ex150sardines mod review: Non-24 stayed in remission despite zero-carb, down 4lbs in 20 days

Seems pretty fishy..

Lost 4lbs in 20 days, breaking through to the 230 lbs range.

Edit 5/14/2023:
Seems like I was even more unfairly down on this experiment than I thought. The morning after this experiment, still not having consumed a single non-sardine food, I was down another pound, for a total of 5lbs lost. Two pounds down in 2 days is very rare, even on ex150, once you’ve left water weight territory. But, hey, I’ll take it.

I think I’m unfairly down on this experiment. The sardines were quite boring. Never to the point of disgust, but I’d give them maybe a 3/10 on the flavor scale. Turns out most of the flavor in sardines usually comes from the olive oil, lol.

Man, do I look forward to real meat tomorrow :) I have a ginormous ribeye lined up that’s been drying in the fridge for 2 days now.

For the record: when I started keto, what’s now known as “Carnivore” was called “zero-carb” and focused way more on auto-immune issues than being a lion and lifting massive amounts of weights, though there was some of that.

In my mind, zero-carb/carnivore are pretty much equivalent: you exclusively eat meat or other animal products. So I use them interchangeably here.

Non-24 and Zero-Carb

(This whole section is about my Non-24 sleep disorder. If you only care about fat loss type stuff, you can skip it.)

This experiment is somewhat unique in that it also had a non-fat-loss component. If you remember my very first post, I had actually started my experimentation career by testing what about keto was putting my Non-24-hour sleep–wake disorder into remission.

Non-24 is a circadian rhythm disorder with which your body’s clock is unable to adjust to the sun’s rhythm like everybody else’s. It manifests in you waking up later every day, causing you to circle around the clock. In my case, I would shift by almost an hour every day. So I would shift around the clock in about 3-4 weeks if I was on vacation and had no other hard wake-up requirements.

Of course, you can still use an alarm to wake up at some more normal time, but it won’t fix the underlying problem - you’ll just be extremely tired. There is no known cure or treatment for the sort of Non-24 I have, though there are treatments for some other types. For example, many (not all) blind people have Non-24, and there appears to be a medication that can help them. For some others, the Non-24 symptoms are actually caused by underlying Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (another circadian rhythm disorder) and can be treated with very intense light/dark therapy.

I had accidentally fixed my Non-24 completely, within 3 days, when I tried a ketogenic diet for fat loss. I also ended up losing 100lbs over nearly 2 years. Something about ketosis seemed to put my Non-24 into remission completely. When I ate carbs again, it would return within 2-3 days. It’s so predictable I can actually use it to reset jet lag by eating carbs for a few weeks.

Years later I tried zero-carb - and my Non-24 came back after 7-10 days. It seemed there was an adaptation period of about a week, after which I would start cycling. So not quite as fast as when straight up eating carbs. Fascinating. I stumbled upon a study where people were kicked out of ketosis after taking antibiotics, suggesting the bacteria in the digestive system (our old friend, the microbiome!) were somehow involved in ketosis. I speculated that eating zero fiber would lead to those bacteria dying over the period of about a week, kicking me out of ketosis on carnivore/zero-carb, thus bringing back the Non-24.

Another hypothesis was that excess protein consumptions would trigger gluconeogenis, the body turning all that protein into blood glucose. This could possibly prevent ketosis. My protein intake on carnivore was much higher than on regular keto, so this also seemed plausible.

At the time, I designed two experiments to test which one of these it was:

1. Eat a low-protein carnivore diet of 1lb of meat per day

2. Eat a high-protein carnivore diet but add a minimal amount of fiber each day

The fact that I considered 1lb of meat a very low protein diet tells you how much protein I was eating on keto/carnivore at the time. “Fatty beef to satiety” was the mantra I was following, and I mostly ate ribeye steaks and 80/20 or 85/15 ground beef, usually cooked with butter. Typically I’d eat over 3lbs of meat a day. I would often add slices of butter on top. I was using heavy cream in my coffee pretty much this whole time, too, so it wasn’t a low-fat diet whatsoever.

