ex_rice review: Didn't lose any weight, Non-24 gone

With apologies to Walter Kempner

Walter Kempner, looking smug as a bug in a rug

I swear I’ll shut up about Denise Minger (heart.gif) and Walter Kempner (heart.gif) at one point, but not today.

Why do a rice-only diet? I thought you were a ketard!

I am a ketard. I’ve been doing pretty strict keto for the last 9 years. Besides falling out of ketosis once or twice by accident the first few months, I’ve only had 2 significant periods of not being in ketosis in that entire time, both in 2022. One lasted 3 weeks, the other 2.

The reason I stayed keto for so long was that it fixed my Non-24 circadian rhythm disorder.

In 2022, both the 3 week and 2 week period of eating carbs brought my Non-24 back within 3-4 days, and my sleep cycle circled around the clock until I went back on keto.

Some seed oil people had speculated that keto was really just circumventing something in my brain related to sleep, and maybe seed oils were what broke it in the first place. Maybe, having avoided PUFAs for long enough, my Non-24 would be fixed and I’d be able to eat carbs and have a stable sleep cycle?

I was skeptical, but then, I would’ve been very skeptical that a keto diet would fix my Non-24 to begin with.

The second issue was that a lot of people on r/SaturatedFat were seeing great success with HCLPLF (high-carb, low-fat, low-protein) diets, the other side of the “metabolic swamp.”

In short, people had similar success on “carbo” as I’d had on “keto.” So I had wanted to try it.

And, finally, since 2022, I hadn’t tested if my Non-24 was still present for over 2 years now. Why not make sure I still have it? Every other year sounds like a decent check-engine-light interval.

So I decided to give HCLFLP a shot.

I’d sort of made the decision to do this 6 months ago, but I was 99.99% certain my Non-24 would come back, and wanted to align it with work, so that I would be able to take some time off in the worst part of the Non-24 cycle.

I decided to do a rice diet.

Walter Kempner’s Rice Diet

When you read about Walter Kempner’s fabulous rice diet, one of the first things you’ll notice is that it was NOT a 100% rice diet. There were different variants he experimented with and recommended for different diseases/conditions/goals, but none of them were “100% rice.”

A large percentage of his diet was actually made up of fruit. He had people mostly eat 3 meals a day, and each meal consisted of:

• A cup of plain white rice

• 1-2 pieces of fruit

• 1-2 cups of fruit juice

This allowed Kempner’s “rice diet” to achieve the following macro composition:

From Denise Minger

Notice how low his diet is in protein: only 4% of kcals! That’s significantly lower than even ex150, which is about 6% protein.

This makes the “rice diet” by far the most extreme mono-macro diet on my Swamp Visualizer:

You’ll immediately notice, when examining his diet, that pure, plain white rice is almost 8% protein:

So, naturally, you couldn’t possibly eat a “just rice” diet and get down to 4% protein. The 7.8% protein is quite a bit higher than my 6% on ex150! Nearly 1.5x the protein.

Kempner was also quite militant about the rice diet; he thought that even the tiniest deviations could completely ruin its effect. He disallowed any sort of sauce or other condiment for his patients, especially no salt. He describes his diet as “extremely monotonous” and “barely palatable” and acknowledges that almost nobody could stick to it, and the best motivator seemed to be “impending death.”

That’s right, most of his original patients were just a few months from certain death; he originally invented the rice diet to treat patients with fatal, late-stage kidney disease.

Making death in the next 3-6 months slightly more uncertain is probably pretty good motivation, even for people who really don’t like rice.

My rice diet: Not Kempner’s

I bring all this up because, even in my own little nutrition paradigm here on the blog, these details already matter for this experiment.

My experiment was NOT Walter Kempner’s rice diet, and the differences could easily be big enough to make it into something completely unrelated.

Why did I not do Kempner’s exact diet? For one, I had heard that starch vs. fruit/fruit juice is metabolized very different, and many people on r/SaturatedFat were doing much better on starch than on fruit or fructose/sugar.

