ex225lean mod review: Even medium protein intake not that great
Tasted worse, didn't lose weight but also didn't gain much. New pants.
For 14 days I replaced my trusty ex150 meal of 150g (1/3lb) of 80/20 beef with 225g (1/2lb) of 96/4 beef. This doubled my total protein intake. I scaled up the vegetables and sauce by 50% accordingly.
In pure scale terms I kept the previous down trend going at first but then went back up, netting out at exactly +/- 0lbs over the 14 days.
After about 5 days my pants fit as well as they ever have, indicating previous stomach area water retention was mostly gone.
My arms felt and looked more bulky than they do on ex150, so probably increased muscle glycogen and water retention that caused a slight gain of temporary weight toward the end.
I got a DEXA toward the end of this which confirmed I’d lost fat and gained lean mass since a month ago. Unclear how much of this happened in the (then) 9 days of ex225lean but higher protein almost certainly would lead to more muscle glycogen and water retention. So I don’t feel too bad about stalling on weight.
I did not reach my previous lowest (recent) weight of 243lbs on this despite that having occurred less than 14 days before starting ex225lean.
Honestly I’m surprised by this. I thought that, surely, upping my protein from around 25-30g per day to 60-70g shouldn’t make a huge difference. And the difference might’ve been mostly water weight and muscle glycogen storage - but still not impressed.
The Macros: 2x the protein, 2x the cost
Meal
- 225g Ground beef 96% lean
- 45g Ghee
- 100g Green beans
- 140g Tomato sauce
Fat 57.8g (64.6%)
- Sat. 32.8g (36.7%)
- Unsat. 25.0g (28.0%)
Protein 52.8g (26.2%)
Carbs 18.4g (9.2%)
Fiber 4.6g
kcal 805.4
Cost $6.7
Dessert
- 200g Heavy cream
Fat 72.6g (93.7%)
- Sat. 45.6g (58.8%)
- Unsat. 27.0g (34.8%)
Protein 5.6g (3.2%)
Carbs 5.4g (3.1%)
kcal 697.4
Cost $1.0
Coffees
- 300g Heavy cream
Fat 108.9g (93.7%)
- Sat. 68.4g (58.8%)
- Unsat. 40.5g (34.8%)
Protein 8.4g (3.2%)
Carbs 8.1g (3.1%)
kcal 1046.1
Cost $1.5
Total
Fat 239.3g (84.5%)
- Sat. 146.8g (51.8%)
- Unsat. 92.5g (32.7%)
Protein 66.8g (10.5%)
Carbs 31.9g (5.0%)
Fiber 4.6g
kcal 2548.9
Cost $9.2
65g of protein felt like too much
Maybe I just got used to ex150-size meals (i.e. a very small meal) over the last 6 months but I would often lose my appetite 2/3 of the way through a meal. I’d still finish it eventually, but would get distracted by stuff on the computer or take a few minutes’ break.
There is something called the Protein leverage hypothesis which posits that our body is programmed not to reach satiety until its protein needs have been met. The common conclusion is that we will overeat non-protein rich foods without ever reaching satiety.
My (reverse) conclusion is that protein becomes unappetizing once we’ve had our fill and that over 60g per day, most of it in one meal, was too much. There is also some research out there suggesting we can’t synthesize much more protein than about 60g in one sitting. Maybe splitting it up into 2 smaller meals would’ve worked better.
An ongoing but completely untested idea I have: due to losing a lot of fat mass I’m also still liberating a lot of lean tissues that used to exist solely to support that extra mass. Maybe skin or parts of fat tissue. The ongoing process of my body recalibrating to the lower mass it has to support now.
So just like somebody burning his own body fat is constantly being injected with a flux of fatty acids into his blood stream, maybe he will also receive a bunch of amino acids that can be recycled. That would explain how I can get away with what some are calling dangerously low levels of protein (~0.15g/lb of ideal body weight) for so long and why I reach protein-satiety so quickly.
The fact that a DEXA scan confirmed I actually gained 4.8lbs of lean mass, .9lb of which was muscle, makes me feel pretty safe about my low protein consumption. Even if all of that muscle should’ve come in the recent higher-protein phase that seems to suggest I could just beef up for a few months after getting to my goal weight and gain back all the muscle I lost in the process.
Lean beef tastes worse than fatty beef
In other news: water is wet. I expected this going in but I didn’t expect it to be that much worse. It’s just kind of bland and uninspiring. I tried to compensate for the lower fat content (and calories) by adding ghee but still it just didn’t taste right.
