Holy S&*t, is my Non-24 gone?!

Does this change everything?

If you’ve read this blog for a while you’ll know that I have a circadian rhythm disorder called Non-24, and couldn’t get regular sleep for roughly the first 30 years of my life.

What is Non-24?

Non-24 is basically constant jet lag: your inner clock travels around the world at around 1 timezone per day, no matter where you are. You might be on Tokyo time while living in the U.S., waking up and getting tired at crazy times of the day. A week later, you’re on Hawaii time. Another week later, Central Time.

It is very socially inconvenient, to say the least. I’ve had this since before I can remember. There are anecdotes about 3 year old me playing in the backyard at 3am, in total darkness.

Around 9 years ago I tried keto for weight loss reasons, and my Non-24 went into remission within days. Since then I’ve done pretty strict keto. And keto reliably put my Non-24 into remission this entire time.

During those 9 years I ran a handful of experiments, introducing carbs again. Like clockwork, my Non-24 began rearing its ugly head every time, usually after around 3 days. I would wake up later and later, get tired later and later. The first few days you can ignore it and pretend it’s some sort of outlier or fluke. And then you wake up around lunchtime and go to bed just before sunrise, and you realize “Oh dang, it’s back.”

My Non-24

Why did keto put the Non-24 into remission? No clue. The cause of Non-24 is unknown, and there is no known treatment. There seem to be at least 2 different types of it, too:

1. What I call “Type 1 Non-24” means you have an extremely long circadian rhythm. Our clock has 24h, most people’s rhythm is around 24.5h and they entrain (adjust) a little every day. If your rhythm is 30h long, that’s a heck of a lot of entrainment to do every day, to the point where it’s almost impossible.

2. “Type 2 Non-24”, which I have, doesn’t necessarily mean you have a very long circadian rhythm (mine is about 25h). But something in the entrainment mechanism is broken, so you can’t adjust at all even with the most drastic measures. I’ve done things like 2 week hikes with no artificial light, and didn’t entrain at all.

Keto seems to only work for some people with “Type 2 Non-24.” It doesn’t help if your circadian rhythm is extremely long.

As for the cause: all I knew was that ketogenic diets put you into ketosis, so I assumed it was something something ketosis in the brain. The ketogenic diet was originally used for another brain condition, epilepsy, so maybe it was related. Maybe my SCN (the part of the brain that entrains our circadian clock to sunlight) was damaged and couldn’t use glucose correctly, whereas fueling it with ketones worked.

Since adding carbs back even for a few days seemed to immediately bring my Non-24 back, I was pretty committed to stay on keto for life. After all, it’s very nice to be able to have a social life and a career and all that stuff. Very difficult to do if you don’t know what time you’ll be awake in 2 weeks.

I should mention; circadian rhythm disorders are an officially designated disability and lead to very short life spans and low quality of life; mostly due to a lifetime of constant sleep deprivation. If you talk to people with Non-24 in their 50s or 60s, they typically have several chronic, debilitating conditions.

I got lucky by accidentally discovering a fix (for myself) before age 30. All I have to show for my Non-24 is sleeping through most of high school and college :-) Also having used up all my sick days by May every year (to sleep in, obviously).

Previous Carb Diets brought my Non-24 back

With all that preamble, you can probably imagine why I was hesitant to try a high-carb, low-fat, low-protein diet (HCLFLP) when those became popular on the r/SaturatedFat subreddit.

I had done the Potato Diet back in 2022, after reading Slime Mold Time Mold’s A Chemical Hunger. This series of blog posts inspired me to become serious about running dietary experiments, and shortly thereafter, I discovered ex150 and finally stopped being morbidly obese for the first time in half a decade.

On the potato diet, my Non-24 came back within days. It was actually really annoying: somehow my circadian rhythm didn’t keep cycling, it was now stuck with me waking up in the afternoon and going to bed just before sunrise. Extremely impractical.

You can see I was waking up around 9:30-10am most days before I started the potato diet. The first week I only did plain potatoes, and my Non-24 was visible by day 3. Day 5, I was waking up after noon.

After the first week, I added condiments and later butter. Eventually, my “potato” diet was a diet of butter with some potato sprinkled in. Maybe that’s why my Non-24 stopped cycling after hitting a wake-up time of around 1:30pm.

Desperate to get back to normal working hours, I then decided to initiate another bout of eating carbs. The hope was to surgically activate my Non-24, cycle back around to normal work hours, and go back on keto to stabilize it.

It worked like a charm.

This graph shows both the potato diet period on the left, and the “Carbs” period on the right. Between the 2 I was doing my normal keto diet, and my wake-up time was mostly stable - if at that inconvenient time.

After 3 days of the “carb” period, my wake-up time started jumping dramatically: day 4 I woke up at 6pm, day 10 around 11pm.

I stopped after 14 days, leaving me waking up at 3am. Now back on keto, my rhythm continued to drift a few more hours until I reliably & consistently woke up around 9-12pm again and was stable from then on.

My strategy had worked. Yay!

(To be clear: this second “carb” period was not HCLPLF, I just added carbs to my normal keto meals. Mostly rice & bread.)

Enter the Kempner Rice Diet

When people asked me why I was stubbornly sticking to keto and not giving HCLFLP a shot, I could honestly say: I’ve tried it with the potato diet, and it messed up my sleep. I had triggered it even on purpose, and timed it nearly to the day.

But then, so many interesting anecdotes and success cases crept up on r/SaturatedFat about people doing HCLFLP diets, and I felt like I was missing out.

I “knew” (spoiler alert quotes lol) that going on such a diet would bring my Non-24 back, and would make it impossible for me to work. I work from home, but I still have to attend meetings and talk to people while they’re awake and stuff.

