One Year of the Heart Attack Diet

Mixed Results, Confusion

Jan 13, 2024

Roughly one year ago I noticed that I was gaining weight rapidly, for the first time in my life. I'd gained four kilos in one year, which was pretty scary if extrapolated. I also realised that the fatigue I'd been suffering from since the pandemic in 2020 wasn't going away.

That led me to start thinking about the causes of obesity, and of the "diseases of modernity". I quite quickly hit on the idea that the most likely cause of both was polyunsaturated fats.

And so around last December I renounced all polyunsaturated evil. Initially this just involved examining the ingredients list on anything I bought, looking for seed oils and particularly rapeseed oil, which in England is the principal representative of the horror.

At first I wasn't thinking of this as any sort of experiment, and I didn't really have any theory apart from a feeling that it might be hard to burn polyunsaturated fats in large quantities.

Generally I had to stop eating most processed foods. Luckily they are all slightly awful, and so that was no real problem. The only thing I really missed was chips, which are invariably fried in vegetable oil in England these days.

In the following six months, my general state of well-being improved considerably, and I noticed that my new home-cooked foods tasted much better than anything I could get eating out. In fact on the rare occasions when I did eat out, everything tasted pretty foul. Rapeseed oil has a strong and rather rancid taste, and if you don't eat it all the time, you really notice it.

But I kept gaining weight at the same rate. Another two kilos in the first six months. My highest achievement in this sphere was 100kg, a BMI of 31.6. Actual obesity rather than mere overweight.

At that point I decided that I was keeping my new diet even if it turned me into a barrage balloon, but I wasn't very happy about the fact that I was gaining weight so quickly, and I started to think about what I could do with the explicit purpose of losing weight.

Conventional "eat less, exercise more" advice seemed obviously hopeless. The only thing on the whole internet that looked like it might actually work was the ex150 diet invented by u/exfatloss.

I want to make something very plain here, because people get confused:

"Calories In, Calories Out" is a law of physics. I would bet my life on it being true, pace certain concerns about the crapness of medical "science" and nutrition "science" in general. But I don't think those concerns really matter much in practice.

But "Calories In, Calories Out" as a method of losing weight is a really stupid plan.

I think it takes a philosopher to even notice the difference between the two things, and the resulting ubiquitous equivocation between these two different meanings of the same four words causes all sorts of confusion.

To continue:

At around the time of my Last Gravitational Maximum, in May 2023, I noticed three things:

The first was that I could get a hangover from lime-and-soda. This led immediately to the discovery that the terrible hangovers that had caused me to stop drinking alcohol were actually being caused by sulphite preservatives.

I've checked that in various ways and I'm pretty sure it's true. Sulphites are bad for me. They cause headaches and nausea within a few hours of eating them, and the effect lasts for a couple of days.

I'm equally sure that that didn't use to be true for me, and that it isn't true for most people. But it is true for me these days.

The main result of that was that I had something else to check for on ingredients lists, and I stopped eating anything with sulphites in it. I remember regretfully throwing a packet of my beloved breakfast muesli overboard when I noticed that the dried fruit in it had sulphur dioxide as a preservative.

A secondary result was that I could take up drinking again. I have no desire to revive my previous happy and carefree alcoholism, but it is nice to have a couple of scotches now and then, and as long as I stick to spirits I'm fine.

The second thing I noticed was that peanut butter is very very high in polyunsaturated fats.

I hadn't even thought to look. The ingredients on my favourite peanut butter are peanuts, salt, and palm oil, which seemed very wholesome and innocent. It's only when you look at the label carefully that you realise that it's actually much worse than rapeseed oil as far as the polyunsaturated curse goes.

I'd been eating a lot of peanut butter for the first six months of this, and I think in hindsight I hadn't given up polyunsaturates at all, I'd just replaced a lot of the things I used to eat with peanut butter.

So I sadly threw my last huge jar of peanut butter into the bin. It's the other thing I miss.

And the third thing I noticed was that I was doing an experiment, and ought to keep notes. So I bought a set of scales and started keeping daily weight records.

With a certain combination of excitement and trepidation I tried the mad ex150ish diet, first for about nine days, then a break, and then for a couple of weeks.

It not only worked exactly as advertised, it carried on working even after I'd stopped doing it.

For about three months, I was eating normally, in fact I was eating whenever I felt capable of eating, but I just wasn't very hungry, and I dropped about 4kg with no effort at all.

After three months, the effect seemed to stop.

And I have no idea what was going on for those three months. Was it that ex150ish had somehow reset my broken homeostat to a more reasonable level, and it just took three months to lose the weight? Was it that finally managing to get rid of most of the PUFAs in my diet had caused my system to slowly fix itself and my weight tracked down as things got better? Was it something to do with sulphites? My normal diet changed after ex150ish, I started eating more stews and occasionally would drink double cream out of the pot as a snack, maybe I'd cut something else out by accident?

And whatever that effect was, what caused the effect to stop at around 95kg?

Anyway, noticing that things had stabilized at 95kg/BMI 30, on the boundary between overweight and obesity, I decided to have another go at weight-loss, but this time, rather than doing the full ex150ish shtick, I decided to try a more normal keto diet, without ex150's strict protein limit. And of course, no PUFAs, no sulphites.

heart-attack-keto seemed to work rather differently from ex150ish, and I'm still not sure what it actually did. My weight certainly fell, but then afterwards it started going back up again quite quickly.

Once it was back to roughly where it had been, I thought "Oh well, that didn't work", and tried ex150ish again.

My third bout of ex150ish worked pretty much how it had worked the first two times.

Two weeks of absolutely spectacular weight loss, probably half water-weight and half real fat loss. At the end of it I got the predictable speedy regain of the water-weight.

And I would very much have liked to see what happened next, but that was just before I went to visit my parents for the first 'Mom Test'.

At home in the Pennines I was hungry, and eating lots, and I gained three kilos in three weeks, a spectacular rise back to 95kg. Once back in Cambridge and in control of my own food supply again that seemed to stabilize and maybe even drift slowly downwards.

And again, I've no idea why.

Is my homeostat now fixated on 95kg? That's a damned sight better than north of 100kg, and I'm no longer staring barrage-balloon proportions in the face, and to be honest I'm no longer particularly worried about my weight.

But I think that the ideal average human BMI should be about 20. That's the value that our ancestors, pretty much worldwide, on any diet, seem to have maintained effortlessly right up to the second world war.

I'm a heavily built man, and for most of my life I was a healthy and fairly trim 27, but these days I'm an old man, and no longer so well-muscled as I was, so even allowing for my heavy frame, I should probably have a BMI of about 23 or so.

BMI 30 seems a very strange place to stop.

I decided to have another go at ex150ish, but this time I figured I could probably get away with eating sour cream and créme fraîche instead of/as well as double cream.

ex150ish-4-sour-cream seemed to work just the same as ex150ish, spectacular weight loss followed by a water-weight rebound. But once it was over, my weight tracked steadily but not rapidly back up to about 94kg, where it stabilised.

Again, it would have been nice to see what happened next, but by that time it was Christmas, so I went home again for my Xmas Mom Test.

This time I haven't had the spectacular hunger, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if my weight has gone up. I'm going to guess, before I get back to Cambridge and measure it, that it's back to 95kg.

I'm seriously puzzled, what on earth can be going on?