In short, the “low-protein” experiment still brought back Non-24, whereas the minimum-fiber one didn’t. I thus concluded that the total lack of fiber on zero-carb/carnivore was kicking me out of ketosis and therefore causing the Non-24 to return. I never tested my ketones during these experiments.

When I published my original blog post, mentioning this hypothesis, Amber O’Hearn of zero-carb fame told me she was quite sure one could stay in deep ketosis without any fiber whatsoever, and that 1lb of beef wasn’t really that low in protein. After all, 1lb (454g) of 85/15 ground beef has about 130g of protein! That was moderate protein at best, not low. Amber encouraged me to run my current very-low-protein diet with about 30g of protein/day without any fiber, and see if that still brought back the Non-24.

In short, it didn’t. So now I really don’t know what’s up.

Experiment design

ex150sardines replaces my beef/vegetables/sauce meal with a protein-matched amount of Season skinless, boneless sardines in water (without added salt). The heavy cream in coffee and whipped heavy cream as evening meal to satiety stayed the same. This way, ex150 turns into a zero-carb diet without any fiber whatsoever. The only plant material I consumed was coffee.

One can of these sardines contains about 85g of edible sardines (I weighed it, the serving size is pretty spot on), and that has 22g of protein. So I ate 1.5 cans per day, getting just over 30g of protein. ex150 is a tiny bit less than that most of the time, maybe 25-30g. But close enough, right? I wasn’t going to measure out 1.37840 cans per day.

I also bought a ketone blood meter and sufficient sticks so I could test my ketone levels 2x per day, in the morning and evening. That way, I would know for sure if I had fallen out of ketosis, which I was expecting to happen.

Macros

Meal
- 120g Sardines

Fat 12.7g (47.9%)
- Sat. 2.8g (10.7%)
- Unsat. 9.9g (37.3%)
Protein 31.1g (52.1%)
kcal 238.6
Cost $2.2

If you compare to regular ex150 macros, you’ll notice that the total calories are less than half of my normal meal, mostly because there’s practically no fat in those sardines.

Theoretically, that meant I’d have to consume more cream than usual to get the same amount of total energy.

Duration

Since this diet is so similar to regular ex150, and I was expecting to fall out of ketosis and have my Non-24 return after 7-10 days, I originally planned the trial for 14 days. The original “low-protein” zero-carb trial only lasted 13 days, because my waking time had already shifted from 9am on average to 2pm, a shift of 5 hours.

My wake times the last time, on the “low-protein” zero-fiber experiment. Flat for about 10 days, then 1-2h/day shift. I suspect I was rounding my wake up time to the full hour back then, judging from the graph.

This time I planned it so the last 2 days would fall on a weekend, where I wouldn’t have to get up at a specific time and would therefore be able to observe a drastic shift in waking time better.

I didn’t see any symptoms whatsoever on day 13. To make sure it didn’t just take a bit longer this time, I decided to add a week and make it a 21 day experiment. Then I discovered I had bought exactly enough sardines to make it a 20 day experiment, and just went with that. Unlikely that the 21st day would prove anything new.

Sleep Results

In short, nothing happened to my wake up time whatsoever. The Non-24 did not come back. I woke up at 8:20am today, on the 20th day of the experiment, with no alarm set (because it’s the weekend). The graph shows that I hit my 9am alarm a few times during the experiment, but not a lot, and not all toward the end, which would indicate a shift that was just cut off by the alarm.

Wake up time on ex150sardines consistently between 7am and 9am.

This means my zero-carb → Non-24 comes back theory is wrong. It could be that my previous low-protein experiment wasn’t low protein enough, as it contained 3x the amount of protein per day that ex150 contains.

When I do the macros, 1lb of 80/20 beef calorie matched would be an 81% calories from fat vs. 88% calories from fat (ex150) diet. So the difference doesn’t seem super crazy from that perspective. Then again I recently failed to lose weight on a diet of merely 60g of protein per day, ex225lean.

