ex_plainrice review: surprising success - 5.5lbs down!

This diet worked Beri Beri good

fat man swimming in bowl of rice

Why plain, white rice with no sauce, no salt, no nothing?

I had previously attempted different high-carb, low-fat, low-protein diets. In fact, I’ve run several experiments attempting to go as close to zero-fat as possible.

This includes a previous month of white rice + fat-free marinara sauce only, on which I didn’t lose any weight.

It also includes a more recent attempt at eating only 1,500kcal of plain white rice + some fruit each day, my attempt at Kempner’s rice diet. I had to abort that after 6 days due to increasing hunger psychosis like constant intrusive food thoughts.

But I was surprised by how little it bothered me to eat a near-zero-fat diet of a food as boring as white rice for so long. Others suggested, and I wondered, if drowning my rice in delicious marinara sauce each day had caused me to overeat. Or maybe the marinara sauce contained something that increased my appetite, disturbed fat loss, or messed with satiety signals?

After all, commercial pasta sauces are pretty high in salt and they’re loaded with herbs and spices to.. well, make them taste good. Maybe because tomatoes are a nightshade, they might be inflammatory? Or maybe their acidity makes them pick up high amounts of microplastics from processing and transportation?

It was thus only a question of time, I suppose, until I’d try… ex_plainrice.

That’s right, just white rice. No salt, no vinegar, no sauce. I did supplement vitamin B1 to avoid Beriberi.

I mainly did this because Tucker Goodrich yells at me whenever I mention going on a rice diet and tells me I’m going to get Beriberi.

If you’re curious, I used the Objective Nutrients Thiamax B1 supplement, but I have no clue if it worked. I never got much of any symptoms, so yay me.

Goal: Fat loss, EFAD

In general, like usual, my goal was to lose fat. That’s sort of the entire purpose of this blog, isn’t it.

But I wasn’t particularly hopeful, since I hadn’t lost any weight (and in fact even slightly gained weight) on ex_rice with the marinara sauce previously.

One neat thing about these near-zero-fat diets, though, is that they might be better at depleting your adipose storage of linoleic acid, which I believe to help with long-term fat loss and health, even if I don’t lose weight acutely during such a diet.

The main mechanism by which this is speculated to happen is basically inducing an Essential Fatty Acid Deficiency (EFAD) on purpose. Linoleic acid (LA) is an “essential” fatty acid in the sense that your body cannot make it, but needs it or arachidonic acid, which is a downstream product it can make from linoleic acid.

Eating near-zero fat, and therefore near-zero linoleic acid, could therefore force the body to use up any LA that is coming out of your adipose storage.

Even compared to a “regular” low-LA diet that is high in fat, like my normal heavy cream diet, this could deplete LA storage significantly faster. We have a couple of anecdotes about it, and I’ve also seen relatively good progress doing this in the past.

So even a low-fat experiment on which I don’t lose any weight is probably good in the long run.

Cheat Days

While I am usually super strict on diet experiments, I did have 3 cheat days during this 30-day trial.

They were honestly probably avoidable, and happened while I was traveling abroad, very sleep deprived, and didn’t have access to a rice cooker.

The cheat days would probably be easy to avoid if I just had more experience eating a HCLFLP diet, but they were also instructive in how different high-carb metabolism seems to work vs. the ketogenic, fat-adapted metabolism I’ve mostly been running on the last 10 years.

Fat metabolism == infinite fuel, no hunger

On high-fat keto diets like ex150, I can just not eat for 5 days straight, and I don’t even get hungry. This makes travel extremely easy. I don’t care for the airline food. If it doesn’t adhere to my current diet, I just don’t eat anything.

It also makes “refueling” very easy; if I can find a grocery store carrying heavy cream, I can just buy a quart, down it, and toss the empty container. Boom, I can run another 1-2 days just on that. Starbucks heavy whipping cream lattes work just as well. For protein, I can just get burger patties at McDonald’s or roast beef deli slices at a grocery store.

In the past, when traveling, I would just rely on this feature of my ketogenic diet. I could just not eat, maybe refuel every day or 2, and be totally fine. I wouldn’t even notice it.

Carb metabolism == constant refueling

On the carb diets I’d been trying recently, this was not the case. Initially when I did ex_rice, I had to eat every 2 hours or I’d become ravenous and get hunger pangs. I eventually developed the ability/gut biome/whatever to last 4-6h on a big meal of rice.

But 6h was kind of stretching it, and typically I’d eat about every 4h unless I was out and really distracted.

This wasn’t usually a problem. I work from home, I’m an introvert and spend all day in my house anyway. Throwing some rice in the rice cooker every couple hours was trivial.

