ex150ish-5 : Review

It Worked, But Not as Expected

08/05/24 94.9 36.9 0.5 0.5

07/05/24 95.7 36.73 0 0.5

06/05/24 95.4 36.62 0.5 0.5

05/05/24 95.8 36.67 0.5 0.5

04/05/24 96.2 36.76 0 0.5

03/05/24 95.3 36.54 0.5 0.5

02/05/24 95.3 36.6 0.5 0.5

01/05/24 93.7 36.58 0.5 0.5

30/04/24 94.7 36.49 0.5 0.5

Making and evaluating predictions is important to me. It helps me to know when I actually know something and when I'm just fooling myself.

So here are my predictions from before ex150ish-5 and how they panned out.

> I expect to go into ketosis, with attendant mild headaches, fairly quickly, and will take electrolytes (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07YN75QLS) for the first few days to try to reduce the effect of 'keto flu'.

> I also expect to feel like I've got an endless supply of energy and mental clarity, but that that will somehow feel 'a bit thin' and run out quickly if I try to use it seriously.

I think I did go into ketosis speedily, but I think that adding pickled cabbage to the mix screwed me up. I'd been suspicious before about malt vinegar having sulphites in it, but since small amounts of vinegar as a condiment didn't seem to cause any problems I'd forgotten about it.

Actually I think eating lots of vinegar-soaked cabbage gave me sulphite poisoning.

I remember the two weeks as involving a lot of headaches and sluggishness, but actually looking at my notes there seem to have been quite a lot of days of energy and clarity, but with a load of headaches thrown in. I can believe that everything worked as expected, but with extra headaches and an afternoon of fatigue and depression caused by accidentally recarbing on milk one day.

So the prediction of an endless supply of energy and mental clarity is definitely a fail, but I think it can potentially be explained away by excessive malt vinegar.

> Weight-wise, I expect that to cause roughly 1kg of water-weight loss quickly over the first week, which will come back on once I start eating carbs again.

Fail, weight loss was savage and scary. My seven-day average just before ex150ish-5 was 97.25 and it had come down to 92.2 at the point where I bottled and stopped. Five kilos in two weeks is just far too fast.

It then rebounded to around 95kg, so that looks like 3kg of ‘water-weight’ lost and rapidly regained. I've got no explanation for this, it seems much more violent than any previous time I've tried it. Hmm...

I'm also not sure where that 'water-weight' was coming from. I'm fairly sure that I don't have 3kg of water-bound glucose on board normally. So it probably wasn't water, but some other transient effect. I am mystified. I notice that I am confused.

> I also expect to lose actual body mass at a bit more than 0.5kg/week while I do it.

Looks like I lost about two kilos of not-transient mass, presumably fat loss and maybe some muscle. So that's prediction’s a fail, it was roughly double what I expected.

> So in two weeks I expect to be a bit below 95.3kg, at which point I'll come out of ketosis and go back up to 96.3.

Again, fail on the side of losing far too much far too fast. I stopped at 92.2 kilos and rebounded to around 95.

> I also expect to start overheating, and to have to reduce my thyroid dose somewhat.

I did get a bit of overheating, and dropped a couple of thyroid doses, but it doesn't seem to have pushed the actual amount needed to stay normal down at all. My dose is stable where it was.

So on the whole, ex150ish-5 did the sorts of things I expected it to do, but not at all in the same way that it was working last year.

I'm still convinced that ex150ish is a good hack for losing weight short-term! Whether it’s actually a wise thing to do is another question.

If all that lost weight was fat, then great, and even if it’s made no long-term difference then that’s still a good thing to do from the point of view of clearing out PUFAs.

But if some of that weight was actually muscle, or some other important tissue, then no, I don’t like that at all. And I’ve no idea how to tell. I don’t feel noticeably weaker, I guess?

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As I said before, the actual interesting bit is 'what happens when it's over?'. My seven-day average weight is still rising, but it's not clear whether that's just that the water-weight rebound is still feeding into the average, or whether my body is trying to get back to where it was before by storing fat. So I'm not going to try to call that one way or the other yet.

I find I'm expecting my weight to start rising slowly as it was before. I will report on that in another week or so when it’s clearer.