And how does eating fiber play into it? Why is my Non-24 easily in remission when eating 2-3lbs of meat per day if it comes with some fiber?

Clearly I don’t fully understand this yet.

Ketone levels

My ketone levels measured by blood prick. Never below 0.7mmol/L, never above 3.2.

This would’ve shown something more useful if the Non-24 had actually come back - of course now that it didn’t, I wouldn’t have presumed to have fallen out of ketosis. Still, I poked my finger 2x per day for 20 days straight, so I thought I’d at least show you the graph.

Ketone levels pretty typical for ex150, not super deep ketosis like fasting (5mmol/L is common), but almost always much higher than what I’d get on a high-protein keto/carnivore diet, which would usually be around 0.5mmol/L.

I poked myself once in the morning, and once in the evening. The mornings were always much lower. Probably the dawn effect due to rising morning cortisol.

Weight Results

Almost this whole post has been about Non-24 and sleep so far, but of course I did also continue to weigh myself daily.

Weight throughout ex150sardines. Confusing at first and not super rapid, but steady.

Note: as noted in a recent post, I had started several supplements containing magnesium, vitamin C, potassium, and more magnesium. I realized early on that these would be confounding variables to weight loss during the experiment.

I stopped taking the magnesium on the first day of ex150sardines, and stopped the vitamin C/potassium/magnesium supplement 5 days in. These might’ve still confounded the first few days. But I haven’t been below 240lbs (or even at 240lbs) since 2019, so pretty sure it wasn’t just water weight I lost.

Overall I got exactly 0.2lb/day on average of weight loss. While this isn’t the 0.3lb/day I have previously seen on ex150, it’s not too bad either. Could be just the supplements in the beginning, the small-ish sample size of 20 days, the 1 long plateau of 7 days..

That said, I’m not exactly keen on repeating this one. The plain sardines just tasted way worse than my normal ex150 meal. I’m still fine to eat them, but they’re a 3/10 on the delish scale, whereas my normal meal is a full 10/10. I miss the taste of seared meat and tomato sauce, lol.

Maybe if it gave me insanely higher fat loss. But for similar/slightly less..?

Other Impressions

I didn't feel great most days. Not bad, just not great. Previously, I’d often felt so energetic and bursting with movement after eating a meal of whipped cream. This time, I was just kind of… normal. I don’t think I got that bursting-with-energy-to-go-outside feeling a single time, though I still went outside for walks pretty much every day.

I never seemed to hit cement-truck satiety, just.. regular satiety. Instead of “omg I can’t eat this next spoon” it was more of a “Ugh, I guess I’ll try to finish this bowl..” feeling. I did end up putting whipped cream back into the fridge a handful of times, but it did feel markedly different.

Overall I would say I consumed less cream, which is surprising, since my lunch meal contained about 300kcal less than before. I didn’t measure all of it, but I used about the same amount of cream for coffees in the mornings/afternoons. But I tended to make closer to 200-250ml of cream for dinner, instead of the 300-350 I had worked up to on ex150 previously. I made the whipped cream dinner 2x on a few days. But overall I’d say I ate less, although I wasn’t hungry either. Maybe this explains my lack of energy? Maybe even the slower fat loss? Maybe I should try overfeeding on saturated fat. So many experiments to try..

One thing I definitely noticed a few days in: food smells from restaurant seemed more intense, something I normally get when fasting. One time I was at a carnivore friend’s place when he cooked burger patties with egg on top, and I almost died it smelled so good.

Because plain sardines in water are pretty plain, cold, uncooked, and so on, I think those psychological/aromatic factors just came in. I definitely am someone who doesn’t “just eat for fuel” like many carnivores describe it.

I love cooking, I love flavors, I love the crackling sound of beef exploding in hot fat, I even love doing the dishes (it’s very meditative). This had none of that. So given that I didn’t even lose fat at the same rate, I’d only eat sardines for the convenience, say when traveling and without access to a kitchen. Although, even then, I think I’d actually prefer ex150deli most days. But nice to add some variety, I suppose.