ex150ish : Rebound and Actual Results

A Highly Qualified "It works..."

It worked, just?

13/06/23 98

12/06/23 98

11/06/23 98.5

10/06/23 97.6

09/06/23 97.6

08/06/23 97.3

07/06/23 96.8

Many social obligations and occasions to eat out were looming, so I decided to end my first ex150ish experiment.

I actually accidentally ended it a couple of days earlier than I planned, because I walked into Sainsbury's and noticed some coconut chunks in little packets bearing the yellow stickers of extreme cheapness. I checked the ingredients, they were only coconut, and so I thought "wow, a tasty uncontaminated keto-friendly lunch for 20p", and bought and ate the lot.

Oops. Coconut *Oil* is keto-friendly and admirably saturated fat, but coconut *flesh* has a lot of carbohydrate in it.

I didn't feel any different, but the next morning my weight was up 0.5kg. That could have been a random fluctuation, but it was probably glycogen stores replenishing.

The next sin, this time voluntary, the following evening, was a load of shortbread biscuits at choir. I make the tea for my choir, and I always have lots of shortbread biscuits because despite being processed food, they're admirably pure from a heart-attack diet perspective.

I figured that since I'd arranged to meet a friend for a pizza the following lunchtime, and I'd already buggered up the last couple of days of my experiment, it no longer mattered, and I ate half a packet and had milk in my tea, as a man should.

I was expecting the biscuits to taste wonderful (carb-deprivation), and they did, but no more wonderful than usual. Shortbread biscuits just go well with tea.

I also had a couple of vodkas with iced water afterwards in the pub (sulphite-free booze!), and was rewarded with a pleasant and long-missed feeling of energetic merriment, and the tiniest imaginable hangover the next morning.

Almost a quantum hangover. I don't think I'm alcohol intolerant at all. I think it was the sulphites all along. Weight up another 0.3 kilos. That's probably most of my 'water weight' back.

That seems reasonable. 1kg of water holds about 1000kcal of glycogen, and I can well imagine that the coconut carbs and the shortbread together were 1000kcal.

After that I went back to my standard heart-attack diet (No PUFAs, no sulphites, plenty of salt), and enjoyed various meals out with visiting parents and friends and umpired a cricket match between a couple of beloved cricket teams that I’m too old and ill to play for any more.

I didn't keep track of what I ate. Deliberately. The point is to work out what your weight goes back to when you’re not paying attention. I remember a couple of pizzas and a tea at a cricket match with scones and jam and sausage rolls, so pretty carb-heavy for the first week at least.

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So let's say that the formal end of the ex150ish experiment was 07/06/2023, the day of the coconut chunks incident.

That morning my weight had been 96.8kg, and over the course of the next week it climbed up to a mysterious high of 98.5kg and then seemed to stabilize at around 98kg

Also the feeling of endless energy went away, and I started occasionally having little bouts of unexplained tiredness. That's just normal for me these days, but it was noticeably different from the duracell-powered-state of ketosis.

At that point, I felt that ex150ish had been a success, but only just.

I'd said 98.2 was my success criterion, and it looked like 98.0 was the actual result.

That's actually about a kilo of weight loss in a couple of weeks, but I was expecting to lose 3/4kg anyway. And who knows what the effects of no sulphites has been?

On the other hand, I hadn’t really given it enough time to work unambiguously, and it had stripped the whole of the 3/4kg that Mum had put on me in three weeks at home, plus a bit extra, in two weeks.

Two weeks in which I hadn’t felt even remotely hungry at any point. ex150ish is very easy to stick to.

And the feeling of ketosis is just so amazing compared to my usual state that I’m sure it’s a huge clue to whatever the hell is wrong with me, which is probably whatever the hell has caused me to start gaining unneeded fat stores when I never have before.

And then, the weirdest things started to happen....