Short fuel range + stressful travel makes Jack a hungry boy

But then I ended up doing quite a bit of travel during this experiment, and the combination of “only” having 4-6h of a fuel reserve + being inexperienced with carb diets while traveling meant I put myself into a pretty weak position.

I’d load up on rice before departing for the airport, but if you’ve traveled internationally you probably know that it usually takes 1-2h just to get to the airport in most cities, then you’re around the airport checking in and nonsense like that, then you’re waiting for your flight to get delayed, then you sit in the airplane waiting for takeoff… and suddenly you’ve not eaten for 4h and the plane hasn’t even taken off yet!

Then, you discover that the meal on the flight doesn’t even have ANY rice in it, and you’re sort of stumped. At this point you’re hungry, but you use your willpower to reject the airline meal and think you’ll just eat when you get there.

But you get there at 8pm, it’s 10pm by the time you’ve made it from the airport into the new city, you check into your hotel at 11pm… and you’re fucking STARVING.

Naturally, your hotel room doesn’t have a rice cooker.

Now you’re in a foreign country, everything’s about to close for the night, you haven’t eaten in 12h, you’ve already used up all your willpower & discipline… and this country is actually sort of famous for it’s delicious food!

And so you cheat and have some of their delicious food. It’s ok, cause it’s a new experience, and you’ve always wanted to try their food!

This whole sequence happened to me twice. The first time I was also extremely sleep deprived, which didn’t help, as it generally leads me to make bad decisions and erodes my willpower & satiety.

The first time I ended up having sort of a cheat meal, then another, and stopped the next day, leading to about a 24 “cheat period” spread among 2 days.

The second time it happened, it went worse and I did a full 2 days in a row. So you could say it was 2 “cheat instances” of 1 and 2 days each.

Neither times did I eat fried chicken or anything like that, in fact, much of my cheat food was also rice based. But there were sauces and salt and some of the rice was probably fried, and in any case it certainly wasn’t “pure plain white rice without anything” as this diet prescribes.

Learning to travel with a small fuel tank

The third time, I wised up to the pattern. Not only did I load up on rice before leaving for the airport, I also checked into a lounge at the airport and ate 2 huge plates of rice there, right before boarding.

This helped me through the flight, and when I arrived at my destination I was not yet depleted of willpower, I wasn’t starving, and I was easily able to make good decisions.

So naturally I purchased a 10 pack of pre-cooked instant rice and paper plates, and cooked steaming piles of rice in the hotel microwave.

I could’ve done the same thing the last 2 times, but the sleep deprivation, at that point acute hunger, and already having used up my willpower didn’t leave me in a spot to make smart decisions and stick to any plan, really.

In short, I don’t have willpower, it’s all systems

Sometimes people claim I must have incredible willpower to stick to these diet experiments. I don’t.

As my friend John likes to say, “I avoid willpower at all costs.” If I notice that I am using willpower to make something happen, I declare that incident a lost cause. And then, after it’s over, I try to develop a system for it not happening next time.

That’s why, the third time, I double-pre-loaded up on rice and made it through unscathed.

Pretty Good Results, Despite Cheating

Given how much I cheated, I was extra surprised by the good results of this trial. Maybe it has to do with even the cheat meals mostly consisting of rice.

Tale of the Tape

Let’s look at it then.

You can see I was sort of around 228lbs at the end of last month’s experiment, ex150vinegar. It got up to 230lbs or so but I think that was just water retention from excessive hot sauce use (Frank’s, Sriracha). So I’m only counting down from 228lbs.

Pretty much immediately there’s quite a drop, and I think it’s just the total lack of salt on the plain rice diet. But then, the weight loss keeps going, pretty linearly.

Even the first cheat day barely made a dent, only setting me back about 2lbs, all of which disappeared 2 days later. Then another big whoosh, and I hit 223.8lbs after 3 weeks!

Unfortunately, that’s when the double-cheat day incident happened, spiking me all the way up to 233lbs (!) for a gain of about 10lbs in 2 days.

By that point I thought it was all over, but the weight came off immediately - and kept dropping! Towards the end, I actually hit even below 223lbs, marking my first time that low in 6 months.

If we count from 228lbs down to 222.2lbs, that’s more than a solid 5.5lbs loss. Sure, some of it is probably just salt related.

But hey, this is the first time I have lost weight on a high-carb diet EVER! And the linear, ongoing nature makes me think it’s not just water weight, even though there was some of that in the beginning.

Huge success!

How was the diet? Plain.

Very plain. Unbelievably plain. Incredibly plain.

That said, it wasn’t that bad, surprisingly. White rice is really the perfect food to let you know if you’re REALLY hungry. If you’re not hungry enough to eat a plate of unseasoned plain rice, are you really hungry? Maybe you’re just bored.

