ex_fatfast review: Massive fuckarounditis, briefly dipped <230lbs

Don't eat salad: I gained 12lbs in 12 hours

Lol, remember my last trial, which went super well and I totally wasn’t going to mess it up now? Instead, I was going to fast and only eat some salad?

Well, that went… not so great.

Gaining 15lbs in a day with salad

This was the plan:

• Make a salad from carrots, pickles, maybe cucumbers, raw onions, some olives, put vinegar on it, and salsa for sauce

• Almost no calories and no protein, so I shouldn’t gain any weight, right? Right?

In retrospect this plan is very stupid.

• There is almost no nutritional value, but lots of fiber

• Lots of pickled foods that are salty

• Salsa is salty

• Ad-lib eating of a non-nutritious, salty, fibrous food.. what could possibly go wrong

In short, I ate 3 salads on day 1 of the “salad fast” and I gained 12lbs in 12 hours. I actually peaked at almost +15lbs that day in the evening. The next day, I was back down to +10lbs.

Let me tell you, it’s quite an experience to see the scale go from 231lbs to 245lbs in the course of one day.

How is this even physically possible?

Well, each salad probably weighed 2-3lbs, and both the fiber and the salt caused crazy water retention. I was thirsty all day and probably drank nearly 2 gallons of water.

It was a surreal experience. The first few bites of the salad tasted great - I had missed the savory, salty flavors on my chocolate truffle diet, and the crunchy texture. All that was there.

But within 30 seconds of beginning to eat, my body realized there was no food in there. It honed in on the olives, which at least have a tiny bit of fat. I quickly found myself just picking out the olives.

Yea, yea, it’s just water weight. But it’s 15lbs of water weight in a single day.

My plan was to do the salad fast as long as I lasted, and I only lasted that 1 day.

By the way, I was vegan for that day! I felt very morally superior, so I have that going for me. I also realized that I had never been to the produce section of my grocery store.

That evening I threw away all the remaining vegetables I had bought. I wasn’t quite sure if I should go back on ex150 or on the chocolate truffle fat fast. I had missed the savory and crunchy, which was not a problem on ex150 due to the meat and tomato sauce.

But now I’d just had my fill of savory and crunchy - 15lbs of fill. So I ultimately decided to just go back on a “fat fast” for another 14 days.

Sour cream + salsa: hyperphagia

Of course, I could’ve just gone back to the chocolate truffle diet. That just worked, literally only 24h ago I had been at my lowest weight ever since 2017.

Of course not! That would be too easy. There were too many things I wanted to try.

• People on Twitter were talking about maybe supplementing glycine (an amino acid) would help just like restricting BCAAs, so I decided to take 4-5g of glycine in the morning

• People on Twitter were talking about taking vitamin B1, which could help in the BCAA pathway, so I decided to take 200mg of B1 each morning

• I decided that sour cream is basically just cream, and it’s more savory and sour than sweet, and also has a nice consistency, so I’d just do sour cream instead of heavy cream

• I liked the flavor of the salsa, and I still had a bunch of salsa leftover from the salads, so I just mixed salsa and sour cream

What followed was one of the craziest accidental diet experiments I’ve done in a while. It was interesting because it showed me that a lot of what “works” and “doesn’t work” about diet is really biochemistry.

The sour cream gave me insane hyperphagia.

“No satiety” is not nearly enough to describe the feeling. I ate a pound of sour cream with some salsa as a meal. An hour later, I ate another pound.

45 minutes after that, I was STARVING.

It wasn’t “no satiety,” the sour cream was making me actively, and acutely, hungry. To a degree I hadn’t experienced in nearly a year due to ex150.

A weird throwback: this was what life was like in college - an insatiable desire to eat until I was painfully bloated, or out of money, or the store closed.

This had always been my experience with carbs, but also, in certain situations, protein. I remember eating about 3-4lbs of BBQ meat (mostly brisket) and having to throw the rest into the trash to stop myself. I was painfully full after 2lbs, but 45 minutes later, I felt like I was starving.

Luckily, the grocery store was already closed when I finished off the 3rd pound of sour cream.

