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?
> So what do we think actually happens in the analogy with ex150?
This is the trillion-dollar question. I hypothesise a homeostat of some sort, but evolution's work is invariably a collection of hideous kludges piled on hideous kludges, and optimized for trade-offs we don't even know about, and easily broken by anything unexpected.
Imagine trying to modify a complicated program in a language you don't understand by randomly inserting noise, and the only feedback you get is whether it still passes the test suite. If it doesn't, your change is reverted.
It's a miracle that anything gets done at all. But you can see why it takes millions of years to get anywhere.
Even worse, the program you're trying to modify was created by this process in the first place, so there's no proper modularity and every change breaks all sorts of different functions.
And you can't look at the code. And your text editor interface is toggles on the front panel. And the test suite is being modified by the same process.
I even wonder if the way things seem to work differently for different people is deliberate and to do with parasite/disease defence. Hard for the wretched little horrors to hack the system if they have to spend a while working out which system they're actually in. And even when they manage it, their children have to deal with something different in the next victim.
Biochemistry will eventually work it all out in fascinating detail, but we'll be long dead before then. The best we can hope for is to get a sense of how things work and where the levers are.
I suspect that the way it works is something like, 'if short of energy, try to release stored energy and then get reports back from cells about how much extra fuel they receive'. If the increase is not commensurate, stores are too low. If it's ample, then not to worry.
And 'ample' is set slightly higher in women, because they care more about babies and surviving famines, whereas we care more about fighting and hunting.
> evolution's work is invariably a collection of hideous kludges piled on hideous kludges, and optimized for trade-offs we don't even know about, and easily broken by anything unexpected.
So, completely unlike modern day programming :grimace.gif:
> I even wonder if the way things seem to work differently for different people is deliberate and to do with parasite/disease defence.
Oh, I absolutely think so. Just look at natural growth vs. our mono crops. They still die even if we genetically modify them and douse them in roundup! A single clever little bacterium/pest comes along and destroys all of Iowa's corn harvest.
> if short of energy, try to release stored energy and then get reports back from cells about how much extra fuel they receive'. If the increase is not commensurate, stores are too low. If it's ample, then not to worry.
You even kinda don't need the second part if you have the first. If the first system goes "low energy -> release energy" and it works, it'll just "turn itself off." If not, it won't.
The thing is we don't have an "absolute energy/fuel storage" sensor, apparently, otherwise we couldn't have obesity. It seems to be sensing either fuel in the pipeline (blood, e.g. glucose/free fatty acids) or even combustion products (mitochondria/ROS theory).
> The thing is we don't have an "absolute energy/fuel storage" sensor, apparently, otherwise we couldn't have obesity.
I don't follow. Any system you can think of could go wrong. Doesn't matter how it was *supposed* to work? In our natural unbroken state, I don't think we did have obesity.
But whatever the system is, it seems reasonable to imagine that one way it could break is by getting the set point wrong and defending the wrong value.
The magic of ex150 for me is that it seems to put that set point back where it should be, as long as you keep doing it.
I wouldn't be surprised if ex150 fixed anorexia, and caused hunger and weight gain in the involuntarily underweight! We need an anorexic on the team.
Yea SM TM have the same hypothesis, that this is just a rare inverse reaction. Thermostat broken in the opposite direction.
Good point that it could be either, but I actually don't think we have a "total fat content of the body" sensor. At least I'm not familiar with one. We have some indirect ones like FFA in the blood (which can be fueled by adipose tissue as well as dietary intake) and leptin.
> I actually don't think we have a "total fat content of the body" sensor.
I don't disagree, I know very little about biology. I'm coming at this from a 'how would I design this system/how must this system work to produce animals that can survive in the wild' point of view.
I'm pretty sure that there will be some sort of homeostatic mechanism, I'm agnostic as to how it might work except that it probably involves hormones, I'm pretty sure that something modern is breaking it, and I'm guessing that ex150 somehow puts it right.
It seems to me that you're fine on ex150, but the slightest increase in protein above that minimal level causes hyperphagia, as does sour cream. Like maybe ex150 set point is 80kg, and non-ex150 set point is very high indeed.
If we want to know what's actually going on, rather than exploit what we already have, those seem like interesting effects to explore. How much protein exactly, how rapidly can it be turned on and off? What exactly is the relevant difference between cream and sour cream?
For me for months now, it's been more like ex150ish fixes things, maybe fixed point goes to 80kg or something reasonable like that. And it still works the same with sour cream instead of double cream.
But on anything else at all I'm stable at (and attracted to) 95kg. Which is just weird. And now it looks like that 95kg might be rising, which is *really* weird.
