Fail Fast: Quit ex150glassnoodle on day 1

FODMAPs & Lessons

In my last post, I announced that I would be doing a month of ex150glassnoodle next.

Well, that didn’t work out: I quit the glass noodle diet on the first day. Saved by the man upstairs*?

sweet potato trying to kill me with King’s Sword of Retinoic Acid

(* Grant G. from Alberta, Canada)

Why glass noodles?

I have recently come to believe that very-low-fat diets might be much better at depleting linoleic acid stored in adipose tissue than high-fat diets.

One issue I’d had in the past was that it took me up to 2 weeks to fully adapt to a high-carb diet when coming off keto. That meant the first 2 weeks of every high-carb trial were somewhat miserable, and maybe ineffective as well.

In addition, even a 100% rice diet would be nearly 10% protein - much more than I am used to eating on ex150 (6%).

Glass noodles have nearly 0 protein, as they’re made from refined sweet potato starch. They also contain almost no fiber, and fiber always gives me uncomfortable bloat.

Doing the glass noodles directly after a month of Honey Diet, I hoped, would eliminate the up to 2 weeks of adaptation. I was intending to hit the ground running.

Boy, did that go wrong.

2 day dry fast washout

As I had recently dry fasted for the first time, I wanted to use this as my new washout diet.

A washout, if you’re not familiar, is a diet that you do between other trials to sort of “reset” to baseline. Since I have a lot of water weight swings, I liked the very brief & effective dry fast as a way to getting all the digestive matter & excess retained water out of my system rapidly.

I hoped that eating nothing for 48h wouldn’t destroy my microbiome or my “carbosis” adaptation.

The dry fast worked as intended, just like last time - despite starting out already pretty thirsty, I woke up the first morning not thirsty at all. I did end the dry fast after 48h again, but again not because I was parched or anything - just seemed like a prudent idea, and I began thinking of water a lot (“intrusive water thoughts”). No health issues at this point.

First Glass Noodle portion… brick to the stomach

Having started the dry fast after dinner, I decided to also end it around dinner. Since I’d already purchased plenty of glass noodles of various brands, I decided to just go straight into that.

I made a 200g portion of glass noodles. Oh, boiling the noodles is another benefit over e.g. rice - no need to use a rice cooker for 45 minutes. You just boil the noodles for 8 minutes or so, done.

The glass noodles tasted great. I put some marinara sauce on them, but not too much. Very neutral taste, couldn’t taste any potato/sweet potato.

But I was a bit bloated - it seemed like the noodles were just sitting in my stomach like a brick.

Oh well, I thought - I did just come off a 48h dry fast. Maybe I shouldn’t have started with a full-sized portion of starch?

I double checked the nutrition label - yea, these had pretty much zero fiber.

I went to bed with a bloated, brick-filled stomach and forgot about it by the next morning.

Day 1 of ex150glassnoodle

The next morning, the first full day of my new glass noodle diet, I excitedly prepared glass noodles for breakfast.

They tasted great, again. I wolfed them down.

Two hours after the breakfast, I was very hungry. Weirdly, my stomach was still extremely full. Almost to the point of being painful. Almost. (Foreshadowing intensifies.)

So I made another portion of glass noodles. I used a different brand this time, although the nutrition data is almost the same.

Somehow, this made it worse. Now I was definitely painfully bloated. But I was still starving! What was going on?

I had experienced a little bit of a bloaty & “hungry feeling” adaptation period on both the rice & the honey diet. But nothing quite like this.

Plus, at this point I could no longer blame it on coming off the dry fast. For one, it had now been almost a day. Two, I had actually come off a 48h dry fast and gone directly into a high-fiber, fruit filled sugar binge the first day of the honey diet. If anything, I should be more adapted to eating carbs now.

Dinner

For dinner, I was already sort of sketched out. I was starving. But my stomach was still full!

I did the math: 100g (1 serving) of glass noodles had about 350kcal in them. To get anywhere close to my normal intake of ~3,300kcal, I would have to eat nearly 10 portions a day.

I was now 4 servings in and considering abstaining from further food intake due to stomach pain. This was not good.

I began having flashbacks to my first Potato Diet trial.

For comparison, on the 100% rice + marinara sauce diet, I never reached this point of pain/bloating. White rice has much, much more fiber than refined sweet potato starch. It wasn’t the fiber.

Knowing I wouldn’t be able to sustain a diet though “pain satiation” on 1,400kcal/day, I forced myself to make another 200g of glass noodles and ate them.

Again, the noodles tasted pretty good, no issue there.

But then the real pain began.

I think all those glass noodles over the 24h must’ve added up, sitting in my stomach. Otherwise, I can’t explain why the 3rd serving of the day was so much worse than the first 2.

For reference, I last ate 200g glass noodles around 6pm that night and was still painfully bloated plus having hunger pangs at 1am, unable to fall asleep.

I couldn’t do anything that evening but just lie in bed on my back, groaning.

The combination of painful bloating & hunger pangs really sold it - this diet was completely unsustainable.

I cannot potato?

If you follow this blog, you know that I can sustain some pretty crazy & monotonous diets.

I’ve spent the last 2 years eating almost the exact same meal every day and drinking coffee with heavy cream. I’ve done a month of only white rice with marinara sauce and didn’t find it a big deal.

