ex225 + strength training review: disappointing/confusing

I just finished 30 days of ex225 - same as ex150, but using 225g (1/2lb) instead of 150g (1/3lb) of meat per day.

Daily macro comparison

ex150
Protein: 42g
Fat: 233g
Energy: 2350kcal

ex225
Protein: 55g
Fat: 248g
Energy: 2550kcal

The rest of the macros were identical.

So I added about 13g of protein per day from ground 80/20 chuck beef, and about 15g of fat, adding up to around 200kcal. I left the amount of vegetables and sauce the same this time, not scaling them up in proportion to the increase in beef.

This month also was the first time in years that I systematically exercised. I did HIT strength training 4x a week, each session being 1 set of 4 exercises each, and that set to absolute failure. I’m talking “can’t move the bar another inch” failure.

Rationale

After historically having lots of success with 150g of beef, which is just under <45g of protein per day, I thought that upping the protein just a little bit couldn’t be that bad, right?

Additionally, the intense strength training, I thought, might “take some protein off the top” by using it for muscle protein synthesis. Surely a measly 13g of protein would be more than offset by the exercise?

Besides the addition of 75g of beef to my lunch every day, this diet (macro-wise) was exactly the same as previous ex150 runs.

Confounders

Author, confounding his own experiments as usual

Because I just can’t help myself, I added a bunch of other, non-food items as well.

1. I added biotin, for joint health (prior weight lifting joint issues).

2. I added some methylated B vitamins because my doc said so

3. I added an electrolyte (seawater) supplement and made sure to drink a lot, again on the recommendation of my doc, and because I thought electrolytes might help prevent cramps from working out. I didn’t get any cramps, so there’s that.

4. To help me drink more, I bought a lot of sparkling, non-caloric water with lime/berry flavor, like LaCroix. I’d pour 1 bottle/can into a 1l pitcher, mix in 1 dose of the Quinton seawater electrolyte supplement, and fill the rest up with tap water. I usually had 3-4 of these per day.

Trial

Effects on appetite

Overall, there were some very weird effects on my appetite.

• The 2nd and 3rd day I was still hungry after finishing my usual evening cream dessert and I ate some more cream. This made sense, because I had worked out: more energy needed

• About 1 week in, I stopped being more hungry even on workout days

• In fact, on some days, I felt weirdly non-hungry, and forgot to eat until 10-11pm several times

• Several times I did not finish my whipped cream on workout days

• At one point I was unable to finish the dinner whipped cream portion basically every night, and I began just straight up drinking the cream so I could get it down

• I ended up not eating dinner cream at all one day despite a strength workout + a swim that day

• One day I just wasn't hungry, thought about making cream multiple times, then "nah"

• Next evening - didn't even finish half my usual portion! What is going on?

Tomato cravings

There were also some less “general appetite things” that I attribute to requiring more protein on the 4x/wk strength training schedule:

I found myself eating spoonfuls of tomato sauce from the jar. Now I have done this before from time to time since I started ex150, sometimes as a palate cleanser after eating so much cream for dinner. Nothing to dissolve that fat layer covering your mouth like a spoon of tomato sauce.

But I realized I was eating 3 spoons of tomato sauce, 5-10 times a day. One time I finished a jar of tomato sauce that I had only cooked with a single time!

I keep a rotation of tomato and alfredo sauce in my fridge and alternate them daily on ex150, so it stood out that I didn’t crave the alfredo sauce nearly as much. I’d sometimes eat a spoon of it, too, but it didn’t “hit the button.”

My assumption is that the strong umami flavor of tomato sauce somehow makes my body think it’ll get more protein. I don’t know if this is a hardwired thing in humans, since both tomato and seared beef taste like umami, or if my body just learned to associate tomato sauce with ground beef. After all, that’s what it had gotten every other day for the last year.

There’s the disorder pica, where people develop cravings or other desires to eat things that are non-nutritious, or even not food. This felt a bit like that - like my body was craving something, and it was simply wrong about where to get it. There’s practically no protein in tomato sauce, or energy - it’s largely water. Yet I didn’t crave ground beef, or protein shakes, or protein bars, or chicken, or steak - just tomato sauce. Maybe because it was the strongest umami flavor around?

No protein leverage hypothesis

The protein leverage hypothesis argues that animals (and humans) will overeat total food and energy if they can’t get enough protein from it.

My experience was sort of the opposite: I lost appetite for pure energy (cream) while developing a weird craving.

