I always wanted to start seafood-maxxing but damn it’s hard to get anything not canned. Particularly oysters, which I love in taste and nutrition but I’m not a fan of the canned versions. Thank you so much for undergoing and recording all this for us. It’s crazy how much we get wrong about nutrition.
Yea I found the canned stuff to be universally nasty. A few upscale grocery stores and higher carry frozen wild caught Sockeye here, which is pretty decent. Pricey though.
I've had negative experiences with canned oysters. But I don't mind canned tuna. Mix it with a lot of dill pickle relish and some mustard and diced celery, put it on top of a piece of sourdough toast, and that's quite tasty.
Been making my own bread these last few refeeds. Even the fancy artisanal bakery bread doesn't compare!
It has the consistency of plutonium, super easy & cheap to make with a bread machine. None of that fluffy spongey nonsense from the store, this bread makes my jaw sore.
Welcome back to normal! I think it's a very very positive sign, well done! You may be nearly fixed à la Coconut and Bees.
I've never lost the ability to get satiated by any food, and that feeling of a thermostat switching on and off and expressing itself through hunger/satiety is why I've always so strongly believed in homeostatic control of weight.
I rarely leave a pot of ice-cream unfinished half way through, and I'm certainly capable of eating it even when I couldn't face most other things (sorbets are even more so edible when you really couldn't eat anything else), but it's quite normal for me to look at a pot of ice-cream and just not want to start eating it at all. I think usually by the time I'm feeling hungry at all I'm capable of eating a few thousand calories before hitting satiety.
Yea I do think it’s a window between “hungry (enough to initiate eating)” and “satiated (enough to stop eating mid-meal.”
My lifelong experience was basically the 2nd one (satiety) being non-existent, and in fact getting worse by eating most types of food.
That’s why it really does feel “different” this time. I have felt “better” with “more satiety lasting longer” with refeeds the last few years, but this one felt like a step change.
Yeah, so my whole life I've had three states: couldn't eat another thing, (although I can force myself to especially if it's something light); normal (I can totally eat, and will finish the plate if there's food, but I wouldn't actively seek food because I'm not thinking about it); and hungry (where I am actively looking for something to eat and thinking about food). I'm very rarely in the "hungry" state because I usually have social reasons to eat long before the hunger comes on.
I suspect there's a fourth state that you can get into if you're seriously calorie-deficient where you'll do pretty much anything to get food and have dreams about food, but I honestly don't think I've ever felt that. (And obviously it's a continuum really, not four distinct states)
If you're starting to feel the hungry/normal/couldn't eat another thing triad then I imagine that's a sign that your homeostat has come back to life. Which is great news! You have probably fixed most of your problem.
That fix has just *got* to be something about your diet I imagine, unless the universe is being very devious. Hopefully going forward the set-point will eventually normalize and you'll be like Coconut (and me pre-2010), where if you just eat whenever you fancy you'll stay at the weight that suits your frame best.
Yea I do imagine it's the diet. I suppose you never know because Descartes' demon, maybe it is the brand of socks that's manipulating my weight or whatever. But probably not, and diet is the big lever I'm manipulating very consciously.
I'll say that until very recently, it was sort of like I was "broken" in those categories you mention on most normal diets, and very few extreme mono diets like ex150 or pure rice would put me in a "normal/fixed" state. Sort of like having to jerry rig some weird contraption or perform some weird maneuver to make your car engine run.
But we clearly see historically & in ancestral peoples that humans are naturally expected to run smoothly on nearly any diet up until 1850 or so, and it steadily getting worse after that, and we see a handful of people reversing the trend and regaining the ability to run smoothly without stupid tricks/contraptions.
I view the "stupid internet diets/tricks" as proof that our body is, in principle, able to run smoothly as we would expect. And depleting enough LA and regaining the ability to run smoothly without stupid internet diet tricks would be equivalent to actually fixing the engine.
I think salmon is slightly proteinier than 80/20 beef, but it’s very close.
You’re right my refeed isn’t SUPER proteiny, but also not particularly low. Surely proteinier than ex150. Bread & rice are higher than cream, I eat cheese, beans, lentils, beef sticks, more beef than on ex150 even if only slightly..
