After gaining 24lbs eating a high-carb/low-fat (HCLF) diet for 2 months, I went back on my proven ex150 heavy cream diet a month ago.
I decided to do pretty relaxed rules this time: I stopped taking apple cider vinegar (ACV) capsules each day, and I decided to allow myself sauce for my daily, solid meal. Rules regarding the sodium content of energy drinks and similar were also relaxed, and I drank an absurd amount of diet soda.
On top of all this, I actually cheated quite a bit even on these rules: I ate chocolate bars, cookies (seed oil free), or extra protein in the form of steak or salmon a whopping 8 times! I believe this makes it by far the most-cheated, least-strict run of ex150 I’ve ever done.
Maybe because of all this, I only lost 11lbs this month, going from just over 241lbs to about 230lbs.
Tale of the Tape
You’ll note that I lost almost all the weight after only 4 days back on ex150, hitting 231.8lbs. From then on, you could argue that my weight plateaued the entire month, or that it went down a tiny bit on average. A lot of the swings are probably due to sweating/water retention from spending time outdoors in the summer heat.
Curiously, I don’t think I depleted much of my glycogen stores. My biceps look almost as full as at the peak of the HCLF diet. This could be because I cheated with carb-heavy cookies or chocolate so much. I also wasn’t particularly active, despite being outdoors quite a bit this summer: I mostly sat around in the shade, lol.
In terms of clothes fit, the 11lbs did make quite a difference. At the peak of 241lbs, all my pants (size 36-38) and t-shirts (size L) were pretty snug around my waist.
Now, at 230lbs, they feel “normal.” At <210lbs, 3 months ago, everything felt loose.
That said this doesn’t necessarily indicate fat being lost; digestive matter & bloat is mainly found around the waist area too, and I’ve noticed that water retention pretty dramatically changes my waist size.
So for all we know, most of the 11lbs might’ve been digestive bloat weight, water retention, maybe some reduced inflammation. Maybe there were a handful of pounds of actual fat in there.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Ok I’ll be honest; I haven’t read that book. But I love the expression. Very poetic. And it is exactly what being back on ex150 feels like after months of eating a high-carb diet.
If you aren’t aware, ex150 is the heavy cream diet I designed for myself. It consists of:
- 1 meal a day: 150g beef, a similar amount of vegetables for flavor, sauce to flavor
- The entire rest of daily food intake is ad-libitum heavy cream (plain or in coffee)
This diet is extremely ketogenic at around 90% kcals from fat, almost entirely from the heavy cream.
I didn’t intend this at the time I designed it, mainly wanting to restrict protein intake while maintaining ketogenesis. But this diet has some unbelievable quality of life benefits:
- It’s extremely low-effort and practical. You only cook once a day, and it’s super fast and a 1-pot meal. Then you just drink heavy cream until you can’t take any more.
- In a pinch you could even get your daily meal in w/ McDonald’s burger patties or deli meat, which I often do when traveling.
- You can get heavy cream at any Starbucks in the world, or you just buy a pint/quart in a grocery store and drink it on the spot.
- This makes it a total cheat code for travel
- It’s extremely cheap, only plain white rice is (barely) cheaper per carolie than heavy cream
- You’re never really “hungry” like on most diets. You obviously still need to eat, but if you don’t eat for 12h or even a day or 2, it’s no big deal. You just need to drink enough cream over a 3 day rolling average.
- Because you’re getting most of your carolies from pre-emulsified fat, and there’s almost no fiber, the diet is incredibly “light” and non-bloating. It feels like charging yourself with electricity. Digestion takes almost no time or effort at all. After walking around with a bloated belly full of starches for 2 months, this felt amazing.
Because of this incredible “lightness” and convenience, I did a big road trip to a place I hadn’t seen. This sort of trip wouldn’t even really be possible on the HCLF diet; or at least it would’ve taken incredible amounts of preparation: bringing loaves of bread or pre-cooked rice/pasta meals, probably.
