ex150nosauce+ACV-6: new all-time low.. by 1lb

Another confusing month

Previously on Lost

My last experiment was exactly the same as this experiment, my new standard diet, ex150nosauce+ACV:

• 150g of beef + some leafy vegetables per day

• Ad-lib heavy cream, usually with coffee but sometimes plain

• Each morning, 1 serving (~=1 tbsp) of Bragg apple cider vinegar capsules

As expected, I started out losing weight very linearly and rapidly, until I hit pretty much my previous modern all-time low of just under 208lbs. Then I plateaued for 2 weeks straight, bouncing around the 208-210lbs mark.

I suspected then that I’d hit my “settling point” and would need to deplete more linoleic acid from my body fat to hit a lower ad-lib weight.

But to make sure, I was just going to do it all again this month. I predicted I’d hit that same level of ~207-208lbs and plateau once more.

Play it again, Sam

And here’s what happened:

Refeed weight gain of 17lbs, back down 17lbs within a week, back down to 207-208lbs 3 days later.

And then, a slow, steady, bizarrely stable plateau for 17 days.

It happened EXACTLY as I predicted. A few days into the plateau I ate 2x my normal beef, just in case it was a protein hunger thing. It wasn’t. I never really did get that ravenous PLH hunger, but just in case.

Next, a reader suggested I could try doubling my ACV dosage. Heck, why not, I thought, that stuff’s cheap enough. So I started also taking one serving in the evening, usually around dinner. I think I only forget it once or twice from then on.

About 10 days into the plateau I had a cheat meal of rice, lentils, and some meat, home-cooked at a pot luck. I could’ve easily said no, but at that point I was 100% convinced I was correct about the plateau and that I might as well cheat. Since it was only a single meal, my weight didn’t even noticeably bounce up.

Two weeks into the plateau, with the double ACV dose seemingly not having had any effect, the same reader suggested I just try something, anything at all. Might as well do a mini experiment-in-the-experiment, right?

So just for shits and giggles, I switched from 150g of beef to 150g of wild caught Alaska sockeye salmon for the last 5 days.

On day 29, I reached a new all-time low of 206.7lbs. And on day 30, I was 206.3lbs, besting my old ATL by a whole pound. I was now down 85lbs from when I first started ex150. Feels good, man.

What the heck happened?

I don’t know. Maybe the 2x ACV finally kicked in, after 2 weeks. Weirder things have happened.

Or maybe the omega-6:omega-3 thing did make a difference on the margin.

A Brief History of Fish

Or, more accurately, my brief history with fish.

In short, I don’t like fish. Never have. I could happily go the rest of my life without eating any fish ever again. Most fish is tasteless. Much fish is worse, actively nasty-tasting. For example sardines. I don’t like sardines at all.

Back in 2023, I did a sardine experiment: ex150sardines. I lost 4lbs, but I hated the sardines, and at that time, 4lbs wasn’t an incredibly impressive amount of weight to lose. I was still 245lbs then, and would lose similar amounts just doing my regular beef.

Salmon is pretty much the only fish I actually enjoy eating, but it’s not nearly as good as even standard 80/20 beef, it’s expensive, it’s a pain to cook, and so I generally don’t.

I did once do a 30 day experiment replacing my daily beef with salmon, back in 2024: ex115salmon.

On that I did lose weight and reach a new ATL, but only by about 3lbs, and after reaching it 2 weeks in, I regained 2lbs so it was mostly a wash overall:

I generally found the salmon to be less palatable than the beef, and I got a major sunburn that month, which I sort of hadn’t in a year at that point, having cut out seed oils.

Overall I wasn’t particularly impressed by “oily fish, rich in omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids” even with the pretty extreme intake.

There are lots of seed oil deniers out there who claim you don’t need to avoid omega-6, all you need is to eat fish once in a while to maintain a healthy omega-6:omega-3 balance.

Those people are stupid.

It just doesn’t work. You can do the math; these people never do. You need to eat 2lbs of salmon to counter a single tablespoon of soybean oil. That ranch dressing you’re putting on your salad? 5lbs of salmon.

Americans are eating an estimated 15-25% of their entire diet from seed oils and derivatives. There isn’t enough salmon in the world to counter this, apart from the challenge of eating 5lbs a day.

The math just doesn’t work out.

That said, have I finally reached levels of omega-6 avoidance where eating salmon daily does make a difference?

I am generally skeptical of broad “omega-3/fish” advice, but I’ve also been working hard for 3-3.5 years on the other side of the equation, avoiding omega-6. I believe this to be the much longer lever.

My own Linoleic Acid Depletion Estimator would predict that I’m arriving around the 5-6% mark, presumably having started very high in the 20-25% range.

And if we plug those percentages into the Adipose Flux Calculator, we come up with some very different scenarios:

At 25% LA with about 68lbs of body fat (from my DEXA at the time) I would’ve gotten 60g LA or ~8tbsp of soybean oil per day from my own body fat. That’s too much for any man, and you couldn’t possibly eat the 16lbs of salmon required to counter this and achieve a reasonable omega balance.