I suspect the protein leverage hypothesis is correct if you lock animals in a cage and give them a single, protein-deficient food: they can’t just walk over to the fridge and satisfy that protein craving. If the protein-deficient food is the only one they have access to, they’ll have to overeat to get enough protein.

Of course, that isn’t at all the case with modern humans: we could just go to the store and buy something high in protein. I even had protein in my fridge, ground beef drying out for the next day.

So while I’d say that what my body did was clearly a malfunction, and did not lead it to get any additional protein from the tomato sauce, the protein leverage hypothesis did not play out in practice.

I suppose that if you’re somebody who gets most of his protein from mixed food sources or junk food, you could be like the lab animal from the study. You’ll eat the happy meal to get some protein from the beef patty, and you’ll have to eat 3 happy meals just to get a few bites of protein in.

But this is clearly not the case for anyone cooking his own meals at home, like me.

Previous attempts at strength training

I loved the strength training. I’ve always enjoyed it, but never was able to stick to one program very long. I seem to have bad knees and elbows, because heavy squats and bench presses always hindered my ability to progress after a few months of training regularly.

I also get very, very hungry for protein from strength training. The one time I tried to seriously lift, I did the Starting Strength program. In the 3 months I trained, I gained over 16lbs, going from under 230lbs to nearly 250lbs. And trust me, it wasn’t all muscle. I went up 2 pants sizes in that time.

Author’s weight during 3 months of Starting Strength

In retrospect this makes some sense: I was not avoiding PUFAs at the time, eating lots of chicken, bacon, and salads with soybean oil dressing.

I also know now that I need to restrict my protein (or BCAA? Or Ile/Val?) intake or I will gain fat like crazy.

So just giving in to my protein cravings at the time was extremely detrimental and fattened me up like nothing else. Did I also gain some muscle in those 3 months? Probably, but it was absolutely not worth it.

Reconciling this with current strength training

I’m not yet entirely sure how to approach it long term. One hope was that since I was already relatively low protein with ex225, the strength training would take a certain amount of protein “off the top” and I’d lose fat at the same rapid rate as on ex150, and maybe gain some muscle to boot.

Honestly I’m not sure how much this happened or not. About 2 weeks in, I definitely felt and looked more muscular in the mirror, I thought. I could feel muscles on myself where there was just flab before. My t-shirts began getting tight in the chest, arms, neck, and even back.

Tucking in my shirt, I was convinced that my stomach had become significantly smaller and flatter. I was at the point, I thought, where I didn’t even look fat around the belly when I sucked in my stomach, just “normal.”

And then I got a DEXA scan after a month of training: 3lbs of fat gained, 1.7lbs of lean mass gained, 0.7lb of which muscle. It also thought my bone density went up, which is good I suppose.

Now I’ve written before how daily water fluctuation in a DEXA scan can make up much more than what you’d gain/lose in most months.

But I was still disappointed. “Maybe there’s some gained/lost pounds hiding in the noise” isn’t exactly a stellar success.

I’ll say I’m a bit skeptical of this particular DEXA scan. I weighed myself at home just 30 minutes before the scan at 242lbs, and the machine thought I weighed 246. That is significantly more than it thought I weighed last time, so it wasn’t just the extra weight from clothes. I might’ve had a glass of water between weighing myself at home and the DEXA scan, but certainly I didn’t consume 4lbs of fluid.

But it is what it is, isn’t it.

Overtraining/underrecovery

About 3 weeks in, I started feeling like my recovery took a hit.

This is my training log. Green means I trained that day, red means I didn’t. The current day is on the left, so it kind of reads backwards.

You can see that I trained 4x in a row when I started, just out of excitement and because I started on a Wednesday.

After that, I settled into the recommended program of Mon/Tue training, Wed off, Thu/Fri training, Sat/Sun off.

On this program (X3), I got pretty sore sometimes. The soreness was very confusing. Some workouts didn’t leave me sore at all, others left me more sore than I’ve ever been. E.g. I’ve never gotten particularly sore in my hamstrings, no matter how much I’d deadlift. Maybe because the normal barbell deadlift isn’t a high-volume exercise.

On the X3 program, I got so sore in my hammies I could barely walk up stairs. Other times, my triceps would get so sore they were painful to the touch, and holding up a glass of water was a challenge.

I noticed that I felt sore one Monday morning, despite just having recovered for nearly 3 full days. I then underperformed my previous workouts 2 times in a row. Previously, I’d gotten stronger in every workout. Suddenly, I couldn’t nearly do what I’d done last time.

