ex_choc_truffle_2000 review: lost 10.7lbs in 14 days

We have seen the enemy, and he is protein.

If you haven’t seen it, my friend John at The Heart Attack Diet just wrote a great post about how the mechanisms of PUFAs and BCAAs could work together, and how they explain some of his past weight loss/gain experiences on what he calls ex150ish. Check it out: ex150ish-4 second week

Reasoning for a “fat fast”

Partly inspired by Brad Marshall’s recent Glass Noodle Diet, which is extremely low in BCAAs, I decided to basically do a “fat fast.” Quotes because, is it really a fast on 2,000kcal?

I had long planned to do it, but after a few recent fails with even medium protein, I pulled this forward. Since I was already at 88% or so calories from fat, and avoiding almost all carbs, I simply turned down the protein even further.

So I stopped eating my daily lunch of 150g of beef, 60g of vegetables, and 80g of sauce. Instead, I added 50g of dark 85% chocolate per day.

For lunch, I made a chocolate ganache like in my previous ex150choctruffle experiment. I made this into what I call “The ApoB”: 150g of heavy cream ganache’d with 50g of dark chocolate, cooled in the fridge to chocolate mousse consistency. Then topped off with 50g of whipped heavy cream.

All my other calories came from heavy cream. I limited total heavy cream to 500g per day, yielding roughly 2,000kcal/day. I continued to use heavy cream in my coffee, and if I still had some left at the end of my feeding window at 3pm, I’d just straight up drink it.

Yes, I decided to do an intermittent fasting feeding window from the morning (around 9am) to 3pm, when I usually stop drinking coffee. That’s roughly 16:8, nothing crazy.

In addition I took 10g of an EAA supplement with the Master Amino acid Pattern formulation (more on that later), Fortagen. This protein powder is absurdly expensive, $105 for a small tub. But hey, I am only taking 10g a day, so it’ll last a while.

It wasn’t a complete “fat fast” because there was a little protein and I was actually now consuming more carbs every day than protein, due to the chocolate:

Fat 207.0g (91.8%)
- Sat. 129.0g (57.2%)
- Unsat. 78.0g (34.6%)
Protein 19.0g (3.7%)
Carbs 22.5g (4.4%)
Fiber 2.5g
kcal 2029.0

Potassium

For the first 4 days I also took a potassium supplement, but I quickly stopped after I got headaches and cramps that were so bad I couldn’t sit upright.

Workouts

As detailed in the last post, I had been overtraining and dialed back the workouts to 2x/week, Monday and Thursday. The X3 program I’m doing has a push/pull split, so I’m really only working each exercise once per week.

The extra recovery time seemed to help, I didn’t get very sore and the rapid weight onset from the tail end of the last trial quickly disappeared.

It seems that working out 2x/wk is compatible with low protein intake and fat loss, and even calorie restriction. 4x/wk might require higher food or protein intake. Maybe I’ll try it again once I’m “lean enough.”

At the end of the last trial I developed strong cravings for tomato sauce and found myself eating it with a spoon throughout the day. This didn’t come back, so I think it was due to overtraining.

The Trial

Setup

Just logistically, I basically used the envelope budgeting system for my cream: I put a whole 500g pitcher of cream into the fridge in the morning as my "budget" and then used it throughout the day, until it was empty.

If there was still some cream in the pitcher at 3pm, I’d usually just drink it. Several times, while I’d finished the cream in the pitcher, I was unable to finish my lunch chocolate truffle. I think once I ate it the next day, and twice I threw it out.

Notes

The first portion of ApoB (chocolate truffle topped w/ whipped cream) on day 1 was so filling I couldn't finish it in 1 sitting.

Day 3, I felt slightly cold in the evening. This seemed to go away, and I didn’t feel particularly cold after that, even when it was actually pretty chilly out.

The first 3 days I had stomach rumbles in the evening when I'd previously have my dinner cream. This went away on day 4, I think it was just ghrelin signaling getting used to the new meal times over a few days. I’ve often had this when switching around meal times.

Day 9 I was officially sick of chocolate. This happened the last time, too. I was still happy to drink pure cream, but the chocolate… ugh.

Day 11:

Felt amazing and high energy. I took a spontaneous 1h walk, didn't feel cold, no caloric restriction symptoms.

