ExFatloss 2025: Year in Review

But did you die?

I did a review of 2024 last year, and thought I’d repeat that process.

Summary of the various things I had going on with this blog & project in 2025:

• My personal progress in terms of weight loss & related (broke through previous weight plateau)

• Experiments I ran on myself (17)

• Posts I wrote (40)

• Web tools I released (2)

• What I had planned but failed to do (running another trial)

• ExFatloss plans going forward

Yellowcream: leaving the keto reservation

This was the year in which I definitely left the keto plantation. While I still default to a ketogenic diet, I experimented with carbs more than ever.

The Goal

My main goal is fat loss, or, technically, “solving the obesity epidemic.” The subtle difference is that I don’t want to find or use weight loss techniques that aren’t relevant or applicable to widespread, mainstream obesity.

That’s why I’m not particularly interested in GLP-1 drugs or “counting carolies” and starving myself down. People somehow weren’t (as) obese in 2000, in 1970, in 1900, in 1850.. and none of them were taking GLP-1 agonists or counting carolies.

I want to find out “what did obesity” and then use that to get lean. Losing fat & getting to a healthy/normal weight by eliminating the root cause of the obesity epidemic, not looking great for the bikini season with an unsustainable method.

Personal Progress

With that said, let’s take a look at my weight for 2025:

Seems like I fluctuated quite a bit between ~225 and ~240lbs for the first half of 2025, then went back down again. Around October I broke though 220lbs, and reached a new low of <210lbs briefly in November.

Clearly I was almost entirely flat for half or 3/4 of 2025, depending on when you start counting the drop:

The answer is: vinegar. Inspired by Jaromir Janda’s writings, I began experimenting with vinegar.

Vinegar

First, I tried just drinking tons of vinegar throughout the day. This worked well, but was nasty and hurt my teeth & throat. This is the first big, visible drop in the summer, although it “only” brought me back to around 225lbs, not to a new low weight.

Later, I just started supplementing a modest serving (3 capsules a day, 750mg acetic acid) of Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar capsules. This led to a month of 10lbs weight loss and another one of around 7.5lbs. This last one was the month I finally broke through my long-term plateau of 217lbs by a substantial margin, briefly touching below 210lbs.

Carb Around, Find Out

Much of the fluctuation/spikes in 2025 came from my many weird high-carb experiments. If you don’t know, I had a circadian rhythm disorder called Non-24 my entire life, and in late 2015 I discovered that keto completely puts it into remission. This was the main reason I stayed pretty strict keto for the last decade.

But in 2024, after about 2 years of avoiding linoleic acid like the devil, I tried a high-carb diet - and my Non-24 stayed away! I was incredulous. This condition had been part of my life & my identity since very early childhood, and it was just.. gone?!

Now I could finally eat carbs without paying the huge health, physical & social cost of suffering from constant sleep deprivation.

Hence I’ve been doing a lot of high-carb diet experiments that I couldn’t easily do for much of the last decade.

Let’s do the time warp look at the graph again

With all this additional knowledge painted onto the graph in pretty colors, what can we see?

1. I NEVER gained weight on a (teal labeled) ex150 experiment. Usually I lost weight or at least stalled near my previous low.

2. I gained a lot of weight on many of the (orange labeled) high-carb experiments, notably with the exception of ex_plainrice (which came directly after my first vinegar experiment, coincidence?)

3. The “summer drop” (back to my pre-carb weight) begins right at the start of my first vinegar experiment, and continues for about a month after I stopped

4. The “fall drop” (through the previous plateau) begins right after I resumed vinegar supplementation via the ACV capsules

5. ex150 seems to work even better with vinegar added, be it liquid vinegar or later ACV capsules

6. The only high-carb experiment I really lost weight on came directly after a month of basically giving myself vinegar poisoning

It felt super intense too; upon adding the vinegar I immediately felt a massive decrease in appetite within a few days both times. The fat just came melting off and I didn’t feel hungry. My cream consumption dropped drastically.

You’ll understand why I’m so big on vinegar now. I’d say adding vinegar was probably the biggest effect since I “invented” the ex150 cream diet in late 2022.

Caveat: I also cut out my usual (seed oil-free) sauces when I resumed vinegar via the ACV capsules and the combined effect felt even stronger than the initial high-vinegar effect. Maybe this polyol pathway-effect and the vinegar effect combined made it feel so powerful.

