Current Beliefs, Suspicions and Confusions
Some Things Seem Clear
So, at the moment, I am, as usual, confused. But I'm reasonably confident about some things, so I'm following my usual strategy of writing an essay and publishing it to help me think.
Lightly Held Beliefs
The natural state of man is that weight is under unconscious homeostatic control. If you ever need to think about your weight at all you're broken.
The natural state of man is endless inexhaustible energy. Not infinite, but there should be plenty available on demand. Unless you've pushed yourself very hard, if you ever find yourself too tired to do something, you're broken.
Neither of these features seem terribly common in modern people living Western lifestyles. Children seem more like that than adults, but even children seem to be having problems these days.
Polyunsaturated fats are bad news and probably the cause of both these problems.
Animal fats and proteins are a natural food for humans, innocent a priori. So is salt, and so are carbohydrates, both starches and sugars. Sucrose may be an exception.
If you're in a good state you should be able to deal effortlessly with all these things. Sucrose is unambiguously bad for teeth, but metabolically it's probably no problem.
There's no good reason to eat polyunsaturated fats in anything except tiny quantities, and it's practically impossible to eat so little polyunsaturated fat that you'll become deficient. If you're fanatical about avoiding them but still eating ordinary foods of any kind, you're still probably getting plenty.
Ketosis is a human-specific evolved mechanism for surviving shortages of carbohydrates. It works well, and allows our big brains to function without using excessive gluconeogenesis from protein, but without stores of glycogen, you're not fully functional. You don't have large stores of quickly accessible energy to draw on, so medium-duration exertion doesn't work as well as it should. You might still be competent to run an ultra-marathon or to sprint or lift heavy weights, but you won't be able to do a regatta well or run up a hill as well as you should be able to.
Ketosis, for me, actually seems to improve my energy levels. The emergency back-up system actually functions better than the foreground carb and fat burning metabolism that I'm supposed to run on normally. But this effect seems to be lessening as my metabolism improves.
Ketosis also mysteriously fixes u/exfatloss's non-24 hour sleep disorder. But it comes back if he goes out of ketosis.
Yet another natural state of man is to be able to tolerate sulphites. A man should be able to eat a jar of Opies’ 'Maraschino Flavoured Cocktail Cherries' without the slightest ill effect.
Forswearing all sulphites resulted in an immediate dramatic improvement in my general well being, and any accidental sulphites cause me immediate obvious harm.
I've never had a 'thyroid problem'. But thyroid drugs mysteriously patched my mysteriously broken and sluggish metabolism to the point where I could function fairly well. Without them I would have suicided years ago.
My weight is still under homeostatic control, but the set-point is too high. A year ago that set-point was 99kg and seemed to be rising at around 4kg/year.
Something that happened between May and August last year, probably one of {no-sulphites, ex150ish, no-PUFAs} caused that set point to drop, but it's around 95kg, which is probably at least 10kg too high. And it may still be rising, although I think quite slowly.
Similarly something has improved my metabolism to the point where I can't really remember what 'tired all the time' was like, and is still causing me to reduce my thyroid dose. I hope that one day I will be able to forget everything I know about thyroid matters.
The improvements in my metabolism and my lipostat, while wonderful and excellent and surprising, have now stopped or slowed down or may even be reversing. But the three possibilities are indistinguishable on month-long timescales. I am basically fine these days, but further improvement is probably possible.
Both u/exfatloss's ex150 and my ex150ish variant are spectacular weight-loss techniques. They reliably cause dramatic fast effortless weight loss.
They're not starvation diets. I think they must function by temporarily making the lipostat mechanism work as intended. Your set-point normalizes, and you just stop eating much because you're not hungry, falling back on stores that the lipostat now realises are excessive.
They may or may not affect the long-term lipostat set-point itself, and you may or may not find the weight coming back when you stop. I seem to have seen both these effects!