Finally, I decided to take the plunge. I wasn’t losing any weight doing ex150 any more, my fasting experiment had failed (in the sense that I quickly regained all the weight), and I was just out of ideas of what to try.

So I committed to just doing a HCLFLP diet. I would just try to time it with a weekend and take a few sick days to hopefully get me through the most painful circadian misalignment. What were they gonna do, fire me?

Which HCLFLP diet was I going to do? I had attempted the Potato Diet previously, and failed miserably. Potatoes are so low in energy and so high in fiber that I was starving with a painfully bloated belly. No thanks.

Brad Marshall from Fire in a Bottle was doing what he called The Emergence Diet. It sounded very complicated and very Brad. I am not Brad.

Various people on r/SaturatedFat were doing similar diets, some inspired by vegan/whole food plant based people like McDougall. Some were all for fruit & sugar (e.g. Peaters), others recommended against it, at least for weight loss.

Then, a few weeks ago, I re-read Denise Minger’s article In Defense of Low Fat when building my Swamp Visualizer.

In it, she detailed the glorious Kempner Rice Diet, invented by Dr. Walter Kempner in the early 1930s. He initially developed it for patients with acute and fatal kidney disease who only had a few months to live. While some still died, he had an impressive success rate at saving them and normalizing their health.

He quickly noticed that the rice diet also seemed to put diabetes into remission, and helped people lose amazing amounts of weight. Although it must be said that his weight loss version consisted of pretty extreme caloric restriction, from 700-1,200kcal/day or so of plain, white rice & a piece or 2 of fruit.

I chose to do a rice diet. Since I’m not interested in starving myself down only to regain all the weight back immediately (as recently happened after my fasting experiments), I decided to eat rice ad libitum. If there were really any metabolic secrets, if this was “carbo” to ex150’s extreme “keto,” then I was hoping it should still work.

Worst case, I was going to cycle around the clock once with my Non-24 and lower my OmegaQuant linoleic acid a bit. After all, a white rice diet is almost entirely fat free. This should hopefully force my body to use the PUFAs from my adipose tissue for those essential functions like building cell membranes.

Oh, I was also cutting out all coffee. I don’t like black coffee, so coffee without cream wouldn’t be the same. I suppose I could’ve done energy drinks, but I had really gone overboard with energy drinks during the fasts. So maybe it was just time to get off the caffeine for a while. After all, I keep saying that I can stop any time, right?

The Rice of Time

Imagine my surprise around day 4-5 when I felt myself get tired around 11pm. Then again. And again.

Remember this graph:

I had previously shifted my internal clock by 12h in 14 days by eating carbs (rice and bread, at the time).

We had just gone back 1 hour from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time, so I “gained” a free hour. Sure, it might just take 1-2 days longer now.

But still not having shifted at all after 5 days was a huge surprise. By day 7, I couldn’t believe it.

I’m writing this on day 15 of the Kempner Rice Diet With Fat-Free Marinara Sauce, and I woke up this morning (without alarm) at 7:15am. If anything, that’s before my “normal” wake time.

Here’s the last few weeks of my wake times. You can see my alarm goes off at 9am, which is why almost every day had me waking up at 9am.

On the right side you can see the 13 days since I started the rice diet. The yellow average line is down, if anything, meaning I’m waking up earlier. I woke up before my alarm every singly day in the last week.

This could just be the (lack of) caffeine, of course.

But on day 15, I’m calling it: my Non-24 is not coming back on the rice diet. My last carb “intervention” was so successful that I stopped it on day 14. This time, I haven’t even started cycling by that time!

Neo, realizing he retains his powers on the Kempner Rice Diet

I can’t put into words how shocking this is. I was 99.99% sure my Non-24 would be back. If not day 4, then on day 7 the latest.

I would’ve bet you $1,000. After all, it had come back in the past, right? On potatoes, which are extremely similar in macros to rice. And then, on rice & bread!

I am truly shocked. And confused!

Why did the Non-24 not come back despite carbs?

No clue, honestly. Here are some ideas:

1. HCLFLP has the same effect as keto, and would’ve always worked (then why did plain potato bring it back?), as long as I sufficiently avoided swamping.

2. It was seed oils the whole time, keto just circumvented that, and I’ve avoided seed oils long enough now (2 years) that the root cause is fixed.

3. Something is different about the type of carbs: potatoes didn’t work, rice + bread didn’t work. I could see bread, as many people seem to have weird and specific issues with bread, maybe from gluten. But potatoes?

I suppose I could try 1) by eating a low-PUFA swamp diet, and 3) by trying potatoes or rice + bread again. I’m not going to try eating PUFAs again and see if it comes back, lol.

Conclusion

This is a super unexpected and weird surprise. I don’t even want to call it “positive” - I wasn’t exactly missing carbs.

Even now, eating the rice, I’m not like “omg finally the crabs I missed u guys so much!” The experience of eating only rice vs. mostly cream is decidedly worse and less delicious and less pleasant, if not bad per se. It’s like a 6.5/10 instead of a 10/10. I’d say it’s even slightly worse than ex115salmon, although more pleasant than the a pure chocolate truffle diet.

I do suppose it might open up the door for far more experiments now. If I can really stay totally entrained and my Non-24 stays in remission even eating carbs now, I could try swamping diets, potato diets…

I guess we’ll see if the rice trial leads to some fat loss after 30 days when I’ll have my monthly DEXA scan. Cause if not, I don’t even know if I want to try more carb diets, haha.

I sort of miss ex150.

PS: Still SHOCKED. I was so sure.