This post is an interview with some guy, writing under the name Exfatloss, who has been conducting a weight loss self-experiment and recently put out a blog post about the results so far. 

Exfatloss has tried a lot of different weight loss techniques, including the potato diet, but nothing seemed to work over the long term. Until now, that is. He has invented a diet he calls “ex150” that has caused a surprising amount of weight loss, and which seems to be quite reliable — at least for him.

This interview is lightly edited for clarity, and to make Exfatloss “sound smart and funny” per his request.

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Exfatloss: Hey SMTM, I finally wrote up a summary on my crazy diet experiment, now that I’ve lost just over 43lbs in 5 months. It has a weight graph that I hope you find enlightening.

Feedback from an experimental/author/publication/science/whatever perspective highly appreciated!

SMTM: This is very exciting, and it makes us want to drink some heavy cream right away, yum. Several questions: 

ex150

SMTM: For starters let us make sure we understand the ex150 diet as you describe it. It involves:

• Eating just one meal per day, of:
  • ~150 g meat, usually as
    • ground beef chuck (80% lean / 20% fat) or 
    • ribeye steak
  • ~60 g green vegetables, usually as
    • microwaved frozen vegetables “(okra, spinach, green beans, fajita mix)”
  • ~80 g pasta sauce, usually as
    • “the sauce is low-everything and mostly water (e.g. most store brand tomato/alfredo pasta sauce)”
    • I.e. either red or white sauce
  • As much butter as you want to cook these things in. (“usually about 15g”)
  • None of these things measured or weighed precisely, i.e. the diet seems quite flexible. “I don’t think the exact number matters much.”

Exfatloss: Initially I just cut a 1lb thing of ground beef into thirds. It’s pretty much exactly 150g that way. I’d say it doesn’t matter much if you do 130g or 170g. That’s what I mean by “exact numbers don’t matter much.” If lack of a kitchen scale is holding you back, don’t worry about it, eyeballing it worked fine for me. Now if you were to eyeball double the amount of meat… I dunno. I’d consider that more “ex300” than “inexact numbers.”

tl;dr, just buy 1lb of meat and cut it into thirds.

SMTM: 

• Otherwise eating no meals but:
• butter and whipped cream, as much as you want, as snacks/desserts
  • Sometimes with instant coffee powder for flavor or tomato sauce to cut the fat taste
  • Quite a lot of it, “I go through a lot of cartons of heavy cream, maybe one every 2-4 days.” How big of a carton? 16 oz?
• As a result, most calories come from cream.
• No-calorie foods like coffee are also ok, including coffee with arbitrary amounts of cream, and including going to Starbucks.

Exfatloss: The heavy cream comes in 32oz. I have 3 of those in my fridge right now. I think it’s about one 32oz carton every other day I go through. I put instant coffee powder in the whipped cream most days for flavor.

SMTM: Also you are currently in the USA right? 

Exfatloss: Yes, and have been for this entire weight loss period so far.

SMTM: As we understand the intent behind the design, the butter and whipped cream are there to make it high-fat, the 150 g meat is there to make it a low-but-nonzero protein diet, and the vegetables are there to give some minimum amount of fiber. Does that seem right? 

Exfatloss: Vegetables for flavor/texture and minimal fiber, yes.

Pure ground beef tastes like shit. Trust me, I’ve tried it.

Butter/cream are there to provide calories that are not protein/lithium/whatever the factor is. They’re a known-not-fattening source of calories that also happens to cause no bloating and that I deal with super well. 

SMTM: Butter and cream are “a known-not-fattening source of calories that also happens to cause no bloating”? Our sense is that most people would assume that butter and cream are fattening and might cause bloating, so the fact that you seem so confident is surprising. Known to whom, how? It’s news to us! 

Exfatloss: Well, known to me, at this point 😉 Through trial and error. There are a bunch of people with theories why (low protein, low PUFA, low UFA).. but honestly I have no clue if any of them are right. I just know I lost a bunch of weight eating mostly heavy cream.

I think it’s an important factor of any sustainable diet that you are NOT in a caloric deficit, or it won’t work (Caloric deficit symptoms -> “willpower breakdown” -> quit diet).

SMTM: This also really stands out! It does seem to fit with what we saw on the potato diet. How did you come to this conclusion?  