Cooking was also more annoying, which I hadn’t expected. With fatty ground beef you can just toss in a bit of butter, wait for it to melt, and dump in your beef. As the beef cooks it releases its fat which helps cook it further. The lean beef was so.. lean that almost no fat came out, only water. This meant the beef would stick to the pan and just get steamed by the water instead of seared nice and golden brown.
First I added more butter. But it turns out that when you add 45g instead of 15g of butter to the pan you now need to wait a significant amount of time until all the water has cooked out (butter is 30% water).
So I bought ghee, clarified butter, which contains no water. It works like oil and there’s no need to cook water out. But since the milk solids have been removed it didn’t get the same golden brown sear. It did actually sear better but it was more of a dark brown instead of the golden color I’m used to. I guess the milk solids add to the flavor after all.
I ended up using about 30-35g of ghee, adding the beef, and then adding another 15g or so of butter later so the water would cook out at the same time as that from the beef.
After making the same meal every day for 6 months and having it down pat this seemed like a huge downside, lol.
The first few ex150 meals with my trusty old 80/20 ground beef have turned out to taste much better. I also didn’t get that “too much protein” feeling.
Didn’t get that high-energy burst effect, but cement-truck satiety was still there
Even though I consumed the same amount of cream (and fat, since I added ghee) I didn't really get that "buzzing with energy feeling" that I’d gotten almost every night after eating my dinner dessert of heavy cream over the last few months of ex150.
The first few days this could’ve been recovering from a cold I had a week prior to starting ex225lean. But at this point I feel well over it and I’m still not getting that heat flush and insatiable desire to move. Not sure if it’s related to the protein though.
I did still get the instant-onset cement-truck satiety. I timed myself and it was pretty similar, usually setting in after about 4 minutes and hitting like a brick at 6 minutes or so. I’d sometimes continue picking at the leftover cream but was unable to bring myself to finish it.
There’s a half filled (Ha!) cup of milkshake-consistency heavy cream with instant coffee powder sitting next to my keyboard right now and I can only stare at it longingly. For context: I wrote this entire blog post between starting that cup of cream and now, not having finished it.
Weight loss not impressive, if any
It wasn’t terrible, either: clearly I didn’t spike myself on it. The first 5 days, coming off a previous spike, I actually lost 3lbs. Then it slowly crept up 3lbs again, but that was probably just muscle glycogen and intra-muscular water retention.
My pants continued to fit better after 5 days, just like they had at the previous low of 243lbs. And I realized I should just go for it and buy new pants again. Even with the 3lbs gain on ex225lean these didn’t get tighter, so I’m not worried about that small gain.
Possible confounders: doubled Starbucks consumption, carbs went up a bit, DST & a cold
There’s always something.
I added another daily walk to Starbucks (and therefore latte consumption) about 2 weeks before starting ex225lean. That added another 15g of carbs or so per day. Then again I reached my (recent) low of 243lbs just a few days after that, before starting ex225lean. So I don’t think that’s it.
Daylight Savings Time and a week of having a cold were only 1-2 weeks in the past so there could still be lingering effects. I sleep much better now at 2 weeks after the DST switch. I think the fact that I’ve added a small morning walk in the sun to my daily post-lunch walk has helped entrain my circadian clock.
Next up: Return of the ex150
I’m honestly kind of fed up with all the experiments and spiking myself preventing the fat loss I’m used to, lol. 10lbs per month just feels so good! Even though -4lbs fat and +1lb muscle is nothing to scoff at I just don’t feel ready to be recomping tbh. I think I still got plenty of easy pounds to drop. I really, absolutely, positively expected the same level of weight loss on ex225lean. I had already planned out ex450 to increase protein even further because I was so sure it’d work great.
So I’m just going to do 14-30 days of OG ex150 straight after and I’m not going to spike myself and ruin everything in between.
Another reason is just to calibrate the baseline - if ex150 doesn’t work either then maybe there is another factor like sleep or the after-effects of the cold or the extra latte. Or maybe I have actually reached the end of 10lbs/mo drops - although it kinda doesn’t feel that way.
Plus I really want to buy new jeans again.
As always, thanks for the great reading. I believe you could retry stronglifts or starting strength or any strength workout routine to couple with the ex225lean, otherwise it doesn't seem worth eating anything else than reliable ex150. By now you should have enough data points for simple stats, like a regression to check the coefficients, errors and significance.