Excellent post (though I don’t care for the profanity in the thumbnail image), and congrats on the ATL. I'm 2¼ years into a low-omega-6 diet. I've basically been eating your "refeed diet" on a daily basis for many months now (just last night I ate 4 shortbread cookies, 4 Tbsp HWC, and 1 cup of strawberries for dessert). Maybe I've gained a couple of pounds, but otherwise feel just fine.
I've had a history of high fasting glucose (close to the magical 100 mg/dL cutoff for 'prediabetes') and I'm curious to get another test later this year to see if it's improving. My hypothesis is that low-omega-6 will take my fasting glucose down into the 80s while keeping all my other blood lipids, etc looking good.
> though I don’t care for the profanity in the thumbnail image
This is funny! I thought 'profanity?' and went back and checked. I hadn't even noticed the f***s.
I think this is one of the major US/UK differences, and I know you read my substack too, so I'd like to apologise generally for my own natural register. I can just about remember in my own childhood 50 years ago that it was offensive enough that nice people only said it when they were really angry and would avoid writing it down. And the first time someone said it on the BBC was big enough news that I remember, it was when I was a teenager so mid-eighties?
In British English f***ing is pretty much a neutral intensifier these days, and 'F***!' communicates surprise and not much else.
I actually once read a children's 'learn English' picture book in Catalonia where chapter eight was 'use of the word f***ing', and there were little pictures of teddy bears saying 'that honey was f***ing tasty!'. I suspect that that book should have had more emphasis on 'but don't ever say this in America!'.
Of course our host is American so he may actually have been trying to be offensive. Words are flipping hard!
I'd say we are, like on so many topics, high variance. You certainly have people here who use the "f-bomb" in every other sentence.
I actually used to be one of these people, but then I watched The Lego Movie which is PG rated and replaces all cussing with words like "gosh" and "fudge buckets" and my friends and I just started talking like that for no reason other than that it was funny lol.
I know an American girl from Virginia and when she came here she used to say "shucks" and "sugar" all the time. It sounded very cute and exotic. Over the years she has adopted the local register.
I suspect if she ever goes home she'll sound like a sailor and be driven from polite society by gangs of pitchfork-wielding belles.
hahaha, well, even by US standards I’m a prude, so that’s probably the bigger story here. (You don't need to apologize for anything on your Substack.) That’s crazy about the children's book.
Nothing is "just sitting" in biology. You fat cells are not cement blocks which stays intact indefinitely and just stores the LA. They have lifecycle and your body always release and store fat. So it's not like you have eaten 10g LA 10 years ago and that 10g is stored in cells A, B and C and those same LA molecules are still there because you have not lost weight since then.
In reality your cells constantly release and re-store fat. Also your cells die and remade during which they release their stored fat. So the more LA % you have in your cells the more LA you are circulating in your body. So even you maintain weight and eat 0 LA you will have LA circulating and so metabolizing in your system.
I don't think there's per se a problem with LA being metabolized (if, by "metabolized" you mean "beta-oxidized and converted to energy"). That's actually probably the best outcome, because then the LA doesn't turn into more sinister substances.
There are several harms to having excess LA sitting around:
1) excess omega-6 sitting around is prone to lipid peroxidation, which produces dangerous aldehydes that causes lots of other issues
2) fat cells can become dysfunctional (called "senescent") when too many aldehydes are circulating; these cells become unable to contribute to normal/healthy fat metabolism
3) insulin signaling becomes impaired by too many aldehydes being around and this prevents muscles from properly intaking insulin, which leads to elevated blood sugar and eventually diabetes
4) excess aldehydes overwhelm the liver's detoxification capacity, which causes liver damage and leads to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD); insulin resistance in the liver also causes dyslipidemia (elevated cholesterol or triglycerides)
5) excess omega-6 causes other problems, like stimulation of hunger through endocannabinoid system, and inflammation in other areas of the body
You can start to see how excess omega-6 might be the foundational problem underpinning obesity / type 2 diabetes / fatty liver / heart disease / other "diseases of civilization." The exact outcome for a particular person might depend on which dimension they are weakest in.* For example, someone might remain thin but be more prone to heart attack; someone else might become obese but have good blood sugar numbers.
*I should also note that a lot of what I've described above has not been shown in humans, mainly because we can't run randomized control trials (RCTs) for long enough and in reasonable enough conditions to definitely prove this. But everything above lines up well with aggregate data and has been well proven in RCTs done on animals (mice and rats, mainly). This is the main reason why there is a "seed oils war": your conclusion depends on your null hypothesis because there isn't enough data to definitively prove one side or the other.