So I wasn’t doing any fruit, or fruit juice.

Instead, I made my rice more palatable by adding Whole Foods Fat Free Marinara sauce. It has no oil, and so is very well-suited to a practically-zero-fat diet.

Initially, I planned on only doing the sauce for 1 meal a day, but quickly found myself adding sauce to every single meal. And there were lots of meals; I ate 6-7 meals a day of ad-libitum rice with marinara sauce.

A note: to my surprise, many tomato products like sauces & pastes seem to be 20% kcals from protein (!), significantly more than even rice. This is in the beef range per kcal. Of course, tomato sauce doesn’t have very many kcals and therefore not much protein per unit of weight. But I was using A LOT on this diet.

I also added some microwaved frozen vegetables, typically fajita mix, spinach, or similar. Similar to what I do on ex150, just more times per day (because more meals).

I think, over the course of the entire month, I ate maybe 5 or 7 cups of rice without the marinara sauce. A few in the beginning, and a few in the end, just to test that I wasn’t just “overeating” the rice due to the sauce. I wasn’t, even in the very last week of the rice diet, a bowl of plain rice was quite palatable and tasted pretty good.

Oh, a word about “cups of rice” or “bowls”:

The rice cooker I used came with instructions and a scoop that represent one “cup” of rice. I think it’s some traditional Japanese or Chinese or Indian measurement.

This isn’t the same as a regular measuring cup, it’s slightly less. With the rice I tested (mostly jasmine & basmati), one of these “rice cups” was about 135g of rice. That’s almost exactly 110g of carbs and 500kcal.

Each of these “cups of rice” yields a big bowl of 3/4 of a pound when cooked, after it soaks full of water. With the sauce added, that means each cup ended up being around 1lb of food.

No Caffeine

I also decided not to do any caffeine during the experiment. Main reason being I can’t stand black coffee, and would rather drink no coffee than black coffee. Cream obviously not being allowed on a low-fat rice diet.

What about energy drinks? I’d done tons of energy drinks just recently, and wasn’t really feeling it. Also, I thought, why not just cut out all caffeine for a while. See if those caffeine skeptics are right and I’ll feel different/better. It had been years that I’d gone more than 1-2 days without lots of coffee, so why not give it a go?

How it went

I’d separate the month into 3 phases:

1. First 2 days totally sucked (carbo adaptation? caffeine withdrawal?)

2. Next 2 weeks were sort of fine, but my digestion was still catching up (microbiome adaptation?)

3. Starting around 2.5 weeks in, my digestion got much better and the diet became more or less “effortless” - not that it had been a huge effort before, but it got significantly better

Just as a reminder, I ate rice ad-lib. I mostly made 2-3 cups at a time in the rice cooker. Leftovers went in the fridge.

Here’s how many cups I ate per day:

The first 2 days I vastly underate. Then it’s pretty stable around 6 cups. Day 11-19 I mostly ate 7 cups a day, then it went back down to 6 almost every day.

On day 20, I was busy all day and only got home late; since it takes so long to cook & eat & digest rice, I only had time for 4 cups.

Day 26 was Thanksgiving, on which I opted to eat no rice, and instead indulge in fatty meat (beef only!) and I also had a latte.

I decided to do a full “fat day” instead of making it a rice + fatty meat day, just because I assumed that it would be better in terms of swamping, rather than adding fatty beef on top of rice.

Carbo adaptation/caffeine withdrawal (2 days)

The first 2 days were pretty bad. In retrospect, I vastly underate, eating only 2 and 3 cups respectively. This adds up to less rice than I ate on any other day of the day except the Thanksgiving fat day and 1 other day.

I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, day 2 I got weird starvation-type symptoms. This was probably my body adapting from deep keto mode, in which I’d been for 2 years straight, to function on glucose instead.