For reference, 3lbs of sour cream are about 2,700kcal. I’ve never managed to eat a single pound of heavy cream in one sitting.

How could eating 2,700kcal in the course of a few hours not give me any satiety? In fact, left me ravenous? I was thirsty as hell all day long, and after being up 10lbs day-over-day the morning after the salad fiasco, I was now up even more!

Something was rotten in the state of Denmark. The sour cream was making things worse, not better.

It was a very interesting experience after doing over a year of ex150, where I hit cement-truck satiety many days, and “appetite” or “hunger” almost disappeared from my vocabulary. I simply hadn’t felt the desire to eat in a year.

And, suddenly, the sour cream triggered an insatiable appetite in me to the point of painful overeating.

A pretty clear sign that something weird was up between the sour cream and the heavy cream.

I was mixing salsa sauce into the sour cream, which unquestionably made it more “palatable” if only for variety. But I think it probably would’ve been similar without it. I remember buying a 2lb tub of full-fat yogurt during a few of my protein-refeeds, eating the whole thing, and being more hungry than before.

In retrospect, this undoubtedly contributed to the weight I gained back during my various protein refeeds. There seems to be something about certain foods (proteins?) that gives me acute hyperphagia, leaving me hungrier than before even after thousands of calories.

If only there was a tool to compare the sour cream and heavy cream… oh, of course, let’s use the Foodulator!

This compares sour cream to heavy cream, calorie-matched at 3,000kcal. As you can see, the Foodulator now has buttons to auto-match amounts to 1,000-3,000kcal. Thanks to reader Lucent for the idea! It’s very convenient and I use it every day now.

According to the USDA database, sour cream has 27.9% of its protein from BCAAs, whereas cream only has 19.4%. I will say I’m a bit skeptical - no other dairy food seems to have BCAAs this high, and the USDA database has lots of weird issues and outliers that don’t seem to make sense.

But in any case, the absolute amount of BCAAs per calories in sour cream is almost double that of heavy cream. Carbs are nearly 3x as high. The fatty acid composition is quite similar, there’s just less fat in sour cream per weight. In short, sour cream has less fat, and more carbs and protein.

Not really sure if the 3x carbs + 2x BCAAs explain the extreme opposite effects, with heavy cream giving me cement-truck satiety like I’ve never had in my life, and sour cream giving me predictable hyperphagia, leading me to eat to the point of painful bloating. (Yes, 3lbs of sour cream sit in your stomach like rocks.)

Heavy cream and sour cream, are there 2 more similar foods? They even share a name, for heaven’s sake.

Anyway, I decided to end the sour cream fat fast after 2 days and didn’t buy any more.

In fact, I decided to just trash this part of the experiment and start the 14 day fat fast over with a known-good food.

Stick to the plan.

Naturally, I went back to chocolate truffle, but without calorie restriction this time. I also technically didn’t do the 9am-3pm feeding window, although I actually liked it, and so mostly stuck to it. Sometimes, if I’d not finished my chocolate truffle after 3pm, I’d eat it a 4 or 5pm. But, largely, I had gotten used to not eating after 3pm.

I kept the single serving of Fortagen (an EAA supplement) every morning, which yields 10g of protein, about 5 of those BCAAs.

On day 4 I started to miss meat/savory flavors again, but I decided that 14 days was easy enough to power through. I’d just go back on ex150 after that, which featured meat every day and plenty of savory sauces like tomato sauce.

I’m writing this on day 6, and the chocolate truffle is… meh. It’s very easy to prepare, but I don’t really look forward to it. Eating it feels a bit like work, and I don’t think I’ve finished a portion in a sitting the entire time so far.

Which, if you think of it, is kind of remarkable. 150g cream emulsified with 50g dark chocolate, topped with another 50g of whipped cream. That’s actually less cream than I used to eat in my whipped cream dinner dessert. But there’s the chocolate, of course.

Interestingly, I’m not sure I actually ate more than 2,000kcal sans the active restriction. During the last trial, if my feeding window was about to end at 3pm and I still had some heavy cream sitting in my pitcher for the day, I’d just drink it real quick. This happened several times.