On the cream diet, it was no problem at all. Travel is a total breeze because the margins on everything (hunger, digestion, perceived energy, bloat) are so enormous compared to any other diet.
The Loose “Cheaty” Version of ex150
Maybe I was subconsciously trying out a “forever” version of ex150. As much as I like being able to eat carbs after a decade of keto, I just feel much better on ex150. And it’s also so much more convenient and fast and effortless and cheap and non-bloating.
So what if I did ex150 but basically cheated every time I felt like it? This is essentially what I did this month. Turns out, I didn’t really feel like cheating that much. When a friend invited me over for steak, I had a steak. When another friend baked homemade cookies with butter and no seed oils (yes, all my friends are seed oil woke - try being around me for 5 minutes!) I ate one. And then another one the next day. And another the next day, until the cookies were gone lol.
Curiously, being on ex150 & eating the seed-oil free homemade cookies, I didn’t get hyperphagic at all. I had no issue limiting myself to 1 cookie for the day despite ready access. I even got what I’d describe as very good satiety from the cookies. This is quite unusual for me.
This less strict version of the diet might not lead to the same amount of fat loss as a super strict version, but if this is what I’d have to do for the rest of my life.. sign me up!
Sauce Hyperphagia
Also curiously, a couple of times I actually “cheated, but not really” by eating e.g. an entire can of tomato sauce, or a can of salsa poured over a can of sliced carrots lol. (Ray Peat talked about this?)
This isn’t really cheating because it stays roughly within the parameters of the diet. But… it’s also .. not normal? Felt like a weird craving/addiction issue.
I’m not sure if this is more a craving for salt, given how all canned vegetables/sauces are incredibly salty, and I didn’t particularly crave actual tomatoes or carrots. Could also be the citric acid they use as preservatives in canned food.
Originally the plan was to do my OG version of ex150, which includes about 80-100g of sauce on the meal each day. But I quickly realized that the sauce was making me pretty hyperphagic - for more sauce!
I ended up eating entire jars of tomato sauce at a time.
But I also discovered that my meat/vegetable meal didn’t actually “taste worse” in that sense without the sauce. It’s just that adding the sauce then made me eat more sauce later.
Very confusing; and I ended up not buying the sauce as a staple ingredient, but only as an indulgence when I had a craving. This ended up being about 2x/wk after I made this change about a week in.
I do think there is something weirdly hyperphagic to salty/acidic/glutamatic foods for me. Pasta sauce or salsa is practically crack for me, I’ll happily eat an entire jar of it plain or on green beans.
The odd thing is that these are practically carolie-free, and I’m otherwise eating ad-lib carolies from cream. So it’s not that I’m hungry, just that I could eat non-stop salsa and tomato sauce. Maybe it’s related to the Polyol Pathway theory, or maybe it’s just something something hyper-palatable.
I suppose that eating tomato sauce plain, on its own, or on barely-caloric vegetables, is more benign than mixing it with normal food and massively overeating due to the sauce.
Notes
As always, I took notes.
On the diet setup
With sauce
No ACV
Going OG lol (mostly to see if it even makes a difference)Day 1
lol very weird feeling to be back on cream & coffee
constantly eating starch all day long & prepping food has become so second nature during the last 2 months
also being constantly full, like a race with time or you’re starving (red queen effect)
whereas now i’m sitting next to coffee w/ cream but I just “don’t feel like taking another sip” due to cream satiety
zomg the ex150 high-fat meal fried in butter is SO MUCH BETTER than the low-fat version
Day 2
zomg the meal w/ tomato sauce & butter is like crack compared to the starchy low-fat one
Day 5
lol down 15lbs in 4 days [from refeed peak, not “real” HCLF weight]
the lack of thirst is pretty dramatic vs. the HCLF diet. i’m almost never thirsty. losing tons of water weight, too.
