I dig this a lot. I like the idea of having an 'approach' moreso than a 'prescription'.
Really loving your work. Love that you're willing to entertain the whole spectrum. It's so necessary to regaining this 'approach'.
I myself am underweight. I'm about 5'11. Through my late teens/early 20s I weighed 125. I've been able to get up to 140 by going much more keto (it's not about 'weight loss'; it's about 'homeostasis'!). I'm nowhere near as thorough as you but I've just been slowly modifying my diet; noticing "how do I feel" on different things. I am finding that adding in a few carbs (no more than 20% of calories; into the swamp is horrible) gets me way more "regular" in terms of gut feeling and energy level. In the winter I do a lot of standing outside in the cold (farm life) and this has been my best winter yet - I am starting to finally have the circulation and body fat required to endure it.
Approach is a great word for it, thanks. Invokes the physical act of getting closer to something :) Like a mountain peak.
Good point about the underweight/homeostatis point, this gets lost in the “everyone is overweight & needs to lose weight” approach, which is true on average but not for every individual. For some people, their metabolism might be wrecked “the wrong way!”
A bit late to the party, but I think I have my own N=1 observations to contribute.
You see satiety as the signal to track. It absolutely doesn’t work for me.
I have never, in my life, felt satiety. Okay, I’m lying. I have, once time, a few months a go, for the first time, and never again. I was sick with COVID, 2 days stuck in bed. When I got better, I prepared a meal, and halfway through it, I had that weird, previously-unknown to me feeling of "I’ve eating enough even if I’m not full ; I could force myself to eat more I guess, but I really don’t want to".
It was awesome. I want to feel that again. It’s just I just don’t normally work that way : I can eat as much as I want until physical fullness, without feeling any point of "it’s enough" along the way. It has always been that way for as long as I can remember ; I don’t think it’s a "seed oiled" thing.
Instead, my food intake is (poorly) "regulated" that way : I have two "eat" impetus :
* Habits becoming physiological expectations in terms of timing and quantity. If I eat 4 slices of bread in the morning for two weeks, then if one day I skip it, I will not necessary get _hungry_, but I will quickly have a "craving for slices of bread" : mouth salivating, taste buds expecting/wanting slices of bread, wanting to chew and swallow something having the same mouth-feeling as bread. It is a pretty strong thing. And going to 3 slices of bread trigger it at a lower intensity. Fighting it requires a quite large quantity of willpower.
* Usual hunger, if my intake from my habits is clearly metabolically insufficient. "Stomach growling". I think everyone knows this.
The first is a ratchet (because I can add I much as I want to my habits and there’s absolutely no signal that says "nope, too much", outside of fullness that takes a lot, but subtracting to my habits require a lot of willpower). The second cranks it (it’s getting colder => I’m getting constantly more hungry => I’m adding a bit of chocolate at breakfast => it’s now locked in as an expectation by my food reward circuitry). The outcome is obvious.
In short : your idea of "just find what you can eat to satiety, don’t rely on willpower" is probably not as the "obvious/universal starting point" as you make it (exhibit two would be Yudkowsky — I know you know his case).
Also, in that light, "CICO" makes more sense ; if I can "lie" to my first system as to what constitute the "habitual meal" (ie : keeping quantities/timing/overall taste/consistency the same, substituting real food with "low caloric substitutes"), then that "kinda" "works"… (clearly not a silver bullet tho).
And I don’t think the "eat less, move more" idea is completely ridiculous non-sense. Sure, it doesn’t explain the bulk of the obesity epidemics by itself, and if you think It’s The Only Answer you’re going to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods… But that idea that "you can eat too much, and if you do you get unhealthily fat" was an idea you can find in medical writings from _antiquity_. It cannot be just "heh, but that too much is just driven by seed oils right ?". There is probably something such as "overeating".
I also had never experienced “satiety” my entire life until my late 30s when I first tried ex150. Have you tried ex150?
I didn’t even know what the concept really meant before I experienced it.
“Overeating” was known in antiquity, but have you seen obesity rates rise? They were drastically lower in 2000. And in 1970. And in 1950. And in 1920. And in 1900. And in 1860.
How come people in 2026 are so much fatter than people in 2000?
CICO doesn’t explain anything, it merely reformulates the obvious observation.
Independently of CICO, WHY do people eat more/move less in 2026 than in 2000?
Yes, tried ex150, but can’t keep it for more than 3-4 days : gives me worse and worse heartburns and acne-like skin reaction (and no, it’s not lactose intolerance, heavy milk intake is fine, tallow is less bad than heavy cream but still bad, butter is the least bad but still not in "entirely fine" territory). Didn’t experience satiety in those few days, but I’m not sure I was expected to in such a short amount of time (and anyway by day 3 I don’t think I’m in a state where I can distinguish between satiety and "my GI system is begging for mercy").
Q: was your "discovery of satiety" an immediate thing, or did it take a few days ? weeks ?
(a possible hypothesis for my personal case is that my "natural diet for reaching satiety" is keto, but I can’t find any fat that don’t give me terrible reactions for other independent reasons, locking me in a ill-suited carbo).
> Independently of CICO, WHY do people eat more/move less in 2026 than in 2000?
Well, why was overeating/obesity a known thing in antiquity if it’s just a bad thing in the modern food supply ?
I’m not pushing back against the idea that there’s something uniquely bad in the modern food supply. Those observations are pretty convincing. Especially the 2000s rise — hard to explain with a change in "lifestyle", if anything hitting the gym is more popular than ever.