Exfatloss: Decades of experience? Pretty much any time you restrict your intake or increase your expenditure, you can expect to keep it up for 1-3 weeks or maaaybe if you’re really hardcore a bit longer, and then it stops working and you lose “willpower.” That seems like THE ultimate diet experience of everybody who’s ever tried to lose weight. I write about this in my latest post.

Also when people say “deficit” they are super vague and conflate things and that’s why it’s both necessary and impossible to run a deficit to lose weight. Planning on writing about this at one point.

SMTM: What is the pasta sauce there for? You say, “mostly water”, is that also part of the design? 

Exfatloss: Flavor and to soak up the fat 🙂 It tastes significantly better with the sauce. Maybe that’s just me. This whole meal is my previous go-to meal for over 3 years, just scaled down. I used to eat 1lb of that stuff per day, now it’s ~170g and I added the cream to make up for the calories.

SMTM: It may not matter, but we’re curious, what method do you use to test whether you’re in ketosis? If you tracked your ketones data it might be interesting to graph or publish it as well.

Exfatloss: Currently using a ketone blood meter (finger prick style). I will say a lot of carnivore peeps are calling my “zero fiber != ketosis” statement BS and I’ve updated that section of the blog post to clarify.

Since ketone blood strips are expensive and annoying I haven’t tracked those in years, since first starting keto 7 years ago. So unfortunately no data to show 😦

Would be cool if CGMs could track more than just blood glucose! I would love to have years worth of ketone levels. Good news is that the next-gen Libre Freestyle CGM will have this! Very excited.

Palatability and Variability

SMTM: In your post you talk a bit about hypotheses, including this one:

Palatability/brain hack: there is a lot of science out there around the brain’s ways of dealing with food, food reward, and metabolism. Stephan Guyenet’s The Hungry Brain is maybe the best summary, I think. I’ll admit I haven’t read the book, but I listened to a few podcasts where he talks about the ideas, and I think the ex150 diet fits his hypothesis. The idea is that hyper-palatable food that is very energy-rich causes us to overeat in terms of energy. The ex150 diet has 1 hyper-palatable meal every day, but it is very small. The remaining calories come from a bland mono-food that’s hard to overeat (heavy cream). Maybe this tricks the brain into not overeating the cream, yet never feeling more than 24h away from a hyper-palatable meal to release lots of dopamine or other happy food reward signals? I think that even if this might not be the main causal factor, it sure helps make the diet sustainable. I’m never more than 24h away from the most delicious meal I could imagine, and I can eat unrestricted amounts of “dessert” (=whipped cream w/ instant coffee powder).

This mostly seems like evidence against the palatability hypothesis to us, though it might be interesting to ask Guyenet what he thinks. But to us it seems like you are eating delicious foods and getting a lot of food reward. If as much heavy cream and butter as you want plus “the most delicious meal I could imagine” counts as “low palatability”, then the term is so meaningless that it should be tossed out.

Exfatloss: I do personally think that “palatability” (and “satiety”) are meaningless the way they’re often used, even by Guyenet. I heard him on a podcast where he basically said (paraphrasing) “Science has found that humans tend to be caused by their brain to overeat foods that have high palatability.” Wait, isn’t that the definition of palatability? Very roundabout way of saying “Food that tastes good tastes good.” 😀

SMTM: Yeah that has always seemed kind of circular to us. 

Exfatloss: I’ve @mentioned Guyenet on Twitter, but he didn’t reply (maybe cause I’m a nobody lol). Maybe I’ll ask him again when I have street cred lol. I do think he’s a good representative/explainer of “The Science” on this because he’s got a good grasp of various ideas out there and has been in full-contact debates with Taubes etc. and was able to hold his own. I respect him. I sometimes feel like citizen-scientism is bordering on anti-science and someone knee-deep in science like him is able to check that tendency. That said, in a fight, my money is on Taubes.

SMTM: We like Guyenet and he’s interacted with us a tiny bit, maybe we can help get his attention. We understand that he’s reluctant to engage with weird randos on the internet but we’d be curious to see what he thinks of this.

Exfatloss: Regarding the dichotomy here: I think the meat/vegetables/sauce meal has near infinite palatability, I’ve literally eaten a pound of this before scaling it down for ex150. So if this diet was “eat as many of these tiny meals a day as you want” I’d eat 15 of them. But I can only have 1. The cream/butter on the other hand has extremely low “palatability” in the sense that it’s very hard to overeat.

