I had the same experience quitting coffee on the "sugar diet" you described. Lifelong coffee drinker, quit and restarted many times. Currently drinking fruit juice and/or peppermint tea with ~100g of honey every morning instead, and almost zero desire for coffee.
Is that a real quote from Also Sprach Z? I tried reading it but had no idea what the f was going on.. he goes into the forest and talks to a dead guy or something.. wtf
I've been told you basically need to be reading an annotated version because it's so metaphysical.
Unadjusted for the rice diet the real quote is: „Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!“, I would translate this as "You're going to see Ladies? Don't forget the whip".
This quote is somewhat famous and often misunderstood in Germany (people use it jokingly but don't really know the origin). Reading some of his writing it all seems more like a man who lost his marbles or is hiding banalities in prose with people thinking it's profound. At least that's my view of a lot of philosophy or art. Everybody pretends to understand some deeper meaning so their friends think they're smart.
Or maybe I'm just stupid. Most people I know who claim to get this stuff usually just think that understanding something means repeating what a teacher said or they read in a book.
Super interesting, thanks for the article. I've been trying the sugar diet, too. I also notice veggie/savory cravings. So I tend to have a sugar phase and then either for lunch or dinner have (usually cooked) veggies. Something like zucchini and eggplant in tomato sauce, cucumber dipped in ketchup, red cabbage with apple, a stir 'fry',tomato juice with seasonings as a soup. All of it low fat, low starch. Seems to be working well so far, yesterday I had to 'cheat' since I was eating lunch with friends and had some vegetarian food (probably with pufa) and had totally planned to have a doner kebab for dinner (before lunch, when I was super hungry), but ended up going back on the diet organically, zero interest in the doner. I was always the type to say 'fuck it, let's just eat everything now' after a diet slip. Pretty neat!
Interestingly I find myself less interested in coffee during very high fat moderate to low protein very low to no carb stints (HFlplc?). Actually, I just have less thirst in general on such diet. I haven’t noticed this with any other diet though and in my pre keto / carnivore years I definitely on occasion had some mostly fruit stints (including notably just drinking smoothies for a bit after some dental surgery).
In my experiments with a sugar / honey diet I've had two roadblocks: First I had a sort of hungover feeling, slightly dizzy and just weird. Now it seems that any time I have a new low on the scale I somehow crash, have a day of massive fatigue, the fatigue leads to going off the diet and a major weight gain the days after. I often get back to new lows a few days after and repeat the cycle. It seems to work only when I'm very active, sometimes I even get the urge to exercise but I don't yet know reliably how that can be achieved.
The most difficult part for me is the protein restriction, once I have a little lean protein without fat it causes massive hunger for me, much like when I tried glass noodles, full stomach massive hunger. And if I eat a lot of protein (or fat) the weight gain the next day is massive - though likely mostly water.
Did you take any supplements while on the sugar diet?
Yea my experience with lean protein is the same :'-(
I was taking B1 plus a B complex.
Can you sort of ratchet your weight down (if you still want to lose) or does this make you bottom out/plateau? I never got a hungover/dizzy effect losing fat on the cream diet, but I suppose my "general feeling of not-well being" was similar on the sugar diet..
I've been slowly losing weight but the weight loss chart looks more volatile than Gamestop stock during the pandemic. The numbers are nothing like what's reported by others (more like 1kg rather than 10lbs a month that some people claim). The hungover/dizzy feeling kinda solved itself, I might have needed more salt or electrolytes in general. I also wondered whether the feeling may be related to byproducts from PUFA metabolism which I believe can be somewhat similar to alcohol metabolism.
I'm still trying to figure out the protein restriction, in general my tolerance for fasting seems to have become worse but I think I'm going to try a 46h sugar fast with a protein day every two days. Like a blind man at an orgy I'll have to feel things out.
Unfortunately, from anecdotes I think lots of people aren't seeing the insane results reported for the sugar diet.. when I posted this update on Twitter some guys were astonished like I was the first & only one for whom it wasn't perfect. Nope, if you leave your little bubble, there are TONS of anecdotes like this.
I think a lot of people for whom it doesn't work are really wary of then having to debate a bunch of internet people about how they did it wrong so they will usually just disappear. I'm sure for some people it works really well. It also wouldn't surprise me if those who lost a lot will just hit a wall at some point or even put the weight back on. I've had this experience a couple of times where something worked well until it didn't without any appreciable change.
Yea that's sort of why I jumped on it. I mean besides x% chance of it actually working magically, I felt like on the Honey Diet I waited too long and the hype got out of control.
Luckily it seems this time a couple people tried right away, including myself, and now the image presented out there is more balanced.