I’m pushing back against "overeating can’t happen in a healthy diet, if you’re overeating it’s _necessarily_ because there has to be something bad in your diet that makes you do so".
I think it’s pretty clearly wrong in antiquity — there’s just not that much variance in diets. I think that while it’s directionaly right today, you have to replace _necessarily_ with _likely_. In other words, while for a modern person it’s likely to be in the modern case, it’s still possible to be in the antiquity case and it shouldn’t be ruled out as impossible. Intuitively, if we look at the "obesity cases", we should see a mixture of a constant rate of antiquity-like cases, and an increasing rate of modern-like cases. Given that the increase is entirely made of modern-like cases, most cases today are modern-like. But there still should be antiquity-like ones.
If you disagree with that, I’m curious of what you think my strategy should be ? Keto side is out, carbo side don’t give me satiety, already added vinegar and reduced salt/glutamate and reduced protein — I’m pretty much on your exbread experiment now. That’s the important point after all ; theory "CICO ? modern food supply ?" is important only to guide experiment/action, and your framework seems kinda stuck at "what should be done" in this situation ?
Whereas CICO-ish framework says "you can lose weight by just eating less and powering through it" (which, for now, seems true). Well, I’m going to do it until I lose enough or it stop working. I’m not counting "seed oiled" out either (if only because cutting them out solved other health issues), so there’s an obvious path of "try to lose that reserve of seed oils in my spare tire with the CICO-ish strategy, then go back into the swamp, maybe try ex150 again, see what happen — maybe keto failure was because of seed oils, like your early carbo failures were, and I can make keto side work by then".
Hm, not sure what about fat per se could be causing your symptoms - I suppose you could try finding other fat sources, but maybe it's just not in the cards for you :'-(
Obesity in antiquity was extremely rare, and overeating experiments even just a few decades ago showed that it was extremely difficult to make people gain fat by overeating. Once they stopped, they immediately lost the weight.
Clearly, this has dramatically changed for the worse.
I think "overeating" is circular - it's only "over" if you gain weight, and you gain weight cause you overeat.
I'm ok if you call it "very likely" instead of "necessary" sure.
I do agree with your "old school obesity" vs "new school obesity" cases if you will. But given that the obesity rate was practically 0% even just 150 years ago, I'm not sure we'll find many "regular" obese people. Maybe these are the people who can just eat less/work out and lose all the weight and get to normal weight.
Do you think you are a "normal" case, not like "modern" obesity?
Have you tried an entire month of white rice? I experienced pretty good satiety on that.
Of course there likely exist people for whom whatever metabolic issue I have, and I suspect most modern obese people have, are not the root cause. And these people won't experience relief by a "metabolic fix" diet. You might be one of those, or you might not have found the specific fix for you. It took me 20 years to find mine.
For example there are actually some rare people who are leptin deficient, maybe you're one of them. Have you tested your leptin levels?
> I suppose you could try finding other fat sources, but maybe it's just not in the cards for you :'-(
There’s still coconut oil and macadamia nuts. I’ll probably end up trying one (or both) after my "see how much of my spare tire I can lose by just powering through undereating", if heavy cream still fail fast at that point.
> I think "overeating" is circular - it's only "over" if you gain weight, and you gain weight cause you overeat.
I think there’s centrally a non-circular definition of "overeating" in healthy individuals. It’s eating past satiety. Not entirely satisfactory (what are the criterion for "healthy" ? what about non-healthy individuals ?), but enough to glimpse a non-entirely-circular thing ? This leads for example to three possible categories for obesity/overweight, one where you have satiety, respect it, and still end up overweight (obesity without overeating, that we can mostly identify to the "modern" case ?), one where you have satiety, regularly decide to eat past it anyway, and end up overweight (overeating-driven-obesity, possibly most of the cases of antiquity case ?), one where you lack satiety altogether (is this only a modern thing or not ?).
> Do you think you are a "normal" case, not like "modern" obesity?
I think you can have a mixture of both models in a single person, and it’s probably my case ?
I don’t think my lack of satiety is caused by the "modern" part. I was not raised in a seed-oils-saturated food environment (I’m french, and I was mostly raised in a traditional-ish food environment of home-baked bread, butter, garden-grown vegetables and locally-sourced meat), I have no memory of "satiety" in childhood, and I have positive evidence I didn’t have it even in pretty early age (my parents : "you wouldn’t stop eating by yourself if you even mildly liked something — but it was not hunger/gluttony, you wouldn’t even be annoyed if we said it was enough").
It also never caused weight gain. It’s the part where "CICO is wrong" is correct, CO very much adapted flexibly to whatever I would throw in to CI.
Then I moved to the city, and that lack of satiety slowly started to translate into weight gain. I believed it to be the "toll of aging", now I’m strongly suspecting it’s just "got seed oiled".
So my working hypothesis is that I have a mild case of both ? My lack of satiety is annoying but not overly problematic by itself and not modern-case-causes-driven. Modern-case causes does make it problematic.
> Have you tried an entire month of white rice? I experienced pretty good satiety on that.
Yes, same (non-)effect as exbread.
> For example there are actually some rare people who are leptin deficient, maybe you're one of them. Have you tested your leptin levels?
Macadamia looks promising actually. Coconut I think is too metabolically weird due to being mostly SCFA, they just metabolize differently. I don't think it's a great "bread & butter" fuel. Cocoa might actually be better, have you tried that?