How do you know you’ve had too much cream? You’ll fricking know. It comes from one second to the next, where the thought of another sip almost makes you gag. Total on-off switch for me, whereas I can literally eat carbs until I puke and not be satiated (ask me how I know. College, man!)

So if “palatability” means something like “able to overeat” then cream is not it, because it’s very self-limiting. Potatoes and dry chicken breast are also very self-limiting, but they’re in fact so limiting that I got into a massive deficit, got caloric deficit symptoms, and had to quit the diet (plus all the fiber made me feel bloated and gross).

SMTM: Your results look a little more like the variability hypothesis, though. We interpret this as a version of (or closely related to) the palatability hypothesis, where the problem is not tasty foods per se, but eating a variety of foods that are tasty in different ways. We think this theory is poorly-supported but ex150 is definitely a low-variety diet, mostly consisting of the same 5 or so foods eaten every day, however delicious they might be.

It’s clear that ex150 is a low-variety diet, close to a mono diet. But it also seems like variety or mono-ness aren’t the active ingredients here because you did other low-variety and/or mono diets and they didn’t work for you at all. If low-variety or mono diets worked for you, then you would have lost weight on the other low-variety/mono diets you tried — on the carnivore diet, on the “eating only at In’n’out burger” diet, and on the potato diet. 

Exfatloss: Yea I do think there’s something to “variety -> overeating.” I do think mono-foods “work” in being self-limiting. My hypothesis here is basically that ex150 manages to hit the goldilocks zone – 1 hyper-palatable meal per day and the rest is a self-limiting mono-food, but it’s not so mono that you get into a massive deficit that makes the diet unsustainable (like potatoes did for me).

On my first week of Potato I was doing only boiled potatoes sans everything, and I couldn’t get down more than 600kcal per day. I’d force myself to go to the fridge, grab a boiled potato, take a bite. It’s not even that the bit tasted bad – but after 1 bite, I was almost gagging. I just couldn’t take a second bite.

So clearly too self-limiting to be sustainable. 200ml of heavy cream has almost 700kcal just on its own and you don’t have to boil it, doesn’t come with all the bloating fiber, digests super easily. Plus you can put instant coffee in it 🙂

SMTM: This isn’t our sense of how the potato diet works in general, since it seems like the tato makes you LESS INTERESTED in other foods.

This seems especially clear in people who have tried half-tato diets. They let themselves eat other foods, but eating a big chunk of potatoes on a regular basis seems to lower your appetite for everything else. For example see M’s experience on the half-tato diet. He says, “maybe two or three weeks in, for the first time in a really long time, I did not have the urge to finish off leftover food at dinner.” Or Joey No Floors Freshwater, who said, “The difference is now I get full and stop eating. I leave food on the plate, which is new for me. I leave texmex on the plate y’all. Its wild.” So the potato diet doesn’t seem to work on just the self-limiting aspects of potatoes because people are less interested in eating other foods too. 

That might be one more reason to do a larger half-tato diet study, to see if this generalizes.

Exfatloss: Hm, that sure wasn’t my experience. For me, it was just an inefficient fast plus the worst bloat in years.

I only did full-tater, maybe half-tater would’ve worked better for me? Not sure why it would work so awesome for some and so badly for me.

One theory I have for that is the goldilocks satiety idea. If you eat a mono food and it’s not satiating enough, you’ll overeat and gain weight. If it’s too satiating, you won’t be able to eat enough to meet energy expenditure and you’ll begin getting caloric deprivation symptoms and will eventually land in caloric bankruptcy (see my post).

Not sure why exactly potatoes don’t hit goldilocks zone for me but do for others. Maybe I have a higher energy expenditure or do worse on potatoes?

Re-reading the section of those people who had potato-success, I do think there’s something to “fix satiety.” Maybe the common thread is that these diets somehow fix satiety in people whose satiety signals are broken.

Of course that just moves the question to “how did the satiety signals break and what fixes them?”

SMTM: To us this looks like evidence against both palatability and variability in your case, and some evidence against them in general, especially if it turns out that ex150 works for other people.

Exfatloss: As those hypotheses are commonly understood, yea. But maybe the Goldilocks Palatability thing? 🤷

I.e. it’s not that “lowest palatability/variety” is optimal, but “modest palatability/variety?”