Obviously, our host is walking proof that omega-6 matters for obesity because he's lost 85+ pounds while OD'ing on saturated fat and not eating a "balanced diet," which goes against every official health recommendation ever.
> you couldn’t possibly eat the 16lbs of salmon required
Aish, so weak!!! Jk jk! :D
> ice cream, milkshakes - all these opulent “unhealthy, fatty, sugary” foods would be efficiently used for energy, and not lead to obesity.
Funny, because a few weeks ago I had a ~1-1.5 week long ice cream diet pretty much.
My autism or something did that "eat only THIS food" thing, and the only thing I wanted to eat was ice cream, so I ate A LOT of it every day and by the end my weight was.... Literally unchanged, lol.
I felt like a million $$ as well, which was neat.
It wasn't 100% pure ice cream but OKAY enough to say the least, mostly just a ton of extra sugar in it beyond the cream and chocolate and such.
Since then I've been doing the swamp eating plenty of fats with carbs and protein and so far been going through a slow recomp it seems, which I'll take. I am doing lifting again,though, so that does factor into my recomp.
-
I have been trying to do keto but obviously it's been so hard this time I've lk given up for now, though my freezer is full with ground beef right now so I am ready to try again, or at worst do some beef mixed with some greens or rice noodles.
I always wanted to start seafood-maxxing but damn it’s hard to get anything not canned. Particularly oysters, which I love in taste and nutrition but I’m not a fan of the canned versions. Thank you so much for undergoing and recording all this for us. It’s crazy how much we get wrong about nutrition.
Yea I found the canned stuff to be universally nasty. A few upscale grocery stores and higher carry frozen wild caught Sockeye here, which is pretty decent. Pricey though.
I've had negative experiences with canned oysters. But I don't mind canned tuna. Mix it with a lot of dill pickle relish and some mustard and diced celery, put it on top of a piece of sourdough toast, and that's quite tasty.
Been making my own bread these last few refeeds. Even the fancy artisanal bakery bread doesn't compare!
It has the consistency of plutonium, super easy & cheap to make with a bread machine. None of that fluffy spongey nonsense from the store, this bread makes my jaw sore.
Canned tuna and canned mackerel in tomato sauce is my go-to canned fish.
Tuna I either eat plainly with some salt and a light splash of olive oil, or mix into various foods like even ground beef!
Mackerel I just eat straight from the can, though. I don't have it often, but the cravings hit hard at times.
Welcome back to normal! I think it's a very very positive sign, well done! You may be nearly fixed à la Coconut and Bees.
I've never lost the ability to get satiated by any food, and that feeling of a thermostat switching on and off and expressing itself through hunger/satiety is why I've always so strongly believed in homeostatic control of weight.
I rarely leave a pot of ice-cream unfinished half way through, and I'm certainly capable of eating it even when I couldn't face most other things (sorbets are even more so edible when you really couldn't eat anything else), but it's quite normal for me to look at a pot of ice-cream and just not want to start eating it at all. I think usually by the time I'm feeling hungry at all I'm capable of eating a few thousand calories before hitting satiety.
Yea I do think it’s a window between “hungry (enough to initiate eating)” and “satiated (enough to stop eating mid-meal.”
My lifelong experience was basically the 2nd one (satiety) being non-existent, and in fact getting worse by eating most types of food.
That’s why it really does feel “different” this time. I have felt “better” with “more satiety lasting longer” with refeeds the last few years, but this one felt like a step change.
Yeah, so my whole life I've had three states: couldn't eat another thing, (although I can force myself to especially if it's something light); normal (I can totally eat, and will finish the plate if there's food, but I wouldn't actively seek food because I'm not thinking about it); and hungry (where I am actively looking for something to eat and thinking about food). I'm very rarely in the "hungry" state because I usually have social reasons to eat long before the hunger comes on.
I suspect there's a fourth state that you can get into if you're seriously calorie-deficient where you'll do pretty much anything to get food and have dreams about food, but I honestly don't think I've ever felt that. (And obviously it's a continuum really, not four distinct states)
If you're starting to feel the hungry/normal/couldn't eat another thing triad then I imagine that's a sign that your homeostat has come back to life. Which is great news! You have probably fixed most of your problem.