In conclusion: while my weight fluctuated quite a bit in 2025, I didn’t really lose any serious weight until I introduced the vinegar. With its help, I broke through my previous plateau with relative ease.

Of course, I also had several very severe high-carb experiments under my belt that might’ve set me up for this, and another year of avoiding linoleic acid.

In fact, the intent of several of these near-zero fat, high-carb diets (e.g. 2 months of eating nothing but rice) was explicitly to deplete my stored linoleic acid. So maybe… that worked?

Speaking of linoleic acid..

OmegaQuants

quants, get it?

My main hypothesis for the root cause of the obesity epidemic is an excess of the omega-6 polyunsaturated fat linoleic acid in the modern diet.

To remediate this problem, step 1. is just massively reducing your dietary intake of this fat: no seed oils, no bacon, no fatty chicken, no salad dressings, no junk food.

But step 2. is a little more complicated: you need to deplete the linoleic acid stored in your body fat, which is estimated to take anywhere from 4-8 years.

I’m about 3 years into this process, and I started measuring it via OmegaQuant Complete tests about 2.5 years ago. You can see my entire series of tests on the OmegaTracker.

In 2025 I took 12 OmegaQuant Complete tests, which is $1,200 in tests. Fuck me.

You’ll immediately notice that my numbers went down, then back up, then back down, then back up.

This is due to a phenomenon when eating a super low-fat, near zero-fat diet. With dietary fat low enough, your body will start ramping up DNL (de-novo-lipogenesis) to provide the necessary fats. This is akin to constantly eating some amounts of MUFAs and SFAs (your body can’t make most PUFAs) and washes out the LA (linoleic acid) number in the test.

I can reliably switch my OmegaQuant LA from around 15-16% to around 7-8% by switching between a high-fat and near-zero-fat diet.

Remember that useful diet color coding on the weight chart earlier? Let’s just copy & paste it here:

Aha! It doesn’t quite line up due to the different scales, but all the very low LA data points (in the green) were during high-carb diets with very low to near-zero fat. When I switch back to my usual high-fat diet, the LA jumps back up, too.

It’s unclear if spending a lot of time in this lower-blood-LA, low-fat, high-carb territory actually helps deplete your stored LA, but it is one theory, and part of why I wanted to try these experiments.

That dramatic jump around 1/3 in, where you see several data points in rapid succession, was an experiment I ran to see how much time it would take for my de-novo-lipogenesis to turn off after resuming a high-fat diet. It was back up nearly completely in 3 days, and a few points higher even at 6 & 9 days.

I repeated the experiment in the opposite direction, which is why you see that sudden drop a few weeks later, again with several data points: How long for de-novo-lipogenesis to ramp up? The answer: also about 3-5 days.

I ended 2025 with a higher LA% on my OmegaQuant than I started it, even on the same high-fat diet. On the other hand, the “low-fat diet to deplete adipose LA” theory seemed to show decent preliminary results.

Experiments in 2025

I ran the following experiments last year:

• ex150-13

• NAC (a supplement, didn’t seem to do anything)

• ex_dryfast

• ex150honey (went ok, didn’t gain any fat but also didn’t lose any)

• ex150glassnoodle (massive fail, I can’t digest potato starch)

• ex150hclflp (rapidly gained weight)

• ex150-14

• ex_sugar (massive fail, liver pain, quit on day 9)

• ex_kempner (massive fail, just starved & had to abort)

• ex150vinegar

• ex_plainrice (only high-carb diet I lost weight on)

• ex150-15

• ex150nosauce+ACV-1

• ex150nosauce+ACV-2

• ex150creamsauce+ACV

• ex_acv_fast (6 day fast, my longest yet!)

• ex_bread+butter (well, I started it 3 days before end of the year, lol)

Wow, 17 experiments! Not bad if I say so myself.

The ratio here is interesting; I learned nothing new in almost any of these experiments. The only things I learned this year were:

• The only starch so far I tolerate ad-lib is rice

• I can tolerate it quite well if in a super plain diet, even lose weight on it

• Vinegar is amazing, even in small doses

• Cutting the sauce from my diet (polyol pathway theory) has a similar effect size to supplementing vinegar

That’s 4 things learned from 17 experiments, or about 23%.

Science man. Most things don’t work out, but those that do can have amazing effects. If you experiment a lot and almost everything fails, keep going! Try weird and crazy things.