Most people who have given up polyunsaturated fats for a while report that they become much less prone to sunburn. But I have never had a problem with the sun, so I wouldn't have noticed any improvements.
Possibilities Only
In Eskimos, I have heard rumours that ketosis works differently, and that might be an evolved difference, something to do with the large quantities of PUFAs in the traditional polar diet.
There are also some minor effects that I've noticed, which could be coincidence but are at least consistent with the improvement in my metabolism. I wasn't expecting them, and didn't make records, and I've no way of measuring them, so I'm not sure about them and don't take them too seriously:
My fingernails, which a year ago were rather brittle and prone to detaching cuticles, are now more flexible and seem to be growing faster. I can't remember the last time a cuticle pulled away from its nail.
My beard, which a year ago was pure white, is now showing dark roots in my original "mousy brown" hair colour, which as I remember goes blond in the sun. I also get the impression that this has happened to my body hair too. No white hairs any more. No such effect on what remains of the hair on my head though, which is still white.
Also I don’t seem to need as much salt as I used to. Last year I used to put remarkable amounts of salt on everything I ate, and I noticed that I’d forgotten what ‘too salty’ tastes like. These days I’m using much less, I think, and if I use too much it tastes very sharp and makes food difficult to eat. Again, I haven’t been tracking this, so it may be an illusion of some sort.
Confusions
The things I am confused about are:
What are the underlying mechanisms?
What can be done to cause further improvement?
Is my sulphite intolerance problem downstream of the other breakages, or is it an independent problem?
Which if any of {no-sulphites, no-PUFAs, ex150ish} actually caused the metabolic improvement?
Which if any of {no-sulphites, no-PUFAs, ex150ish} partially fixed my lipostat?
Is there actually a difference between ex150ish and ex150ish-sour-cream-and-crème-fraîche?
If so, what on earth can be causing that difference?
Is my lipostat set-point now stable at 95kg, or is it, having fallen, now slowly rising again?
What is going on with SlimeMoldTimeMold's various potato hacks? In particular many people seem to have had ex150-like experiences eating just potato and dairy products. That's some protein restriction (cheese would be the main source), and no-PUFAs, but very high carbs.
What is going on with my friend u/exfatloss? He's made spectacular progress using ex150 as a weight loss technique, but either his lipostat is completely broken, or its set point is very high indeed. In fact he doesn't believe in homeostatic control of weight at all, because it's not consistent with his experiences.
Also he has no problem with energy levels and his waking body temperature is fine, so whatever broke his lipostat didn't also break his metabolism. How can that be?
What happened in my heart-attack-keto experiment? It looks to me now like that could have been a combination of slow water weight loss, and a reduction in the noise level of my measured weight, followed by quick water-weight regain at the end, with no other effects at all.
Speculations
I can't see what the answers might look like while being consistent with my experiences over the last year.
If it was no-PUFAs or no-sulphites that fixed my metabolism or my lipostat, why has the effect apparently stopped? I haven't touched much of either recently, and stored PUFAs should be clearing out of my system at some rate, since I can't synthesise them.
If it was ex150ish, why did the first couple of bouts do so much good, while the most recent two (one OG ex150ish and one using sour cream and crème fraîche instead of double cream) seem to have caused temporary weight loss exactly as before, but *not* permanently changed my lipostat set-point?
I can believe that the last bout of OG ex150ish (dark blue region on graph, September 2024) caused a permanent reduction in necessary thyroid dose but not in lipostat set-point.
The ex150ish-sour-cream-and-crème-fraîche bout (November 2024, medium blue region) seems to have done neither, despite causing the usual spectacular effortless weight loss and improvement in energy and positive metabolic effects while I was actually doing it.
Ideas
I'm stuck.
My idea about protein restriction being necessary to promote PUFA burning still seems very tempting, but I tried just keeping protein low while eating an otherwise normal mix of macros (and no PUFAs) in December 2024 (not marked on graph, but it was the couple of weeks after ex150ish-sour-cream, and it didn't do anything. My weight and thyroid dose quickly tracked back up to their previous levels and stayed there.