I didn’t do that this time, because I didn’t have a strict feeding window and no pitcher of pre-measured “today cream,” and, intuitively, I felt like I actually ate less cream now than before because of this. If it wasn’t in my coffee during the day, or in the chocolate truffle, I just forgot about it.

Sparkly, flavored water: innocent?

During ex225, I speculated that the excessive amount of sparkling water combined with a high-sodium electrolyte supplement was somehow blocking my fat loss.

I kind-of tried this here, drinking ad-lib sparkling, flavored water (think La Croix, Topochico) throughout the experiment. It did not seem to cause any issues, even regarding pure water loss from the salad water weight.

So, if anything, it might’ve been the salt in the electrolyte supplement causing excess water retention. Or that little bit of extra protein in ex225 really makes a difference.

Sodium

In case you don’t know, I haven’t added salt to my food in a few years now. I used to be a heavy salter on keto, going through several buckets of Maldon sea salt.

But when I tried to go from keto to carnivore, I would get persistent headaches that wouldn’t go away. They’d get worse, not better, over time.

Finally I tried carnivore without adding any salt, and there were no headaches. Of course this might’ve been a coincidence, but in those 90 days of carnivore I got used to not using any salt, and I just never went back.

Some of the foods I eat contain salt, of course. Tomatoes and meat both contain salt, as do some vegetables, I think. Pasta sauces, which I use every day on ex150, contain some salt.

After the salad fiasco, I was very suspicious of any salt, but I was also really tired of only eating sweet chocolate flavored things on the fat fast. I craved something savory/umami tasting.

As a trial, I ate a small can of salsa from the store. It listed 860mg of sodium for the can. I did not see a reduction in water weight loss the next day, so this amount is likely fine, at least once in a while.

But I just couldn’t stick to the plan. I had to mess around more.

Tomato cream soup

After a full week of just eating chocolate truffle, I was really sick of the chocolate. I got the tomato cravings again. So I decided: hey, this is a fat fast this time, not a chocolate truffle fast. Could I just make tomato cream soup?

Recipe:

30g butter
30-40g chopped onions
30-40g chopped green peppers
30-40g chopped mushrooms
150g cream
200g tomato puree (I used unsalted)
Red cayenne pepper to taste
Italian herb mix to taste

In a sauce pan, fry onions, mushrooms, and peppers to a crisp in the butter. The more burnt, the more flavor.

Add tomato puree and cream, then pepper and herbs. Bring to boil. Don’t burn the tomato soup (trust me on this one lol)! Be vigilant while having it on high heat and stir frequently.

Turn down heat, let simmer forever until it’s boiled down to a thick, creamy consistency. I often let it simmer for 45-60 minutes while working or doing something else. Just stir often enough so your tomato soup doesn’t burn (TRUST ME!)

You can use an immersion blender to smooth the texture, or leave it as is if you prefer the vegetables chunkier. I like both.

The tomato soup definitely didn’t ever give me cement-truck satiety, although it contained nearly the same amount of fat as whipped cream, and came in a very similar consistency (I made it really thick, it was nearly solid in the fridge).

I never felt like stopping while eating. I think that’s “satiation” not satiety. 15-30 minutes later, I would get that feeling of “fullness on an empty stomach” and warmth. So satiety did set in on a biochemistry level, but no satiation during the meal.

I didn’t try it, but it felt like I’d be able to eat a gallon of this without ever wanting to stop. It just tasted really good.

But did the tomato soup stop weight loss progress?

Just show us the results, ffs

In orange: fuckarounditis. In green: fat fast.

For context, as usual, I included the tail end of the last experiment, which brought me down to 232lbs. Massive spike from salad and 2 days of sour cream.

The first half of ex_fatfast, the period shaded in green, I only ate chocolate truffle and put cream in my coffee. I had 1 small can of salsa on day 6 because I really missed savory flavors, then started tomato soup.

I kept losing weight for a little bit and actually hit my lowest weight in a long time at just under 230lbs, then it started going up a bit again and I hovered at 232-233lbs the last few days.

