ex_savoryfatfast review: disappointing, only down 2lbs

Fat fasts not that special after all?

Why do another fat fast?

After 2 solid months of the original ex150 diet, bringing me officially below the “obesity” and into the “overweight” category, I felt like I had made enough progress to goof around a little, and run another experiment.

The experiment wasn’t even going to be that big: I had previously done 2 fat fasts, one restricted to 2,000kcals, and one non-restricted. I say non-restricted instead of unrestricted because I actually ate significantly less on that one, having to force down the remainder of 2,000kcal at the end of the day a lot during the “restricted” fat fast.

Both of those fat fasts were done exclusively using chocolate ganache (an emulsion of dark chocolate and heavy cream) and cream in coffee, and both felt unsustainable and caused me to exhibit “fasting-like symptoms” and kind of go off the rails.

Simply said, I began hating the chocolate and the diet and started jars full of tomato sauce.

But I did lose a shit ton of weight doing fat fasts.

The first time, it was unquestionably not just water weight, but a lot of fat. I did this right after ex225, a 30 day experiment of slightly higher protein, during which I gained quite a bit of weight (some of it fat, by DEXA):

ex_choctruffle_2000

You see that “hill” of weight gain? I went from ~240lbs to ~245lbs working out, probably fatigue from too much volume. That started coming down as I decreased workout volume and recovered better. I was back down at ~242lbs when I began the fat fast.

It went down rapidly. I suspect a few of those pounds were water weight, but even if we count from the previous low of 240lbs, at which I’d plateaued most of the summer of 2023, it would be a pretty astonishing 8lbs as I ended the 14 days at 232lbs, BY FAR a new low and at last the break through my malaise-inducing plateau.

If we count from the top, it’s over 10lbs lost in 14 days.

But I did go off the rails at the end of this, eating salad and gaining 15lbs (!) of water weight in about 15 hours (!), gaining a ton of weight eating 3lbs of sour cream, and otherwise just being stupid.

Eager to undo this mistake and replicate the 8-10lbs success of the first chocolate truffle fat fast, I did another one:

ex_fatfast

You can see the insane weight gain from the salad (first spike) and the sour cream (second spike & little .. butte?) right before I start ex_fatfast. The orange layer is fuckarounditis, the green layer is the fat fast.

And the weight came off super rapidly, netting me a loss of 13lbs in 10 days. But, of course, almost all of that was just water weight. Counting from the low-point before this fat fast to its own low, I only lost 2lbs in 14 days. That’s not crazy bad, but it’s also nothing to write home about - a little worse than ex150-8 did recently.

Was the difference that the previous fat fast followed ex225, and had just taken off the fat gained during that?

At the end of the second fat fast I had started hating chocolate truffle so much I couldn’t stomach much of it any more, and I began going off the rails again, buying & eating jars of salsa.

One hypothesis is, of course, that the chocolate truffle becomes so monotonous and unpalatable that it severely restricts my caloric intake - an “inefficient fast” - and the associated caloric restriction symptoms.

The Savory Fat Fast

This is what ex_savoryfatfast was designed to test. It would be much closer to regular ex150 - the only difference really being the lack of ground beef, and the addition (like in the other 2 fat fasts) of 10g/day of EAAs (essential amino acids).

This way I’d eat a “meal” of savory tomato or alfredo sauce with vegetables, cooked in butter & tallow, for lunch every day. And I’d still have my regular cream in coffee during the day, and whipped cream at night.

If it was really just a lack of palatability that had me going off the rails, maybe some sort of psychological “boredom with chocolate,” would a savory fat fast be the magic pill?

Spoiler alert, yes and no.

As you can see, I did lose some weight during 14 days of ex_savoryfatfast, but not a lot. I’m down 2-2.5lbs. Hitting just below 222lbs was still a new low and felt great, but it’s not exactly the record-breaking 8lbs performance of the first fat fast.

In fact, it might just all be glycogen loss. I’m a little torn on this. One the one hand, eating even less protein definitely could lead to less glycogen stored in the muscles, and therefore less water, and just cause a temporary 1-2lbs loss due to temporary muscle glycogen depletion.

On the other hand, my lifts actually went up in some exercises!

But, honestly, if these 2lbs just came back when I ate normal ex150-style protein again for a week, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

(Spoiler alert from the future: after a single day of eating meat on ex150 again, I’m up 1lb, so it was likely all or mostly glycogen.)

It was sustainable

Then again it felt way more sustainable. I rate my normal ex150 a 9/10 or 10/10 in terms of palatability. I am totally satisfied on it, in fact I love it every day, and I don’t usually miss anything that I’d add to the diet. Definitely no weird cravings for salsa and tomato sauce like on the chocolate truffle fast.

ex_savoryfatfast was more like a 6/10. It definitely felt like an intervention. The “fat & vegetable soup” I had for lunch was good, but not amazing. I definitely missed the meat.

Rough differentiation vs. other experiments

Compared to ex150:

• - 150g of beef per day

• + 10g of Fortagen (EAA) supplement per day

Compared to ex_choctruffle:

• - Chocolate truffle (or chocolate of any kind)

• + Cream + 60g vegetable + 80g pasta sauce per day, cooked into “fat soup”

Observations & little things

Just a few notes I made during the 14 days.

Tomato tallow soup is pretty delicious

Alfredo tallow soup is more of a chowder

I think the sauce & vegetables really helped with fat intake.

Glued/welded stainless steel lunch box shut in Hot Logic, whoops!

If you use the Hot Logic Mini cooker I described recently, make sure your stainless steel cooking container doesn’t have a rubber gasket. Ask me how I know.