SMTM: Some other theoretical explanations do come to mind. You’re probably eating close to zero calories from seed oils, so while we don’t find seed oils to be a very plausible theory of obesity, we want to at least note that this result is very consistent with that theory.

Exfatloss: Yea, I’ve actually kind of added that as a new hypothesis. I found this insane s/saturatedfat subreddit after posting my article. People there were like “Duh, of COURSE you would lose tons of fat by eating saturated fat!” There’s this guy Fire in a Bottle (twitter/youtube) who has this whole theory how modern meat (even beef) is full of TCCD (I forget what it stands for but it’s BAD cause CHEMICALS) and PUFAs etc. and that’s what’s making us fat.

I will say I did Paleo for 3+ years before Keto, and Keto for 7 years before this, so it’s not like I was chugging seed oils. But I was eating TONS of US commercial grown beef. So if it’s in that..

It would be cool to design experiments to kind of disentangle the various hypotheses, although I’m not sure exactly how. I suppose a month of 2lbs/day of grass-fed beef? 🤷 Maybe ask the gurus who recommend those theories to design an experiment? They’d know.

SMTM: We also notice that “lots of pure fat” does sound kind of like the Shangri-La Diet, so there might be some connection there. A chemical engineer we work with has repeatedly emphasized that while lithium probably accumulates in many foods, it shouldn’t end up in oils because it’s not fat-soluble. Maybe this is connected to why high-fat diets sometimes work? This isn’t limited to lithium, it’s just generally a note that if obesity is caused by a contaminant, there’s some reason to think that the contaminant doesn’t accumulate in fats.

Exfatloss: Interesting, yea. I remember reading about Shangri La years ago. It does seem very similar. Question is why, I guess: is it “appetite suppression” and what does that even mean – ensuring energy balance is met or some psychological thing?

Have you sent a bunch of meat/milk/cream/potatoes to the lithium lab yet? That would shine some light on it, I imagine.

SMTM: We’re working on it! 😉 

Potato Diet

SMTM: The fact that you didn’t lose any weight on the potato diet and “HATED how bland it was” seems really interesting, especially given that most people on the potato diet said they loved it and many talked about how delicious they found the potatoes, even after 30 days. And for the most part, obese participants had the most success on the potato diet, so it’s interesting that you found it boring.

It kind of suggests there might be at least two kinds of obesity, one that responds to the potato diet and one that responds to ex150. If something like that were the case, it would be pretty easy to demonstrate experimentally.

Exfatloss: I’ve long suspected that obesity is a “slightly complicated problem.” My analogy is a broken down car.

You drive by a car broken down by the side of the road.

You say: “Have you tried putting gas in the tank?”

“Yes, still doesn’t drive.” says the guy

“I’m pretty sure putting gas in cars works, my friend broke down once and he put gas in the tank and then it worked again.”

“Doesn’t work for me,” says the guy in the car.

“I think you’re just not putting enough gas in the tank,” say you.

That’s basically the state of our discourse on obesity, when even much simpler things like cars can break down for a handful of reasons. Maybe spark plugs. Flat tire. Crankshaft. Hell, I’ve had a cylinder blow up on me because the timing belt skipped a beat and one of the cylinders fired out of order.

If there were 4 causes of obesity and 4 different diets to fix them, we would currently conclude that there is no solution and we don’t know and nothing works better than anything else, because we insist on averaging everything out.

On average, putting gas in broken down cars’ tanks doesn’t work. But sometimes it does. When lack of gas is the problem.

SMTM: Yes! We’ve been working on a post about this. People spend a lot of time saying obesity is a disease when clearly it is a symptom that can be caused by all kinds of things. So while there could be just one epidemic, there could equally be several.

There could even be several epidemics for just one reason. If you roll a bunch of cars over a cliff, many of them will break when they hit the bottom and won’t be able to start. But they might all end up broken in different ways, even if the ultimate cause is “was rolled off of a cliff”. 

Exfatloss: Yea “disease” has always seemed wrong to me. I get that people want to take the moral stigma out of it, but “disease” sounds like your immune system will clear it out after 2 weeks or it’s a viral infection or something.

If anything, I’d call it a “condition.”