At some point I should try ex150ish and then once it's clearly working start seeing how many other things I can sneak in without breaking it.
> 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.
That sounds fine. Why do you think there's a problem?
> Have you ever done a full 30 day bout of ex150ish?
No! I've never managed more than a couple of weeks. Events, dear boy, events...
But it doesn't seem to have mattered much. Early doors the weight loss happened regardless, later on anything that was lost has come back speedily anyway.
By the way I just talked to a physicist friend and he says exponential decay in fat loss can easily be explained by torricelli's law. If we were literally a large bag of fat with a hole in the bottom, it's exactly what you would expect to happen, until you hit equilibrium.
> Plus you might get back down closer to 90kg and then you can stay there, which will feel good
It would feel wonderful, but only in the sense of intellectual victory. I'm a middle-aged man and I lost interest in women years ago (I recommend it, it's like not being chained to an idiot any more!). So the main reason I'd care about my weight *per se* is to take the strain off my knees.
I am actually a bit worried that if I fix my metabolism properly, my sex drive might come back. It would be a most undignified weakness in an elderly philosopher. Like suddenly developing an interest in Magic the Gathering or something equally embarrassing.
Epicurus was quite right. Satisfy your drives! But even better not to have them in the first place.
Maybe this will stop being true once I approach your weight (SOON!) but so far, every 10lbs weight loss has been a major quality of life upgrade. And intellectual victories feel good, too!
> Like suddenly developing an interest in Magic the Gathering or something equally embarrassing.
Well, I suggest you tap that then.
> But even better not to have them in the first place.
You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want.
> Sounds like a good idea. I like to go back to basics, validate my axioms.
TBH I know ex150 works. And I'm pretty sure that if I stick in a couple of weeks of ex150 then I'll drop a kilo or so, which I'll then put back on when I go home. (That may be a good thing to do from a PUFA-clearing point of view).
The thing I'm curious about is what happens when I'm not doing ex150. I thought last year's adventures had fixed the 'weight goes up 4kg/year' problem that I had, and I was now in a state of 'weight returns to 95kg when unattended'. I'd seen that happen four times in six months, and was reasonably confident of it. It was still true a month ago.
But I'm now averaging 95.7 or so and I feel that it's rising. And if I've really managed to gain a kilo in a month while at equilibrium, that's *very* surprising. I was partially fixed but something I did without noticing has broken me again, and maybe worse than before?
So I think the path of maximum enlightenment may currently lie through 'sit tight and see what happens for a bit'.
Absolutely everything on that graph is 'ad-lib swamp', except the blue regions. Loads of potatoes, bread, meat, fruit, butter, coconut oil, milk, cheese, alcohol and so on and so forth. When I say "Eat what you like, whenever you fancy, no willpower", I totally mean it. My only rules are no-PUFAs, no-sulphites.
And before anyone mentions it, I have no idea how one would actually go about counting calories, either! I've never done it. It sounds very fiddly and the errors in it would be way larger than the significant amounts. Like trying to drive a car by nutting the steering wheel.
Hm, you definitely seem to be losing way more weight in the blue shaded phases. But those are protein restricted too, right?
Looking at your overall graph it sure looks like everything was amazing and you trended down even without the blue shades until that long red stretch in the fall.
After that phase you're a bit sideways, then down in another blue phase, but after that it starts going up slowly.
Maybe you accidentally re-PUFA'd yourself, not realizing it? Or maybe there's a limit to how much protein you can eat before you need to spend a bunch of effort restricting again.
I.e. if you do ex150 for 2 weeks you'll be low enough to be in "slow down mode" and if you eat high protein for a couple days, it just takes a couple days to go back to "slow down mode."
But maybe if you spend 3 weeks feasting on protein, you're so far out that it takes another 2-3 weeks of actual effort (ex150) to get back into "slow down mode?"
I don't know, just speculating. But sure looks like something changed either during that long red stretch in the fall, or between it and Christmas.
> Ha, I have the same finger nail issue. It's actually annoying how fast they grow!
Really? Trimming frequency has gone up since giving up PUFAs? And they seem a bit suppler than they were? Toenails too? And did you have the same 'cuticles pulling away from the nail' problem? Is it fixed?
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
Oh, that's interesting, thank you, I'll look into it!
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?
> So what do we think actually happens in the analogy with ex150?
This is the trillion-dollar question. I hypothesise a homeostat of some sort, but evolution's work is invariably a collection of hideous kludges piled on hideous kludges, and optimized for trade-offs we don't even know about, and easily broken by anything unexpected.
Imagine trying to modify a complicated program in a language you don't understand by randomly inserting noise, and the only feedback you get is whether it still passes the test suite. If it doesn't, your change is reverted.