In addition, I dealt with some caffeine withdrawal. Honestly, that part was trivial. I had expected that going from pretty extreme caffeine consumption to 0 cold turkey would be a huge problem. People online complain about headaches for weeks, inability to focus, etc.

I had a brief, very mild headache on day 1. It went away after 2-3 hours. Day 2, I had a more medium-sized headache. Enough to take an advil. It was gone after that and didn’t come back.

Then, I never had any caffeine withdrawal symptoms ever again. Piece of cake!

I didn’t even particularly miss caffeine or coffee. The lack of it didn’t seem to lower my “productivity” or performance at work or anything like that. I wasn’t craving coffee.

That honestly surprised me, because I really, REALLY like coffee. But abstaining wasn’t particularly difficult.

I’m not addicted to coffee, I can stop any time!
- Me, mostly joking

I guess it’s.. true? I decided to quit caffeine cold turkey. Very mild headache situation for 2 days. Totally fine after that, no issues.

I honestly don’t get what the big deal is.

Microbiome adaptation (2 weeks)

Starting on day 3, I really felt my appetite pick up. I’m not sure if the caffeine withdrawal overshadowed my appetite on day 1-2 or my body was just confused by the sudden lack of fat & ketones, and the presence of glucose.

But I ate 5 cups that day, which is around 2,500kcal (+ some from the sauce). Next day, I ate 6 cups, which ended up being pretty much the average for the rest of the month.

I think that I was still adapting quite a bit during these 2 weeks, especially my microbiome. I would usually make 3 cups of rice during this time, and eat them spaced about 1h apart.

A few times I tried eating 2 cups in rapid succession, and would feel bloated and uncomfortable. I think my microbiome just wasn’t ready to deal with that much starch all at once.

Having to space 6-7 meals apart by 1h each made the entire process pretty tedious.

I woke up, and frenetically started the rice cooker. Or, if I had leftovers from the previous day, I’d heat up those. Then I’d eat them as fast as possible and start the rice cooker for the next 3 cups.

During this period, I was constantly full, and not in a pleasant way. Always feeling 75% bloated at any given time, except right after waking up before eating my first rice meal of the day.

Normalcy

After a little over 2 weeks, this got better. I suddenly noticed that I was still hungry after a single bowl of rice. First I thought this meant I’d eat more, but I ended up eating pretty much the same amount averaged over the day - I just ate it in 3 meals of 2 bowls each now. This is meals of 2lbs of food - pretty insane after the super minimalist, low-volume cream diet.

I switched to making 2 cups at one time, and eating both of them in 1 big meal. I was about as full/bloated after this double-meal as I was after 1 meal during the previous period.

This made the logistics a lot easier; it’s easy to eat 3 meals a day vs. 6-7.

Interestingly, my appetite actually seemed to decrease a little during this period. After a week of solidly eating 7 bowls a day, I dropped to 6 a day and didn’t miss the 7th.

Another thing I noticed in this period: I reduced my marinara sauce intake. The first 2 weeks I absolutely drenched my rice in it.

Now, I found the flavor of plain rice quite pleasant. Nutty, savory. I actually ate a few bowls just plain, just cause I felt like it.

Most meals were still with marinara though, just less - instead of drowning the rice, I’d add just enough to cover it thoroughly.

I think the Thanksgiving high-fat/latte day sort of ruined it for me. I had gotten pretty used to my routine and eating just rice + microwaved frozen vegetables + marinara, and suddenly I was reminded of fatty beef & lattes.

So when I discovered I was out of rice just 1 day short of finishing the 30 day experiment, I cancelled it on day 29. Not like I was going to learn something new on day 30.

Still, this felt somewhat unusual for me - as if I was fed up with the rice.

That said, overall it was WAY easier than anticipated. Remember, last time I tried the potato diet, I couldn’t even finish 1 week without adding lots of condiments and then butter.

The white rice was massively more tolerable, especially with marinara sauce added. One reason is probably that rice has significantly less fiber than potatoes. It took 2 weeks for me to be able to digest 2 rice bowls in one sitting; potatoes have 5x (!) the fiber per carolies compared to white rice.