So did the tomato soup ruin it? Maybe.

Confounders:

• The spike after my 229lbs low coincides with the Thanksgiving weekend. I traveled a lot, including many hours of driving. Travel always seems to make me gain weight, even if it might just be water weight.

• I didn’t really break the diet with travel food, only eating a few pickles and salted olives from a gas station at one time. The salt might’ve caused water retention, similar to the salad.

• In the last 2-3 days I made clotted cream for the first time, in my instant pot. If you don’t know, clotted cream is a British thing where you cook cream at low temperatures for 10+ hours and it turns into a smooth, creamy consistency, halfway between cream and butter. I ate this for the last 2-3 days, a few spoonfuls at a time + adding it to my tomato soup. It was honestly so buttery I couldn’t eat more than 1-2 spoons at a time.

So, did ex_fatfast work?

Sorta, kinda? I did hit a new low. But it was almost certainly blocked a lot by the salad/sour cream fiasco, which cost me the entire first week for the weight to come back down. The sour cream especially also might’ve made me gain 1-2lbs by spiking insulin like crazy.

Overall, if we take the lowest point, I lost 2lbs in 11 days. That’s not bad, but also not the best I’ve ever seen. If it was that tempo without the nutty salad/sour cream gain or the rebound after Thanksgiving/tomato soup, I’d be happy.

But I was severely sick of the chocolate truffle after just 4 days or so, leading me to the tomato soup thing, the can of salsa.. and probably the salad/sour cream fiasco to begin with.

So in that sense, I don’t think this version of the fat fast is a very sustainable diet. I didn’t get sick of the same meal every day on ex150 for over a year, yet I can barely eat chocolate truffle for a week. The same thing happened the last time.

In that sense, it’s a failure - it induces me to fuck around and find out. In contrast to ex150, it was psychologically unsatisfying.

I also believe that the informal feeding window (usually no food after 3pm) led me to restrict calories too much, and then I was cold/hungry some days and tried to make up for it/experiment with weird stuff.

Satiation vs. satiety

I’ve heard the definition of “satiation” as in “it induced you to stop eating.” In that sense, a phone call could give you “satiation,” or finding a fly in your soup.

Satiety is difficult to define in the best of times; I’d basically define it as “met all nutritional requirements, and this fact somehow being communicated back to you” which might include protein, fats, micronutrients, and, most importantly, energy. Since most people are not protein or micronutrient deficient, energy seems the most common factor in satiety.

Whipped cream on ex150 gives me both “satiation” and satiety - maybe cement-truck satiety should really be called cement-truck satiation, because it makes me stop eating in the process of eating a meal. But it also gives me satiety in the long term.

Or is it still satiety, because it could be a signal that I’ve reached energy balance? It does take significantly longer to set in when I’ve consumed less cream that day, or the previous day. Maybe “satiety” can cause “satiation” if it hits before you stop eating?

It was pretty interesting to see how the very creamy/buttery tomato soup did not give me satiation, even though it’s basically the same thing as just cream - cream with tomato puree, some vegetables, butter, some spices, reduced down to a similar, thick consistency as whipped cream.

Yet 30-45 min after eating, I would feel a warmth and a similar “all-around satiety” feeling I get from chocolate truffle or whipped cream. That feeling that you really don’t want to eat, you’re good.

While the tomato soup did not induce instant satiation, it also didn’t induce the hyperphagia that I got from the sour cream.

I think this is pretty fascinating in terms of highlighting satiation vs. satiety. One of my original hypotheses was “goldilocks-satiety.” The idea is basically that you need X calories to reach “satiety” in the energy balance sense. If you ate foods that were palatable enough to make you eat more than that before the satiety signal hit, you’d gain fat. If you ate foods that were not palatable enough (e.g., for me, potatoes), you’d eventually starve unless you stopped doing that diet. You could call these foods “oversatiating” and I’d consider it a bad thing.

In a sense, it’s a satiation/satiety ratio I suppose.

Goldilocks-satiety meant that, somehow, whipped heavy cream gives me exactly the right ratio to stop when I got the required amount of energy, not too soon, not too late.