SMTM: Your experience actually seems like some evidence against the contamination hypothesis and in favor of some kind of deficiency hypothesis. Let’s say that obesity is caused by a deficiency in either X or Y. Potatoes contain X and heavy cream contains Y. If you are X-deficient but have good Y levels, then the potato diet will cure your obesity but cream will taste gross because your body is trying to avoid overloading on Y. If you are Y-deficient but have good X levels, then ex150 will cure your obesity but potatoes will taste gross because your body is trying to avoid overloading on X. 

Exfatloss: I don’t know if I agree, it could easily be consistent with contamination. Maybe potatoes and fats are both very low in contaminants, but some people do super well on fiber and starch whereas others do better on fat. I’m sure people with dairy intolerance will hate my diet, but I used to chug a quart of milk for breakfast as a kid and I can dairy all day. Others apparently love potatoes all day. Personally I do best on “close to zero but not quite zero” fiber.

I think the “feels good on X/Y diet” and “contamination” theories can exist side by side and explain this.

SMTM: Would you be at all interested in running an ex150 community trial, maybe recruiting specifically from people who also found the potato diet bland/difficult? You could start by just getting a couple of other people to try it as case studies, since there’s a rather blurry line between “2-3 case studies” and “community trial of 10-20 people”. If the effect is as strong for other people as it is for you, you wouldn’t need a very big sample size to produce convincing results.

Exfatloss: Yea, definitely. In fact I’m trying to recruit some of my friends 🙂 One insisted on switching to the diet at the same time as doing CrossFit for the first time, because apparently isolating variables is for losers…

If you pointed a couple people my way I’d be happy to set up some kind of study. People can contact me on twitter or the blog, or can email me at hello@exfatloss.com

SMTM: Absolutely! People will see it in the blog post and we’ll share about it on twitter, we’ll encourage people to email you there.

Exfatloss: Sounds good!

If it’s just a handful of people I think I’d be more comfortable managing it. I’m not sure I’d be up for hundreds of people like you had on Potato because I’ve never done that type of thing before. That seems to require infrastructure.

SMTM: Yes, and it’s good to start with more case studies before scaling it up to dozens of people. Better to make sure it generalizes and we can re-create it so we don’t waste everyone’s time. 

Exfatloss: Yea for sure. Maybe I’m just somehow a crazy sat fat outlier who can’t deal with potatoes 🙂

Boundary Conditions

SMTM: You mention,

For example, could you make the diet work eating only at common fast food restaurants? Using only prepared deli meats? What about cheese? Is it really just about the amount of protein, or does it matter what kind of protein? Eggs?

Does the diet even need to be ketogenic? What happens when you reach a healthy weight, can you back off the diet? Do you cycle it? Is there a maintenance version?

These seem like the most important questions to us. If you switched to 150g eggs + different vegetables + as much olive oil as you want, would it persist? What about other formulations?

What if you stick with the original formulation but slowly add rice until you are no longer in ketosis? You wouldn’t necessarily need to go out of ketosis if you could show a correlation between the rate of weight loss and your ketone levels (though obviously dropping out of ketosis without it affecting the weight loss would be most convincing). 

Exfatloss: I’m actually currently on day 5 of ex150deli, which substitutes supermarket deli meat cuts (salami, turkey breast, roast beef..) for the ground beef. I kept the vegetables/sauce the same for science’s sake and let me tell you, they do NOT go well together with sliced deli meats lol. [SMTM note: since finished with success, see here]

Agreed that this would be awesome. It seems there’s gotta be a whole lot of alpha out there in fat loss, and we’re probably nowhere near the efficient frontier. So we should explore the boundaries. What do we actually have to give up to be successful? Why give up more.

SMTM: We also noticed that you say,

What piqued my interest though was that the super-low-protein carnivore diet, while it still kicked me out of ketosis, made me rapidly lose weight, about 10lbs in the 12 days until I ended the experiment early (because I was out of ketosis already, proving the hypothesis).

This story suggests that such a thing is possible. 

Exfatloss: See my 2/17/2023 update on the post on the fiber/ketosis issue, several carnivore people claim I’m wrong on this and I concede it’s possible.

SMTM: It also seems like this could just be a cream-maximalist diet, right? Do you know about how many calories you’re getting per day, and how many of them are from cream? Seems like it’s over 50% right? 

Exfatloss: 50%? Ha. It’s 85% before I add the cream in the coffee 🙂 I have a macro estimation in this blog post.