On that day I also tested 81mg/dL glucose, and 6.3mmol/L ketones. That is insanely high ketones even for me. I didn't even have a documented 5 or 4mmol/L before this experiment. I tested a few more times and usually got between 2.5-4.5mmol/L.

Days 12 & 14 I did not finish my 2,000kcal. This is interesting because it’s at the end of the experiment. You’d think that if I’m in a caloric deficit every day, that “debt” would accumulate and I would get a little hungrier each day. Yet the opposite happened. Satiety seemed to set in quicker and last longer the longer I stuck with it.

On day 14, the last day, I measured my blood glucose & ketone bodies and got 48mg/dL, by far the lowest glucose reading I’ve ever had (incl. 6 months of wearing a CGM). And 6.1mmol/L BHB. This indicates the previous super high 6+ level might not have been an outlier.

Some days I would wake up and still be feeling “full.” And that is after not having eaten since 3pm the previous day!

I also consumed considerably less coffee the last 14 days. Since I drink a lot of my cream in coffee, I’m usually somewhat rate-limited by my appetite for coffee. After 6-7 coffees, I don’t want to drink any more coffee.

This time, it seemed I was rate-limited by the cream. I don’t like black coffee, so after a few coffees, I just couldn’t fathom the thought of more cream, and thus, coffee.

There was one day where I only had a single (!) cup of coffee. I’m not sure that’s happened once in the last decade.

I did miss my ex150 meal. The taste of beef burned to a crisp with thick, reduced tomato sauce… also, eating only cream & chocolate ganache, there was no texture. Nothing crunchy, nothing to really bite into. It was basically a pudding diet, and super boring that way.

Results

I lost a total of 10.7lbs in the 14 days of this experiment, for an average of 0.76lb/day.

To give some context for water weight gain/loss, I’ve added a whole month of weight data, with ex_choc_truffle_2000 marked in green.

You can see that I was somewhat stable around 240lbs after doing ex150collagen and ex225, but then began going up to 245lbs in the last 10 days or so. I think this was from overtraining, I was strength training 4x a week and starting to feel really sore, my lifting performance degrading.

The water weight had already been coming down about 3lbs from the top, but there was likely some more water weight loss in the beginning.

But the weight loss just kept going.

This is insane. It’s on par with my very first month of ex150, when I lost 20lbs in 30 days. I broke through my previous lowest-since-2017 plateau of 235lbs with nothing more than a little dead cat bounce.

I am visibly leaner, especially in the belly area. When I tuck in my shirt, my belly bulges a lot less. I have to tighten my belt a lot more, too.

It even feels different. Just walking around, I feel lighter on my feet. I guess over 10lbs in 14 days is rapid enough that you don’t get used to it immediately. Boiling frog and so on.

Honestly it’s refreshing to run an experiment that exceeds your expectations - by a lot. I had expected this to work ok, but not nearly this effective.

Massive Confounders Crashing Into Each Other

Of course the question is, what caused it? Since I tried so many changes at once, I can’t say for sure. But this is part of my strategy, as I’ve written before in The Efficient Frontier of Fat Loss: Doing things slowly and carefully is fine if you already have a huge effect size. But since I’d largely plateaued or only trickled down in the last 6 months, it was time for a bold move.

Once you strike oil, you can start whittling down the potential causes.

Even lower protein/BCAAs

This is, of course, the main contender when going from a very-low-protein ketogenic diet to a hyper-low-protein ketogenic diet. ex150 is about 45g protein/day, this diet had 19g/day. Could going even lower really make such a difference?

Given how I seem to have been unable to lose much weight even on just slightly more adequate protein intake, for example 55g/day, … maybe?

Chocolate

Chocolate, of course, is very high in stearic acid, an 18-carbon chain saturated fat. I was getting plenty of stearic acid from my cream before this, but this would’ve increased it. Stearic acid is implicated in satiety and general mitochondrial function.

Or maybe there’s something else magical in chocolate? Slime Mold Time Mold recently blogged about a curious diet experiment where someone on Less Wrong lost a bunch of weight by adding hot cocoa made with baker’s chocolate, aka 100% dark chocolate.

Calorie restriction

I also restricted my calories to 2,000kcal. For comparison, my Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) was previously measured at 2,300-2,400kcal/day.

I’ve also had pretty bad experiences with “just” caloric restriction in the past, including when on keto.