That fix has just *got* to be something about your diet I imagine, unless the universe is being very devious. Hopefully going forward the set-point will eventually normalize and you'll be like Coconut (and me pre-2010), where if you just eat whenever you fancy you'll stay at the weight that suits your frame best.
Congratulations!
Yea I do imagine it's the diet. I suppose you never know because Descartes' demon, maybe it is the brand of socks that's manipulating my weight or whatever. But probably not, and diet is the big lever I'm manipulating very consciously.
I'll say that until very recently, it was sort of like I was "broken" in those categories you mention on most normal diets, and very few extreme mono diets like ex150 or pure rice would put me in a "normal/fixed" state. Sort of like having to jerry rig some weird contraption or perform some weird maneuver to make your car engine run.
But we clearly see historically & in ancestral peoples that humans are naturally expected to run smoothly on nearly any diet up until 1850 or so, and it steadily getting worse after that, and we see a handful of people reversing the trend and regaining the ability to run smoothly without stupid tricks/contraptions.
I view the "stupid internet diets/tricks" as proof that our body is, in principle, able to run smoothly as we would expect. And depleting enough LA and regaining the ability to run smoothly without stupid internet diet tricks would be equivalent to actually fixing the engine.
So yea, this is super motivating.
agree wholeheartedly
Congratulations on your new low! I immediately think, hang on, might there not be slightly less protein in 150g of salmon than 150g of beef?
Also your refeed isn't that proteiny? There's cheese obviously, but eating bread's not so bad? Usually your refeeds involve loads of meat don't they?
I think salmon is slightly proteinier than 80/20 beef, but it’s very close.
You’re right my refeed isn’t SUPER proteiny, but also not particularly low. Surely proteinier than ex150. Bread & rice are higher than cream, I eat cheese, beans, lentils, beef sticks, more beef than on ex150 even if only slightly..
Excellent post (though I don’t care for the profanity in the thumbnail image), and congrats on the ATL. I'm 2¼ years into a low-omega-6 diet. I've basically been eating your "refeed diet" on a daily basis for many months now (just last night I ate 4 shortbread cookies, 4 Tbsp HWC, and 1 cup of strawberries for dessert). Maybe I've gained a couple of pounds, but otherwise feel just fine.
I've had a history of high fasting glucose (close to the magical 100 mg/dL cutoff for 'prediabetes') and I'm curious to get another test later this year to see if it's improving. My hypothesis is that low-omega-6 will take my fasting glucose down into the 80s while keeping all my other blood lipids, etc looking good.
> though I don’t care for the profanity in the thumbnail image
This is funny! I thought 'profanity?' and went back and checked. I hadn't even noticed the f***s.
I think this is one of the major US/UK differences, and I know you read my substack too, so I'd like to apologise generally for my own natural register. I can just about remember in my own childhood 50 years ago that it was offensive enough that nice people only said it when they were really angry and would avoid writing it down. And the first time someone said it on the BBC was big enough news that I remember, it was when I was a teenager so mid-eighties?
In British English f***ing is pretty much a neutral intensifier these days, and 'F***!' communicates surprise and not much else.
I actually once read a children's 'learn English' picture book in Catalonia where chapter eight was 'use of the word f***ing', and there were little pictures of teddy bears saying 'that honey was f***ing tasty!'. I suspect that that book should have had more emphasis on 'but don't ever say this in America!'.
Of course our host is American so he may actually have been trying to be offensive. Words are flipping hard!
I'd say we are, like on so many topics, high variance. You certainly have people here who use the "f-bomb" in every other sentence.
I actually used to be one of these people, but then I watched The Lego Movie which is PG rated and replaces all cussing with words like "gosh" and "fudge buckets" and my friends and I just started talking like that for no reason other than that it was funny lol.
Somehow it stuck.
I know an American girl from Virginia and when she came here she used to say "shucks" and "sugar" all the time. It sounded very cute and exotic. Over the years she has adopted the local register.
I suspect if she ever goes home she'll sound like a sailor and be driven from polite society by gangs of pitchfork-wielding belles.
Yes this is the tradition
hahaha, well, even by US standards I’m a prude, so that’s probably the bigger story here. (You don't need to apologize for anything on your Substack.) That’s crazy about the children's book.