It seems that the tomato soup experiment is a pretty decent piece of evidence here; I never once stopped eating tomato cream, even when I had twice the portion size. No satiation.

This means that on ad-lib tomato cream, I’d probably eat significantly more than on whipped cream.

I also remember fooling around with gelatin cream instead of whipped cream back during my collagen experiment, the only difference being 10g of gelatin to make it a more solid consistency; I never once got satiation from the pudding-consistency gelatin cream. I don’t recall if it gave me satiety later.

Comparison of dishes and their effects

The Good

Whipped cream: Satiation / Satiety
Chocolate truffle: Satiation / Satiety

The Bad

Gelatin cream: No satiation / Maybe satiety
Tomato cream soup: No satiation / Satiety

Clotted cream: Satiation (maybe oversatiation) / Satiety
Butter: Oversatiation / Satiety

The Ugly

Sour cream: No satiation / Hyperphagia (negative satiety)
Yogurt: No satiation / Hyperphagia (negative satiety)

Suet: Oversatiation / No satiety
Potatoes: Oversatiation / No satiety
Pemmican: Oversatiation / No satiety

By oversatiation I mean that I have to stop eating before getting enough food in to later reach satiety. It’s a little bit of a spectrum; I can eat significantly more clotted cream or butter than suet or pemmican, or, calorie wise, potatoes.

By this metric, whipped cream and chocolate truffle are “just right” in the goldilocks sense (maybe just for me?) whereas gelatin cream and tomato cream soup need to be consumed in limited quantities or I’d overconsume them.

Clotted cream, butter, suet, and potatoes can be eaten, but they can’t be the main food or I’ll eventually get into an involuntary and unsustainable internal caloric deficit, meaning I’ll get starvation symptoms and have to quit the diet.

Sour cream and yogurt should be completely avoided because they seem to biochemically make me ravenous somehow.

Fuckarounditis

Overall, this experiment really highlighted that I should stop fucking around.

Both 14-day fat fast experiments and fiasco in between.

Although I lost about 10lbs in the last month if we combine both the 2,000kcal-restricted and this ad-lib/tomato soup fat fast, it seemed like a cycle of losing tons of weight, getting into an internal deficit/psychological problem with the flavor profile, and messing up.

If you haven’t heard the term and can’t guess, “fuckarounditis” was termed by fitness influencer (before it was cool!) Martin Berkhan in 2011 in his eponymous post Fuckarounditis.

It’s pretty self-explanatory: the tendency of people (like myself) to play around with shiny new things and mess up, distracting themselves when they have a good thing going, instead of just sticking to the plan.

I was a pretty big Berkhan reader back then, when I was in college. I never implemented his “LeanGains” protocol and, in retrospect, I don’t think it would’ve been a great fit. It’s very high in protein, very much into calorie math, and intermittent fasting. I believe he was one of the first diet gurus to introduce IF with an 16:8 feeding window.

I was reminded of “Fuckarounditis” a few times last week, both when talking to my friend John from The Heart Attack Diet and on Twitter a few times, talking to others.

To paraphrase John:

You bone-headed colonist!

Your charts clearly show that you lose weight every time you just stick to ex150. Yet you keep messing around, adding stupid variants and increasing your protein when you know protein is your kryptonite, innit.

Don’t make me come over there.

Of course he didn’t say it quite like that; John is, after all, a sophisticated Brit of class who went to a nice preppy school (Camebridge, I think he said?) and he would never talk like that.

But I knew what he meant. And he wasn’t wrong.

Anticipate. Don’t improvise.

So while experimenting is fun, and I love trying shiny new stuff like glycine and B1 and carrot salad and sour cream and clotted cream, at this point I think I should shut up and put my money where my mouth is: no protein refeed this time, I’ll just go back on good old ex150 for a while until it stops working.

The operational definition of “stops working” will be that I do it, strictly, for 30 days, and lose 0lbs. As long as I’m losing, I’ll keep doing it.

There will, of course, be confounders like holidays, travel, sometimes eating something salty, stress, sleep, overtraining, whatever. But no need to confuse all that by experimenting too much on top.