I guess I'm like the Consumer Reports for diets :)
At least for now there is the advantage that it's not a product so far, no one has their livelihood tied to it in a significant way where they have to sell books and courses and go on big podcasts. That also gets amplified by the people who buy the product and make the diet their new identity.
I may have actually figured out that Pu-Erh tea seems to trigger the enormous energy, although it may also be the result of having restricted caffeine for a while.
I'd expect this to work better with a timing element. The main metabolic function of fructose is to relatively directly replenish liver glycogen (which will tend to be depleted after an overnight fast or exercise), while glucose goes into general circulation. Fructose metabolism in the liver is strongest in the morning or early afternoon. So I'd expect a crude heuristic of sugar (e.g. fruit and juice and honey) ad libitum before 2PM, and starches (e.g. rice) ad libitum afterwards, to work better than an all-sugar all-day diet.
I thought that one deprecated PM starches? I'm proposing something like either a circadian-optimized Kempner diet (fruit and fruit juice in the morning, plain rice or potatoes in the afternoon), or you could relax the protein restriction and let lean meat consumption vary separately ad lib.
I did generate the idea partly by thinking about what might make the honey diet work for some.
Though overall it just seems like you personally might do worse on carbs and I don't want to contribute to torturing you.
Fruit til noon/then starch seems to be working for a bunch of more "normal" people, whereas the full on sugar fasting diet seems to be mostly hyperactive athletes or bodybuilders, from what I can tell.
> I have previously never done well on caloric restriction
Memo to self: As per Ocamz Razor, this, right here, is the core problem you should delve deeper into. All the tweaks, hacks, and silly experiments—just ways to avoid facing it. If you’d accepted that truth earlier, you’d probably be lean by now. It will be hard. It will require extreme sacrifice. You will have to give up something you love dearly, at least for a while. But there’s no cheap way out. And maybe—just maybe—you don’t actually want to lose enough to do what it takes.
What's the truth here? I can't do caloric restriction well and I don't sustainable lose fat on it, so I try other methods, yea. The other methods have helped me lose 100lbs once and 75lbs again this time.
Seems pretty decent score for the "silly experiments" vs the "dumb caloric restriction."
In short, extreme sacrifice does not work, I've tried it for decades. I've yet to see it work in anybody. It's just a terrible strategy, so I'm looking for better ones.
I'm talking about sacrifice on a much smaller scale. For example, I have found that if I skip watching movies (+ snacking) at night and instead go straight to bed, that is typically enough for me to lose weight. That doesn't seem like an extreme sacrifice for others, but I still keep spiraling back to my bad habits, because deep down, I feel that I don't want to put in the work. I feel like there must be a way, without any suffering whatsoever, to get there. That belief I want to bust. I'm circling back on an assumption that anything worth having in life has a price. And I'm seemingly not willing to pay it right now. I was highly successful in my weight loss twice in my life. But not now. That's what I wanted to remind myself of.
> Seems pretty decent score for the "silly experiments" vs the "dumb caloric restriction."
Some of your experiments led you to get into a deficit, but if they were truly sustainable, you would stick with the ones that work for you until you reach your goal. But, of course, there is much more to it: you like to experiment, you like to write about your experiments, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. I just wanted to point out that maybe, just maybe, doing a sugar diet won't get you closer to your weight loss goals. In your case, it seems pretty likely that this blog and your love for experiments might work against your weight loss attempts. Yes, you have lost weight, but considering how many hundreds of hours and money you've invested in experimenting and writing about it and coding apps for it, what if, instead, you had invested all of that in finding a way to get to -500kcal per day, sustainably.
> Some of your experiments led you to get into a deficit, but if they were truly sustainable, you would stick with the ones that work for you until you reach your goal.
See, I'm not even sure that first part is true. I at least had zero effort on the cream diet, zero deprivation, always ate ad-lib, never "sacrificed" anything and certainly no extreme sacrifice.
I rode the cream diet until I seemed to plateau on it. Why? I don't know. "Cause you stopped being in a deficit" seems like a useless tautology to me, "Yea ok, why did I stop being in a deficit?"
I (now) agree doing a sugar diet isn't likely to help me lose weight, but I don't know that until I try it.
> what if, instead, you had invested all of that in finding a way to get to -500kcal per day, sustainably.
What if that doesn't work, though? Cause I tried that the first decade.
All of this seems to be predicated on the idea that "eating less just works if I did it." Trust me, I've done it, and I never made it work. I've only ever lost significant fat with "silly experiments" and tricks.
That makes more sense, finding some tradeoff that isn't a big deal for you. I'm wondering if stacking food and other "rewards" is a problem in general, so perhaps having a social life that doesn't revolve around food (or alcohol) and not eating at the desk or while watching movies is worthwhile. Perhaps it confuses the hunger signalling?