In 2021, I attempted a 30 day experiment of eating exactly 2,000kcal a day by eating 4 protein-style double-doubles at In’n’out burger each day. I didn’t make it to 30 days. By day 16 I had to quit because the symptoms of caloric restrictions had become so severe: trouble sleeping, trouble concentrating, feeling cold all the time.

These are also symptoms I’d get when trying to fast.

So how come that this time, on the exact same number of calories, but with the addition of 2 workouts per week, I was fine?

Not just fine, I couldn’t even finish my 2,000kcal on day 12 and 14! The previous time I’d been starving at this point.

Well, for one, there’s of course the PUFAs. In’n’out doesn’t say what the ingredients of their “spread” sauce are, but you can call them and ask about ingredients for allergy reasons. I called and they confirmed that there is soy in the spread, so I’m pretty sure it’s mostly soybean oil. (Their cheese also contains soy lethicin, if you’re worried about that.)

If we check their nutrition info, we can kind of guesstimate it. They list their Double Double w/ Onion as having 41g of total fat, while the same burger w/ mustard and ketchup substituted for the spread has only 32g of total fat. I assume the 9g difference are soybean oil. I was eating 4 double-doubles a day for a whopping 36g of presumed soybean oil. FML. That’s about 18g of linoleic acid every day, or about 8% of my 2,000kcal/day intake.

The 4 double-doubles also contained a ton of protein. One is listed as having 37g of protein for a total of 148g of protein per day. I wasn’t working out at the time, so it’s likely I had pretty much the same lean mass as now - about 150lbs.

So I was eating close to the bro-science 1g of protein/lb of (lean) body weight - likely way too much. Assuming the beef in the burger patties had about 15% BCAAs from protein, like most muscle meat does, that’s over 22g of BCAAs per day.

In conclusion: I ran a “2,000kcal/day” experiment before, and it failed catastrophically. This time, it worked ridiculously well and I wasn’t hungry at all - in fact, I often didn’t finish the 2,000kcal.

The calorie math says it should work. I still have enough body fat on me to supply between 1,000-2,000kcal/day, theoretically. So I should easily be able to sustain such a deficit. But last time I wasn’t 240lbs when I started, I was near 300lbs, and so should have had considerably higher fat flux available.

What was different this time? What changed?

Over 1 year PUFA free

This brings me to the next confounder, the big one: what if any caloric restriction diet “just work” if you’ve just de-PUFA’d yourself enough? Does this mean I’ve de-PUFA’d myself? I’m about 13 months into not regularly eating any PUFAs.

In the beginning I would still eat some on my scheduled diet breaks, and I remember eating fried chicken a few times - but it would make me feel so terrible that I quickly gave it up, and my diet breaks morphed into just eating more protein instead, e.g. steak or cheese.

But what if the idea behind sustainable fat loss is:

1. Stay PUFA free for 1 year

2. Now any diet just works

Could be. It would be a bit lame, because it’d mean you’d have to wait a year. But it’d also be pretty cool, because, after that, you could pretty much eat any diet you wanted as long as it was still PUFA-free.

Feeding window

Something else was the 16:8 feeding window. Previously I’d eat my dinner cream in the evening, typically between 8-10pm. Maybe the fasting period helped?

I’ve of course tried a lot of intermittent and other fasting over the decades. Ironically, I was always great at fasting when I was lean, easily able to fast 5 days, and with some effort, 7-10 days.

But when I was morbidly obese, I could barely fast for 3 days before severe symptoms set in. Which always made fasting somewhat… useless. It’s like a car that only runs when you don’t need to go anywhere.

Hot vs. cold coffee

As part of this experiment I also switched from the cold-brew coffee I drank for most of the summer back to making hot coffee at home. I realized I use a lot less cream in the same cup of hot coffee. I don’t know why, it just feels right. The hot coffee is too diluted with the same amount of cream.

Maybe it’s because cold-brew coffee is so strong?

But this experiment was calorie controlled, so .. I still ended up consuming the specified amount of cream, even if not in coffee?

Fortagen

Fortagen is an Essential Amino Acid (EAA) supplement powder. It’s sold by the same company that makes the X3 training system I use, which is how I learned about it.

It is ABSURDLY expensive. $105 for a 620g tub.

Now the claim is that it is 5x as effective as e.g. whey powder, and so you should really be comparing it to a lot more whey by weight.

Why is that? It’s all about MAP.

MAP stands for Master Amino acid Pattern. I first heard this mentioned on Twitter a few months ago and had no clue what it was supposed to be.