But now at an estimated 57lbs of body fat and 6% LA:

Aha! That scary toxic green mountain is almost gone. A mere 12g of LA, or 2 tbsp of soybean oil, would drip into my system each day.

Since the “officially safe, ancestral” number is about 6g/day, I might just be getting mighty close. And the few grams of omega-3 PUFA from 150g of wild salmon might just be enough to push into the margins here and put my metabolism into a near-healthy, satiety-inducing state.

(If you don’t understand marginal utility from economics, do yourself a favor and read up on it. I maintain that you cannot understand about 1/3 of reality without understanding how things work on the margin. Don’t be like all those people claiming you just need to eat some fish to counter the onslaught of seed oils in the Standard American diet!)

A Surprising Refeed

I’m merely speculating of course, but the refeed after this experiment has been very interesting. In terms of what I bought & ate, it was almost identical to the last two refeeds:

• Milk chocolate & chocolates

• Home made butter cookies

• Home made bread (with butter, cheese)

• Butter croissants (also with cheese)

• Rice with beans and beef

You can see that my current style of refeed is quite swampy, it contains quite a bit of sugar, and it’s not particularly low in protein either.

Usually I’d experience quite a bit of satiety for the first meal of these refeeds, which would quickly disappear to be replaced by ravenous hyperphagia, and I’d be stuffing my face for 4 days trying to re-experience that first sense of satiety. But I would never get it again until I forced myself to stop and go back on ex150.

This time was different. It’s the evening of day 3 of this refeed now, and I just barely finished a single slice of bread w/ butter and cheese.

Both the mornings of day 2 and day 3 I woke up satiated, to the point I didn’t manage to drink more than a single cup of creamy coffee before having to go out and distract myself for a while.

The hyperphagia is largely absent. I did binge a little bit on chocolates last night, but then I drove to the store today to buy an ice cream sandwich and returned home with a case of Dr Pepper Zero.. having FORGOTTEN to buy the ice cream sandwich.

“Forgetting” about food, about effing ICE CREAM, is just about the best sign of normal-working satiety and a healthy metabolism I have yet experienced.

A well-oiled machine

Among the believers of Modern PUFA Theory (MPT), we largely believe that metabolically healthy humans eating metabolically-inert or -positive foods should experience good satiety and not become obese. The system should be self-regulating, as it had been for most of human history.

The obesogen introduced sometime in the mid 1800s, MPT followers believe, which has caused the epidemic of obesity and other diseases of civilization, is linoleic acid (LA). LA is an omega-6 polyunsaturated fat found mostly in seed oils, in products made with seed oils like junk food, pastries, or ranch dressing, and in the fats of animals fed seeds (soy/corn) or seed oils.

Anyone living in modernity would almost certainly be filled to the brim with LA, having eaten large quantities for a lifetime, with the nasty fat stored in our adipose tissues.

If you were to avoid LA for hard & long enough, your body fat levels of it would decrease, which would take about 4-8 years. After that, you should no longer need to do “weird diet hacks” to achieve satiety: things like keto, low-fat diets, avoiding the metabolic swamp, or low-protein should no longer be necessary.

The body’s metabolic machinery, having been cleansed of the nasty obesogenic gremlin linoleic acid, would achieve satiety on any mix of foods, no matter how scrumptious or decadent they might appear: tallow fries, butter croissants, ice cream, milkshakes - all these opulent “unhealthy, fatty, sugary” foods would be efficiently used for energy, and not lead to obesity.

There are a few anecdotes of people achieving this in the MPT community: people who’ve avoided LA for typically 4-5 years at the very least. These people report reversing type 2 diabetes, long-term obesity, and never gaining much fat again even when “pigging out” on foods that would give any registered dietician a heart attack.

I am personally probably not quite there yet: I’ve only avoided LA for about 3 years now, maybe 3.5. Coming from Standard American Keto high in soybean oil salad dressings, bacon, nuts, and roast chicken, I probably started pretty high, too.

But this refeed feels like a major step.

Why refeed anyway?

This is one of the questions I get the most: why do I even do refeeds? I keep gaining 15-20lbs on them, and then have to re-lose them. Wouldn’t I be much leaner already if I didn’t do these every month?

In short, I don’t think so. I’ve tried doing no refeeds for 2-3 months straight, and I’d just plateau and stay there, scraping along the new settling point.

Let’s look at this month’s weight chart again:

Do we really think that the refeed prevented anything here? The weight came off rapidly, linearly, and predictably within a week or so. After that, SEVENTEEN DAYS OF STALL CITY. I plateaued twice as long as it took me to lose the refeed weight.

It just doesn’t seem that these refeeds are what prevents me from reaching leaner weights. 17 days would’ve been plenty of time to lose as much as a single pound.

But one thing that I love about the refeeds has always been that first meal, and sometimes the entire first day, after finishing up an ex150-style experiment.

