What my Protein Refeed looks like

620g protein in 2 days

fat man eating giant feast of grilled meats and bbq (I hope those are tallow fries!)

I’ve been getting a few questions lately about my protein refeeds, and I did a little write up on Reddit replying to someone. That made me think; I could just post that here if anyone’s interested.

Why protein refeeds?

My refeeds evolved a bit over time.

When I first started, I wasn't even sure I'd be able to eat mostly cream for 30 days - so the refeed was a bit of a "reward."

I also thought 150g of beef as my main protein source would be way too low and I was really looking to not die from such low protein, lol. After all, the fitness bros on Twitter were telling me that anyone eating less than 1g/lb of body weight of protein was surely going to lose all their muscle and die within days!

So, at first, I mostly ate my regular "trashy keto" diet on the refeeds, and they took much longer, about 3-7 days. The first few times, I even ate fried chicken and commercial chicken salad from the store. I later discovered all of the sauce in that salad is soybean oil.. ugh. Roast chicken was also common, and I kept being surprised how the roast chicken would be both disgusting (the dry meat, at least) yet not satiating whatsoever.

Interestingly, the contrast between extended ex150 trials and those "trash refeeds" showed me how shitty I felt and how bad my digestion got when I went back to the trashy foods. Then I stumbled upon the r/saturatedfat subreddit and learned about seed oils.

Ever since then my protein refeeds mostly consist of more beef and lots of cheese.

Sometimes chocolate, although I think I've made myself sick of chocolate. I can no longer eat more than 1-2 squares at a time without feeling nauseous. This is coming from someone who routinely ate a whole bar of 85-95% dark chocolate every day for most of a decade.

I don't measure the protein, and one of the biggest challenges has turned out to be that I buy so much delicious looking food that I can't eat it all during the refeed. This time I deliberately scaled back due to past experiences.

Experience has also taught me that I tend to buy everything under the sun, and then get sick of protein halfway through the refeed, hoping it would already be over.

How often do I refeed?

In the beginning, I did an extended refeed (3-7 days) after pretty much every 30-day trial of ex150.

Over time I’ve started intuitively doing them less often, and for shorter amounts of time. At some point I decided that I didn’t actually need the protein refeeds, and started going without them between trials, just going directly from one trial into the next. That’s e.g. what happened most of this year so far.

This was my first real protein refeed since the holidays, and so the first time in about 3.5 months that I haven’t eaten “very, very low” protein (<45g/day).

Am I worried? No.

I do regular DEXA scans and blood work, and neither of them show any drastic indications that I’m harming myself or losing any lean mass.

My most recent protein refeed

This last refeed was just exactly 2 days. Here's what I ate (not in temporal order, just in the order I thought of it):

Day 1

• Breakfast: 150g Teton Grass-Fed Beef Maple Sausage Links

• Dinner: ~1lb NY strip steak w/ cream sauce + blue cheese sauce (made myself by heating cream and melting blue cheese into it)

• The rest of the blue cheese

• One parmigiano reggiano cheese

• One sheep milk + honey soft cheese

• 50g of 90% chocolate, had to distribute across day due to aforementioned chocolate issue

• 300g of pretty lean roast beef from the deli counter. Got a 1.5lb container that I ate over the 2 days.

Day 2

• Breakfast: 150g Teton Grass-Fed Beef Maple Sausage Links

• Lunch thru dinner: ex450, basically my normal ex150 meal but scaled up to 1lb of ground beef, more vegetables, more tomato sauce. I also added a whole mozzarella cheese to it. Took me like 4 meals to finish it, I can't eat big protein meals any more I get too full/bloated lol.

• Rest of the roast beef, so another 300g

• Another sheep milk soft cheese

• Rest of the 90% chocolate, so another 50g

Note: When I say "whole cheese," think of those wrapped up pieces at the deli counter. Because I love different cheeses and I know I can't eat that much over the 2 days, I get a lot of variety, and it's not that much per type of cheese. I think it might've been 1-1.5lb of cheese in total across the 4-5 varieties I had.

I did not make my usual dinner whipped cream during the refeed, even though I was typically not “satiated” from the high-protein food, just physically full.

I did, however, continue to drink lots of coffee with lots of cream in it throughout the day.

Macros (protein, really)

Day 1

150g beef breakfast sausage: 28g
1lb NY strip steak: 120g
300g roast beef: 55g
200g parmigiano reggiano: 64g *
200g blue stilton: 42g *
200g sheep’s milk cheese: 53g *

Total protein: 362g (7x my normal protein)

Day 2

150g beef breakfast sausage: 28g
1lb 80/20 ground beef: 78g
300g roast beef: 55g
200g sheep’s milk cheese: 53g *
200g mozzarella: 44g *

Total protein: 258g (5x my normal protein)

(* I didn’t weigh the cheeses, but 200g on average seems about right)

Protein refeeds still make me feel terrible

I was painfully full most of those 2 days, and I already hated it on day 2. Glad when it was over. Another motivator to not do these too often, or too long. The protein just sits in my stomach like a brick, forever.

My blood glucose went up significantly, instead of 70s/low 80s I was now constantly high 90s and even above 100 - even hours after ceasing to eat. The following is about a week’s worth of CGM data. You’ll notice I barely even touched 90mg/dL for most of the week, then suddenly the average shot way up the last 2 days on the protein refeed.

This shows you that the common line “gluconeogenesis is demand-driven” is false. There wasn’t any change in demand during those 2 days, my activity level didn’t increase whatsoever. If anything, it went down because I felt bloated and tired the whole refeed.

My weight also went up 7lbs, but back down 6.5lbs as of day 4 of eating low protein again:

Workouts: drastically improved

The high protein did wonders for my x3 workouts.

I set 3 new PRs, one of them insane - more than doubled my previous reps in one exercise. My muscles also looked much fuller.

I don’t know if this is muscle glycogen, but that would be my first suspect. I suspect that the body keeps muscle (and liver?) glycogen at a certain level, depending on supply (blood glucose) and demand (activity). My activity level is not particularly high, and so when I eat low carbs and low protein, there’s no need to keep my muscles topped off.

This materializes in me not being able to do very many reps. I’ve noticed I can still lift the same 1 rep max, but I can do way fewer reps at the same resistance level.

After topping off with tons of protein, much of which presumably got turned into glucose (see the CGM chart) and then glycogen, my body probably decided there was enough to go around, and raised my muscle glycogen stores.

Therefore the number of reps I could do dramatically increased, especially in those exercises that are less strength-based and more glycogen-demanding, those with say 10+ reps per set.

Maybe this is why people do “carb loading” for workouts? I guess you can get the same effect by mainlining protein, like I did during the refeed. But if you’re in principle agnostic to low-carb/keto/carbs, I don’t see why you wouldn’t just eat carbs directly to top off glycogen, instead of taking the protein detour and turning your expensive protein into carbs anyway.

Next: ex115salmon

After the 2 day protein refeed, I started doing ex115salmon. 115g instead of 150, because salmon is slightly higher in protein than 80/20 ground beef and I wanted to protein match. The salmon is exclusively wild-caught Alaskan salmon, mostly sockeye.

So far it’s going well, I lost almost all the water weight from the refeed already, and the salmon tastes much better than the sardines did during ex150sardines. Too early to say, of course, but I’m having a good feeling about it so far.

I’ll also do a before/after OmegaQuant comparison and see how much phospholipids changed from eating so much omega-3.