I could presumably train up my microbiome by going rice, then slowly adding potatoes over time. But I currently don’t particularly feel like eating potatoes anyway.

Oh, given how regimented my food consumption was with the rice cups, it’s easy enough do make a carolies chart:

This doesn’t include the carolies from the marinara sauce:

118g have 40kcal. I probably used over 200g per bowl of rice when I was drenching it, and then toned it down to about 120-150g. I weighed the sauce a few times, but not regularly.

So we could add about 1.5 * 40kcal per cup of rice:

This yields an average of 3,310kcal/day. Spookily close to what I was ad-libbing on ex150 and ex115 not too long ago.

Very interesting that my body ended up at nearly exactly the same caloric intake from pure rice + marinara, vs. a heavy cream diet. It’s almost as if there’s a system in there to make us stop eating when we’ve hit energy balance.

(Not counted in this are the carolies on the high-fat day, probably about 2,000-3,000kcal, as well as 2 glucose tests of 75g glucose each that I did over the month.)

Weight part: Didn’t lose any

Let’s look at my weight.

Womp womp! The big jump in the beginning, before the green period (rice diet) begins, is just a protein refeed. I gain around 7lbs during this pretty modest protein refeed. Definitely didn’t stuff myself.

From that, the rice diet takes me up another 3lbs in as many days, and I’m now a whopping 10lbs heavier than I was at the end of my last ex150 trial (ex150-11, seen on the very left edge).

But my weight also stays there the entire time, I don’t gain more. The only real outlier is the day after Thanksgiving, after my fatty meat day. Funny heh, down 4lbs only to regain it the next day on rice again.

But maybe I lost a few pounds of fat and gained a few pounds of lean mass instead, right?!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that way. My body fat percentage went up via DEXA after 3 weeks on the rice diet:

My lean mass did go up (2lbs), but my fat mass went up more (4lbs).

You could argue that these results are worse than “no weight lost.” I didn’t even get back to my pre-protein-refeed baseline. Of course, we can’t exactly A/B test this and prove that just doing ex150 would’ve, but, typically, is does.

It seems that this time, the fat I gained during the protein refeed stuck around and my new fat settling point was 4lbs of fat higher.

Sad!

Non-24: ZOMG IS IT GONE!?

Plot twist: after I posted my 3 week update on the rice diet, indicating my Non-24 circadian rhythm disorder was gone despite eating 90% carbs, people suggested I try adding the caffeine back in.

I thought this was a reasonable experiment. I hadn’t felt any different on 3 weeks without caffeine, and I doubted the 4th week would change anything. So I added back insane amounts of energy drinks, typically 7-8 per day totaling about 1-1.5g of caffeine a day.

This is an insane amount of caffeine, and would probably put normal people in the hospital. I did this cold turkey directly after zero caffeine consumption for 3 weeks straight.

Felt nothing. Felt no different on or off caffeine. No jitter, no being “wired” after maybe the very first dose, no “productivity” change. Either I have the best caffeine genetics in the world (both my parents drink coffee to go to sleep), or I’ve permanently busted my caffeine receptors, or caffeine isn’t a real thing.

I don’t know.

But the Non-24 never came back. If anything, I woke up slightly earlier when adding the caffeine back:

One thing that I find curious and did not expect: it seems that switching from burning mostly fat to carbs for fuel, my circadian rhythm shifted earlier by over an hour even before the energy drinks.

You can see I woke up to my alarm around 9am most days on keto, and the first few rice days. Then, about a week into the rice diet, I started waking up at 8:30am. By week 3, when I reintroduce the energy drinks, I hadn’t woken up to my alarm in nearly 2 weeks. I actually stopped setting the alarm because I just didn’t need it any more.

With the addition of the caffeine (or something else in energy drinks? They are very high in B6 and B12), my average wakeup time actually slipped even earlier, and I started waking up at 7:30am. That is bizarre for me.