I'd agree with your non-circular definition, but by that definition obese people aren't "overeating" even when they gain lots of fat if they're still not satiated. It again leads to the question "Ok what breaks people?" I'm less interested in the word and more in the thing.
Regarding your background, don't forget that it takes a long time to saturated yourself fully with seed oils. So being in France might just have delayed that much longer than it would in America.
I suppose there could be mixed cases.
Interesting on the ex_rice and ex150 results. I suppose whatever your issue is, it's not the same as my (swamping related?) issue.
I do recommend checking the leptin just in case, here at least it's easy & cheap to test next time you see your doctor.
I reckon this post marks an epistemic turning point where you go from the perfect tense (this happened, I saw this, I read this) to the imperative tense (do this).
Frank feedback: dont like it. Harder to stay open minded past this point.
Isn't this what experimenting is all about? It's to find what works for you and then to do it. I don't see why it's close-minded. I guess the claim that removing excess LA is necessary? Otherwise, he's just telling people to do lots of N=1 experiments and then settle into a long-term path once a "solution" has been found. I'd also say this post is very open-minded about "it was keto that worked for me, but HCLF might be your silver bullet."
Thank you! Also to my surprise, compared to last year, nothing has fundamentally changed. It’s just become a little more complex at the long tail side of things.
Yeah I think we basically got this, it just seems that the fix is awfully slow. I'm a bit freaked out that my yo-yo plan hasn't obviously worked, and that I'm not off the thyroid yet, but it may just be that I haven't given myself long enough to find a new low equilibrium, and maybe there's short term damage from PUFA release during weight loss. I'm about to go visit Mum again so another yo-yo is locked in, and then I'll take my hands off the controls for a bit and we'll know for sure one way or another.
The *other* fly in my ointment is the discovery that a friend of mine also has your 'no previous experience of satiety'. She also thought that 'feeling full' was literally stomach stretched to bursting, rather than a metaphor for 'Don't want to eat anything the thought is repulsive', and has been on mad CICO-style starvation and exercise cycles her whole life. It did work, she's usually a pretty normal weight with a tendency to run to fat if she relaxes her discipline, but I can't imagine the willpower it took.
She's only recently felt real satiety under the influence of tirzepatide, and now she can understand what I've been banging on about these last few years. She thought I was just talking gibberish before.
What freaks me out is that it looks like she's always eaten a pretty PUFA-free diet. We went through here whole life history. Not strictly PUFA-free, but not much of it. In fact not much in the way of processed food at all... Hmmm.
I think your yo-yo plan would take much more volume under the loss/gain curve and therefore time to see measurable results. Of the pure weight lost/gained each time, a lot will be water weight, and your actual "fat replacement" rate is likely not as big as you'd expect.
And yea, short term damage would be expected upon PUFA release.
I suppose my strength has always been that I have absolutely no discipline. Which is why I make a decent programmer.
> If you do remember, what is her normal diet like?
Cooks all her own stuff, doesn't eat out much, won't buy anything with more than four ingredients, lots of pasta, does like chicken and sausages, and does buy that dreadful 'spreadable' butter although I don't think she uses much of it it's just for toast, she also buys real butter for cooking. I'll eat her cooking without the slightest worry as long as she promises she's checked for sulphites.
Literally doesn't like most processed crap because it tastes rancid and oily to her. Which is not something I'd noticed until I deliberately cut all the vegetable oil out of my diet.
She's definitely lightly PUFA'd like everyone else is, but probably not as much as most English people, but her childhood was all wholesome 1980s home-cooked stuff, and there's no big obvious source of linoleic acid like my commercial chip habit.
If all I knew about her was her diet I'd predict she'd be about as low PUFA as any modern person is unless they're deliberately anti-seed-oilz, and yet she's literally never experienced satiety before the drugs, she's been dieting since she was a teen and has never had a healthy relationship with food.
The thing is, LA is so sneaky and fat so energy dense that it doesn't take much.
Mayo: soybean oil, water, egg yolks, vinegar. 4 ingredients. Chicken or (pork) sausage might be enough on its own. A tablespoon of spreadable "butter" might be enough.
Maybe she's just "lucky" and her sense of satiety is extremely whacked by the LA. Maybe it's something else. If she's willing to try going off the drugs, you could ask her to run some experiments. E.g. will she experience satiety on ex150? Plain white rice? 100% potato diet?
Or maybe just leave her be. Not everyone likes experimenting.
There are handful of restaurants that are finally understanding the problem with excess LA/omega-6 fats. Seed Oil Scout is a phone app that uses crowdsourcing to identify such establishments and make it easier to dine out “safely”. I have no financial ties with them, but invite you to check them out!
Hi Ex, long-time reader, first time commenter. Interesting post as always. I wanted to ask: What would you do if you had the resources of an academic lab or government agency?
I don't know if this is your priority, but top of my mind is proving the PUFA theory to a mainstream scientific audience. If removing PUFA became mainstream advice, I imagine it could be cut from the food chain fairly quickly. It seems like the problem is that it's hard to prove given the long recovery timeline you describe. Some initial thoughts:
1. Run a large-sample size trial with a strictly controlled diet with 0 PUFA for as long as possible. If there are statistically significant benefits within a couple months, that would be a strong start to building evidence.
2. Study ways to speed up linoleic acid depletion within the body - this makes any future cures & clinical trials faster.