Hard to foster such a social life out of thin air. Some people don't have a weight problem, and others don't care about it so much. I had a much different social circle every time I was a successful loser.
I've noticed that I can actually function well without much of a social life at all, or rather without the kind of social life I used to have. I pretty much lost interest in alcohol, going to bars used to be my standard and I would even get a feeling of loneliness - which I assume was just another cross-contaminated wiring in my brain that tried to get my to booze. I think this is also related to eating more carbs and fasting less. And then I realized that most people are quite boring when one is sober.
People used to have hobbies, my parents played tennis, met up for card games or something else like bowling or some other such things. It seems to me that most people I know have just very low energy in general, so eating or boozing used to be what we did when we went out in our 20ies and 30ies. Younger people don't even do that anymore.
I'm also quite terrible at team sports so that is out.
Yea I was always pretty immune to the drinking/bar/party "social life" thing cause I hated it (and drinking). When you're the only one sober, that isn't very fun.
Hence pretty much nobody in my circle of friends is pushy when it comes to alcohol or food, some of my friends drink, but they don't push others to do it. Some eat foods I don't, but they don't nag/push me for foregoing those foods.
Yesterday I was at a family gathering and there was some cake everyone ate except for me, and I got asked if I wanted the cake literally 15 times.. 💀Peer pressure is a big thing.
Technically it worked for me, though idk if a BMI of 30 is high enough to be relatable to you/most people when it comes to big fat loss?
I went from undermuscled, fat BMI of 30 down to ~18 BMI (eating disorder with extreme restriction says hi) and then I discovered keto/carnivore for my mental health and slowly went up to a BMI of 20 for a while, then started getting muscle, like A LOT of muscle real fast (went from barely being able to lift up 8kg Kettlebell to moving a 32kg one within the span of half a year or so) and got to ~22-23BMI and barring some real odd weight changes at times where my weight went up or down 5kg for some odd reason only to later return to baseline, I've been pretty weight stable for years now.
There was one where I tried to bulk up real hard, but once that stopped my weight dropped down effortlessly again, and I never managed to get that high either way, as I think I maxed out at 26BMI, but I still wouldn't be classified as fat, just more muscled but chubby-kinda look, lol.
I do often wonder if the reason for my success was that I just depleted my entire LA storage as I was literally skin and bones thin at my lowest, so I had a really clean start-off point with my extreme weight loss, whereas someone who might restrict down to a normal weight will likely still have tons of LA in their adipose tissue.
Hard to say 100%, of course, but that would be congruent with MPT.
One of the reasons why it's difficult to judge a diet by "it works for normal/skinny people" when you know at least one massive mechanism that would be different in the obese.
Fat loss too, frankly. I lost the first 45-50lbs super rapidly, without any effort or sacrifice.
If you're morbidly obese like I was, that should be easy. Once you get closer to a normal weight the fat loss might slow down or stall, but going from 300lbs to 250lbs should be trivial if the diet is right.
Here's the problem with the starvation approach: Success is by no means guaranteed even if you make extreme sacrifices. You might end up more broken than you were before and either need to continue to suffer every day or just gain all the weight back, or never even lose it in the first place. There is plenty of research that documents white-knuckle diet failures. At some point the body fights back. You also can't hold your breath forever through sheer willpower.
I'm not talking about starvation at all, which is defined as "a state of extreme suffering or death caused by a lack of food." Research indicates that there is a clear optimal window for calorie restriction, typically ranging up to a deficit of 500 kcal per day. And my point is that even that 500kcal deficit is tough for some people to reach (like myself, and the author of this post). I've been thoroughly tracking my calories over the last 8 months, and even though I tried many things, the result is depressing: I was not, on average, in a caloric deficit. I'm all in for a sustainable approach, which is why I gave up water-only fasting a long time ago. I've been searching for a sustainable way to lose weight over the past two years, but I haven't found one yet.
I think this works well for some people, basically if you take a group of male college athletes (or students) and put them on what appears to be 500kcal restriction that usually works and that's often how these experiments are done. It also seems to work well for bodybuilders.
But how do you even know if you're in a deficit or not? It seems to me that measurements of calorie expenditure and calorie content in food aren't precise enough to even tell without a margin of error that is often close to the target deficit.
Eh, I don't really believe in that. I've personally experienced to many crazy outliers and then the CICO titration people just pretend you didn't just break their system.
And even that doesn't necessarily tell you if you lost fat, water or muscle or bone. It's like trying to run a company with only seeing the bank account balance every month.
Great writeup! I've tried the sugar diet thing mostly by eating pure sugar/fruits until a certain hour then having a protein re-feed in the evening on super lean chicken with no fat added to it and had okay results, though did have plenty of energy and felt great.
