The One In Which I Count Carolies

Can't make Friends without counting some heat energy

For reasons I shall explain, I just counted all my cArOliEs for 7 days. This wasn’t difficult, of course, because I eat the same exact thing every day.

The only difference was that I measured my ad-lib cream consumption, and I weighed how much tallow and butter I was using for my lunch every day instead of just eyeballing it. The tallow & butter only made a minimal difference, but hey, I try.

Quantum Cream

There’s an effect that’s probably called “The Observer Effect” or similar; where people told to merely observe something started (subconsciously?) making changes to affect those results. I suppose it’s like that old adage “What gets measured, gets managed.”

Was I changing my cream consumption now that I was tracking it daily?

Maybe, it’s of course hard to tell. I tried hard not to. Some days when I felt like maybe I could have a bit more, I’d just go for it, just to see if I’d hit “cement-truck satiety” and become a little nauseous.

Results: exactly as expected

I quickly found out that my intuition about my cream consumption is extremely precise, and my day-to-day appetite is accurate in an uncanny way, too.

Here’s what I measured:

As you can see, my beef, tallow, and butter consumption are nearly constant.

When I render my tallow, I pour the hot liquid into a steel ice cube tray to shape it into even cubes. Depending on how deep I fill the tray, these turn out to be around 15-25g each. Trivial to get the same amount within 1-3g each day that way.

The butter I slice off a brick each time, and it’s typically 15-20g. I try to do roughly 50:50 between the grass-fed suet tallow and the butter, because the suet tallow alone is too saturated: without the butter to soften it up, my meal quickly solidifies at room temperature. The stearic acid in it actually does not melt even at body temperature, which makes for a VERY uncomfortable brushing of teeth. Imagine brushing candle wax out from between your teeth. Your best bet is to drink coffee/tea as hot as you can tolerate it, to melt the stearic acid out.

The beef is always 150g (weighed wet, just out of the package). 60g of green vegetables & 80g of sauce are so low in carolies that I didn’t bother noting them down.

The big variable is clearly the cream, the only ad-lib part of ex150. I’d rarely tracked it previously. But, out of curiosity, I did 2 days of just tracking for a day because of a suspicion I was eating too many carolies.

One of those days I consumed 725ml of cream; but later found out that particular cream was lower in fat content. I tested again with my regular cream, and finished that day with 550ml of cream - only 50ml more than when I started out at nearly 300lbs!

But now, having measured consistently for 7 days, it seems that I average just under 650ml/day of cream, for ~2859kcal/day average total energy intake.

The fluctuations range from -17.7% (only consuming 2,350kcal/day) up to +22.3% (~3,500kcal/day). They seem to follow a zig-zag pattern, roughly canceling each other out.

That is about the same or less than the 20% that nutrition labels are allowed (by law) to be off in the U.S., meaning my total caloric variance ad-lib is less or equal to the noise just from the labels.

Here are the carolies graphed over time:

We can easily see that everything but the cream was almost completely flat, and contributed next to nothing to total energy intake.

On the other hand, the cream intake exactly matches the shape of the total energy curve.

Precise appetite

I found it quite fascinating how precise my appetite was. Given that I basically consume ad-lib cream in coffee from waking up to about 3pm, and whipped cream for dinner (sometimes getting seconds, sometimes barely finishing 1 bowl), you’d expect some pretty big swings if appetite wasn’t somehow tied & regulated by energy metabolism. Yet my appetite seems to be pretty exact to within a couple hundred kcals over 2-3 days.

When I underate one day, I made up for it the next day. When I overate, I’d consume less the next.

The day directly after I stopped tracking, after 2 days of higher cream intake, I could barely touch my dinner whipped cream, putting it back in the fridge after just a few spoons.

On the whole, the thing seems to be extremely self-regulating with uncanny precision. Another indication that appetite, if it is working correctly, is an absurdly effective & precise mechanism to match our energy intake to our energy needs.

It’s just that something in the “modern environment” is breaking that mechanism. I guess we’ll never know.

Labeling the Water Doubly

As alluded to in my review of Herman Pontzer’s book Burn, I mentioned that there is now a $1,000 test for consumers to test your actual, real-world TDEE with doubly-labeled water. The company is called Calorify and I think Pontzer is an investor or something in it.

I decided to do this test, and as part of it they ask you to track your macros for a week. Hence this whole carolie counting charade.

The test is pretty simple: you pee in a cup before drinking the doubly-labeled water they send you, then a few hours after. Then you weigh yourself & track macros for a week, and finally pee in a cup again.

You mail them the 3 urine samples and then.. well, I haven’t gotten to that part yet, still waiting on the results. I’ll let you know when they come in.

What to expect

Given that I’ve basically not lost any fat over the last 2 months, I suppose that I should expect my TDEE to equal my caloric intake, i.e. roughly 2,900kcal/day?

On the other hand, that actually seems lower than I’d previously assumed. With my RMR measured at 2,300-2,400kcal/day, only adding 500-600kcal/day in extra expenditure seems… low. Remember, the RMR is merely the body existing, like in a coma. Even sitting up and using your brain at all, which I do from time to time, bUrNs caRoliEs.

Plus, if we look at the chart from Pontzer’s study, 2,900kcal/day seems a little low for 150lbs lean mass individuals (70kg ~= 150lbs):

Given that my RMR has always come out as “exactly as expected” I would assume that my TDEE is over 3,000kcal, closer to 3,300kcal. That would be just about the average for my lean mass.

That said, 2,900kcal is still easily within the distribution we see , which has values as low as ~2,500kcal for individuals of my lean mass. There is a wide individual variance even for the same lean mass, so you never know.

Or maybe CICO is just nonsense and counting heat units is useless :)

Did I lean anything from counting carolies?

I suppose I learned that I was pretty much spot-on with my estimates the whole time, lol. That’s not surprising: I’ve eaten the exact same meal almost every day for over 1.5 years now. It’s pretty easy to visually judge how much cream you’re consuming each day - did you empty a carton? Half a carton?

It’s not surprising that I would’ve built a very good intuition this way.

What is surprising, to me, is how accurate my appetite is. I had kind of, vaguely, felt like I was always more hungry if I’d eaten less cream for 1-2 days, and less hungry the next if I overate.

But for it to be so accurate and zig-zag so predictably is fascinating.

Going Forward

I’ll let you know when the results from Calorify come in. Quite excited to see if my TDEE is lower than I expected at 2,900kcal/day, or if it’s higher, and therefore CICO is nonsense.

My ex150ffinduction experiment is nearly over. Spoiler alert: I very rapidly dipped within 1lb of my previous low during the fat fast week, but then entirely stalled out the remaining 3 weeks on regular ex150.

I’ll write up a report about that shortly. After this, I’ll try a quick 1 week experiment involving coconut oil, just for fun.

Given that The Summer Malaise seems to continue, I’m not entirely sure what I’ll try after that.