SMTM: There would be a darkly comic element if obesity was cured by high doses of cream, but it would also make some sense. What is the one treatment for obesity that no one would ever think to try? “Drink as much heavy cream as you can stand, every day.” We’re confident that most people would never try this (ok maybe some people would on keto), so it would make sense if everyone missed it… 

Exfatloss: Ha you should see the r/saturatedfat people.. as I understand it, the claim is literally that eating saturated fat will increase your metabolic rate by insane levels and thus create a massive bottom-up deficit.

SMTM: In general, is there a principle of “if you’ve been looking for a long time and tried everything you can think of and nothing works, the real answer must be something that seems really stupid”? Reminds us of Sherlock Holmes’ “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Exfatloss: I will confess to having read a lot of Sherlock Holmes.

SMTM: Us too! 

Superstition and ABA

SMTM: Generally we are concerned about the “superstition” element of self-experiments. If spontaneous remission is a possibility, and you try a long enough list of things, you might randomly spontaneously remiss and it would look like the thing you were trying at the time is the cause: 

Let’s say that Mary develops chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). She is proactive and wants to solve the problem, so she comes up with a plan of 26 different treatments, which we’ll call A, B, C, D, and so on. Maybe A is “cut out dairy”, B is “walk 20 minutes every day”, etc. but the specific plans don’t really matter. She starts implementing each plan for two weeks, first plan A, then plan B, etc. 

But Mary is working from the wrong assumption. She thinks her chronic fatigue comes from something she’s doing or not doing. … But what really happened is that last month she bought a bag of rice that was grown in a field that was contaminated with cadmium, and developed low-level cadmium poisoning, which is entirely responsible for her chronic fatigue. …None of the interventions she has planned will help. 

But the cadmium is slowly being cleared from her system by natural means at the same time as she works her way through the 26 treatments. What happens is this: Mary reaches treatment L (“take omega-3 supplements”) just as the cadmium in her system drops below critical levels, and Mary is immediately “cured”. 

Since her symptoms stop almost immediately after starting treatment L, Mary assumes that the omega-3 supplements are what cured her, and continues taking them indefinitely.

This is basically what happened when you moved back to the US from China. 

So we REALLY like how you took a 14-day break from ex150 right in the middle of your self-experiment. If you were randomly losing weight for some other reason, then you should have kept on losing weight during this break. The fact that you gained weight back, and that it closely corresponds to the break (modulo pemmican), seems like strong evidence that, as you say, “it wasn’t some other random factor in the environment causing the fat loss.” 

We see the same thing in a smaller way in two other short breaks you take.

This looks a lot like an ABA design, or since you have four experimental periods, an ABABABAB design. 

Usually we would say that ABA-type designs don’t really provide enough evidence to draw clear conclusions. Even with an ABABABAB, that’s still only a sample size of 8 intervals. But in this case, the effect seems so distinct and so the effect size so huge we’re not sure. What do you think? 

Exfatloss: Definitely agreed that it doesn’t prove “what did it” or even anything.

But it disproved a bunch of really likely environmental factors like a) city (walkability? air quality?) b) weather/temperature c) drinking water d) cancer haha.

I think it’s a really easy and pretty good thing to do. If you really know why the light turns on and off, you shouldn’t be afraid to hit the switch a couple of times and see if it works as you thought. That’s kind of the least you can do. If you never turn the light off because you’re afraid it won’t come on again, does that really sound like you understand why it’s on in the first place?

Set Point 

SMTM: In your Q&A section you give this exchange: 

Q: You’re just going for walks now.

A: No, fat loss started 2 months before that and the rate hasn’t changed. But yes, I feel so energetic many days on this diet that I started spontaneously wanting to go outside and take long walks. One time I even fell into a light jog! In my experience this is a result of effective fat loss, having “unlocked” the key to utilizing my body fat, not the cause of fat loss. 1,150kcal/day (0.3lb of body fat) would be a long walk to take every day.

This is interesting to us because it suggests your set point is falling faster than your weight is. Compare this experience to how you mentioned that running as exercise just makes you hungrier to compensate for the extra calories you burn. So that suggests that something about this diet changes your set point very quickly, which seems interesting. 

Exfatloss: I kind of believe that we’re thinking about “set points” slightly wrong. This is inspired by my understanding of circadian rhythms.