I did a strict sugar only/fruit only two days ago for one day and it was fine, but after that one day of doing it strict I don't think I'll do it again. It just doesn't feel good, at all, and I cannot imagine doing it several days in a row. Pretty sure I could even feel the inflammation as I started feeling odd pains here and there throughout my body.. At this point I am just sticking to eating a ton of bananas/apples (I love them) and having leaner proteins with starches in the evening, though I will try adding in more fats as I had a swampy meal yesterday with lots of butter and some coconut milk and oh God, it was so amazing.. Heck, maybe I'll go keto again. It's just the cost that's prohibitive, sadly.. I am saving so much money eating the way I do right now, lol.. (Beef is insanely expensive here now for even the cheapest supermarket ground beef, as is butter and chicken if not on sale.. Pork is cheap, but I avoid pork beyond a "treat" here and there as I quickly feel sick from it)
> black beans, beef, green beans, tomato sauce, mushrooms, spinach, onion, even beets.. so I made a giant stew pot w/ almost no caloric food in it.
That seriously sounds SO GOOD, omg.. Wish you shared a pic with us, haha.
I hope your ex_kempner goes well!! Not too far from what I am doing, if you exclude my lean meat, lol.. I love rice, I love fruits.. Just worried about the caloric restriction, though maybe eating a lot of fruits will help with that as they seem to be quite filling for me, and I often have them as a dessert after eating my dinner, as I'll still feel hungry but just a little bit, and 1-2 apples will often do the trick for me and fill me up.
Funny, cost wise it's the opposite for me. I spend <$7/day usually on ex150 with only 150g of beef (1lb lasts me 3 days) and the rest just spent on cream.
On the honey diet with high fruit, I was spending $50+ a day lol I think.
As I am less concerned about proteinmaxxing now, when I go keto again I might try something closer to your approach eventually and see how that works out, and just have 1lb of beef for 2-3 days vs 1.5-2lb every day.. lol.. and the lb cost here is like $8.5-9/lb, rip.
Fun fact, prior to covid it was very often on sale for ~2/lb so the price increase has been insane.
Here it's about $5-7/lb, depending on the type and what quality you want. For $9 you can get goat or pretty decent grass-fed stuff.
High meat carnivore gets pricey quickly, yea.
Wow $2 - I don't know if I've ever seen ground beef for that low. I def remember it being on sale for $3 though, but that was lower quality and 70/30 which is insanely fatty. I usually prefer 80/20.
Ha, unfortunately I couldn't find exact instructions for that part of the diet.
Although I found this interesting phrase in The Rice Diet Report:
Those who request it (or who are perceived to need it) are referred to outside psychotherapists, but for the majority. Dr. Kempner's mix of diet, exercise, and "motivational enhancement" is more than enough to do the trick.
Am I really following a weight loss blog where the author has put on 20 pounds in a year?!
Obviously all this metabolic hacking is really interesting but there's one page on this blog where you say your #1 priority is weight loss. I would have to ask if in 2024-25 that ceased to be true?
Feels like the 'ex-' part is now primary and the 'fat loss' part is secondary ?
No, the sugar diet isn’t ad lib. You eat kinda normal. For example, my daily: 8 oz oJ and a Fruitbowl from Safeway with about 1 tablespoon raw honey for breakfast.
If i get hungry at lunch, an orange and a large McDonald's Banana/Strawberry smoothie or equivalent.
For Dinner, 50-100 grams lean (lean!) protein. 350-400 gram potato cooked in air fryer, covered in water sautéed mushrooms, zero-fat greek yogurt, Date Lady Sweet Chili sauce.
I use zero fat hard candy and jelly beans between meals if I feel hungry or need energy.
My fat grams are under 15 for the day. My protein is under 100. Carbs is around 500 grams. Total calories around 2300.
I had the same experience quitting coffee on the "sugar diet" you described. Lifelong coffee drinker, quit and restarted many times. Currently drinking fruit juice and/or peppermint tea with ~100g of honey every morning instead, and almost zero desire for coffee.
Very curious! Any ideas what might do that?
I also have way less cravings for coffee on a lot of sugar, and I love my coffee, lol.
So weird! Maybe we should market it as a caffeine quitting diet lol.
It will be interesting to read the Kempner Chronicles! You need a German shouting at you to maintain discipline
The whipping will continue until willpower resumes!
rhymes with your usual -- the whipping cream will continue until morale improves
As Nieztsche was fond of saying: "Du machst Reisdiät? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!". (Also sprach Dr. Kempner)
Is that a real quote from Also Sprach Z? I tried reading it but had no idea what the f was going on.. he goes into the forest and talks to a dead guy or something.. wtf
I've been told you basically need to be reading an annotated version because it's so metaphysical.
Unadjusted for the rice diet the real quote is: „Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!“, I would translate this as "You're going to see Ladies? Don't forget the whip".
