Non-metabolic Diet Hacks

Beyond macros and the metabolic impact of food

A while after I first posted about having lost 43lbs eating mostly heavy cream, somebody commented something like this:

“Well, duh! The cream has nothing to do with it!

All you’re doing is home-cooking every meal, never eating out, getting the majority of your calories from one bland mono-food (cream), while still deriving psychological satisfaction and appetite reduction from a hyper-palatable daily meal.

You also have an extremely repetitive meal plan, eating the same exact meals every day, which limits your hedonistic desire to overeat on novel & stimulating foods.

All the while you’re leveraging coffee to increase lipolysis, helping liberate fatty acids from adipose tissue to suppress appetite further.”

(I don’t remember all the exact details, but you get the gist of it.)

And, uh, yea, I suppose I am doing all those things. I guess I picked up a couple of subconscious habits after nearly 20 years of dieting.

So, while I think the metabolic effects of food are extremely important, I thought I’d go into some of the non-metabolic “hacks” I use on ex150. Most of them I didn’t do on purpose, they just kind of .. happened.

Delicious meal every day

I think this one’s underrated. If you’re gonna lose 100lbs, it’s going to take a while. Last time, it took me nearly 2 years. This time, I’m on track for roughly the same pace (down 70lbs as of today).

You can’t suffer and “willpower through” for 2 years. It has to be sustainable, and that means it has to be satisfying and fun.

I love my meal on ex150. It’s the most delicious meal I’ve ever had, even after eating it nearly every day for over a year. I look forward to it every single day, and, honestly, I miss the burned-to-a-crisp ground beef on my current fat fast.

There seems to be a lot of religious overtones around diet and fat loss. You have to suffer. You have to abstain. You have to deny yourself. You can’t indulge.

Fuck that.

I’d much rather lose the fat indulging and eating a decadent “hyper-palatable” meal every single day.

Seriously, this is a huge psychological factor. Find something that’s delicious, decadent, that you love - and that fits into your diet.

Doesn’t have to be exactly my meal. Maybe you’re doing a low-fat, low-BCAA, low-PUFA “Glass Noodle” style diet. Make the most delicious glass noodle ramen you can think of.

You’re not going to make it if every day is abstinence & sacrifice. Those don’t last.

Ad-lib vs. non-ad-lib foods

That said, I don’t eat the hyper-palatable, most-delicious food ad libitum ever. I used to - when I gained 100lbs.

My portion is extremely limited. The first few weeks it seemed small, because I was used to eating heaping plates full of the same stuff. But I got used to it quickly, and now I can’t go back - when I eat more during diet breaks, it just seem too much. I lose interest after the first few bites.

On the other hand, I think it is important that you eat ad libitum energy on your diet. In my case, that’s dairy fat - heavy cream. If you’re restricting calories to a point where your body can’t cough up the difference, aka you get into an internal deficit, your metabolism will begin to shut down. That’s not good for fat loss, and it’s also not sustainable. Remember, we’re in this for the long haul.

Maybe this is an important realization: there are certain foods/meals you can ad-lib, and there are others you can’t.

For me, whipped heavy cream and heavy cream in coffee hit that “Goldilocks” spot: delightful, but not delicious enough I’ll eat it just for deliciousness’ sake.

Or maybe that is actually a metabolic effect, and pure dairy fat somehow hits my satiety switch in ways that nothing else does.

In any case, I think there’s a good insight here: while the majority of ad-lib energy on your diet might come from something “boring” like potatoes, or heavy cream, or glass noodles - that doesn’t mean you have to abstain from all delicious foods entirely.

There are certainly foods or ingredients I think you should abstain from entirely, because even tiny amounts have devastating metabolic impacts. For example, seed oils and foods fried in seed oils.

But there’s nothing wrong with tomato sauce & ground beef in principle. It’s just that I can’t stop eating them, and so I cannot have them ad-lib.

That’s fine. I’ll still enjoy my small portion every day, and “fill up on an empty stomach” on the whipped cream.

Repetitive meals over and over, no novelty

This one I honestly don’t do on purpose. In college, my roommate commented that I had apparently eaten the same bacon & eggs for breakfast, every single day, for the past month.

I hadn’t realized that. I just liked bacon & eggs.

I’ve cooked the vast majority of my meals since I was about 20 years old, so almost 2 decades now. I’ve followed various patterns and diets.

But within those diets & patterns I tend to find 1 dish that I eat the majority of the time. Sometimes it’s 2-3, but as I’ve gotten older, my desire for variety has decreased.

Case in point: I just ate the same ex150 meal practically every day for *checks watch* 510 days. And while I missed the variety in the beginning, and used to splurge on diet breaks, I quickly lost interest in the other food. These days, on my diet breaks, I just eat more ground beef, or a steak once in a while. Unless somebody invites me for a home-cooked Christmas dinner or something.

Maybe I’m just autistic, lol. But for dietary purposes and controlling variables, it sure helps if you eat the same thing every day.

At the very least, it’ll minimize the daily weight fluctuations you get from eating wildly different foods. My weight tends to fluctuate within an 1-2lbs range day to day, except when I make drastic diet changes, travel, or otherwise put my body under a lot of stress.

Home cook practically everything

Oh yea, I cook almost all my meals at home, from fresh ingredients.

I did this before, even when I gained 100lbs. So it’s certainly not a panacea. But it is the only way to 100% control what’s in your food.

No matter what restaurant you go to, even if you ask the waiter not to cook your steak in seed oils, you have no idea what they’re really doing.

Most waiters & line cooks probably have no clue what “seed oils” are and they just use the squeeze bottle (filled with soybean oil) to give things a nice sear.

Those vegetables? Sauteed in soybean oil.

That salad dressing? Emulsified soybean oil.

Given that we now know how small an amount of seed oils it takes to wreak havoc on your metabolism and body (i.e., 6g per day, or half a teaspoon), cooking all your food from whole ingredients is really the only way to be 100% sure what you’re eating.

I don’t keep any other foods in the house

“Don’t keep cookies in your house when on a diet” is maybe one of the oldest pieces of diet advice I remember.

I also don’t keep anything else, even if it’s “healthy.” I keep 3-4 days worth of the ingredients for my 1 meal, and I stock up when I get low on anything.

At any given time that means 3-5 quarts of heavy cream, 1-2 bags of frozen vegetables, 1-2 jars each of Rao’s tomato and alfredo sauce, 1-2 bricks of Kerrygold butter, and, currently, a container full of beef suet tallow I rendered myself.

I don’t even currently stock ground beef, because I’m doing ex_savoryfatfast.

Oh, and the remainder of my 1 tub of Fortagen EAA protein, which has a few scoops left and which I’ll hopefully finish exactly with the end of the “fat fast.”

Know your travel food sources

Maybe the 1 exception to the “all restaurant food is tainted” rule, and a staple on road trips: McDonald’s burger patties. Carnivores are all over these because McDonald’s fries them just in their own juices, as confirmed by many former McDonald’s employees. I suppose due to people being allergic to certain oils.

McDonald’s is also maybe the most ubiquitous fast food chain in the country or the world. You can be driving through western Kansas, pull off the interstate at 2am, and there’ll be some golden arches to fuel you with 100% fresh-cooked beef and an acceptable latte. If the latte machine isn’t broken, ugh!

By the way, according to their food calculator, you can eat 2-3 pure Big Mac’s worth of patties per day on ex150.

That said, I only do this on road trips or when otherwise traveling.

Another thing, more of a liquid food: Starbucks heavy cream lattes. If you absolutely, positively know you won’t be able to get any real food that day, this is an easy way of getting 10-14oz of heavy cream in.

Somehow, espresso-based drinks are one of the few foods that aren’t yet tainted by seed oils. Don’t touch any of the food at Starbucks, though.

Caffeine stimulates lipolysis

Not sure if this one matters for reversing obesity, but it might.

I’ve read that bodybuilders use stimulants like caffeine to stimulate lipolysis when cutting for shows.

Thing is, I don’t think that’s a problem (most) obese people have.

Lipolysis is the process of taking the fatty acids out of the “storage form” in your adipose tissue, which is triglycerides. They are then dumped into your blood stream for your body to use.

The more body fat you have, the more fat will be dumped by default. If you test obese people for free fatty acids in their blood, they tend to have a lot. My last blood panel I got free fatty acids tested, and I was above the reference range.

From my understanding, when you get to very low body fat levels, the fat cells are hesitant to give up that fat. Bodybuilders then use stimulants to “squeeze out” the last few percent of body fat from their fat cells, to get to super low levels.

But, as obese or overweight people, we already have more than enough fatty acids in our blood, nearly constantly, from our excess adipose tissue.

Does even more lipolysis help?

I really don’t know, but intuitively I’d suspect no.

Does coffee suppress appetite?

Maybe, but I don’t think “appetite” is the cause of obesity, or that suppressing it can reverse obesity.

Could be that it helps a bit on the margin.

Conclusion

A lot of these tactics feel like useful logistics for diet experimentation. In a perfect world without seed oils, in which nobody is metabolically messed up, we probably don’t need any of these hacks.

But we’re not there, and while we have some decent clues as to what’s going on, and how to get to the end state, this is far from over.

Until then, I’ll stick to my little tactics.