Thanks for documenting your journey in public. This type of open science is a great contribution to society.
Something similar to what you’re suggesting, plus larger scale adipose tissue studies of people.
E.g. the 0 PUFA diet would still be run on people that are highly likely very PUFA’d, so the results might not mean that much if the study isn’t years long.
Studying the fat metabolism & adipose levels of the few mysteriously healthy people today would be interesting too.
Great post! Feel I could share this to friends who might be interested in what I am talking about or doing myself to a certain extent when they're curious as to why I eat the way I do.
Also:
>Reduce salt & glutamate
Another benefit is that it can reduce the intense deliciousness of food causing you to overeat.
The difference between me using MSG and salt vs keeping food "bland" is staggering.
With the former I'll usually eat until I am quite full — still comfortable but definitely could've eaten less.
With the latter I'll eat until I am like fine and comfortable — I could easily go running right away and not feel like I'd have too much food in my belly.
The salt/glutamate/sauce aspect is interesting. I ate WAY more white rice when covered in (salty, glutamate-y) tomato sauce (PUFA free). I couldn’t tell you if the effect is “metabolic” maybe via the polyol/fructose pathway, or simply “well your food is more delicious, duh!” but it was very noticeable.
Basically I wouldn’t stop eating white rice + tomato sauce until the bowl was empty. Then maybe I wouldn’t make a new one. But without the sauce, the white rice would become boring in the middle of the bowl and I’d put it down.
Could be that a required ingredient of ex150/heavy cream cement truck satiety has always been “low sodium/glutamate in the ad lib portion of the diet?”
I wouldn’t say it takes the “pleasure” out of eating this way, but it takes the “excess, addictive” pleasure out. In terms of flavor I don’t ever miss salt or, now, even tomato sauce - my meal is still extremely delicious to me.
But I sure did stop eating earlier on the ad lib rice.
I also dig this a lot! I read the entire article which is rare for me because I either get bored or confused. Not the case here. Thank you for taking the time to share your experiments with us.
What are your thoughts or experiences with carageenan? To find heavy whipping cream in the US without it costs a bunch.
I am in the newborn phase(started 2 months ago) of my high fat/low carb/moderate protein experiment so I have much to learn. I’m buckled up for the long haul and reading about your experiments will be beneficial! :)
It is ultra thick, not sure if that is because of the carageenan. I have tried raw heavy cream before but I find the taste to be a bit off-putting….tastes like a cow is standing nearby, lol.
It has been a lot of trial and error. Far too much protein in the beginning. But I do believe it helped me to kick the carbs. I’ve been a chronic dieter most of my life, so I’m ready to have a calm and steady eating regime that will help me to lose a good bit of stubborn fat and something I will adhere to for the rest of my life.
I didn't care for raw cream either. Went bad within a few days in the fridge, too!
Agreed, after decades of frantically gaining fat & trying new stuff to get it off, just being calm & collected about food without instantly gaining fat is a godsend!
I got lucky in that there was a brand available that only had gellan gum, not carrageenan. I have done carrageenan cream off and on when traveling or no other is available, but I prefer not to. Haven’t had any acute side effects but the cream feels… granulated? Like there’s powder in it, lol.
The nice thing about not addressing Cremieux is that whatever he says doesn't matter: you've found what works for you, so who cares what anyone else says? N=1 is king.
There's no downside to removing seed oils, so let everyone else take their GLP-1 RAs and/or statins and see where we're all at in 10-20 years. Even if removing seed oils were harmful, you can always regularly check your blood labs and stop if things start looking/feeling iffy. But I've yet to meet someone where that was the case. On the contrary, all the other common micro-benefits like no sunburn, no headaches, no joint pain, more energy, no brain fog, better sleep, more regular bowel movements, less gas, are just icing on the cake.
The bigger issue is that I've yet to see any of the pro-seed-oil camp make any argument for *what else* could be causing the sorry metabolic state our world is in. And, no, "ultra-processed food" isn't going to cut it. CICO is dead, too. Do we need to start looking into dough conditioners, artificial dyes, or something else?
It’s not exactly precise, and you are right there are factors like DNL. But this roughly happened in the LA Veterans study.
“PUFA is preferentially burned” does not seem to be true in a meaningful way for this. It is still stored if you eat it, even if you don’t gain weight.
DNL does contribute, but it seemed a small factor in LA Veterans. It’s probably a massive factor if you eat a near-zero fat diet and most of your fat comes from DNL.
I dig this a lot. I like the idea of having an 'approach' moreso than a 'prescription'.
Really loving your work. Love that you're willing to entertain the whole spectrum. It's so necessary to regaining this 'approach'.
I myself am underweight. I'm about 5'11. Through my late teens/early 20s I weighed 125. I've been able to get up to 140 by going much more keto (it's not about 'weight loss'; it's about 'homeostasis'!). I'm nowhere near as thorough as you but I've just been slowly modifying my diet; noticing "how do I feel" on different things. I am finding that adding in a few carbs (no more than 20% of calories; into the swamp is horrible) gets me way more "regular" in terms of gut feeling and energy level. In the winter I do a lot of standing outside in the cold (farm life) and this has been my best winter yet - I am starting to finally have the circulation and body fat required to endure it.
Approach is a great word for it, thanks. Invokes the physical act of getting closer to something :) Like a mountain peak.
Good point about the underweight/homeostatis point, this gets lost in the “everyone is overweight & needs to lose weight” approach, which is true on average but not for every individual. For some people, their metabolism might be wrecked “the wrong way!”