Somebody did show me a study that circadian rhythm can be tied to eating carbs vs. fat, so this could definitely be a thing.

After the rice diet (end of green shade), I went back on the heavily fat based ex150, and my wake up time slipped later rapidly, until I was back at 9am.

Why did the Non-24 disappear?

In conclusion, it’s still kinda crazy that my Non-24 seems… gone. I can’t believe it. This was the defining feature of my life for the first 25-30 years, and the reason I stuck with keto even after regaining 100lbs on it.

I was pretty firmly convinced that I’d need to be doing keto for the rest of my life.

When I got into the whole seed oil thing, some people (Coconut, mostly) speculated that if keto fixed it acutely, maybe long enough PUFA reduction would do the same but permanently, independent of ketosis.

To say I was “extremely skeptical” would be an understatement. I gave it about a 0.01% chance of working.

After all, I’ve only really been aware of Modern PUFA theory for less than 2 years, and my OmegaQuant results are not particularly low in linoleic acid.

The typical time period to reduce your adipose linoleic acid is suspected to be 4-8 years, and with sleep/circadian rhythm being a brain thing, I had suspected it would have to come at the very tail end of clearing out your PUFAs, if there was any chance at all.

Of course, it could be something else, too.

But consider that my Non-24 came back within 3-4 days when I tried an all-potato diet in 2022, just before I started cutting out PUFAs. That’s a pretty similar diet.

Glucose Tolerance

You might know I’m quite interested in glucose tolerance on/after long-term ketogenic diets. I’ve even done a Kraft test before, which is sort of a longer OGTT (Oral Glucose Tolerance Test) that also measures insulin at each point.

So with this being my first proper high-carb diet in at least 2 years, and the first full month of eating carbs in 9 years, I was quite interested how I’d tolerate all that glucose.

For the record, some people claim that being in ketosis (long/deep enough) will reduce your body’s ability to handle glucose. I didn’t particularly find that to be the case; I passed the OGTT portion of the Kraft test despite not even carbing up like they recommend. My glucose was back down to <100mg/dL after 2 hours, and back below baseline after 3.

This time, I’d be carbing up quite a bit. I was interested in a carbed-up OGTT and how it would be different, and also how eating a portion of rice would be different from the liquid glucose solution used in the OGTT - simply since digestion time would be a factor, just on a mechanical level.

I wasn’t wearing a CGM during this month, but I did a number of manual OGTT-type tests via finger prick glucose monitor.

1. My very first rice meal after 2 years of not eating any significant carbs

2. Similar rice meal after 5 days on the rice diet

3. Fasted OGTT (75ml glucose solution) on day 7 of the rice diet

4. Fasted OGTT on day 21 of the rice diet

First rice meal

This one I had struggling eating in one sitting. It took me about 20 minutes to eat the whole bowl, as it was plain white rice.

I peaked just under 200mg/dL, and it was back down to nearly 100mg/dL after about 2h. There’s a weird 2nd rise there, but it never reached 150mg/dL again. Then it dropped below 100mg/dL.

This was the first meal of the day, aka it was fasted.

Day 5 rice meal

This meal I ate faster and it contained tomato sauce. Amount of rice was the same (1 cup), also fasted.

Despite eating the entire meal much more quickly, the peak was much lower (just over 150mg/dL), which indicates that my first-phase insulin response had improved in the 5 days of eating lots of carbs.

The first-phase insulin response is a sort of “quick-acting” store of insulin that the body keeps around. When a large glucose bolus is detected, it is dumped to immediately make use of those nutrients. This way, the body doesn’t have to wait for the pancreas to spool up regular insulin production.

Not eating carbs for long enough (e.g. 2 years) will lower or even remove the first-phase insulin response, because the body “learns” that it doesn’t need it - there are never any large amounts of glucose to deal with.

I think this is often interpreted as “keto makes you glucose intolerant!” but I think it’s not true in an important way. It’s like saying that not wearing a jacket makes you cold-intolerant. Yea, ok, but I can just put on the jacket again.