If anything, this should’ve been the rice diet but simpler - less fiber, less effort cooking.

Lying in bed (on my back, due to stomach pain) I pondered how this was a near-identical recap of my very first potato diet trial, back when I’d read Slime Mold Time Mold’s excellent series A Chemical Hunger.

The potato diet was a total fail for me: I was painfully bloated the entire time, yet starving. I could only eat about 600kcal of potatoes per day, which, in my defense, is about 2lbs.

It’s a bizarre feeling to both be stuffed to the brim, yet starving. All those people that say they eat low-energy foods because they “fill you up” seem crazy to me. Yea, I HATE being full. I want satiety, not a painfully bloated tummy! The two feelings are completely orthogonal for me.

Back then, I had to cancel the potato diet eventually because I simply couldn’t sustain it. At the time I blamed eating the potato skins for the first week, and the very high amount of fiber found in potatoes.

I didn’t have either of these factors this time: glass noodles are made from extremely refined potato starch. Almost zero fiber, and almost certainly none of the things (oxalates?) found in potato skins.

FODMAPs

I had heard this term, but never really paid attention. They seemed to concern mainly carb-eaters, and I just spent 9 years on strict keto.

But with my newfound “power” of being able to eat carbs, again, I had to learn this lesson the hard way, I suppose.

FODMAPs or fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols are short-chain carbohydrates that are poorly absorbed in the small intestine and ferment in the colon.

- Wikipedia on FODMAPs

That was exactly what it felt like to me. The glass noodles were sitting in my digestive system, but they were not digesting. Each serving I ate seemed to accumulate, adding to the brick wall in my midsection that caused me bloat & pain.

Confusingly, the Wikipedia page for FODMAPs does not mention any potatoes or sweet potatoes.

There are apparently tons of different FODMAPs and I suppose not everyone is sensitive to all of them. I can eat almost all the foods en masse that the page lists. For example, I just ate tons of mushrooms and fruits listed there with no issue.

But searching for FODMAPs in potatoes & sweet potatoes, I found that both can have mild amounts if eaten in excess:

Aha, 112g is considered high FODMAP. I had just eaten 200g portions for 3 meals a day, adding up to 600g.

Dang it.

A diet is not sustainable if you can’t digest the food

This cleared up some things. I had, somewhat accidentally, cut out pretty much all the factors I’d blamed in my original potato experiment.

1. The glass noodles were extremely low-fiber, certainly less than a pure rice diet

2. I wasn’t coming off an extreme keto diet this time, but a month of high-fiber fruit & sugar

3. No oxalates from potato skins or other potential anti-nutrients

It explains why I had always been able to eat tons of rice with zero issues. It might also explain why I never liked fries or potato chips much, even as a kid. Maybe they’d always sat in my stomach like bricks, and I’d intuitively avoided them?

That night, after lying on my back for 6h with a bloated stomach and researching FODMAPs, I threw away half a month worth of glass noodles and decided on which diet experiment to do instead.

ex150hclflp

This diet is somewhat nondescript in name, but it’s mostly just a mix of the Honey Diet & the Rice Diet. I decided that I should just go back to some variant of high-carb/low-fat/low-protein (HCLFLP) that I know worked for me.

1. 150g (lean!) meat per day - mostly bison and venison

2. White rice with sauce

3. Fruit/sugar/honey

4. No added cooking fat (butter/tallow), the only fat is 5-10g from the bison

My main goal right now is to see if a HCLFLP diet can really deplete my adipose linoleic acid. For that purpose, it doesn’t matter if I do glass noodles, rice, or sugar, I suspect. As long as it’s extremely low in fat.

So far, 7 days in, no digestive issues at all. I have minor bloat after eating a ton of rice. But nothing painful.

Have I always had this?

I don’t know how FODMAPs work. I’ve heard that you can desensitize or train yourself to digest certain ones better?

Have I always sucked at digesting potatoes, or did this maybe happen during 9 years of not eating them during keto?

Who knows.

I certainly ate potatoes once in a while back before keto, but I can’t say they were a staple, especially in the amounts apparently required to trigger issues.

When you eat “normal” food, how much potato do you eat even in a meat & potato meal? One? Maybe two if they’re medium sized ones and you’re extra hungry?

I remember having the big baked potato at the steakhouse, but it was typically dry and more of a vehicle for sour cream anyway. I’m not sure how often I’d finish that bad boy.

Like I mentioned above, I never liked fries or potato chips much as a kid. My junk food of choice was always pizza or pastries. That’s not to say I never ate them, but never in huge quantities. I remember viscerally disliking McDonald’s french fries from a very young age.

If possible, will I ever train myself to tolerate potatoes?

Probably not. Why bother.

Lessons?

“Fail fast” is a Silicon Valley/Startup idea. Programmers love nothing more than sitting in their garage for 4 years, coding up a solution to a problem nobody has.

The idea is that if you’re going to fail, you better not waste a lot of time doing it.

No sense trying to willpower through a diet that I clearly can’t handle. Some people can apparently tolerate high potato volume or sweet potato volume, but I’m not among them.

There are plenty of other ways to achieve a HCLFLP diet.