It's a miracle that anything gets done at all. But you can see why it takes millions of years to get anywhere.
Even worse, the program you're trying to modify was created by this process in the first place, so there's no proper modularity and every change breaks all sorts of different functions.
And you can't look at the code. And your text editor interface is toggles on the front panel. And the test suite is being modified by the same process.
I even wonder if the way things seem to work differently for different people is deliberate and to do with parasite/disease defence. Hard for the wretched little horrors to hack the system if they have to spend a while working out which system they're actually in. And even when they manage it, their children have to deal with something different in the next victim.
Biochemistry will eventually work it all out in fascinating detail, but we'll be long dead before then. The best we can hope for is to get a sense of how things work and where the levers are.
I suspect that the way it works is something like, 'if short of energy, try to release stored energy and then get reports back from cells about how much extra fuel they receive'. If the increase is not commensurate, stores are too low. If it's ample, then not to worry.
And 'ample' is set slightly higher in women, because they care more about babies and surviving famines, whereas we care more about fighting and hunting.
> evolution's work is invariably a collection of hideous kludges piled on hideous kludges, and optimized for trade-offs we don't even know about, and easily broken by anything unexpected.
So, completely unlike modern day programming :grimace.gif:
> I even wonder if the way things seem to work differently for different people is deliberate and to do with parasite/disease defence.
Oh, I absolutely think so. Just look at natural growth vs. our mono crops. They still die even if we genetically modify them and douse them in roundup! A single clever little bacterium/pest comes along and destroys all of Iowa's corn harvest.
> if short of energy, try to release stored energy and then get reports back from cells about how much extra fuel they receive'. If the increase is not commensurate, stores are too low. If it's ample, then not to worry.
You even kinda don't need the second part if you have the first. If the first system goes "low energy -> release energy" and it works, it'll just "turn itself off." If not, it won't.
The thing is we don't have an "absolute energy/fuel storage" sensor, apparently, otherwise we couldn't have obesity. It seems to be sensing either fuel in the pipeline (blood, e.g. glucose/free fatty acids) or even combustion products (mitochondria/ROS theory).
> The thing is we don't have an "absolute energy/fuel storage" sensor, apparently, otherwise we couldn't have obesity.
I don't follow. Any system you can think of could go wrong. Doesn't matter how it was *supposed* to work? In our natural unbroken state, I don't think we did have obesity.
But whatever the system is, it seems reasonable to imagine that one way it could break is by getting the set point wrong and defending the wrong value.
The magic of ex150 for me is that it seems to put that set point back where it should be, as long as you keep doing it.
I wouldn't be surprised if ex150 fixed anorexia, and caused hunger and weight gain in the involuntarily underweight! We need an anorexic on the team.
Yea SM TM have the same hypothesis, that this is just a rare inverse reaction. Thermostat broken in the opposite direction.
Good point that it could be either, but I actually don't think we have a "total fat content of the body" sensor. At least I'm not familiar with one. We have some indirect ones like FFA in the blood (which can be fueled by adipose tissue as well as dietary intake) and leptin.
> I actually don't think we have a "total fat content of the body" sensor.
I don't disagree, I know very little about biology. I'm coming at this from a 'how would I design this system/how must this system work to produce animals that can survive in the wild' point of view.
I'm pretty sure that there will be some sort of homeostatic mechanism, I'm agnostic as to how it might work except that it probably involves hormones, I'm pretty sure that something modern is breaking it, and I'm guessing that ex150 somehow puts it right.
It seems to me that you're fine on ex150, but the slightest increase in protein above that minimal level causes hyperphagia, as does sour cream. Like maybe ex150 set point is 80kg, and non-ex150 set point is very high indeed.
If we want to know what's actually going on, rather than exploit what we already have, those seem like interesting effects to explore. How much protein exactly, how rapidly can it be turned on and off? What exactly is the relevant difference between cream and sour cream?
For me for months now, it's been more like ex150ish fixes things, maybe fixed point goes to 80kg or something reasonable like that. And it still works the same with sour cream instead of double cream.
But on anything else at all I'm stable at (and attracted to) 95kg. Which is just weird. And now it looks like that 95kg might be rising, which is *really* weird.
At some point I should try ex150ish and then once it's clearly working start seeing how many other things I can sneak in without breaking it.
Agreed. Longer experiments give you more confidence in what's happening. That's why I like 30 day experiments.
> 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.
That sounds fine. Why do you think there's a problem?
Cause I still gain weight when I eat protein
Sure, sorry, I thought you meant those temperatures were bad!
Ah no, I meant "they seem ok (if not as high as Peaters would want them lol)"
> Have you ever done a full 30 day bout of ex150ish?