When I hadn’t eaten in a while, the rice would be DELICIOUS. It would be crunchy, fluffy, nutty, earthy, and just simply in every way taste amazing.

Then, about a cup in, it would become somewhat boring. I’d keep eating, and it was still fine, but no longer delicious.

At some point, after 2-3 cups depending on how long I hadn’t eaten, eating more rice would turn into a chore.

It was quite fascinating to observe this phenomenon in myself over and over, several times a day.

I wrote recently about how rice satiety is very slow and linear compared to the hitscan cement-truck satiety of heavy cream on a 90% fat diet.

Just for that, I thought the experiment was worth having.

Compared to rice + marinara sauce, that was similar but the sauce never allowed it to get too plain or boring. I could probably eat gravel with marinara sauce, that’s how much I like tomato. Therefore I could easily down any amount of rice when drowned in sauce.

Plain, not so much.

That said, the plain nature of it also made this pretty rough psychologically. On ex150 I have one super delicious meal every day, and so am never more than 24h away from the psychological satisfaction of eating. Even plain heavy cream tastes much better than plain rice.

On the plain rice, I would sometimes wander through the supermarket or past restaurants and wish I could eat something, ANYTHING, with any flavor at all.

That might’ve contributed to the cheating, too.

Rice preparation

For the first half or so of the experiment I prepared my rice in a rice cooker. I used mostly Jasmine rice, but also tried some short grain rice like sushi rice. I preferred the Jasmine, as the short grain rice tends to get very sticky & clumpy and turns into a starchy mass/mess.

That’s probably great if you’re trying to make sushi and have it stick together in one piece, but for just plain eating, I liked the slightly looser texture of Jasmine rice better.

The second half of the month I was traveling a lot, and bringing a rice cooker wasn’t always feasible. Although I did spend a few days cooking rice in a tiny rice cooker in my hotel room lol.

The remainder, though, I would buy pre-cooked instant rice. To avoid total microplastic apocalypse, I did not microwave the rice in its plastic bowl, but pour it onto a paper plate to microwave.

The instant rice tasted surprisingly good. I had expected it to taste pretty lame or old, but it was just as good as the freshly cooked rice.

How much rice did I eat?

During ex_rice, the experiment with rice and marinara sauce, I averaged about 6 “Japanese rice cooker cups” of rice a day. Each one holds about 130-135g of dry rice, and is nearly exactly 500kcal. This is apparently some old timey measure of rice that the Japanese have used forever, and every rice cooker I’ve ever seen seems to come with a measuring cup in that size, so I’m using it too.

The instant rice did not come in this format, so I used the labeled carolies from the packaging instead to deduce the number of cups. Both cups & carolies are in the graph below for each day of the experiment.

On average, I ate 4.7 cups of rice, for about 2,357kcal. That is SIGNIFICANTLY less than the 3,000-3,300kcal I was eating with marinara sauce!

Heat Unit Math

In fact, it’s a daily “deficit” of 953kcal.

Now as you can see above, I did not count any carolies for my 3 cheat days. Those certainly weren’t 0 calorie, in fact I almost certainly ate more on those days. But I don’t have any way to count it, because I was eating at restaurants and the food wasn’t nearly as amenable to measuring & weighing as plain rice is.

In terms of pure carolies, my math says I should’ve lost 7.4lbs during those 27 days that I stuck to the diet w/o cheating: 953kcal means it would take 3.6 days to lose 1lb of body fat (3,500kcal), and 27 days of that are 7.4lbs.

In reality, I lost about 5.5lbs, and some of it was water weight for sure. I don’t think the 3 cheat days make up for the discrepancy in terms of pure calories.

I think it’s just that the calorie math never actually works out like it should. Nobody ever seems to lose as much as they should.

Ad-lib eating 950kcal less?

Still, pretty amazing that I ate nearly 1,000kcal/day less compared to the rice + marinara trial.

Also, an average of just under 2,400kcal ad lib, whereas I was starving after 6 days of 1,500kcal on ex_kempner just a few months ago? Wild. That doesn’t seem like a big enough difference to explain “starving all day long, quits on day 6” vs. “pretty much sustainable forever, except it’s pretty boring.” I wonder if the fructose from the fruit on ex_kempner played into it?

Random Observations

Some stuff I wrote down during the trial.

Satiety

The rice is pretty satiating, and mildly filling. I think I tend to stop eating not from physical bloat, mostly, but from actual satiety

Bloat/digestion is pretty fine. Clearly I'm physically fuller than on the cream diet, but it's not nearly as bad as it was the first time I did rice. Has my microbiome stuck around? Interesting.

Didn't end up finishing the 6 cups, maybe 5-5.5. Threw rest out.

Woke up, not particularly hungry. In fact, I don't think I'd eat even if I already had some rice made already.