A bit late to the party, but I think I have my own N=1 observations to contribute.
You see satiety as the signal to track. It absolutely doesn’t work for me.
I have never, in my life, felt satiety. Okay, I’m lying. I have, once time, a few months a go, for the first time, and never again. I was sick with COVID, 2 days stuck in bed. When I got better, I prepared a meal, and halfway through it, I had that weird, previously-unknown to me feeling of "I’ve eating enough even if I’m not full ; I could force myself to eat more I guess, but I really don’t want to".
It was awesome. I want to feel that again. It’s just I just don’t normally work that way : I can eat as much as I want until physical fullness, without feeling any point of "it’s enough" along the way. It has always been that way for as long as I can remember ; I don’t think it’s a "seed oiled" thing.
Instead, my food intake is (poorly) "regulated" that way : I have two "eat" impetus :
* Habits becoming physiological expectations in terms of timing and quantity. If I eat 4 slices of bread in the morning for two weeks, then if one day I skip it, I will not necessary get _hungry_, but I will quickly have a "craving for slices of bread" : mouth salivating, taste buds expecting/wanting slices of bread, wanting to chew and swallow something having the same mouth-feeling as bread. It is a pretty strong thing. And going to 3 slices of bread trigger it at a lower intensity. Fighting it requires a quite large quantity of willpower.
* Usual hunger, if my intake from my habits is clearly metabolically insufficient. "Stomach growling". I think everyone knows this.
The first is a ratchet (because I can add I much as I want to my habits and there’s absolutely no signal that says "nope, too much", outside of fullness that takes a lot, but subtracting to my habits require a lot of willpower). The second cranks it (it’s getting colder => I’m getting constantly more hungry => I’m adding a bit of chocolate at breakfast => it’s now locked in as an expectation by my food reward circuitry). The outcome is obvious.
In short : your idea of "just find what you can eat to satiety, don’t rely on willpower" is probably not as the "obvious/universal starting point" as you make it (exhibit two would be Yudkowsky — I know you know his case).
Also, in that light, "CICO" makes more sense ; if I can "lie" to my first system as to what constitute the "habitual meal" (ie : keeping quantities/timing/overall taste/consistency the same, substituting real food with "low caloric substitutes"), then that "kinda" "works"… (clearly not a silver bullet tho).
And I don’t think the "eat less, move more" idea is completely ridiculous non-sense. Sure, it doesn’t explain the bulk of the obesity epidemics by itself, and if you think It’s The Only Answer you’re going to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods… But that idea that "you can eat too much, and if you do you get unhealthily fat" was an idea you can find in medical writings from _antiquity_. It cannot be just "heh, but that too much is just driven by seed oils right ?". There is probably something such as "overeating".
I also had never experienced “satiety” my entire life until my late 30s when I first tried ex150. Have you tried ex150?
I didn’t even know what the concept really meant before I experienced it.
“Overeating” was known in antiquity, but have you seen obesity rates rise? They were drastically lower in 2000. And in 1970. And in 1950. And in 1920. And in 1900. And in 1860.
How come people in 2026 are so much fatter than people in 2000?
CICO doesn’t explain anything, it merely reformulates the obvious observation.
Independently of CICO, WHY do people eat more/move less in 2026 than in 2000?
Yes, tried ex150, but can’t keep it for more than 3-4 days : gives me worse and worse heartburns and acne-like skin reaction (and no, it’s not lactose intolerance, heavy milk intake is fine, tallow is less bad than heavy cream but still bad, butter is the least bad but still not in "entirely fine" territory). Didn’t experience satiety in those few days, but I’m not sure I was expected to in such a short amount of time (and anyway by day 3 I don’t think I’m in a state where I can distinguish between satiety and "my GI system is begging for mercy").
Q: was your "discovery of satiety" an immediate thing, or did it take a few days ? weeks ?
(a possible hypothesis for my personal case is that my "natural diet for reaching satiety" is keto, but I can’t find any fat that don’t give me terrible reactions for other independent reasons, locking me in a ill-suited carbo).
> Independently of CICO, WHY do people eat more/move less in 2026 than in 2000?
Well, why was overeating/obesity a known thing in antiquity if it’s just a bad thing in the modern food supply ?
I’m not pushing back against the idea that there’s something uniquely bad in the modern food supply. Those observations are pretty convincing. Especially the 2000s rise — hard to explain with a change in "lifestyle", if anything hitting the gym is more popular than ever.
I’m pushing back against "overeating can’t happen in a healthy diet, if you’re overeating it’s _necessarily_ because there has to be something bad in your diet that makes you do so".
I think it’s pretty clearly wrong in antiquity — there’s just not that much variance in diets. I think that while it’s directionaly right today, you have to replace _necessarily_ with _likely_. In other words, while for a modern person it’s likely to be in the modern case, it’s still possible to be in the antiquity case and it shouldn’t be ruled out as impossible. Intuitively, if we look at the "obesity cases", we should see a mixture of a constant rate of antiquity-like cases, and an increasing rate of modern-like cases. Given that the increase is entirely made of modern-like cases, most cases today are modern-like. But there still should be antiquity-like ones.
If you disagree with that, I’m curious of what you think my strategy should be ? Keto side is out, carbo side don’t give me satiety, already added vinegar and reduced salt/glutamate and reduced protein — I’m pretty much on your exbread experiment now. That’s the important point after all ; theory "CICO ? modern food supply ?" is important only to guide experiment/action, and your framework seems kinda stuck at "what should be done" in this situation ?