This quote is somewhat famous and often misunderstood in Germany (people use it jokingly but don't really know the origin). Reading some of his writing it all seems more like a man who lost his marbles or is hiding banalities in prose with people thinking it's profound. At least that's my view of a lot of philosophy or art. Everybody pretends to understand some deeper meaning so their friends think they're smart.
Well makes me not feel so bad for not getting him, lol
Or maybe I'm just stupid. Most people I know who claim to get this stuff usually just think that understanding something means repeating what a teacher said or they read in a book.
Super interesting, thanks for the article. I've been trying the sugar diet, too. I also notice veggie/savory cravings. So I tend to have a sugar phase and then either for lunch or dinner have (usually cooked) veggies. Something like zucchini and eggplant in tomato sauce, cucumber dipped in ketchup, red cabbage with apple, a stir 'fry',tomato juice with seasonings as a soup. All of it low fat, low starch. Seems to be working well so far, yesterday I had to 'cheat' since I was eating lunch with friends and had some vegetarian food (probably with pufa) and had totally planned to have a doner kebab for dinner (before lunch, when I was super hungry), but ended up going back on the diet organically, zero interest in the doner. I was always the type to say 'fuck it, let's just eat everything now' after a diet slip. Pretty neat!
Nice, that sounds encouraging!
Interestingly I find myself less interested in coffee during very high fat moderate to low protein very low to no carb stints (HFlplc?). Actually, I just have less thirst in general on such diet. I haven’t noticed this with any other diet though and in my pre keto / carnivore years I definitely on occasion had some mostly fruit stints (including notably just drinking smoothies for a bit after some dental surgery).
In my experiments with a sugar / honey diet I've had two roadblocks: First I had a sort of hungover feeling, slightly dizzy and just weird. Now it seems that any time I have a new low on the scale I somehow crash, have a day of massive fatigue, the fatigue leads to going off the diet and a major weight gain the days after. I often get back to new lows a few days after and repeat the cycle. It seems to work only when I'm very active, sometimes I even get the urge to exercise but I don't yet know reliably how that can be achieved.
The most difficult part for me is the protein restriction, once I have a little lean protein without fat it causes massive hunger for me, much like when I tried glass noodles, full stomach massive hunger. And if I eat a lot of protein (or fat) the weight gain the next day is massive - though likely mostly water.
Did you take any supplements while on the sugar diet?
Yea my experience with lean protein is the same :'-(
I was taking B1 plus a B complex.
Can you sort of ratchet your weight down (if you still want to lose) or does this make you bottom out/plateau? I never got a hungover/dizzy effect losing fat on the cream diet, but I suppose my "general feeling of not-well being" was similar on the sugar diet..
I've been slowly losing weight but the weight loss chart looks more volatile than Gamestop stock during the pandemic. The numbers are nothing like what's reported by others (more like 1kg rather than 10lbs a month that some people claim). The hungover/dizzy feeling kinda solved itself, I might have needed more salt or electrolytes in general. I also wondered whether the feeling may be related to byproducts from PUFA metabolism which I believe can be somewhat similar to alcohol metabolism.
I'm still trying to figure out the protein restriction, in general my tolerance for fasting seems to have become worse but I think I'm going to try a 46h sugar fast with a protein day every two days. Like a blind man at an orgy I'll have to feel things out.
Haha Godspeed.
Unfortunately, from anecdotes I think lots of people aren't seeing the insane results reported for the sugar diet.. when I posted this update on Twitter some guys were astonished like I was the first & only one for whom it wasn't perfect. Nope, if you leave your little bubble, there are TONS of anecdotes like this.
I think a lot of people for whom it doesn't work are really wary of then having to debate a bunch of internet people about how they did it wrong so they will usually just disappear. I'm sure for some people it works really well. It also wouldn't surprise me if those who lost a lot will just hit a wall at some point or even put the weight back on. I've had this experience a couple of times where something worked well until it didn't without any appreciable change.
Yea that's sort of why I jumped on it. I mean besides x% chance of it actually working magically, I felt like on the Honey Diet I waited too long and the hype got out of control.
Luckily it seems this time a couple people tried right away, including myself, and now the image presented out there is more balanced.
I guess I'm like the Consumer Reports for diets :)
At least for now there is the advantage that it's not a product so far, no one has their livelihood tied to it in a significant way where they have to sell books and courses and go on big podcasts. That also gets amplified by the people who buy the product and make the diet their new identity.
I may have actually figured out that Pu-Erh tea seems to trigger the enormous energy, although it may also be the result of having restricted caffeine for a while.