Feels like reduced appetite for energy

Forgot to eat dinner cream 1 day

Barely hungry the next day, only finished 1/4 of normal whipped cream

This was a consistent theme that increased during the fat fast. Toward the end, I barely even ate 1/2 my usual whipped cream portion.

My appetite was just gone. I don’t think I ever finished my normal dinner portion in the last 10 days of the (14 day!) experience. Often times I’d only make half a portion and still not finish it.

A few times towards the end I just didn’t feel like making/eating dinner, so I just drank a small swig of heavy cream so I’d get SOME cream in.

It seems that reducing protein even further reduces my appetite even further, and in a pretty dramatic fashion.

I didn’t count cArOliEs during this experiment, but I’d estimate eating around 1,700kcal on average instead of my usual 2,300kcal+.

Appetite for sauce slightly increased despite putting more sauce into "fat soup"

Psychological/flavor?

Salt craving?

Protein craving?

It wasn’t as dramatic as during the chocolate truffle fast, but I did go up to the fridge and eat just a few spoonfuls of sauce more often than usual. I often do this even on ex150, e.g. a spoon of tomato sauce after a bowl of whipped cream to “cleanse the palate of fat.” But usually I’d do that maybe 1x/day, and now 2-3x/day.

Several x3 PRs e.g. on day 6 of the fat fast

Surprising, thought lifts would go down a lot

Last time on the fat fasts, my workouts absolutely tanked. I went down 50% in several lifts, and, a few times, I nearly blacked out (!) while exercising, feeling my vision shrink.

This time there was none of that. I set new records in several exercises, and I never got that “blackout” feeling ever. I also didn’t do quite as well in some other exercises, but it was more of a natural fluctuation, and not a clear drop in performance.

I’m not sure what this means.

Wtf, sleep shifting?! Looks like no, it's back

For one weekend I noticed I was going to bed at 3am, and then 4am. I briefly feared my Non-24 had come back somehow, but then I went for a walk in the morning sun the next day and it just kind of fixed itself.

Maybe I just hadn’t been in the sun enough, without any sunlight, (almost) everybody has Non-24.

Confounder: raw “cream”

I was quite strict on this one, but I did have one confounding variable: I tried “raw cream.”

I’m putting it in quotes because, well, it wasn’t really… cream?

It wasn’t very thick, it tasted pretty sweet, and it didn’t whip at all. It also sent my blood sugar flying. I am currently back to wearing a CGM (and CKM for measuring ketones!) so luckily I could see that. I can drink a quart of heavy cream and see no measurable impact on my blood glucose, but a cup of coffee or 2 with this raw “cream” sent my glucose to the high 90s.

I just think it was more of a “very whole milk” or “barely half and half” type deal, not real cream.

It was also 3x the price of normal heavy cream. After discovering this issue, I poured out the rest of the (extremely overpriced) cream and went back to normal, pasteurized, store-brand cream.

That’s what you get for trying new things I guess, lol.

This happened on the weekend right at the start of the 14 day experiment, where you see those big up & down spikes. Those could very well come from the lactose in the raw “cream.”

So maybe I messed up that whole experiment, and that big, long plateau wouldn’t have happened?

I consumed about 1-1.5 quarts of the stuff, not sure that would make such a big impact.

Sigh. Sciencing is hard.

Conclusion

Ehh, kinda not that impressed. Ok, maybe that raw “cream” messed me up for a few days. But still, the result was nowhere NEAR what I was expecting/hoping, which would’ve been something on the order of 5-8lbs of fat lost in 14 days, like the first chocolate truffle fast.

What’s interesting is that during that initial, 2,000kcal/day fat fast I was actually eating MORE than during the second one, and during this savory one.

I also went off the rails significantly more during the 2nd than the 1st one.

So maybe I was actually losing LESS weight because I was undereating due to palatability issues?

No clue if that’s a viable theory.

Was whatever made the fat fast sustainable & the workouts improve the same thing that caused me not to lose much if any weight?

Or was the fat fast never that great, and I just tricked myself with the first one? Maybe ex_choctruffle_2000 just worked so well because it followed the higher-protein ex225?

I think for now the most reasonable assumption is that the first fat fast was an exception, and, in general, lowering protein much further than ex150 doesn’t help at all, and the monotony (or lack of protein) of the fat fasts leads to behavioral issues.

There might just be a threshold for protein restriction, and ex150 is already below it. In fact, several mouse studies on protein restriction show as much, with mice restricted to 7% protein doing very well, and those on just 5% protein actually doing slightly worse.

And, in fact, when you look at my macros on ex150, just under 7% of the calories come from protein:

Fat 257.1g (89.71%)
- Sat. 152.9g (53.35%)
- Unsat. 104.2g (36.36%)
Protein 42.1g (6.53%)
Carbs 24.2g (3.76%)
Fiber 2.7g
kcal 2580

Going Forward

Originally, just because I was so astounded as to the difference to the first chocolate truffle fast, I was going to add 7 days of chocolate truffle.

But I already failed that as of this writing, lol. I began to hate the taste of chocolate on the first day, during meal 1. Maybe I’ve just ruined chocolate for myself now after forcing myself to live on it for a total of 30-40 days over the last few months.

On day 2, I began eating leftover sauce and quickly realized this wasn’t going to go great. Instead of forcing myself through 7 days of hell and possibly derail myself with salad or sour cream or who knows, I decided to just abort.

And so I’m just going back on ex150-9. Today was the first day, and I had meat for the first time in 16 days. It was delicious! The ex150 meal really is substantially better when it contains ground beef, lol.

I think I’ve had enough experimentation/fuckarounditis again for a while. My spidey-sense went off this time and I think it’s not worth risking something like the salad/sour cream incident last time, which took weeks to undo.

If all goes well, I’ll report being below 220lbs in 30 days. Wish me luck.

Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise.