The Longest Refeed

Another win for Modern PUFA theory? Very optimistic.

Narrator’s house during the last refeed

Last month’s experiment, ex150nosauce+ACV-6, left me at a new all-time low (ATL) of 206.3lbs. This came after a 17 day plateau, and subsequently eating salmon instead of beef for the remaining 5 days of the experiment.

I wrote the blog post reviewing that experiment on day 2 of the refeed, and in retrospect you can already see what’s about to happen, but I thought this refeed was unique & special enough to warrant more reporting.

Some of you might’ve already seen me gushing about this on Twitter, Reddit, or here in the comments.

What’s the big deal, anyway?

People keep asking me about my refeeds. Why do I do them? Wouldn’t I lose weight faster if I didn’t refeed? Do I think they’re necessary?

1. I don’t think they’re strictly necessary in a nutritional sense. This is the reason I did them initially: I was embarking on an ultra-protein restricted diet, and everyone was telling me I was going to die immediately. I had no experience with it and was not very familiar with the clinical studies on required protein amounts, so I thought re-feeding on high-protein keto every 30 days would ensure that I wouldn’t keel over.
   
   Since then I’ve changed my mind on this. Studies of nitrogen excretion show that almost all healthy, active, adult men are fine and nitrogen-stable on 40g of protein per day. My diet gives me about that much and I’m not particularly active.
   
   I’ve also since learned that going severely below the 40g/day causes me very distinct hunger symptoms within 4-5 days that won’t go away until I eat protein, but even eating ~25g of protein makes them disappear within minutes.
   
   In short, I am no longer worried about “secret, sneaky” protein deficiency. I have a much better grasp of where the thin blue protein line is, and I seem to be able to get very rapid feedback if I fly to close to the (protein deficient) sun.
   
   

2. I don’t think I’d lose fat faster if I didn’t refeed. It might look like that because on these experiments my weight tends to slowly drop, then jump up when I refeed, and then I have to lose that refeed weight again.
   
   But let’s look at this graph, which is my weight over nearly the entirety of last month’s experiment:

   

   Does it really seem that the big refeed weight spike held me back? I don’t think so. I was back down below my previous low after 8 days or so, and then I bounced around flat for 17 days straight.
   
   Whatever the rapid, linear loss of “temporary/water” weight is from the peak back to the old low or beyond, it seems to be a completely different mechanism to whatever happens after.
   
   If I barely reached my old weight before the end of the experiment and jacked it back up with a refeed, I could see this argument. But it seems clear that I’m losing the refeed weight quickly and predictably, and then something else is holding me back from further fat loss. (Of course I think it’s PUFA in my adipose tissue.)
   
   In the past, I did experiment with not doing refeeds a few times, and that did not seem to help.
   
   

3. Psychological benefits of the refeeds are probably a serious advantage. As much as I still love ex150 after 3.5 years of doing it nearly every day, it sure helps never being more than 30 days away from eating practically whatever I want (except high-PUFA things that would cause lasting damage. Luckily, I tend to not like these foods anyway.)
   
   Initially my refeeds were just higher in protein and keto foods that weren’t good staples, and would consist of beef jerky, steak, keto protein bars, and dark chocolate.
   
   After I noticed that the low-PUFA diet seemed to have permanently fixed my Non-24 circadian rhythm condition, and I could eat tons of (low-PUFA) carbs again, my refeeds shifted more towards starchy or swampy foods.
   
   One of the foods I missed most over my decade of keto was, surprisingly, lentils, and to a lesser degree beans. I also really got into white rice, and so I’ve been making rice & bean stews on refeeds ever since. I also got into making my own bread, and I eat a lot more sugar on refeeds these days, e.g. typically milk chocolate, butter cookies, ice cream, or chocolates instead of super dark 85%+ chocolate like I used to.
   
   I do eat a handful of pure sugar candy here and there, but I just usually don’t crave them. Pretty much the only variant I consistently buy are sour gummies of various kinds, and I suspect it’s more the sourness lol. I don’t particularly care for regular gummies.
   
   Even the old high-protein keto refeeds opened up a ton of possibilities, and now with the ability to swamp if PUFA free, you can really eat quite decadently. Steak, butter cookies, chocolates, ice cream.. this is pretty much the most opulent and delicious diet you can eat. Yea, I still avoid PUFAs, but the PUFA-laden foods tend to actually be less delicious and more junky anyway than their traditional, saturated fat-laden counterparts.
   
   Fried chicken & doritos with soybean ranch/queso sauce might be more “hyper-palatable” than butter cookies and ribeye steak in the technical sense of making you overeat, but they’re clearly low-quality trash & not as “delicious.” Nobody pays extra for PUFA trash “foods,” they’re just cheap, ubiquitous, and addictive.
   
   

4. A new reason for refeeds that I probably valued subconsciously, but that really came to the fore this time: they are a measuring stick for my ability to metabolize a more “regular” diet and more “normal” foods.
   
   If you think about it: losing 85lbs on a heavy cream or pure white rice diet is cool & healthy and probably worth the trade off vs. being morbidly obese and in constant pain.
   
   But wouldn’t it be even cooler to be able to eat ribeyes, butter cookies, and chocolate ice cream every day and still have the exact same benefits? Seems like a pareto improvement to me!
   
   While “it takes 4-8 years to deplete your body of PUFAs” makes our Modern PUFA Theory (MPT) hard to prove/disprove and somewhat of a grind, it’s also a pretty optimistic promise long-term: unlike keto, low-fat, or carnivore, where people just declare entire macronutrients as total no-go zones for life, MPT promises that you only have to avoid one specific type of fat forever (omega-6 PUFA linoleic acid). Once you’re sufficiently depleted, after the aforementioned 4-8 years, you’re supposed to be able to eat the decadent diet of your grandparents, back when foods contained much lower amounts of linoleic acid because not everyone had replaced butter and beef tallow with soybean oil.
   
   The monthly refeed, besides the points above, therefore acts as a “are we there yet?” test. I didn’t fully, consciously realize this until last week, when I had…

The Longest Refeed

Alright, this entire preamble was just to explain why this particular refeed was so different, and why it made me so optimistic.

The refeed lasted for 6 days. For comparison, the last refeeds were typically 2.5 days, 3.5 days, or sometimes 4 days. Now what determines the length of my refeeds? Nothing formal. I tend to go to the store the day before or the day of, and buy everything that looks delicious. Sometimes I make a list beforehand of things I definitely want to buy, but this time I did not.

I tend to massively overeat on refeeds because 1. swamping and high protein still tend to make me massively overeat and 2. because eating a large number of delicious foods in a short time frame can incentivize this.

This time I didn’t have a written list, just because I didn’t actually crave anything in particular. I was pretty confident I was going to make bread again and a rice & bean stew, but I still had the flour from last month.

Because the overeating tends to make me feel like crap the latter half of refeeds, but my satiety signal has been completely turned off by the swampy & high-protein foods, I usually end up wondering how I could cut the refeeds short, or prevent myself from overeating so much. (Not refeeding at all is, obviously, one solution to this problem.)

So I went to the store the last day of the experiment and bought delicious foods for the following day. I bought rice, lentils, beans, some vegetables to put into the stew, milk chocolate, chocolates, beef sticks, havarti cheese, and probably a bit more.

Day 1

Day 1 of the refeed went just as expected: the first meal, or often even several meals, I’d usually gotten very strong satiety no matter what I ate. This used to be a pretty miraculous feeling: satiety from a 3-egg omelette, or butter cookies, or a ribeye steak.

Unfortunately, it usually only took a 4-24 hours for this “ability to get satiated on anything” to disappear, and then I’d be in that state that made me reach morbid obesity in the first place: ravenous hyperphagia after eating 4,500kcal in a sitting and being physically bloated to the point of pain. (So much for “filling.”)

Day 2

But day 2 of this refeed I woke up and I was… stuffed. Not merely physically, although I also just felt like my belly was quite full, but I was VERY satiated. I only managed to drink a single (!) creamy coffee that morning. Usually I drink at least 2, and sometimes 4. But I was immediately hit by cement-truck satiety.

This was different, and I sort of loved it. Eating a ton of food on day 1 and then waking up super satiated is literally what I’d been touting as a measure of metabolic health for years: if people are obese, how come they don’t wake up every day feeling “stuffed” and satiated?! Based on the Bucket of Calories theory of obesity, wouldn’t we expect all that body fat to go right into fat people’s blood, flooding them with carolies and keeping them satiated? Or do they have a leak somewhere?

CICO steelman

By noon of day 2 I regained the ability to drink 2 more creamy coffees, and I ate a few of my refeed foods, including home made bread.

But I couldn’t eat 2 slices of the bread in one sitting. Now these are pretty thick slices admittedly, because I’m cutting them by hand out of a bread machine sized (=small) loaf. Think nearly an inch thick (that’s 0.013 fathoms for my European readers).

I spread some butter on these slices, and would add either sliced cheese or cottage cheese or something like that.

But even eating a single one of these slices was like getting hit by a sledgehammer of satiety. When I’d start on a second one, I’d be unable to finish it every time, and so I’d have half-eaten slices of bread lying around much of the day.

Now don’t get me wrong, the homemade bread is DELICIOUS. I’d say it’s probably the tastiest bread I’ve ever had. It’s thick, it’s dense, it’s earthy, it has the perfect consistency. None of that spongy PUFA shit they sell at the store, where you need to eat half a loaf to reach any sense of having eaten food.

(By the way, the recipe is trivial: flour, water, yeast. I don’t even use salt, still works. My favorite was half white flour, half whole grain flour. I use organic flour like King Arthur brand to avoid “fortification.”)

But despite it being super tasty and topped by butter & havarti cheese, I was unable to take another bite. It was just too.. not filling, too satiating.

I still hadn’t finished the pretty modest sized bread machine loaf by that night, so I didn’t end up making the rice & bean stew yet and put the bread in a ziploc bread to prevent it from drying out overnight.

Day 3

Day 3 I woke up and… I was HAMMERED with satiety. It was like a satiety hangover. I once again only managed to drink a single creamy coffee despite my best intentions.

It continued like day 2. I had zero desire or even ability to eat much until around noon, and instead went out and did a bunch of stuff.

Around noon I regained the ability to nibble on stuff, and I finished the last 1.5 or so slices of my bread.

I also finished some of the cheese, ate a few of the beef sticks, and an ice cream sandwich I grabbed in the store.

I got incredible satiety from the ice cream sandwich. Bizarre. I came home and couldn’t eat.

I finished day 3 without having even entertained the idea of making the rice & bean stew.

Day 4, 5, 6

I woke up incredibly satiated on day 4, too. This was bizarre, was I living in a time loop? This is how Groundhog Day starts, isn’t it? (By the way, I highly recommend you watch as many movies about time loops as possible.)

Getting initial “satiety on any food” was normal for refeeds for a few hours, maybe a full day. But 4 days?!

To make a long story short, the ability to get satiated on pretty much any type of food never went away. I don’t even think it diminished. I ate ice cream sandwiches 4 days in a row, and they hit me with crazy satiety every time.

Like they should! It’s high-flour, high-sugar, high-protein, AND high dairy fat! The combination of flour, sugar, and dairy fat traditionally was peak food. It’s peak energy, allowing you to eat more carolies more easily and more palatably than pretty much anything else out there. Very few people can choke down a jar of beef tallow, and many even balk at me drinking a pint of heavy cream.

But everybody can enjoy a delicious ice cream sandwich, or eat tallow fries, or butter cookies.

And people used to do this all the time and not get obese or overweight on it. They certainly weren’t counting carolies or exercising to stake off the fat gain.

I kept underestimating the time it would take me to finish off my decadent foods. At one point I made a second loaf of bread, because the first one had been so delicious. One time I managed to force down a second entire slice of bread, but it was literal torture. Most of the time, I’d eat 1 at a time, which seemed the right amount.

I did end up making that rice & bean stew with plenty of vegetarbles, cooked in plenty of butter, with an entire pound of ground beef thrown in, fried to a brown crisp.

I ate on that stew for 2 entire days. It was swampy as heck, very high carb and decent protein from the rice, beans, and beef, and despite all that it was super satiating.

On the last day, just to prove a point, I even bought a regular sugar coke. I usually don’t even like sugary cokes on refeeds, I’ve just gotten so used to the “zero” taste and soda with actual sugar feels weird and sticky to me now.

But I wanted to try it, so I bought a 12oz bottle of coke with the the red cap and drank it.. and got HAMMERED with satiety. (I also had a Twix with it, and those contain palm oil which tends to be 10% linoleic acid. That’s about the biggest amount of linoleic acid I tend to eat on my refeeds.)

Satiety from Twix and sugary Coca-Cola. After stuffing my face for 6 days. What was even happening?!

Because I underestimated how much satiety I was now getting from EVERYTHING, it took me 6 days to eat the things I bought for a 3-4 day refeed, supplemented possibly by the ice cream sandwiches, the coke, and the Twix.

I ate the last beef stick from that initial pack the evening of day 6. Normally, I’d have destroyed the entire pack on the drive home.

Wild. I had never experienced anything like it. Was I in heaven? Had I died?

Why? What mean?!

I’m not 100% confident why this happened. In comparison, the literal same foods in the near exact same amounts had not given me lasting satiety just 30 days prior. Sure, the first half day I’d get satiated, but after that I’d eat a box of butter cookies on the drive home from the store, and then eat half a loaf of bread w/ butter and cheese, and then start cooking my real lunch.

In that sort of “satiety-less” hyperphagia that defined most of my life on non-stupid mono internet diets, I could easily eat 4,500kcal in a sitting and still be ravenous.

This time, I was basically not hungry a single time for the entire 6 day refeed, and I had to force myself to eat just to get it over with.

So it wasn’t the foods I was eating on the refeed, per se, cause those were the same.

What changed? Ideas:

1. Maybe I finally depleted the linoleic acid in my body fat enough? I hadn’t looked at this for a while, but my own linoleic acid adipose depletion calculator predicts that if I started around 25% linoleic acid in my body fat from years of Standard American Keto, and I consistently ate 2.5% on ex150, I should be at around 5-6% linoleic acid stored now after 3.5 years (42 months):

   

   Now 5-6% isn’t the 2-3% we think it should be, but maybe I had crossed a threshold?
   
   

2. Or maybe it was that I’d eaten salmon instead of beef for the 5 days preceding the refeed? I had eaten salmon instead of beef for an entire month before on ex115salmon, and while I reached a new all-time low the results weren’t entirely positive:

   

   Eating salmon I lost weight, but then plateaued and regained much of it

3. Was it the double dose of Apple Cider Vinegar I’d taken during the last experiment? After hitting that plateau, I’d started taking a second serving in the evenings, around dinner time, about halfway through the 30 days. Maybe that had finally kicked in, possibly causing the 1lb drop to the 206lbs ATL on the last day, and the lasting satiety in the subsequent refeed? (I’ve been keeping this up ever since then, even during the refeed.)

4. Was it a combination of depleting my body fat omega-6 AND upping my omega-3 intake via fish? If what’s important is really the ratio, then dumping a fixed (and relatively small) amount of omega-3 from salmon onto a raging omega-6 trash fire would not necessarily be expected to work. If you’ve eaten a lifetime of the SAD or SAK, you’ll be so high in stored o6 that no amount of salmon could balance it out.
   
   What the Omega-Balance/Ratio people like to forgot is to do the math: 1tbsp of soybean oil would require you to eat 5lbs of wild salmon to keep the balance.
   [Edit: After a reader commented on this I re-did the math, and it’s only about 2.6lbs of wild sockeye salmon to get the equivalent omega-3 that 1tbsp of soybean oil contains in omega-6. I might’ve been thinking of 1tbsp of linoleic acid, but even soybean oil is “only” 50% LA.]
   
   Not only is that unrealistic and none of them do it, it doesn’t even take into account that the fats we eat get stored in our body fat, and, over time, define its fatty acid profile.
   
   My adipose flux calculator predicts how much total fat and how much linoleic acid is released every day at varying levels of body fat and LA%, here the original 25% assumed:

   

   That’s right, 60g a day of linoleic acid just from my own body fat, or the equivalent of 8tbsp of soybean oil. Good luck eating 40lbs of salmon to balance that. [Edit: it’s only 21lbs of salmon.]
   
   Now compare to the expected level of LA in my body fat now, let’s go with the upper end of 6% and also a slightly lower total fat mass from a more recent DEXA:

   

   Only 12g/day of linoleic acid, or ~2tbsp of soybean oil. That’s not perfect, as I hope to achieve <6g one day, but it’s certainly much better. It’s less than 1/3 of the original amount, and would only require 10lbs of salmon to counter (lol). That’s still a lot, but it is much, much better. [Edit: it’s only 5lbs of salmon.]

Positively Optimistic

Of course I don’t know for sure, and it could’ve been a fluke. And, yes, I think I still gained a bit of fat during this refeed. I’m certainly not 100% metabolically fixed yet.

But this is what you’d expect to happen if Modern PUFA Theory was correct, and you stayed the course of avoiding PUFAs, and deplete your adipose tissue.

I find this incredibly motivating. MPT seems the most correct of all the hypotheses of what caused the obesity epidemic and in particular my own morbid obesity only a few years ago. And we’ve seen a bunch of incredible anecdotes of people reversing morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, sunburn, mental & physical conditions of all sorts, including my own aforementioned Non-24 disorder.

The somewhat unfortunate thing is that you have to really believe and stick it out for a couple of years sometimes. I got “lucky” in that I was immediately rewarded with incredible weight loss and feeling great when I started ex150. 20lbs lost in the first month will motivate you, and 45lbs down after 3-4 months.. I was a believer.

I stumbled into the low-PUFA thing by accident and was obviously motivated by the weight loss and the much improved quality of life.

But there were improvements that I only got years later, and this ability to reach satiety on cookies, ice cream, chocolates, and other decadent swampy foods, is a first.

And, so far, it seems to likely depend on eating some fish. The OmegaQuant tests from long-time omega-6 depleters tend to be quite good in terms of the o3:o6 balance even in total absence of eating any fish or similar seafood. It’s commonly assumed that this is because omega-3 and omega-6 use similar enzymatic pathways in your bodies, and an excess of o6 “blocks” the body’s ability to use o3 in many places.

You can jack up your omega balance quite a bit by just eating fish a handful of times a week, and it tends to stay in your body for some time too. Depending on tissue type it depends on how long, but the red blood cells typically measured in most Omega tests stick around 3-4 months.

I’ve taken OmegaQuant Complete tests after eating fish previously, e.g. after ex115salmon and ex_sardines. Both times my o6:o3 ratio was markedly lower, hitting 4.7 and 5.7 respectively. But that’s just borderline “Ok” and a good ratio would be 2:1, with 1:1 being the goal. The best I’ve ever seen was 1.1:1 from my friend Steve, who eats the cleanest, lowest-PUFA diet I’ve ever seen, and eats tons of wild seafood on top. He’s a real salmon snob and won’t even let me non-Alaskan, non-Sockeye salmon for fear of it being contaminated lol. I expect 1:1 to 2:1 to be the endgame for most people, realistically.

Is it therefore a sensible strategy to eat wild caught salmon 1-2x a week, at least until your adipose tissue is sufficiently depleted to reach a good Omega balance without eating any?

This experience certainly seems to hint at that. I still think that, once you’re depleted to normal, healthy o6 levels after 4-8 years, you’re likely to no longer need to eat the fish.

And it doesn’t seem to do as much when fighting the raging trash fire of o6 most people’s diet has them eat & that they have stored in their body fats.

But it could be that it has an effect on the margin, and that enough avoiding of o6 improves your balance enough for the o3 from wild salmon to actually make a difference in satiety, and maybe other things.

In any case, I’m on day 5 of ex150salmon right now and have lost 13.5 of the ~20lbs I gained during the refeed. I do suspect that I did gain some fat over the 6 days, but I’m not sure how much.

If just 5 days of eating salmon had this drastic an effect on my refeed satiety, I’m hoping that 30 days will be even stronger? We’ll see next refeed.

I’m also planning on taking another OmegaQuant Complete toward the end of this experiment and see if the ratios there have improved since the last salmon experiment.