I'd expect this to work better with a timing element. The main metabolic function of fructose is to relatively directly replenish liver glycogen (which will tend to be depleted after an overnight fast or exercise), while glucose goes into general circulation. Fructose metabolism in the liver is strongest in the morning or early afternoon. So I'd expect a crude heuristic of sugar (e.g. fruit and juice and honey) ad libitum before 2PM, and starches (e.g. rice) ad libitum afterwards, to work better than an all-sugar all-day diet.
Yea sort of like the Honey Diet.
I thought that one deprecated PM starches? I'm proposing something like either a circadian-optimized Kempner diet (fruit and fruit juice in the morning, plain rice or potatoes in the afternoon), or you could relax the protein restriction and let lean meat consumption vary separately ad lib.
I did generate the idea partly by thinking about what might make the honey diet work for some.
Though overall it just seems like you personally might do worse on carbs and I don't want to contribute to torturing you.
Ah yes, I meant the timing element per se.
Fruit til noon/then starch seems to be working for a bunch of more "normal" people, whereas the full on sugar fasting diet seems to be mostly hyperactive athletes or bodybuilders, from what I can tell.
> I have previously never done well on caloric restriction
Memo to self: As per Ocamz Razor, this, right here, is the core problem you should delve deeper into. All the tweaks, hacks, and silly experiments—just ways to avoid facing it. If you’d accepted that truth earlier, you’d probably be lean by now. It will be hard. It will require extreme sacrifice. You will have to give up something you love dearly, at least for a while. But there’s no cheap way out. And maybe—just maybe—you don’t actually want to lose enough to do what it takes.
What's the truth here? I can't do caloric restriction well and I don't sustainable lose fat on it, so I try other methods, yea. The other methods have helped me lose 100lbs once and 75lbs again this time.
Seems pretty decent score for the "silly experiments" vs the "dumb caloric restriction."
In short, extreme sacrifice does not work, I've tried it for decades. I've yet to see it work in anybody. It's just a terrible strategy, so I'm looking for better ones.
> extreme sacrifice does not work
I'm talking about sacrifice on a much smaller scale. For example, I have found that if I skip watching movies (+ snacking) at night and instead go straight to bed, that is typically enough for me to lose weight. That doesn't seem like an extreme sacrifice for others, but I still keep spiraling back to my bad habits, because deep down, I feel that I don't want to put in the work. I feel like there must be a way, without any suffering whatsoever, to get there. That belief I want to bust. I'm circling back on an assumption that anything worth having in life has a price. And I'm seemingly not willing to pay it right now. I was highly successful in my weight loss twice in my life. But not now. That's what I wanted to remind myself of.
> Seems pretty decent score for the "silly experiments" vs the "dumb caloric restriction."
Some of your experiments led you to get into a deficit, but if they were truly sustainable, you would stick with the ones that work for you until you reach your goal. But, of course, there is much more to it: you like to experiment, you like to write about your experiments, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. I just wanted to point out that maybe, just maybe, doing a sugar diet won't get you closer to your weight loss goals. In your case, it seems pretty likely that this blog and your love for experiments might work against your weight loss attempts. Yes, you have lost weight, but considering how many hundreds of hours and money you've invested in experimenting and writing about it and coding apps for it, what if, instead, you had invested all of that in finding a way to get to -500kcal per day, sustainably.
> Some of your experiments led you to get into a deficit, but if they were truly sustainable, you would stick with the ones that work for you until you reach your goal.
See, I'm not even sure that first part is true. I at least had zero effort on the cream diet, zero deprivation, always ate ad-lib, never "sacrificed" anything and certainly no extreme sacrifice.
I rode the cream diet until I seemed to plateau on it. Why? I don't know. "Cause you stopped being in a deficit" seems like a useless tautology to me, "Yea ok, why did I stop being in a deficit?"
I (now) agree doing a sugar diet isn't likely to help me lose weight, but I don't know that until I try it.
> what if, instead, you had invested all of that in finding a way to get to -500kcal per day, sustainably.
What if that doesn't work, though? Cause I tried that the first decade.
All of this seems to be predicated on the idea that "eating less just works if I did it." Trust me, I've done it, and I never made it work. I've only ever lost significant fat with "silly experiments" and tricks.
That makes more sense, finding some tradeoff that isn't a big deal for you. I'm wondering if stacking food and other "rewards" is a problem in general, so perhaps having a social life that doesn't revolve around food (or alcohol) and not eating at the desk or while watching movies is worthwhile. Perhaps it confuses the hunger signalling?
Hard to foster such a social life out of thin air. Some people don't have a weight problem, and others don't care about it so much. I had a much different social circle every time I was a successful loser.
I've noticed that I can actually function well without much of a social life at all, or rather without the kind of social life I used to have. I pretty much lost interest in alcohol, going to bars used to be my standard and I would even get a feeling of loneliness - which I assume was just another cross-contaminated wiring in my brain that tried to get my to booze. I think this is also related to eating more carbs and fasting less. And then I realized that most people are quite boring when one is sober.