And the reason was that, while still somehow in a metabolically healthy mode, I could experience satiety eating ANYTHING.

A 3-egg omelette. Butter cookies. Croissants. Spaghetti. Rice & beans. If you’re used to becoming hyperphagic on pretty much any diet but the most extreme versions of keto or carbo (=rice diet), being able to eat a 3-egg omelette without becoming ravenous feels AMAZING. Heck, satiety on chocolates?! Where can I sign up?

Of course it would never last, and the following 2-3 refeed days I’d just keep chasing that high and making myself sick, only to realize the magic was gone and resuming yet another ex150 experiment.

I’m not saying I’m quite fixed yet, but this refeed feels fundamentally different. Like a major step up, my metabolic wheels spinning, the furnace firing, the engine banging on all cylinders.

Maybe it’s just the double dose of ACV and the salmon speaking, but this refeed feels like a glimpse of a metabolically healthy future. I’m usually a cynic and not somebody who’s too optimistic that “we can have nice things.”

But then, cutting out the linoleic acid did fix my incurable circadian disability/disorder, and combined with those anecdotes I mentioned..

Maybe there is a metabolic happily ever after?

Notes

As always, here are my notes:

Rinse & repeat

Day 1

Lol got first sunburn of the year

At least got pretty red from hours in direct sunlight (neck & arms) but so far, I don’t even feel it

Will see if it’s a “burn” tomorrow (narrator: it wasn’t, just a farmer’s tan. never hurt, never peeled)

Day 4

Somehow drank huge amounts of cream today even before 2pm

Ok cream consumption is getting out of hand. Finished 2 quarts today, which is a lot for me.

Think PLH reared its ugly head, day 4 seems early - then again it was very fatty beef (=less protein) and I did get the same symptoms day 4 of the sugar fast

Had 2nd portion of beef and immediately got brick-in-stomach feeling & cement truck satiety.. within minutes! So yea probably PLH.

(Note: I think this sudden “protein hunger” on only day 4 of the experiment might be related to the mild “sunburn” (not really a burn but a huge tan) I got the very first day?)

Day 8

Did a lot of physical labor today and was in the sun again

Sort of expecting PLH soon lol

Day 9

For some reason, couldn’t sleep at all at night..

Day 10

Sort of waiting for the PLH to set in, but so far, nothing..

Day 12

New ATL: 207.15lbs

Day 13

Ha, woke up 208.5lbs, literally first day this experiment that I’ve seen my weight go back up. Plateau incoming?

Day 15

4 day plateau now. Doing 2x the beef today just in case that helps. Just ate my meal twice, once for lunch and once for dinner.

Didn’t help, still drank about 2x the cream I did previously. I think I’m just at the settling point again, whatever causes it (hint: LA)

Day 16

Starting 2x ACV, morning and evening, due to reader suggestion

Day 19

Social cheat meal w/ rice, lentils, dessert instead of ex150 dinner

Day 21

Stopped buying bulk zero soda

Day 23

Headache

Day 25

Because weight’s been flat for almost 2 weeks now, reader suggested I try “something” the remaining days and see if it moves the needle. Started doing 150g of salmon instead of beef as of today. Surprisingly satiating given that there’s almost zero fat in wild salmon.

Shower thought: I haven’t whipped my cream in months, either. Did get to new ATL just drinking it straight, but of course I COULD try whipping it again for a while..

Day 27

(Mild) acid reflux for the first time in.. I don’t even know. Effing fish lol.

Day 28

Lame duck period of the experiment heh

Day 29

Well I’ll be danged.. new ATL, 206.7lbs

That feeling of surprise satiety again that fat loss whooshes often come with, I am just intuitively WAY less hungry

It’s not “Eat less -> lose fat” it’s “lose fat -> eat less”

Refeed

Day 1

Bought WAY too much food again lol

Day 2

Woke up still strongly satiated.. not just full, satiated. Could only drink 1 creamy coffee, then went out until lunch or so and finally managed to eat something.

Overall, satiety feels stronger or that it lasts longer, at least. I think this is what it’s supposed to feel like? Not sure if the extra ACV or the fish is helping, or I’m just slowly depleting my LA and getting better at this.

Conclusion & Coming Up

You could say that an ATL is nice, even if only by a single pound. Only 28 days into the experiment I would’ve called my prediction perfect, I felt like I was in the “lame duck period” of an experiment.

(For my non-U.S. readers: “lame duck” is what we call it when e.g. a president is already voted out or can no longer run due to term limits, but is technically still in office. There’s typically no longer a mandate, and he can’t do much since the will of the people has already moved on. This is what the 17 day plateau felt like.)

But then.. that single pound drop after just a few days of eating salmon..? The nice, round number of 85lbs lost total now?

So, naturally, I am postponing the silly YOLO experiments & the longer-term HCLF experiment I’d been planning, and I’ll do ex150salmon first.

I’ll also keep up the double dose of ACV, one in the morning and one in the evening. Cheap enough, and who knows, maybe it does something.