Whereas CICO-ish framework says "you can lose weight by just eating less and powering through it" (which, for now, seems true). Well, I’m going to do it until I lose enough or it stop working. I’m not counting "seed oiled" out either (if only because cutting them out solved other health issues), so there’s an obvious path of "try to lose that reserve of seed oils in my spare tire with the CICO-ish strategy, then go back into the swamp, maybe try ex150 again, see what happen — maybe keto failure was because of seed oils, like your early carbo failures were, and I can make keto side work by then".
Hm, not sure what about fat per se could be causing your symptoms - I suppose you could try finding other fat sources, but maybe it's just not in the cards for you :'-(
Obesity in antiquity was extremely rare, and overeating experiments even just a few decades ago showed that it was extremely difficult to make people gain fat by overeating. Once they stopped, they immediately lost the weight.
Clearly, this has dramatically changed for the worse.
I think "overeating" is circular - it's only "over" if you gain weight, and you gain weight cause you overeat.
I'm ok if you call it "very likely" instead of "necessary" sure.
I do agree with your "old school obesity" vs "new school obesity" cases if you will. But given that the obesity rate was practically 0% even just 150 years ago, I'm not sure we'll find many "regular" obese people. Maybe these are the people who can just eat less/work out and lose all the weight and get to normal weight.
Do you think you are a "normal" case, not like "modern" obesity?
Have you tried an entire month of white rice? I experienced pretty good satiety on that.
Of course there likely exist people for whom whatever metabolic issue I have, and I suspect most modern obese people have, are not the root cause. And these people won't experience relief by a "metabolic fix" diet. You might be one of those, or you might not have found the specific fix for you. It took me 20 years to find mine.
For example there are actually some rare people who are leptin deficient, maybe you're one of them. Have you tested your leptin levels?
> I suppose you could try finding other fat sources, but maybe it's just not in the cards for you :'-(
There’s still coconut oil and macadamia nuts. I’ll probably end up trying one (or both) after my "see how much of my spare tire I can lose by just powering through undereating", if heavy cream still fail fast at that point.
> I think "overeating" is circular - it's only "over" if you gain weight, and you gain weight cause you overeat.
I think there’s centrally a non-circular definition of "overeating" in healthy individuals. It’s eating past satiety. Not entirely satisfactory (what are the criterion for "healthy" ? what about non-healthy individuals ?), but enough to glimpse a non-entirely-circular thing ? This leads for example to three possible categories for obesity/overweight, one where you have satiety, respect it, and still end up overweight (obesity without overeating, that we can mostly identify to the "modern" case ?), one where you have satiety, regularly decide to eat past it anyway, and end up overweight (overeating-driven-obesity, possibly most of the cases of antiquity case ?), one where you lack satiety altogether (is this only a modern thing or not ?).
> Do you think you are a "normal" case, not like "modern" obesity?
I think you can have a mixture of both models in a single person, and it’s probably my case ?
I don’t think my lack of satiety is caused by the "modern" part. I was not raised in a seed-oils-saturated food environment (I’m french, and I was mostly raised in a traditional-ish food environment of home-baked bread, butter, garden-grown vegetables and locally-sourced meat), I have no memory of "satiety" in childhood, and I have positive evidence I didn’t have it even in pretty early age (my parents : "you wouldn’t stop eating by yourself if you even mildly liked something — but it was not hunger/gluttony, you wouldn’t even be annoyed if we said it was enough").
It also never caused weight gain. It’s the part where "CICO is wrong" is correct, CO very much adapted flexibly to whatever I would throw in to CI.
Then I moved to the city, and that lack of satiety slowly started to translate into weight gain. I believed it to be the "toll of aging", now I’m strongly suspecting it’s just "got seed oiled".
So my working hypothesis is that I have a mild case of both ? My lack of satiety is annoying but not overly problematic by itself and not modern-case-causes-driven. Modern-case causes does make it problematic.
> Have you tried an entire month of white rice? I experienced pretty good satiety on that.
Yes, same (non-)effect as exbread.
> For example there are actually some rare people who are leptin deficient, maybe you're one of them. Have you tested your leptin levels?
I didn’t know that, thanks for the tip
Macadamia looks promising actually. Coconut I think is too metabolically weird due to being mostly SCFA, they just metabolize differently. I don't think it's a great "bread & butter" fuel. Cocoa might actually be better, have you tried that?
I'd agree with your non-circular definition, but by that definition obese people aren't "overeating" even when they gain lots of fat if they're still not satiated. It again leads to the question "Ok what breaks people?" I'm less interested in the word and more in the thing.
Regarding your background, don't forget that it takes a long time to saturated yourself fully with seed oils. So being in France might just have delayed that much longer than it would in America.
I suppose there could be mixed cases.
Interesting on the ex_rice and ex150 results. I suppose whatever your issue is, it's not the same as my (swamping related?) issue.
I do recommend checking the leptin just in case, here at least it's easy & cheap to test next time you see your doctor.
> Cocoa might actually be better, have you tried that?
You mean eating raw cocoa butter ? I’ve heard that’s pretty disgusting, have I been lied to ?
"If you’ve eaten 10% of your dietary fat as linoleic acid for the last 10 years, your body fat is 10% linoleic acid."
This seems like it wouldn't apply to very low fat diets where people might mostly be synthesizing fats from carbs.