No! I've never managed more than a couple of weeks. Events, dear boy, events...
But it doesn't seem to have mattered much. Early doors the weight loss happened regardless, later on anything that was lost has come back speedily anyway.
By the way I just talked to a physicist friend and he says exponential decay in fat loss can easily be explained by torricelli's law. If we were literally a large bag of fat with a hole in the bottom, it's exactly what you would expect to happen, until you hit equilibrium.
I might quibble with that exact example, but exponential-like decay is a pretty general property of restoring forces, certainly!
> Plus you might get back down closer to 90kg and then you can stay there, which will feel good
It would feel wonderful, but only in the sense of intellectual victory. I'm a middle-aged man and I lost interest in women years ago (I recommend it, it's like not being chained to an idiot any more!). So the main reason I'd care about my weight *per se* is to take the strain off my knees.
I am actually a bit worried that if I fix my metabolism properly, my sex drive might come back. It would be a most undignified weakness in an elderly philosopher. Like suddenly developing an interest in Magic the Gathering or something equally embarrassing.
Epicurus was quite right. Satisfy your drives! But even better not to have them in the first place.
Maybe this will stop being true once I approach your weight (SOON!) but so far, every 10lbs weight loss has been a major quality of life upgrade. And intellectual victories feel good, too!
> Like suddenly developing an interest in Magic the Gathering or something equally embarrassing.
Well, I suggest you tap that then.
> But even better not to have them in the first place.
You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want.
> Sounds like a good idea. I like to go back to basics, validate my axioms.
TBH I know ex150 works. And I'm pretty sure that if I stick in a couple of weeks of ex150 then I'll drop a kilo or so, which I'll then put back on when I go home. (That may be a good thing to do from a PUFA-clearing point of view).
The thing I'm curious about is what happens when I'm not doing ex150. I thought last year's adventures had fixed the 'weight goes up 4kg/year' problem that I had, and I was now in a state of 'weight returns to 95kg when unattended'. I'd seen that happen four times in six months, and was reasonably confident of it. It was still true a month ago.
But I'm now averaging 95.7 or so and I feel that it's rising. And if I've really managed to gain a kilo in a month while at equilibrium, that's *very* surprising. I was partially fixed but something I did without noticing has broken me again, and maybe worse than before?
So I think the path of maximum enlightenment may currently lie through 'sit tight and see what happens for a bit'.
> Sounds like you can't swamp.
Absolutely everything on that graph is 'ad-lib swamp', except the blue regions. Loads of potatoes, bread, meat, fruit, butter, coconut oil, milk, cheese, alcohol and so on and so forth. When I say "Eat what you like, whenever you fancy, no willpower", I totally mean it. My only rules are no-PUFAs, no-sulphites.
And before anyone mentions it, I have no idea how one would actually go about counting calories, either! I've never done it. It sounds very fiddly and the errors in it would be way larger than the significant amounts. Like trying to drive a car by nutting the steering wheel.
Hm, you definitely seem to be losing way more weight in the blue shaded phases. But those are protein restricted too, right?
Looking at your overall graph it sure looks like everything was amazing and you trended down even without the blue shades until that long red stretch in the fall.
After that phase you're a bit sideways, then down in another blue phase, but after that it starts going up slowly.
Maybe you accidentally re-PUFA'd yourself, not realizing it? Or maybe there's a limit to how much protein you can eat before you need to spend a bunch of effort restricting again.
I.e. if you do ex150 for 2 weeks you'll be low enough to be in "slow down mode" and if you eat high protein for a couple days, it just takes a couple days to go back to "slow down mode."
But maybe if you spend 3 weeks feasting on protein, you're so far out that it takes another 2-3 weeks of actual effort (ex150) to get back into "slow down mode?"
I don't know, just speculating. But sure looks like something changed either during that long red stretch in the fall, or between it and Christmas.
Blue bits are ex150ish (dark blue) and a couple of variants (light blue). Red bits are 'visit Mum'.
I think something last summer caused my set point to slowly decline from 99kg to 95kg last fall, at which point it stopped there.
On top of that, ex150ish-like eating causes weight loss, but it comes back quickly to set point when not eating ex150ish.
Everything else is consistent with that (up until this week, which is why I am suddenly rather alarmed).
Christ knows what's going on. Nothing obvious like 'I started eating vegetable-oil based snacks last fall', certainly.
Forgive me, it is 00:40 here. I'll reply to these many excellent points tomorrow!
> Ha, I have the same finger nail issue. It's actually annoying how fast they grow!
Really? Trimming frequency has gone up since giving up PUFAs? And they seem a bit suppler than they were? Toenails too? And did you have the same 'cuticles pulling away from the nail' problem? Is it fixed?