet while supplementing apple cider vinegar (ACV) again - all of this for the 3rd month.

But since it was the tail end of the holidays I had some more traveling to do, some friends & family to visit, and so on. I didn’t actually stick to the diet very faithfully for the first half of the experiment.

And this is reflected in my weight graph:

You can see that I lost a bunch of water weight quickly, but then stalled around 223-225lbs for about 2 weeks. I returned home just before that next big drop in weight happened, and by the end of the month I was down to 217lbs.

That’s a weight loss of ~7lbs AFTER the initial water weight loss. Not half bad, given that I’d already sort of written off the entire experiment by the time I got back. Glad I ended up finishing it.

If weren’t for that big hump in the middle, returning to 225lbs, this would be textbook linear weight loss. Could be that I just cheated with high-sodium or high-protein foods that week, potentially masking some actual fat loss. Or maybe I really stalled. Who knows.

Is nosauce+ACV the new ex150 default?

I frankly don’t miss the sauce. My ground beef & vegetables, cooked in butter, taste great. It’s maybe not quite as delightful as drowning them in sauce, but it’s good enough and I don’t usually think of the sauce.

On my most recent refeed I did eat some sauce, and it was sort of meh. Not bad, but it’s not like the flood gates opened and I developed huge sauce cravings. It was just.. there.

Taking ACV capsules every morning is also sort of a no-op, and it’s very affordable at about $20/mo.

I might just stick to this from now on.

The Fuckarounditis

What this does show is that the diet is pretty “fragile” - even minor indulgences make me plateau. My cheating mostly revolved around some extra beef, extra vegetables, and some sour cream.

At my folks’ house, where I stayed a while after the holidays, I would make a “salad” from chopped up vegetables and sour cream most days.

I also ate a bar of 85% chocolate at one point. Several days I ate extra beef because there was steak or roast beef or something similar, and I ate a “normal sized portion” instead of making my own, separate 150g portion like I normally do.

Because it wasn’t easy to source my recent favorite, low-sodium energy drink (Ghost) everywhere, I fell back on the widely available zero sugar Monster drinks. Those have nearly 400mg of sodium per can. If sodium activates the polyol pathway and contributes to obesity that way, that would’ve been another vector.

All in all, I cheated in some form pretty much every other day for the first 2 weeks and it shows on the graph - stall city!

The.. bread?!

One of the more curious things during this experiment: after I started losing weight around day 15 I did great for a week. But on day 23 I began getting the weird “protein hunger” as I interpret it, which feels different from my normal appetite on ex150.

I’ve gotten pretty decent at recognizing it, and this time I ate… some home-made sourdough bread at a friend’s house.

My friend owns a bread machine and had made a thick loaf, and I ate 3 VERY thick slices with butter. I was basically totally satiated by slice 2, but forced down the 3rd one for no reason at all.

Man, that home-made sourdough hit the spot. Chewy, soft, and superbly satiating.

An hour later the protein hunger was gone and never returned for the rest of the experiment.

Notes

Most of the notes this time refer to cheating w/ vegetables or protein. Not super interesting, but here they are.

Day 1

Not being bloated always feels SO GOOD when going back to ex150

Day 2

Nearly 7lbs down after the first day, lol

WAY less spontaneous diet soda consumption. I just don’t care for it nearly as much.

Day 5

When I eat too many vegetables, even near-zero carb ones, I get hungrier than I was before the “salad” but also when adding too many vegetables to my beef dinner

Day 6

Didn’t sleep well, restless

Day 7

Restless sleep again

Ate a bar of 85% dark chocolate

Day 10

Still sleeping somewhat mediocre, but not as bad

Ate some extra beef and vegetables

Day 11

Ate 100g extra beef

Day 13

Ate steak + vegetables for dinner + chocolate ganache dessert

Day 15

Travel day. Ate some airline lounge food, but not much (~4 shrimps + small salad with balsamic sauce), also a 10g piece of milk chocolate

Day 16

Didn’t eat dinner cause I was busy and just not that hungry

Day 20

Hm, mostly carrageenan cream so far due to Circumstances (tm).. is that why it’s not working this time? lol

[note: on day 20 I was still only 3lbs down since the water weight, so I think I can be forgiven in thinking that it didn’t work. Looking at the graph in retrospect, it doesn’t seem the carrageenan made a difference]

Day 23

Felt pretty cold today (it was cold, too)

Weird yearning hunger, a bit like protein hunger last time but not nearly as bad

Felt lightly tempted to cheat several times during the day, which is typically a sign I’m not eating enough, or something else is wrong

Ended up cheating with 3 slices of sourdough bread with butter, very strong satiety hit during the 2nd slice

Day 29

Hm, I don’t really miss much. Refeed is in 2 days and the thing I look forward to most is sourdough bread and rice with beans lol

I barely notice the absence of sauce at this point

The Refeed

I mainly report on these because I think it’s an interesting diagnostic. If you barely make it to your refeed, white-knuckling it and day dreaming about certain foods, that’s a sign your diet isn’t sustainable.

Luckily, I found this bout of ex150nosauce+ACV quite sustainable. Now given I cheated a bunch, but I barely had any cravings for the refeed. Once again, my biggest cravings were actually starches - bread, rice & beans.

After cheating with the sourdough bread, I ended up making my own loaf of bread with my friend’s bread making machine. I used only water, King Arthur’s organic bread flour, salt, and yeast. I have to say these bread making machines are quite handy: you don’t even have to mix the dough or let it rise. Pour in the ingredients, wait, done. It even has a great crust!

I also made a giant bean & rice stew with vegetables and some ground beef, which ended up lasting me 3 days.

Plus I ate some candy, mostly milk chocolate and some gummy bear type things.

Curiously I got the impression that eating high protein, or specifically high meat meals, made me overeat WAY more than the starches or even the candy.

On day 1 I ate beef jerky, some cheese, and a giant ribeye steak. That made me so ravenous I overate the available sides until the point of physical pain.

On the evening of day 3, I stopped several times in the middle of eating (delicious!) mint milk chocolate - and in fact I still haven’t finished that bar of chocolate at the time of this writing.

I also only ate 1 plate of (again, delicious!) rice bean stew for dinner, despite having mentally committed to eating at least 2. Yes, there was a bit of ground beef in that stew, but it was only 1lb spread across several cans of beans and over 1lb of dry rice over 3 days. In other words, roughly ex150 amounts of ground beef.

It seems that even swampy carbs only made me overeat moderately this time, whereas meat made me insatiable and hyperphagic.

Very curious. Also makes me even more interested in a future rice + beans + ground beef diet.

Next? EAT SLEEP RAVE REPEAT

7lbs down in the last 2 weeks of the experiment is - surprisingly good?!

Now that I’m back in my stable environment & routine, I’ll just run the exact same experiment and see where I end up. The 217lbs I ended at are just 8lbs away from my recent low of 209lbs.

While new & other experiments are shiny & exciting, I should probably just keep this one going and see how low it can get me.

For science and stuff.