It’s said that it takes about 3 days of medium to high glucose intake to bring the first-phase response back, and my reaction certainly seems much faster after 5 days: a peak of just over 150mg/dL instead of just under 200.

You could argue that 150mg/dL is still too high a peak, and a true carb-adapted eater wouldn’t see that. It’s also weird that my glucose never really drops below 100mg/dL, it’s just this long flat decline/plateau shape.

And eating 5-7 bowls of rice a day, it stayed there pretty much the entire time. I was rarely more than 2-3h away from a rice meal unless I was sleeping.

I tested my glucose upon waking a few times, and it was usually in the 80s or low 90s, so it seemed to settle overnight.

Day 7 OGTT (Oral Glucose Tolerance Test)

The OGTT is also done fasted. It consists of 75g of glucose dissolved in liquid. When I did the Kraft in the hospital, they had these orange flavored glucose drinks on hand. I couldn’t find any online, so I purchased glucose tablets and dissolved 75g of them in warm water to make a sort of glucose tea. Hopefully, this gave me a similar “digestion profile” as the hospital solution they use.

As you can see above, my day 7 OGTT peaked at around 1h, at 160mg/dL. This is lower than on my previous Kraft one (over 170mg/dL), but not by much.

By 1h45min it’s at 78mg/dL, and by 2h it’s at 60. Below 70mg/dL on a carb diet is considered hypoglycemic, and I was feeling it. Sweaty, dizzy, almost fell over when standing up quickly.

I’ve spent weeks at a time <70mg/dL in ketosis, and it was never an issue. But, it seems, hypoglycemia on a carb-heavy diet is a real thing.

In a sense this result isn’t much better than my non-carbed up one, the peak is still at around 1h into the test, not at the 30min that is considered optimal. And it’s not much lower. On the other hand, I’m way below baseline at 2h, instead of the 3h it took back then.

In any case, this would be a pass on the OGTT in strict terms. But then, the official terms are pretty lax in my opinion.

Day 21 OGTT

On day 21 I did the fasted OGTT again.

Curious! This time my peak was higher than ever before (over 200mg/dL!), I stayed up there for 15 minutes or more. The peak was 45-60m into the test, so maybe a slight improvement that it started coming down slightly earlier?

I was back down into hypoglycemia at 2h (59mg/dL) after reaching 75mg/dL at 1h45m.

So by all accounts, this OGTT was probably my worst one yet, despite having been the most carb-adapted of all of them?

It still passes the official OGTT guidelines easily. They are as follows:

• Fasting glucose <100mg/dL

• <140mg/dL 2 hours after the 75g glucose drink: pass

• <200mg/dL 2 hours after the 75g glucose drink: “impaired glucose control”

• >200mg/dL 2 hours after the 75g glucose drink: diabetic

These 2h standards are, frankly, bizarrely lax. If you have 139mg/dL two hours after drinking a 75g glucose drink in a fasted state, I don’t think you have good glucose control.

I suppose the standards are derived from the average population, 95% of which is not in good metabolic shape.

Rice vs. glucose drink

It’s interesting to compare the curves for eating rice (~100-110g glucose) & drinking a 75g glucose drink. Presumably, beyond the 45% higher glucose load, the difference is digestion time. The OGTT peaks very rapidly and then drops like a rock, leading me to be hypoglycemic.

Interestingly, the white rice seems to peak about as fast, but never drop as quickly, and never made my hypoglycemic.

I could see that we’re not as well adapted to liquid glucose as solid starch meals. Unless you invent fruit juice or hot tea with honey, there’s really no way to bolus liquid glucose in nature. At least the hunter gatherers we observe now don’t seem to do this. If they eat honey, it’s as a “solid” meal.

Another factor could be that there might be different adaptations for solid starches vs. fast acting carbs like honey or maybe fruit. Since I only ate rice, I wouldn’t have adapted to that fast-acting modality.