All humans have a “genetically predetermined circadian rhythm.” But it’s not that somewhere in your genes it says “8am EST” or anything. The best analogy I’ve read is that what’s basically encoded is a spring weight. Imagine your circadian clock is powered by a spring, and sunshine pushes down on the spring. Different people have different spring weights. Most people’s weight is such that if they get even a little bit of sunlight during a normal day, their spring is fully compressed and ready to go again. Some people have a very stiff spring, and they need enormous amounts of sun exposure to get it compressed during one day.

If you move even normal people to the north pole or something, even their springs will never compress (in the constant dark) or always be overcompressed (in the constant sunlight). If you put people in a cave, the spring mechanism just completely stops working.

My point being, what if it’s not that we have a “set point” that says “He shall be 210lbs” but instead, the rate of how “calories in” is split up? Similar to the P ratio. This ratio could be influenced by various factors like macro composition, chemicals in the food, sunlight, sleep quality.. some people have a ratio in such a way that pretty much no matter what they do, the calories they eat will be sent to the furnace. Other people will have ratios that require them to take super extreme measures to prevent gaining fat. If you put healthy people on a PUFA-sugar-juice diet and sleep deprive them and feed them tons of lithium, even they will probably gain fat.

For example, maybe I’m just an insulin hyper-responder, and what normal people consider “normal” amounts of carbs or protein makes me obese. And suddenly my ratio has swung from one end of the scale (->90% of calories in go to fat) to the other (->90% calories are sent to the furnace and you will fricking go for a walk every day even in freezing rain just cause you can’t stand sitting still).

Maybe it’s not that this ratio per se is encoded. Point is it could easily be encoded as a flow rate, not as an absolute “set point == 210lbs” value. And you just reach a different equilibrium with your current environment depending on the flow rate/spring rate. Just as you’ll reach a certain “waking set point” in the winter, and a different one in the summer, depending on factors like sun exposure.

SMTM: This is a good argument, but the difference between circadian rhythm and metabolic set point is that while the body doesn’t have access to a direct measure of time (it uses external cues like sunlight), it does have access to internal metrics about obesity. This seems to involve signals like leptin, literal compressive weight on your bones, blood sugar, stomach fullness, etc. 

Exfatloss: But those metrics aren’t an objective, comprehensive obesity score like body fat %. It’s different chemical signals. Those signaling pathways can be disrupted or conflated or confused.

In a computer analogy, there isn’t one program in your body that can read the total fat storage value and set the heater/AC accordingly. It’s a bunch of distributed systems sending each other messages in various ways. If something goes wrong with some of the packages, unspecified behavior can set in. The TCP port could be blocked. The pipe could be broken. Your packages might get misrouted by a rogue/broken system in the middle. There might be backpressure in the signaling system that changes the frequency/density of the packages arriving.

Might also be personal. For example, my sensitivity to physical stomach fullness is practically zero. I always assumed that people meant this figuratively. I have literally eaten until I was painfully full and felt zero satiation. I wanted to continue, I just couldn’t, from the pain.

Pro-tip: never go to an all-you-can eat pizza place.

The potato diet wasn’t quite that bad, but it was also really bad.

On the other hand, the whipped cream satiety hits me like a cement truck. One bite fine, second bite good, third bite NO WAY I’M FULL. (These are the last 3 bites, not the first 3 bites, of a whipped heavy cream meal.)

SMTM: How about the hairpin turns when you try going off the diet and back on again? Whatever this diet is doing, your weight seems really responsive! That’s weird, but it kind of matches the results on the potato diet, which also seems to cause abrupt changes in most people’s weight. 

Exfatloss: A lot of the hairpin is water retention. I’ve seen as much as +6lbs the day (!) after ending my second ex150 month, and -4lbs after the first day of pemmican.

One confounder with potato for me is actually that I was pretty low-fiber before it, because I hate fiber. So I went from a low-fiber to an all-fiber diet, which would jack up my water retention. So given the above numbers, even if I lost 6lbs on potato, the very first day of increased water retention could negate it.

Btw these water retention effects are plateau effects, which was my criticism of your recent potassium study. But if you do switchbacks, it creates these insane hairpin turns.

I basically disregard the first, really steep weight loss when I go on the diet. Usually it takes at most 5 days to finish the plateau effect and for the “real” fat loss rate to show.

Metascience

SMTM: We agree that the real point is the meta-framework of experiments, so we’re really interested to hear more about these other things you tried that you list near the beginning of your post (cold showers, no online news, carnivore diet), what can you tell us about those? 