Made only 5 cups today, see how that goes.

Wonder if this reduced appetite is due to 1. no sauce 2. trailing effect of high-fat diet? 3. trailing effect of vinegar?

Still not hungry and haven't eaten around 3pm lol

Again not hungry upon waking up

I sort of get the "I'm full!" people now. When you eat high carb, you are pretty physically full by the time energy satiety kicks in

Ate another few bites of rice just to see if I could eat more. I could, but not much

Again not that hungry upon waking up. Not that I couldn't eat, but no stomach growling, not thinking much about food. Put on some rice in the rice cooker and then went to get groceries and do some other chores before I ate anything, and wasn't exactly ravenous eating the first rice portion of the day

Didn't eat until after 9pm, not at all hungry entire day!

Super painless so far. Like ex150, I barely notice I'm on a diet.

Reduced thirst

I think my thirst is also pretty reduced vs. normal high-carb/high-protein diets. I keep buying iced teas and they are often room temperature before I finish them. Usually on such [high-carb] diets, I'm always super thirsty. Good sign.

Dry skin

Hm feels like the corners of my mouth are drying out the last few days

I think I'm developing a rash on my chin, weird.
Got a rash when I first did potato diet, but not on rice + marinara..
Weird that it would happen (or intensify?) the day after the cheat day but who knows.
Maybe pointing to vA dumping?

lol my earlobes are super dry and itchy today and I scratched myself bloody there.
interesting cause last time, IIRC, the dry skin was on my arms, not my ears.
Nose dry/itchy too

Getting some dry skin again, maybe it takes a few days after a cheat day?

One similar thing that I apparently didn’t write down at the time; during one of those dry skin phases I had 2 old zits break open and bleed, and then completely disappear. Very weird. As if an old wound broke open and healed itself completely.

Those dry skin phases tended to come and go, by the way, usually lasting 2-3 days. Not sure if they just went away when I cheated and then came back or what. Dry airplane air & travel stress might also have to do with it.

Muscles look smaller

Visually my muscles look way smaller than they did on ex150, despite all the carbs (=glycogen). Hm. Creatine? Taurine?

Cheat day

Cheat day while traveling & being very sleep deprived
Ate rice with other stuff, e.g. rice with chicken and vegetables, rice with egg
Probably because of travel stress & sleep deprivation?
I seem to do better under stress when on keto

Plain rice still tastes good when hungry

Plain white rice still tastes surprisingly good when you're hungry lol

Funny how even after about a month of pure plain white rice, the rice still tastes good when hungry

Random stuff

Sort of annoying how plain the rice is I can't wait to eat tasty food again lol

Spontaneously felt the need to go for a 3 mile walk, good sign?

Non-24 still gone

So funny, I keep forgetting, but people keep asking about it - yes, my Non-24 circadian rhythm disorder is still gone despite another month of eating pretty much exclusively carbs.

This is in some ways always huge news because it was the main reason I did keto for the last 10 years, but it seems so “normal” not to have it that I simply don’t think about it any more.

Crazy.

This is an idiopathic condition with no known cure. Except cutting out seed oils, I suppose.

But.. why did it work?!

This is, of course, the big one. How come I ad-lib ate only sub 2,400kcal/day, instead of 3,300 with the marinara sauce last year?

1. Is the fat free marinara so hyper-palatable that it makes me overeat relative to plain rice?

2. Is this still a lingering effect of my recent vinegar exposure? After all, in some of the vinegar studies, they saw the big effects only after over 1 month of starting the vinegar. (To clarify, I did not take vinegar with the rice for this experiment, but I took so much last experiment that it might’ve had some lasting effect?)

I did, after all, lose a decent amount of weight last month on ex150vinegar.

If you ignore the refeed spikes & the cheat days this time, it just looks like a slow & steady weight loss trickle down from ~230-240lbs to ~222lbs or so, doesn’t it?

Or maybe it’s something else entirely.

What’s next?

I’m not immediately taking up another experiment. I am currently still traveling and it’s a little over a week until I’ll return home. I’ll think about what to do next then, with a more stable food environment.

An obvious thought would be to just do another month of plain rice, but I am serious when I say the plainness is quite psychologically taxing. I am also not too worried about deficiencies doing only a month at a time, but if I start chaining months of these…

I’m not as dialed in while traveling abroad, and e.g. the cheat meals and some of the food I’m eating now will contain some PUFAs. I’m honestly not sure what effect this trip will have on my stored linoleic acid levels.

A month of pure rice should of course be pretty decent for depletion, but then I’ve probably eaten more linoleic acid, just by sheer accident and negligence, than during any month in the last 2+ years.

I suppose we’ll see when I get back home and do another OmegaQuant.