Ketones

Just for the record: I measured 0.1mmol/L ketones within 2h of eating the first rice portion, and never tested above that again. That is solidly “not at all in ketosis” I’d say. Even when I didn’t eat rice for an entire day and only ate fatty meat, i.e. no significant carbs for 36h+, I didn’t test any significant ketones.

The ketones started slowly coming back day 2-3 after I went back on ex150. It seems to be more of a “past couple of days” phenomenon than just the acute content of your last meal or two.

Satiety: Energy. Fullness is not a thing.

The rice diet hammered home a point I’d discovered with ex150 and “cement-truck satiety” when eating lots of heavy cream:

Satiety has zero to do with physical fullness (at least for me)
and is almost entirely about energy balance.

Crazy, I know. It’s almost as if our body has evolved to know when it’s being fed cardboard and wood chips, and can’t be fooled by nonsense such as “high-volume” or “low-caloric density” eating.

Nobody knew.

Here are a few notes I typed up along the way:

First rice meal: 1 cup white rice w/o anything

The rice tastes pretty good!

lol 7 minutes in, and I am having trouble finishing my bowl (1 cup rice expands to a huge bowl)

Cement-truck satiety? It's like with cream; the rice tastes good but I just don't want to eat more.

20min in, really have to force the rice down. Cement-truck satiety for sure. Only finishing it now due to the blood glucose test I'm doing.

1-2h later hungry again lol. So weird to be hungry every few hours after nearly a decade of keto, where I’m NEVER hungry.

Fatty acids stay in your system for up to 12h, glucose in a non-diabetic only maybe 1-2h, so I guess it makes sense.

Day 7

Did fasted OGTT (75g glucose drink). Same uncanny energy/satiety connection as on ex150.

After I did the OGTT, couldn't eat for 2h so I only really started eating around lunch.

Ate 3 bowls of rice in quick succession, super full/bloated, but barely reached satiety. "Fullness" is just not a thing. Hypothalamus or whatever detects energy just knows better than fullness.

I’m open to the idea that some people derive actual satiety from physical fullness, but I haven’t seen it in myself at all. I can easily disprove it by eating 3lbs of non-caloric salad, or potatoes, and starving. On the other hand, I can drink a bunch of heavy cream, which has barely any mass/volume at all, and get hit by a sledgehammer of what I’d call mitochondrial satiety.

Random Notes

Just some interesting stuff I noticed.

Kind of sore muscles everywhere, despite not working out. Glycogen -> stretching Electrolyte reshift?

Noticed the last few days on my CO2 monitor that I seem to be breathing out way more CO2 than on ex150.

Teeth always sticky from eating 6x/day and starch sticking between your teeth. Brushing after every meal lol.

Rice w/ tomato sauce and even hot sauce is not hyper-palatable. Similar to cream. It’s good, but not crazy good. I can put the food next to my computer in arms reach and forget about it for 30 minutes.

Temps seem generally about 0.5-1°F lower than previously. Saw lowest temp in a long time, 97.1°F. I thought carbs were supposed to be pro-metabolic and raise my temperature?!

Skin feels a bit drier, although it is also colder outside, so that probably doesn’t help. (This got better after going back on high-fat ex150 despite the cold. Could be beginning of EFA deficiency?)

Arsenic found in pretty much all rice

A commenter mentioned that lab tests by e.g. Consumer Reports have shown pretty much all rice, especially U.S. rice, to be full of arsenic. Sometimes scary high levels. Some reports even recommend not eating rice daily just because of the arsenic exposure. During this experiment, I was eating rice 5-7 times a day. Great.

It seems that white rice has less arsenic than brown rice, and I was eating exclusively white rice.

It also seems that California rice has less arsenic than Southern (Louisiana etc.) rice, because they used to use arsenic as a pesticide on tobacco plants down there, and it seeped into the ground. I mostly used Lundberg rice, which is from California, available at Whole Foods.