What is harm with LA omega 6 just sitting in your fat cells. Won't one expect more trouble when LA is metabolized?
Lipolysis will make it come out. So unless you're constantly keeping insulin high (and therefore likely gaining fat), it's hard to avoid.
Plus, you want to deplete it eventually, right?
Nothing is "just sitting" in biology. You fat cells are not cement blocks which stays intact indefinitely and just stores the LA. They have lifecycle and your body always release and store fat. So it's not like you have eaten 10g LA 10 years ago and that 10g is stored in cells A, B and C and those same LA molecules are still there because you have not lost weight since then.
In reality your cells constantly release and re-store fat. Also your cells die and remade during which they release their stored fat. So the more LA % you have in your cells the more LA you are circulating in your body. So even you maintain weight and eat 0 LA you will have LA circulating and so metabolizing in your system.
I don't think there's per se a problem with LA being metabolized (if, by "metabolized" you mean "beta-oxidized and converted to energy"). That's actually probably the best outcome, because then the LA doesn't turn into more sinister substances.
There are several harms to having excess LA sitting around:
1) excess omega-6 sitting around is prone to lipid peroxidation, which produces dangerous aldehydes that causes lots of other issues
2) fat cells can become dysfunctional (called "senescent") when too many aldehydes are circulating; these cells become unable to contribute to normal/healthy fat metabolism
3) insulin signaling becomes impaired by too many aldehydes being around and this prevents muscles from properly intaking insulin, which leads to elevated blood sugar and eventually diabetes
4) excess aldehydes overwhelm the liver's detoxification capacity, which causes liver damage and leads to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD); insulin resistance in the liver also causes dyslipidemia (elevated cholesterol or triglycerides)
5) excess omega-6 causes other problems, like stimulation of hunger through endocannabinoid system, and inflammation in other areas of the body
You can start to see how excess omega-6 might be the foundational problem underpinning obesity / type 2 diabetes / fatty liver / heart disease / other "diseases of civilization." The exact outcome for a particular person might depend on which dimension they are weakest in.* For example, someone might remain thin but be more prone to heart attack; someone else might become obese but have good blood sugar numbers.
*I should also note that a lot of what I've described above has not been shown in humans, mainly because we can't run randomized control trials (RCTs) for long enough and in reasonable enough conditions to definitely prove this. But everything above lines up well with aggregate data and has been well proven in RCTs done on animals (mice and rats, mainly). This is the main reason why there is a "seed oils war": your conclusion depends on your null hypothesis because there isn't enough data to definitively prove one side or the other.
Obviously, our host is walking proof that omega-6 matters for obesity because he's lost 85+ pounds while OD'ing on saturated fat and not eating a "balanced diet," which goes against every official health recommendation ever.
> while OD'ing on saturated fat and not eating a "balanced diet," which goes against every official health recommendation ever.
That's why I called mine 'The Heart Attack Diet'. It's going to give *someone* a heart attack, either me or some nutritionist.
> you couldn’t possibly eat the 16lbs of salmon required
Aish, so weak!!! Jk jk! :D
> ice cream, milkshakes - all these opulent “unhealthy, fatty, sugary” foods would be efficiently used for energy, and not lead to obesity.
Funny, because a few weeks ago I had a ~1-1.5 week long ice cream diet pretty much.
My autism or something did that "eat only THIS food" thing, and the only thing I wanted to eat was ice cream, so I ate A LOT of it every day and by the end my weight was.... Literally unchanged, lol.
I felt like a million $$ as well, which was neat.
It wasn't 100% pure ice cream but OKAY enough to say the least, mostly just a ton of extra sugar in it beyond the cream and chocolate and such.
Since then I've been doing the swamp eating plenty of fats with carbs and protein and so far been going through a slow recomp it seems, which I'll take. I am doing lifting again,though, so that does factor into my recomp.
-
I have been trying to do keto but obviously it's been so hard this time I've lk given up for now, though my freezer is full with ground beef right now so I am ready to try again, or at worst do some beef mixed with some greens or rice noodles.
Yea easy enough to mix some beef into something else. I do that with my refeed rice/bean stews.
Literal Decadence Diet! Living the dream heh :) Hope I’ll get there.
Really hope you can! ^^
I look forward to ex150svamp one day xD