True, I’d expect the body fat profile to have much more endogenously synthesized (via DNL) fats like palmitic, oleic, or stearic in that case.
I reckon this post marks an epistemic turning point where you go from the perfect tense (this happened, I saw this, I read this) to the imperative tense (do this).
Frank feedback: dont like it. Harder to stay open minded past this point.
I suppose so. LMK if you find any closed-minded posts in the future :)
That said you’re aware I’ve already previously run an ex150 trial in 2023? So it’s not that I’ve never told people what to do.
Isn't this what experimenting is all about? It's to find what works for you and then to do it. I don't see why it's close-minded. I guess the claim that removing excess LA is necessary? Otherwise, he's just telling people to do lots of N=1 experiments and then settle into a long-term path once a "solution" has been found. I'd also say this post is very open-minded about "it was keto that worked for me, but HCLF might be your silver bullet."
Nice post. Everyone should stop occasionally and take the time to write out their current thinking. Yours looks solid!
Thank you! Also to my surprise, compared to last year, nothing has fundamentally changed. It’s just become a little more complex at the long tail side of things.
Yeah I think we basically got this, it just seems that the fix is awfully slow. I'm a bit freaked out that my yo-yo plan hasn't obviously worked, and that I'm not off the thyroid yet, but it may just be that I haven't given myself long enough to find a new low equilibrium, and maybe there's short term damage from PUFA release during weight loss. I'm about to go visit Mum again so another yo-yo is locked in, and then I'll take my hands off the controls for a bit and we'll know for sure one way or another.
The *other* fly in my ointment is the discovery that a friend of mine also has your 'no previous experience of satiety'. She also thought that 'feeling full' was literally stomach stretched to bursting, rather than a metaphor for 'Don't want to eat anything the thought is repulsive', and has been on mad CICO-style starvation and exercise cycles her whole life. It did work, she's usually a pretty normal weight with a tendency to run to fat if she relaxes her discipline, but I can't imagine the willpower it took.
She's only recently felt real satiety under the influence of tirzepatide, and now she can understand what I've been banging on about these last few years. She thought I was just talking gibberish before.
What freaks me out is that it looks like she's always eaten a pretty PUFA-free diet. We went through here whole life history. Not strictly PUFA-free, but not much of it. In fact not much in the way of processed food at all... Hmmm.
I think your yo-yo plan would take much more volume under the loss/gain curve and therefore time to see measurable results. Of the pure weight lost/gained each time, a lot will be water weight, and your actual "fat replacement" rate is likely not as big as you'd expect.
And yea, short term damage would be expected upon PUFA release.
I suppose my strength has always been that I have absolutely no discipline. Which is why I make a decent programmer.
If you do remember, what is her normal diet like?
> absolutely no discipline. Which is why I make a decent programmer.
Hang on, laziness, arrogance and hubris I have; we have to be impulsive too now? I don't think I can be bothered...
Last weekend I was just going to relax, but then I couldn't bring myself to do it..
> If you do remember, what is her normal diet like?
Cooks all her own stuff, doesn't eat out much, won't buy anything with more than four ingredients, lots of pasta, does like chicken and sausages, and does buy that dreadful 'spreadable' butter although I don't think she uses much of it it's just for toast, she also buys real butter for cooking. I'll eat her cooking without the slightest worry as long as she promises she's checked for sulphites.
Literally doesn't like most processed crap because it tastes rancid and oily to her. Which is not something I'd noticed until I deliberately cut all the vegetable oil out of my diet.
She's definitely lightly PUFA'd like everyone else is, but probably not as much as most English people, but her childhood was all wholesome 1980s home-cooked stuff, and there's no big obvious source of linoleic acid like my commercial chip habit.
If all I knew about her was her diet I'd predict she'd be about as low PUFA as any modern person is unless they're deliberately anti-seed-oilz, and yet she's literally never experienced satiety before the drugs, she's been dieting since she was a teen and has never had a healthy relationship with food.
The thing is, LA is so sneaky and fat so energy dense that it doesn't take much.
Mayo: soybean oil, water, egg yolks, vinegar. 4 ingredients. Chicken or (pork) sausage might be enough on its own. A tablespoon of spreadable "butter" might be enough.
Maybe she's just "lucky" and her sense of satiety is extremely whacked by the LA. Maybe it's something else. If she's willing to try going off the drugs, you could ask her to run some experiments. E.g. will she experience satiety on ex150? Plain white rice? 100% potato diet?
Or maybe just leave her be. Not everyone likes experimenting.
> Or maybe just leave her be. Not everyone likes experimenting.
Yeah, pretty sure she won't play our games...
There are handful of restaurants that are finally understanding the problem with excess LA/omega-6 fats. Seed Oil Scout is a phone app that uses crowdsourcing to identify such establishments and make it easier to dine out “safely”. I have no financial ties with them, but invite you to check them out!
I have checked it out! I rarely eat at restaurants, but I’ve used it before the few times I went to one.
Hi Ex, long-time reader, first time commenter. Interesting post as always. I wanted to ask: What would you do if you had the resources of an academic lab or government agency?
I don't know if this is your priority, but top of my mind is proving the PUFA theory to a mainstream scientific audience. If removing PUFA became mainstream advice, I imagine it could be cut from the food chain fairly quickly. It seems like the problem is that it's hard to prove given the long recovery timeline you describe. Some initial thoughts:
1. Run a large-sample size trial with a strictly controlled diet with 0 PUFA for as long as possible. If there are statistically significant benefits within a couple months, that would be a strong start to building evidence.