Day 7
Had bizarro-level satiety from Starbucks HWC on a long drive
Literally had to try picking the latte up 3x after 1/2 way, managed to drink only a small sip
Pretty much had to force my hand to pick it up against my will, absurd feelingDay 8
lol sauce addiction. i forgot about this after doing nosauce for so long
i’m just eating jars/cans of sauce cause it tastes so good. i think it’s the salt and spices, because plain tomato sauce w/o either doesn’t do it. this is crack tho.Day 13
Ate a candy bar from a gas station on a trip
Honestly shocking how many bars I had to check before the ingredients didn’t contain seed oilsDay 14
Ate half a dark chocolate bar, then threw the rest away
Years after the dark chocolate experiment it’s still ruined for me lol
Cheating on ex150 is surprisingly disappointing and anticlimactic, it’s sort of the opposite of that dopamine hit. I cheat and then I go “Oh this isn’t even good” after the first few bites. Like my brain is used to getting a dopamine hit from this, but now I just don’t.Day 18
Ate a piece of home made cake at friend’s house
Sickening satietyAdded 1 salmon filet to my dinner
Day 23
Ate friend’s homemade butter cookies, about 1-2 per day the last few days. Surprisingly, they totally gave me satiety. I intuitively didn’t drink any cream in the evening after eating them.
The incredible cement-truck satiety on day 7, from a Starbucks heavy whipping cream latte, is maybe the most curious thing.
It was almost an out-of-body experience in that I wanted to drink more of the latte, but I couldn’t. On a long stretch of interstate the cup would sit in my cup holder, and I would look at it longingly, but I couldn’t reach for it. As in, I had to physically force my hand to reach for the cup, and I had to attempt this 3 times before I finally managed to pick it up.
Just truly insane to witness yourself being unable to perform a physical task due to satiety. I think this is a great showcase of how satiety is supposed to work, and how it probably used to work in everybody before we got metabolically ruined as a society.
The idea of physically pushing away your plate is somewhat of an old-timey cliche, and this is pretty much that.
Being able to reach this state at all, even if only once in a while on a crazy heavy cream diet, is pretty cool and inspiring to me.
The Plan
The plan is to just do a series of ex150 (or variant) months until I’m back down to my recent low of 206lbs.
I suspected that it would take me 3-4 months of ex150 to get there from the 241lbs after the HCLF experiments, and 1 of those months is now in the bag.
For all I know it could be longer. Last time I reached a new low ad-lib weight and then regained weight, I plateaued for nearly a year before I hit that weight again.
Why? Who knows. My main hypothesis, of course, is linoleic acid released from my adipose tissue during fat loss, and possibly during the HCLF diet. (This was, after all, the explicit goal of doing the HCLF diet.)
Now since I didn’t lose any fat on HCLF, and in fact GAINED a ton of fat, .. would that have depleted my linoleic acid in the same way? And would it have found its way into whatever tissues might be causing the inability to lose fat (hypothalamus?), or would it have been washed out by the palmitic & oleic acid from de-novo-lipogenesis (DNL)?
Just in case, the OmegaQuant Complete test is in the mail.
I guess we’ll find out. I sort of wouldn’t be surprised if it took me almost a year to get back to 206lbs, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it only took me the predicted 3-4 months (now 2-3). Take that, Bayes!
How strict do I need to be with ex150 for this to work? Not sure, it would depend on what the mechanism is. If I’m really just buggered up with linoleic acid from the recent low weight and/or HCLF, then I might just have to wait it out, and no amount of strictness will accelerate the fat loss.
Or, maybe all the cheating & sauces & salt & lack of ACV this month really did prevent me from losing more fat, and being stricter would be of benefit.
Honestly, I think I’ll go with the flow. I feel pretty great at 230lbs and if it takes me a month longer, so be it. Observing my own cravings/desire to cheat, and my reaction to these cheat meals and indulgences, is pretty interesting in and of itself.
So long.