People used to have hobbies, my parents played tennis, met up for card games or something else like bowling or some other such things. It seems to me that most people I know have just very low energy in general, so eating or boozing used to be what we did when we went out in our 20ies and 30ies. Younger people don't even do that anymore.
I'm also quite terrible at team sports so that is out.
Yea I was always pretty immune to the drinking/bar/party "social life" thing cause I hated it (and drinking). When you're the only one sober, that isn't very fun.
Hence pretty much nobody in my circle of friends is pushy when it comes to alcohol or food, some of my friends drink, but they don't push others to do it. Some eat foods I don't, but they don't nag/push me for foregoing those foods.
Yesterday I was at a family gathering and there was some cake everyone ate except for me, and I got asked if I wanted the cake literally 15 times.. 💀Peer pressure is a big thing.
And I hardly ever experienced peer pressure to do something that's healthy.
Technically it worked for me, though idk if a BMI of 30 is high enough to be relatable to you/most people when it comes to big fat loss?
I went from undermuscled, fat BMI of 30 down to ~18 BMI (eating disorder with extreme restriction says hi) and then I discovered keto/carnivore for my mental health and slowly went up to a BMI of 20 for a while, then started getting muscle, like A LOT of muscle real fast (went from barely being able to lift up 8kg Kettlebell to moving a 32kg one within the span of half a year or so) and got to ~22-23BMI and barring some real odd weight changes at times where my weight went up or down 5kg for some odd reason only to later return to baseline, I've been pretty weight stable for years now.
There was one where I tried to bulk up real hard, but once that stopped my weight dropped down effortlessly again, and I never managed to get that high either way, as I think I maxed out at 26BMI, but I still wouldn't be classified as fat, just more muscled but chubby-kinda look, lol.
I do often wonder if the reason for my success was that I just depleted my entire LA storage as I was literally skin and bones thin at my lowest, so I had a really clean start-off point with my extreme weight loss, whereas someone who might restrict down to a normal weight will likely still have tons of LA in their adipose tissue.
Hard to say 100%, of course, but that would be congruent with MPT.
One of the reasons why it's difficult to judge a diet by "it works for normal/skinny people" when you know at least one massive mechanism that would be different in the obese.
I could not disagree more. Maintenance of a healthy weight should be effortless. If it isn't, then your metabolism is broken.
Yup.
Not talking about maintenance here.
Fat loss too, frankly. I lost the first 45-50lbs super rapidly, without any effort or sacrifice.
If you're morbidly obese like I was, that should be easy. Once you get closer to a normal weight the fat loss might slow down or stall, but going from 300lbs to 250lbs should be trivial if the diet is right.
Here's the problem with the starvation approach: Success is by no means guaranteed even if you make extreme sacrifices. You might end up more broken than you were before and either need to continue to suffer every day or just gain all the weight back, or never even lose it in the first place. There is plenty of research that documents white-knuckle diet failures. At some point the body fights back. You also can't hold your breath forever through sheer willpower.
I'm not talking about starvation at all, which is defined as "a state of extreme suffering or death caused by a lack of food." Research indicates that there is a clear optimal window for calorie restriction, typically ranging up to a deficit of 500 kcal per day. And my point is that even that 500kcal deficit is tough for some people to reach (like myself, and the author of this post). I've been thoroughly tracking my calories over the last 8 months, and even though I tried many things, the result is depressing: I was not, on average, in a caloric deficit. I'm all in for a sustainable approach, which is why I gave up water-only fasting a long time ago. I've been searching for a sustainable way to lose weight over the past two years, but I haven't found one yet.
Haha you and me both, buddy :)
I think this works well for some people, basically if you take a group of male college athletes (or students) and put them on what appears to be 500kcal restriction that usually works and that's often how these experiments are done. It also seems to work well for bodybuilders.
But how do you even know if you're in a deficit or not? It seems to me that measurements of calorie expenditure and calorie content in food aren't precise enough to even tell without a margin of error that is often close to the target deficit.
Indirectly through the scale. If it moves at a certain rate, you can calculate your average deficit or surplus in retrospect.
Eh, I don't really believe in that. I've personally experienced to many crazy outliers and then the CICO titration people just pretend you didn't just break their system.
And even that doesn't necessarily tell you if you lost fat, water or muscle or bone. It's like trying to run a company with only seeing the bank account balance every month.
Great writeup! I've tried the sugar diet thing mostly by eating pure sugar/fruits until a certain hour then having a protein re-feed in the evening on super lean chicken with no fat added to it and had okay results, though did have plenty of energy and felt great.