Protein is made of amino acids, and different amino acids have different functions in the body. Muscle protein synthesis, one of the many important functions of protein in the body, requires a certain amount of amino acids, in a certain combination.

If you just ate 20g of just 1 amino acid, that wouldn’t do much. Your body would likely lack all the other amino acids (there are 20 in total, of which 8/9 are deemed essential) unless you still had some around from your last meal. The body can’t store amino acids.

What would the body do? Well, it’d assemble as much muscle protein as possible with what you had, and then get rid of the remaining, unusable amino though metabolic pathways, essentially turning them into expensive and inefficient fuel. Not necessarily into glucose, also into ketones and other metabolic precursors, but that’s neither here nor there.

It’s a bit like legos. To build a thing, you might need 8 of this, 3 of that, 5 of the other thing. If you only have 100 of one piece, it’s not of much use. If you have an equal amount of all 3, you’re rate-limited by the one in highest demand.

So the idea behind MAP is to figure out the perfect combination of amino acids for muscle protein synthesis and supply them in that profile, minimizing the “waste.”

The waste is measured in nitrogen excretion. When your body is unable to use an amino acid, it strips the parts it can use for fuel, and expels the rest as nitrogen.

You can measure the “quality” of a protein in many ways, but this is one of them.

MAP says the highest “quality” natural protein by this measure is egg, followed by meat, with about 50% and 45% or so. Meaning, half or more of the amino acids in your protein are used as fuel, not building blocks.

Whey is considerably worse at 18% utilization, and soy and many other plant proteins are even worse than that.

Hence the 5x claim - 1 unit of MAP profile protein, which Fortagen is, is supposed to be 99% utilized vs. the 18% in whey. 5x as much.

If you’re interested, there are a bunch of studies on MAP. I’ve read them. I’ll say I’m skeptical, and I just lost over 10lbs on it. They read like marketing.

The guy who invented MAP registered a patent, and the patent recently ran out. So now there are a bunch of companies selling MAP profile protein supplements. Fortagen is one. Optimal Amino is another, and theirs only costs $35, though it’s also a smaller tub. Still, about half the price of Fortagen or less.

If you’re interested, give it a shot. I don’t know if I’ll get it again. I have no idea how much of this experiment’s success was due to the MAP profile.

For the record, I made a spreadsheet comparing the AA profile of MAP vs. the popular and cheap bulk supplement provider Bulk Supplements’ EAA supplement:

If anything, I like the Bulk Supplements one better - higher leucine, lower isoleucine/valine. Bulk Supplements will sell you a 2lbs bag of EAA for $32 on Amazon.

What’s next?

You might be wondering: if this worked so phenomenally, why are you stopping after only 14 days? Surely you can endure the horror of eating chocolate truffle for a few more weeks and lose more weight?

But I am not really stopping it.

Intrigued by the question of why I can, all of a sudden, feel perfectly fine on 2,000kcal/day when this wasn’t possible before in a similarly controlled experiment, I am trying fasting again.

And just because I didn’t introduce enough confounders this time, I’m also adding the Illegal Carrot Salad that I’d wanted to try ever since it was brought to my attention by that trial participant: ex_salad_fast.

The idea is to continue taking 10g of Fortagen EAA supplement per day, eat ad-libitum salad made from carrots, raw onions, pickles, a few olives, vinegar, and salsa. You’ll notice that there isn’t any food in there - it’s all just crunchy texture & flavors. No nutrition. This salad is apparently a Ray Peat thing, I don’t know if the trial participant got the idea from Peat though.

I’ll also be slamming energy drinks; since “fast” means no heavy cream and I hate black coffee I’ll replace coffee with those. I ordered a crate and then realized it contains sucralose. FML. If the sucralose wrecks me on day 1, I might just have to throw them out and fall back on the Jocko Go drink, which I know I tolerate well (it has monk fruit for sweetener).

In the past, when I was 200lbs or so, I could easily fast 5-7 days. My record was 10 days.

The last time I tried serious fasting, around 280-300lbs, I barely lasted 3 days before brain fog, irritability, poor sleep, and constantly feeling cold. But that was also the aforementioned In’n’out 40g of soybean oil spread, deep-fried chicken keto time.

How long will I last this time?

If it’s really “avoid PUFAs for 1 year and then anything just work,” this seems like the perfect experiment to find out.

Godspeed to me.