2. Study ways to speed up linoleic acid depletion within the body - this makes any future cures & clinical trials faster.
Thanks for documenting your journey in public. This type of open science is a great contribution to society.
Something similar to what you’re suggesting, plus larger scale adipose tissue studies of people.
E.g. the 0 PUFA diet would still be run on people that are highly likely very PUFA’d, so the results might not mean that much if the study isn’t years long.
Studying the fat metabolism & adipose levels of the few mysteriously healthy people today would be interesting too.
Great post! Feel I could share this to friends who might be interested in what I am talking about or doing myself to a certain extent when they're curious as to why I eat the way I do.
Also:
>Reduce salt & glutamate
Another benefit is that it can reduce the intense deliciousness of food causing you to overeat.
The difference between me using MSG and salt vs keeping food "bland" is staggering.
With the former I'll usually eat until I am quite full — still comfortable but definitely could've eaten less.
With the latter I'll eat until I am like fine and comfortable — I could easily go running right away and not feel like I'd have too much food in my belly.
The salt/glutamate/sauce aspect is interesting. I ate WAY more white rice when covered in (salty, glutamate-y) tomato sauce (PUFA free). I couldn’t tell you if the effect is “metabolic” maybe via the polyol/fructose pathway, or simply “well your food is more delicious, duh!” but it was very noticeable.
Basically I wouldn’t stop eating white rice + tomato sauce until the bowl was empty. Then maybe I wouldn’t make a new one. But without the sauce, the white rice would become boring in the middle of the bowl and I’d put it down.
Could be that a required ingredient of ex150/heavy cream cement truck satiety has always been “low sodium/glutamate in the ad lib portion of the diet?”
I wouldn’t say it takes the “pleasure” out of eating this way, but it takes the “excess, addictive” pleasure out. In terms of flavor I don’t ever miss salt or, now, even tomato sauce - my meal is still extremely delicious to me.
But I sure did stop eating earlier on the ad lib rice.
I also dig this a lot! I read the entire article which is rare for me because I either get bored or confused. Not the case here. Thank you for taking the time to share your experiments with us.
What are your thoughts or experiences with carageenan? To find heavy whipping cream in the US without it costs a bunch.
I am in the newborn phase(started 2 months ago) of my high fat/low carb/moderate protein experiment so I have much to learn. I’m buckled up for the long haul and reading about your experiments will be beneficial! :)
It is ultra thick, not sure if that is because of the carageenan. I have tried raw heavy cream before but I find the taste to be a bit off-putting….tastes like a cow is standing nearby, lol.
It has been a lot of trial and error. Far too much protein in the beginning. But I do believe it helped me to kick the carbs. I’ve been a chronic dieter most of my life, so I’m ready to have a calm and steady eating regime that will help me to lose a good bit of stubborn fat and something I will adhere to for the rest of my life.
I didn't care for raw cream either. Went bad within a few days in the fridge, too!
Agreed, after decades of frantically gaining fat & trying new stuff to get it off, just being calm & collected about food without instantly gaining fat is a godsend!
I got lucky in that there was a brand available that only had gellan gum, not carrageenan. I have done carrageenan cream off and on when traveling or no other is available, but I prefer not to. Haven’t had any acute side effects but the cream feels… granulated? Like there’s powder in it, lol.
How’s it going for the first 2 months?
I like it
Thanks!
> Scales that pretend to measure your body weight tend to be extremely inaccurate.
I think you meant to say "body fat" here?
Whoops! Fixed.
Rebuttal for https://cremieux.substack.com/p/is-seed-oil-intake-correlated-with?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5v04a0 ?
He seems uninterested in honest discussion, as evidenced by his behavior on Twitter. So not gonna bother.
The nice thing about not addressing Cremieux is that whatever he says doesn't matter: you've found what works for you, so who cares what anyone else says? N=1 is king.
There's no downside to removing seed oils, so let everyone else take their GLP-1 RAs and/or statins and see where we're all at in 10-20 years. Even if removing seed oils were harmful, you can always regularly check your blood labs and stop if things start looking/feeling iffy. But I've yet to meet someone where that was the case. On the contrary, all the other common micro-benefits like no sunburn, no headaches, no joint pain, more energy, no brain fog, better sleep, more regular bowel movements, less gas, are just icing on the cake.
The bigger issue is that I've yet to see any of the pro-seed-oil camp make any argument for *what else* could be causing the sorry metabolic state our world is in. And, no, "ultra-processed food" isn't going to cut it. CICO is dead, too. Do we need to start looking into dough conditioners, artificial dyes, or something else?
Well said. Who am I gonna believe, Cremiuex' studies or my *checks watch* 84lbs weight loss? My "incurable" Non-24 being cured? shrug.gif
Fair 👍
"If you had eaten 10% pufa, your stored body fat is 10% pufa"
It doesn't follow. Perhaps pufa is preferenrially burned. In any case, some body fat is converted from excess carbs.
It’s not exactly precise, and you are right there are factors like DNL. But this roughly happened in the LA Veterans study.
“PUFA is preferentially burned” does not seem to be true in a meaningful way for this. It is still stored if you eat it, even if you don’t gain weight.
DNL does contribute, but it seemed a small factor in LA Veterans. It’s probably a massive factor if you eat a near-zero fat diet and most of your fat comes from DNL.