If you don’t fail a lot, you’re not experimenting much.

How many posts did I write?

I wrote exactly 40 posts in 2025. My goal is one per week, but sometimes I’m too busy or don’t have any inspiring ideas at the time.

Given that I did 17 experiments, almost half of the posts were reports on experiments I’d done, and the rest were my general musings/rants/ideas and a few book reviews. It doesn’t look like I had a “gear post” this year, which is mostly because I bought almost no new cooking stuff. The things I have are just mostly great at this point, and I don’t see a point in buying more.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t list & link all 40 posts, you can check them out on the archive page.

Web Tools

Did you know that I released a bunch of web tools like visualizers, calculators, and so on? You can find an overview on the Tools page.

I guess I don’t promote these enough, because people often tell me that they’ve been following me for a long time and had no idea I made them.

Many of these tools I use on a daily basis, for example the Foodulator, which lets you look up very nerdy numbers & ratios for any foods in the USDA database, which is the same database nearly all nutrient/ingredient sites pull their data from.

This year I mostly made smaller additions to some existing tools.

A visualizer to chart obesity trends over time, by country:

And a similar tool to visualize seed oil supply trends by country:

Yes yes, I know the obvious thing is to combine these and get a correlation between obesity and seed oil supply per country.

Unfortunately, the datasets are somewhat disjointed, cover vastly different time periods, and the countries in existence have changed a surprising amount in the time frame covered. Some countries have split up, others have joined, yet others simply changed their name (looking at you, “Türkiye!”).

I still want to do it, but it’s not a 30 minute project.

F(a/o)iled plans

Oh boy! I actually had big plans for this year.

If you weren’t around then, I actually ran an ex150 trial with 10 people in 2023. 7 of the 10 people finished, and lost 9.6lbs on average.

I was going to run another trial this year, maybe pitting ex150 against a rice or potato diet. I was also going to make a custom web app to facilitate this, e.g. allowing people to check in daily with their weight measurements and so on.

But how does that saying go, everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face? Just kidding, I didn’t get punched in the face. But life happens, you get busy with other things..

Both running a trial and maintaining web apps is quite a commitment, and I want to be ready to give it a good shot. I’d rather not run a trial than run a shoddy one with broken stuff when I don’t have the time to support people adequately.

Just as a feeler, let me know in the comments or via email if you’d be interested in participating in such a 30 day trial. And even if you’re not interested personally, what sort of diets would you like to see tested? Heavy cream diet, potato diet, rice diet.. so many options! I think it would be fun to have several “arms” of the trial “competing.”

Plans for 2026

I’m still pretty busy, so I’m not 100% committing to running a trial this year, although I’d really love to if possible.

As for my personal diet experiments, I continue to just feel the best and lose the most weight on ex150-style heavy cream diets, with very limited protein.

But I did surprisingly well on the white rice diets, and I would be curious to run that for a bit longer by making it a little more sustainable than JUST white rice. Maybe a Grant Genereux style rice/beans/beef “prison diet?”

If I can dial this in to be pretty sustainable, I might try and do 3-6 months in a row, just to see if that actually depletes linoleic acid faster than my heavy cream diet, as I’ve speculated before. Of course, that’s if it doesn’t make me gain fat if I move away from just pure plain white rice.

Other experiment ideas involve testing out some of the boundaries of ex150 more, e.g. how much protein exactly can I eat before I gain fat? Maybe start working out again and very slowly increase the protein amount to make up for the extra demand? Try something besides just beef, maybe eggs? Cycle the protein on ex150 with low-protein and high-protein days?

I think there’s a very good chance that, at this point, I just need to slowly but steadily deplete the linoleic acid in my adipose tissue. That’ll take a couple more years even if I do everything right. Maybe low-fat diets, fasting, or certain other specific diets will accelerate this, but nobody seems to know, all we have is some anecdotes.

At this point, though, eating low-PUFA and even eating a pretty extreme heavy cream diet is just.. normal.. for me. Preferable, even. I am happy every time I get back on ex150.

It’s nice to now be able to eat carbs without ruining my sleep, or without getting acid reflux like I used to. But I still feel bloated, I don’t get as good satiety on pretty much any carbs except plain white rice, and it’s more expensive & inconvenient than just heavy cream.

Here’s to a happy & experimentally interesting 2026!