That said, according to an October 2024 report, even Lundberg white rice does contain some arsenic.

For the record, I mostly used Lundberg white jasmine & basmati rice. They have a slightly different texture to them, which makes for a nice change every few days. Jasmine is more sticky and gooey and just turns into a mush, whereas basmati maintains its “individual grain” texture better.

Why didn’t it work?

I am, frankly, pretty disappointed that I didn’t lose any fat, and that I didn’t even get back to my pre-protein weight. I had already imagined countless variations of HCLFLP diets. And maybe some of them would work..

• Was my rice diet too high in protein? Certainly higher than Kempner’s, and even ex150.

• Does HCLFLP only really work with caloric restriction? Kempner’s weight loss program included pretty insane caloric restriction. Then again, that makes me think: he started doing it in the 1940s, people were probably not nearly as PUFA’d then. Caloric restriction of any kind might’ve worked quite well for many of them.

• Did the addition of tomato sauce make my rice too “ultra-palatable,” denying me the benefit of the boring, white-rice mono diet “spontaneous caloric restriction?”

• I am now at a level of body fat where even my initially super-successful ex150 doesn’t seem to produce more fat loss. Maybe, had I started on the rice diet at 292lbs, it would’ve had similar success back then. It is certainly unfair to compare “trying rice @ ~30% body fat” to “trying cream at ~50% body fat.” Of course, it is much easier to lose large amounts of fat effortlessly if you have more of it vs. later, when you’re already down to a more reasonable level.

I obviously took an OmegaQuant right at the end of the experiment, and am waiting eagerly for the results. The rice diet I ate was <1% kcals from fat, which, long-term, is probably a decent way to induce essential fatty acid deficiency. One of its symptoms is skin issues, so maybe I was on my way there.

It could be that, independent of fat gained/lost, a HCLFLP diet like this is a good way to turbo-charge your linoleic acid depletion. I guess we’ll see.

I’m actually expecting my LA number to be higher after this experiment, since I didn’t eat nearly any fat from cream or beef this month. That means all the fat available for building red blood cells and in the blood stream would be coming from my body fat, and that’s presumably still much higher in linoleic acid than the 2-3% from dairy and beef.

We’ll see, I suppose.

What next?

I went back on ex150. It just feels so much more… comfy. Not having to cook & eat 3-6x a day. Never being full or bloated, just… satiated. Eating cream is like eating pure energy. It’s divine.

I also like my small lunch slop meal with ground beef and tomato sauce better than the white rice with tomato sauce. Just a little more satisfying, psychologically or maybe there are some nutrients (B vitamins?) in there as well.

I am totally blown away by the absence of my Non-24 and the possibilities this opens up. I suppose I … don’t have to be a ketard any more if I don’t want to?

Currently I still want to, but it certainly opens up a lot of experiments & options for the future. I could try the Anabology honey diet. Or the Kempner white rice + fruit diet. Or one of Brad Marshall’s Emergence Diet type plans.

Another thing that has been floating around the nutrition sphere recently is dry fasting. I tried reading that Russian guru’s book on dry fasting, but couldn’t finish it. Too much magick nonsense and auras.

That said, his protocols are interesting and Amber O’Hearn just published a post called Why dry fast? that is quite positive as well.

The main upside of dry fasting seems to be that it can achieve the same results as water fasting, but at 2-3x the speed. Since the major downside of water fasting has been days of boredom to me, leading to eventual starvation/sleep symptoms, I wonder if dry fasting would be more effective.

Proponents also speculate that the lack of water forces the body to break up fat cells to get at the water stored in them, so called “metabolic water.” I certainly have noticed that in the “whoosh” periods of losings lots of fat in a few days, I am never thirsty and still have to pee a lot all day long.

Of course, the downside of dry fasting is… everything bad with dehydration. Descriptions make it sound supremely uncomfortable and painful, and even dangerous. Many people warn you not to do it without supervision.

That said, it’s piqued my interest and I guess we’ll see.