ex150trial case study: 48 year old female loses 14.6lbs in 30 days

Subject also reports "insane amount of energy/productivity" and I'll take it :-)

This is the first case study from the ex150trial. If you recall, I put out a post asking for volunteers to try the ex150 diet for 30 days. The first few have finished their trials, and this is one of them.

The Subject

Subject is 48 years old, female and, dare I say, somewhat of a firecracker. Her notes are detailed and meticulous. She used the word “discombobulated” in her weight spreadsheet, which earns her bonus points.

Diet history & goals

The subject lost 50lbs over the last year doing keto, but then stalled out. She discovered Brad Marshall’s The Croissant Diet and began avoiding PUFAs and eating lots of saturated fat. She stayed weight stable on this, but didn’t lose any further weight, for a period of about 3 months before she gave ex150 a go.

Her goal for the 30 days was to lose 10-12lbs more, after the initial water weight loss, which she wouldn’t count.

The Experiment

She lost 14.6lbs over the 30 days. There was a very pronounced water weight loss the first 2 days, and she was down 6lbs just in those. After that, the rate of weight loss stabilized a bit and she lost another 8lbs, with a minor hiccup near the end.

I suppose that’s not quite the 10-12lbs after water weight that the subject had aimed for, but it’s pretty close.

The overall graph looks very smooth and steady, with very little day-to-day fluctuation, similar to mine.

Subject went from 220lbs to 206lbs. Can you spot the 3 cheat days?

Subject generally followed ex150 to a T. While she broke the diet a handful of times throughout the 30 days, she generally minimized the damage pretty successfully. E.g. a few bites of bread from a sub, or 1 burger with bun, or 1 egg/cheese croissant.

Near the end she went off the diet for 3 days in a row, and she quickly gained a bit of water weight. Luckily, it came down just as fast, and she was back near her old weight within 4 days. It’s encouraging to see that one can go off the diet for a little bit, and the damage won’t necessarily be that bad.

Subject drank lots of coffee with heavy cream almost every day. Breakfast of champions.

Subjective well-being

I asked the subject to note well-being daily, in addition to weight. I think it’s not just psychologically important to feel good on a diet, I think well-being is actually a good indicator that the metabolism is running well, and there is enough energy available to function day to day.

The subject didn't sleep super well the first 2 days, but then settled into the diet and reports generally sleeping well after that.

Overall she felt fairly well to good throughout the 30 days, even enjoying a few days of "insane amount(s) of energy/productivity." Anecdotally, I’ve had quite a few such days (or nights) myself, where I’m just bursting with energy.

She reports experiencing cement-truck satiety a few times, that feeling when you eat whipped cream and suddenly you just can’t eat another spoon. Interestingly, she mostly experienced it in the beginning, not so much later. Maybe her body got used to eating more saturated fat, or she got more in tune with how much cream she could eat any given day?

Interesting Quotes

I have that full on an empty stomach feeling more often.

Is full on an empty stomach an oxymoron? Not on a high-saturated fat diet. It’s a surprisingly pleasant feeling to be totally satiated, yet not physically full/bloated. Subject experienced this feeling as well.

I love the phrase: full on an empty stomach :-)

I feel like I binged today, even though I objectively did not, what’s up with that?

Something like that happens to me when I go off the diet. What used to be a normal portion now feels like a giant feast, almost a chore. This could just mean being used to a much smaller physical meal size.

About sleep... yeah sleep and I have not gotten along so well in years. It's a family thing. My dad has sleep issues, two of my sisters have insomnia. I had sort of resigned myself to it. But I would say I had more uninterrupted nights of sleep on ex150, and more nights where if I did wake up [..], I was more likely to fall back to sleep more easily.

I suspect this is ketosis, since I’ve heard anecdotally from a few friends that they just sleep better and deeper when on keto. The subject says she’s not so sure - she’s done keto before, as mentioned, and she didn’t get quite the same effect then.

Last thing, and this may be TMI but I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't share. I was noticeably more regular/predictably regular on ex150. Which for me is a big deal and was a big difference from all of the other ways of eating I've used to lose weight.

In the past, if I was dieting, I was pretty much guaranteed to have GI issues. Which was so aggravating because no matter how good I felt from losing weight, I didn't feel really good day-to-day. Not that I felt awful, but I frequently had a lingering, low level amount of GI discomfort and/or GI related anxiety.

But on ex150 I had very little of that- I just felt, I don't know, what I imagine "normal" might feel like? Don't get me wrong, I love the weight loss that I experienced but from a quality of life perspective this improvement may have been the bigger revelation.

I thought I’d put this quote in here because people often assume that a super-high-fat, super-low-fiber diet like ex150 would lead to GI distress. But this is my experience as well: a few minutes after eating a ton of cream, I simply forgot that I’ve eaten. There’s barely any digestion necessary, no feeling stuffed or bloated, no tummy rumbling for an hour or two. It’s almost like charging a battery.

Of course, both the subject and I are superbly dairy tolerant - if you’re lactose intolerant, this might not be the case for you. One way to find out, I suppose.

Other things of note

It’s fascinating to me that the subject came off about 3 months of TCD, the practically-zero-PUFA diet designed by Brad from Fire in a Bottle.

The reason is that Slime Mold Time Mold just released their analysis of the half-potato trial, and the person who lost by far the most weight (17lbs) during that was also mentioning Fire in a Bottle.

Weird coincidence? Or is there some sort of long-running benefit to minimizing PUFAs that helps you lose weight on any subsequent diet? Brad might just be onto something there.

Edit 7/2/23:

Somebody asked in the comments how much cream the subject consumed on average, and I asked. She estimates at least 1 cup per day, but rarely above 1.5 cups. That’d be around 230-360g per day of cream, split between her many coffees and whipped cream.

The subject also reported that, in retrospect, she seemed to feel fuller on cream with gellan gum or no stabilizer, rather than carrageenan. She wasn’t quite sure if this was a real effect or if she was imagining it, but it’s interesting nonetheless - I’ve heard this complaint anecdotally, too. The cream I use has gellan gum, not carrageenan.

Going forward

Subject seems happy with the results of her trial. I’ll close with a quote from her:

I'm going to keep doing something similar. I think this last month was really great from the perspective of being able to live more simply - I used to be terrible at meal prep and on this way of eating, it's like it begs to be meal prepped!

A few more people have now finished their 30-day trials, and I hope to post the individual case studies over the next weeks. When I have everything collected, I’ll put up a summary for the whole trial.