To emphasize: the real point is the meta-framework of experiments. Formulate a hypothesis, design a 30-day experiment, test it. I’ve probably done dozens of these over the years.

Here are some examples from the last few years:

30 days of cold showers

90 days of no online news (I thought stress might contribute)

90 days of the carnivore diet

30 days of eating only at In’n’out burger

Doing Starting Strength, a beginner’s powerlifting program

Doing Simple & Sinister, a kettlebell training program

30 days of a low-fiber diet

30 days of a low-protein diet

30 days of a potato diet

30 days of drinking only distilled water (including for coffee)

Eating only pemmican, a raw meat paste invented by Native Americans

Exfatloss: Ha I’m planning to eventually write a longer post where I detail some of these experiences. [SMTM note: this post has since been written, see here]

Some highlights: cold showers did nothing. No online news (suggested by a friend) showed me that I consume news as entertainment, but that I just replace it with movies/video games when I stop consuming the news. Carnivore diet was super bland and boring (YES steak gets boring!) and I didn’t lose any weight. In’n’out was the best, I love that place! My first low-protein trial was entirely done at In’n’out, as was the low-fiber one. Starting Strength made me fatter. Pemmican was even more unpalatable than potatoes lol, I chewed every bite for 2 minutes. It just tastes like I imagine cow manure tastes like. Ugh. Sad because I really wanted to like it.

SMTM: A lot of science criticism seems really facile. In particular, it seems like lots of people don’t understand measurement, they think that measuring things is both objective and easy. It makes us wonder if these people have just never tried to measure anything for themselves so they don’t realize what is involved (compare: Reality has a surprising amount of detail). So our sense is that trying a lot of failed diets is part of what has made you a careful experimenter. What was your experience of this? Does this have practical implications for training, or for people who want to get into research / self-experimentation? You seem very virtuous to us. What advice would you give to other people who wanted to do self-experiments like this?

Exfatloss: Hm, not sure. I just like experimenting and trying new stuff, I’d probably keep doing it even if I reach my goal weight. Just for fun.

Most experiments have no effect or almost no effect. “It makes no difference” seems the default result.

SMTM: Good insight.

Exfatloss: All diet experiments that somehow rely on you eating less or burning more energy seem to fail very quickly because caloric deficit symptoms set in. I call these diets “inefficient fasts” because you could’ve saved yourself 15 days and gotten too hungry to continue by water fasting, instead of getting too hungry to continue on day 18 of your diet.

Even when you’re really, absolutely, positively sure you identified The Thing, you can be completely wrong. This was my experience after “knowing” through experiment that keto is what made me lose 100lbs. I had literally already written the book 🙂

Lesson in humility. One of the reasons why I’m couching my terms more this time and mostly going off of my experience so far. One of my broader claims this time was the zero-fiber/ketosis thing, and apparently I’ve already been proven wrong. Zing!

I am very critical of Science(tm) as an institution, especially in fat loss and nutrition. It seems that a lot of scientists hide behind mouse models and sophisticated studies so they don’t have to face the fact that nobody actually fricking knows how to lose weight.

Saw a meta-analysis recently that concluded “all diets work well to reduce weight.” Really? Must’ve not heard about this obesity epidemic.

That’s why I love the citizen scientist stuff so much. I think modern ethics boards literally make it illegal to do meaningful diet research.

SMTM: Preach!

Exfatloss: Try getting a 85% calories from heavy cream study approved.

Final Thoughts

SMTM: Finally, can we publish your responses to these questions (and responses to any followup questions) as an interview on our blog? If that sounds good, we’ll produce a version of this email thread, edited for clarity and flow, and go over it with you before publishing. 

Exfatloss: Yea, that sounds great! Please edit it to make me sound smart and funny lol. Exfatloss is good as a name. You can mention that I’m a guy just for clarity, as that can make a big difference in fat loss/metabolism I think.

SMTM: How should our readers reach you if they have questions? Comments on your Substack? Email? 

Exfatloss: Substack is best. Also on Twitter @exfatloss

Thanks!

And thank you for inspiring me to try this shit again, I had given up until I read the Lithium series.

4 jeans sizes is already so worth it. You wouldn’t believe the quality of life difference 40lbs makes. Literally wouldn’t believe it. If I never lost another pound, this would still be a huge success.

SMTM: ❤ ! 

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