I did a strict sugar only/fruit only two days ago for one day and it was fine, but after that one day of doing it strict I don't think I'll do it again. It just doesn't feel good, at all, and I cannot imagine doing it several days in a row. Pretty sure I could even feel the inflammation as I started feeling odd pains here and there throughout my body.. At this point I am just sticking to eating a ton of bananas/apples (I love them) and having leaner proteins with starches in the evening, though I will try adding in more fats as I had a swampy meal yesterday with lots of butter and some coconut milk and oh God, it was so amazing.. Heck, maybe I'll go keto again. It's just the cost that's prohibitive, sadly.. I am saving so much money eating the way I do right now, lol.. (Beef is insanely expensive here now for even the cheapest supermarket ground beef, as is butter and chicken if not on sale.. Pork is cheap, but I avoid pork beyond a "treat" here and there as I quickly feel sick from it)
> black beans, beef, green beans, tomato sauce, mushrooms, spinach, onion, even beets.. so I made a giant stew pot w/ almost no caloric food in it.
That seriously sounds SO GOOD, omg.. Wish you shared a pic with us, haha.
I hope your ex_kempner goes well!! Not too far from what I am doing, if you exclude my lean meat, lol.. I love rice, I love fruits.. Just worried about the caloric restriction, though maybe eating a lot of fruits will help with that as they seem to be quite filling for me, and I often have them as a dessert after eating my dinner, as I'll still feel hungry but just a little bit, and 1-2 apples will often do the trick for me and fill me up.
Funny, cost wise it's the opposite for me. I spend <$7/day usually on ex150 with only 150g of beef (1lb lasts me 3 days) and the rest just spent on cream.
On the honey diet with high fruit, I was spending $50+ a day lol I think.
Wow! That's definitely a huge difference!
As I am less concerned about proteinmaxxing now, when I go keto again I might try something closer to your approach eventually and see how that works out, and just have 1lb of beef for 2-3 days vs 1.5-2lb every day.. lol.. and the lb cost here is like $8.5-9/lb, rip.
Fun fact, prior to covid it was very often on sale for ~2/lb so the price increase has been insane.
Here it's about $5-7/lb, depending on the type and what quality you want. For $9 you can get goat or pretty decent grass-fed stuff.
High meat carnivore gets pricey quickly, yea.
Wow $2 - I don't know if I've ever seen ground beef for that low. I def remember it being on sale for $3 though, but that was lower quality and 70/30 which is insanely fatty. I usually prefer 80/20.
For you to do strict Kempner, doesn't that mean you need to hire someone to physically punish you when the going gets tough?
Ha, unfortunately I couldn't find exact instructions for that part of the diet.
Although I found this interesting phrase in The Rice Diet Report:
Those who request it (or who are perceived to need it) are referred to outside psychotherapists, but for the majority. Dr. Kempner's mix of diet, exercise, and "motivational enhancement" is more than enough to do the trick.
We should hire some redditors to call him up or send him voice messages every day around the clock. 🤣
Interesting stuff! Might be onto something with the coffee effect...
Still haven't had any coffee! Although today I thought about getting one, so I might be close..
Am I really following a weight loss blog where the author has put on 20 pounds in a year?!
Obviously all this metabolic hacking is really interesting but there's one page on this blog where you say your #1 priority is weight loss. I would have to ask if in 2024-25 that ceased to be true?
Feels like the 'ex-' part is now primary and the 'fat loss' part is secondary ?
I'm still trying, I'm just failing :) 20lbs is nothing. I put on 20lbs in 1-2 months before, so this is just a tiny swing for me.
I had plateau'd with my cream diet at around 217-220lbs, so I started trying different things.
It’s not ad lib
Kempner? Yea the portions are extremely small.
No, the sugar diet isn’t ad lib. You eat kinda normal. For example, my daily: 8 oz oJ and a Fruitbowl from Safeway with about 1 tablespoon raw honey for breakfast.
If i get hungry at lunch, an orange and a large McDonald's Banana/Strawberry smoothie or equivalent.
For Dinner, 50-100 grams lean (lean!) protein. 350-400 gram potato cooked in air fryer, covered in water sautéed mushrooms, zero-fat greek yogurt, Date Lady Sweet Chili sauce.
I use zero fat hard candy and jelly beans between meals if I feel hungry or need energy.
My fat grams are under 15 for the day. My protein is under 100. Carbs is around 500 grams. Total calories around 2300.
No exercise.
What do you mean by "eat kinda normal?" That's what I mean by ad lib, I eat as much as I want, not less, not more.
> 350-400 gram potato cooked in air fryer, covered in water sautéed mushrooms, zero-fat greek yogurt, Date Lady Sweet Chili sauce.
I might have to try that. Sounds delicious!
Interesting 🧐