The program has you start out training on the above 4x/wk schedule for 4 weeks, and then ups the frequency to 6x/wk, so you only have Sunday off.

I decided this was probably not great for me. Of course the X3 program recommends you eat tons of protein (on carnivore, interestingly!), and I didn’t, which could’ve held back my recovery.

Instead, I decided to back down to 2x/wk. For the moment, my priority is still fat loss, not building muscle. If I can just stay fit/active or even build a tiny bit of muscle, yet lose fat, that’s great. I can always try to build mass when I’m at 200lbs or so.

You can see in my log that, after this decision, I took a long time off. I trained on a Tuesday and decided to take a rest until the next Monday, almost a whole week.

Interestingly, the tomato cravings went away 2 days or so after my last workout.

I’ll see how it goes with the 2x/wk schedule. Hopefully, the low amount of protein I eat is enough to recover on this schedule. The X3 program uses a push/pull split, so it’ll actually be a whole week before I do the same exercise again, since the 2 days have completely different movements with no overlap.

Electrolytes/water

I think I drank a lot more than usual. I never measured it before, but it almost certainly wasn’t 3-4l per day. This made me a pee lot, which was annoying.

The more I drank, the thirstier I seemed to get, which was weird. I’m not sure if this wasn’t just an effect of the lime flavored sparkling water, instead of the electrolyte supplement. For this reason, I’ve dropped the sparkling water for now.

Quinton electrolyte supplement, which I took for the duration of this trial, is made of salt from seawater. Seawater has significantly more salt (sodium chloride) than potassium:

From https://www.britannica.com/science/seawater

As you can see, there’s about 49x more sodium in there than potassium. Does this matter? Not sure

But the fine folks at Slime Mold Time Mold have run a potassium supplementation trial. In that trial, most people didn’t lose much weight, but some lost a lot of weight. So it might be that potassium itself doesn’t cause much fat loss, but that it helps in some other context, or is necessary if not sufficient.

So after this trial I dropped the Quinton sea salt supplement and picked up an electrolyte supplement with the opposite ratio: 1g of potassium to 10mg of sodium:

Keto K1000 electrolyte supplement.. name checks out

Will turning the sodium:potassium ratio from 49:1 to 1:100 make a difference? We’ll see.

If you try this stuff, or potassium in general, be careful and ease into it: I got massive heart palpitations the first time I took a dose of this. In fairness, the label tells you not to start with a full dose but ease into it over a few days.

I will say, I did not get ANY cramps despite working out heavily during the entire month. I even did a bunch of calf raises to failure, and I used to cramp up in my calves all the time in my 20s. So maybe the electrolyte did actually help with that?

What did I learn?

1. Adding strength training certainly doesn’t seem to be a panacea. While I might’ve lost a little fat and gained a little muscle visually, the amounts were small and possibly below the fluctuation of the DEXA scan. Maybe I even gained 3lbs of fat like the DEXA scan claims despite only increasing my calories by 200kcal/day.

2. Certainly the exercise doesn’t seem to have made up for the 13g of extra protein I ate daily. It also didn’t seem to “take some protein off the top” if my weight is any indication of that.

3. Frequent strength training doesn’t go well with low protein intake, and moderate/high protein intake doesn’t go well with me, as it makes me ravenous and I gain fat very quickly. Instead, I’ll scale back the frequency quite a bit, and see how that works out.

4. Exercising is fun!

5. I continue to be skeptical of electrolytes high in sodium chloride (most of them) in the context of fat loss. There are a few very interesting anecdotes about the sodium/potassium balance.

6. Even doing something for a whole 30 days, and getting 2 DEXA scans bookending it, you can’t necessarily conclude much. At least if the results aren’t a dramatic 10lbs move in one direction, like I’d get at the beginning of ex150.

What’s next?

Why, ex_choc_truffle_2000 of course.

I’m dropping the beef completely for this one. Since apparently just adding 13g of protein made quite the difference this time, I’ll have almost no protein at all.

To make sure I don’t catabolize my newly built muscles, I’ll be taking 10g of an EAA (essential amino acid) supplement each day. EAAs contain BCAAs, but with a total amount of 10g I should still be significantly lower than before.

I’ll also restrict calories to exactly 2,000kcal/day, and I’ll be consuming them all in a narrower feeding window than before, since I’ll move my dinner cream to lunchtime to replace the missing beef.

I’m planning on running this for 14 days and see how it goes with the workout, recovery, and such. If I feel fine then, I might continue the full 30 days.