I wonder if carbohydrates are also involved, but that starts to look too complex to be true. A complex theory drawn from not much data is likely just modelling the noise.
So, as usual, one of the things I believe must be wrong. Or of course there's something else going on.
I think my next experiment will be a bout of OG ex150ish, to see what happens, but I am open to other suggestions.
Have you considered that you might be deficient in molybdenum? There are a few articles on Chris Masterjohns substack about it, especially with regards to Sulfur. Here's one recent free article: https://chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com/p/the-unknown-testosterone-nutrient
Ha, I have the same finger nail issue. It's actually annoying how fast they grow!
> They're not starvation diets. I think they must function by temporarily making the lipostat mechanism work as intended. Your set-point normalizes, and you just stop eating much because you're not hungry, falling back on stores that the lipostat now realises are excessive.
That's actually interesting to think about in our house heater/AC analogy. Say the thermostat is supposed to be set to 70°F (for people using degrees other than Freedom, this is a comfortable, almost summer-esque temperature).
Several things could be wrong:
1. Maybe the thermostat somehow got set to 93°F
2. Maybe the thermostat is fine, but somebody put ice cubes on or lit a fire under the sensor
3. Pretty much anything else that can go wrong with computers/systems/software could be going wrong
In fact now that I think of it, we know this analogy isn't complex enough. For example, there's a phenomenon PUFAs cause in the mitochondria that's been described by Peter at Hyperlipid forever, and by Fire in a Bottle, too.
This is that the "exhaust gases" of the mitochondria burning fats are part of the feedback signal, the reactive oxygen species, and that burning PUFAs doesn't create them to the same degree as other fats do.
Therefore they don't create sufficient back pressure to cause a cellular "satiety" (=full of energy) signal.
In fact, I think we know that there isn't actually a "temperature sensor" in the body, it's more indirect. I think there are several signals. One of them seems to be leptin, which is elevated the more adipose tissue there is, but can also go too low if you're starved.
Another seems to be that adipose tissue releases fatty acids into the blood, and so you will have fatty acids around at any given time, which can be used for energy and which trigger a certain insulin response. That's why (I think) fat people have high fasting insulin.
It's like they just had a swig of cream at any given time.
I suppose in the house analogy it would be like absence of a temperature sensor, but instead a sensor for furnace/AC exhaust gases. If you choose to burn a fuel that doesn't release the right type of exhaust gases, or not enough (or maybe too much), the sensor will misreport the amount of furnacing/ACing that has actually happened.
So what do we think actually happens in the analogy with ex150? Is the set point set to 93°F, and suddenly gets set back down to 70°F? We know that I'm putting less or no new PUFA-fuel into my tank, but that there's still some old one left in there. I am putting plenty of good fuel in there to balance it, but I was doing that before and it never helped me lose weight, so that part is not enough for me.
Or is the set point on 70°F the whole time, but protein messes up the sensor/the wire in some other way?
> Also he has no problem with energy levels and his waking body temperature is fine, so whatever broke his lipostat didn't also break his metabolism. How can that be?
98.2 and 98.8 just now (after creamy afternoon coffee) within 5 seconds. I'd argue my metabolism is still broken, just not in the "hypothyroid-esque" way.
> I wonder if carbohydrates are also involved, but that starts to look too complex to be true. A complex theory drawn from not much data is likely just modelling the noise.
Sounds like you can't swamp. I likely can't swamp. Just from a black box perspective, it seems like a fair observation that many people can't swamp.
> I think my next experiment will be a bout of OG ex150ish, to see what happens, but I am open to other suggestions.
Sounds like a good idea. I like to go back to basics, validate my axioms. Plus you might get back down closer to 90kg and then you can stay there, which will feel good :) Have you ever done a full 30 day bout of ex150ish?