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30 Eggs a Day. Day 24 update
🕑 Added 2022-11-03 12:58:08 +0000 UTCSo I’m currently on Day 24 of eating 30 eggs a day.
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</figure>If you’re asking why I’m eating 30 eggs, take 60 seconds to watch this brief Youtube short explaining it.
What we’ll cover in this post:
・Weight gain
・Increased energy, libido and assertiveness
・Different (probably worse) sleep
・Gut destruction
・Unexpected blood lipid test results
</figure>My starting point
This whole experiment started shortly after my trip to India for a 10 day meditation retreat. The retreat was solid and sufficiently mind blowing. If you can’t imagine why anyone would want to meditate 8-10 hours a day for 10 days, read this series of mine. One issue was that the meals served there were mainly low protein, high carb dishes with plenty of wheat and vegetable oils. Some people don’t have issues with these, but around day 6 or so, my stomach started to feel queasy after eating and I couldn’t focus on my meditation until I was able to puke. By then I hadn’t totally realized that the food was the issue. I fasted for a bit after that which helped and before long I was feeling great. I thought I had caught a minor stomach bug that quickly resolved and kept on eating as usual. One day after eating lunch, I slowly started sneezing more and more throughout the rest of the day and my nose dripped constantly. This culminated in a sinus headache - which I would say is the worst headache I’ve ever had, considering how relentless it was. I didn’t sleep more than 30 minutes that night. This persisted until the next day, but I was able to sleep a couple hours.
Then I got back to Japan and was jet lagged for several days. The interesting thing though is that meditating for eight hours a day tends to mess with your sleep such that it seems you need less of it.
So my boohoo story aside, the point is that unfortunately, this isn’t the best controlled egg experiment. It’s not like I had a “control” month where I was eating a certain number of calories while doing a specific workout regimen and then matched the calories, macros and workouts in the egg period. Rather, I went from sitting on my ass for 10 days straight, got sick, slept poorly, was in quarantine after returning to Japan, and then started the eggs. All this said, I have had periods where I’m lifting really hard, eating tons of protein and about as much calories as I am eating during this eggsperiment and have noticed some differences between now and then.
</figure>Do you eat other things than eggs?
Yes. The rule is I must eat 30 eggs a day. Other than that I can eat whatever. (As usual, I avoid wheat and vegetable oils). I post every now and then what I’m eating on my Instagram stories.
How do you eat the eggs?
I don’t cook the yolks. Other than that I eat the whites raw or cooked. For a couple days I just couldn’t be bothered to be creative so I drank all 30 eggs raw. This didn’t work out for my stomach (more on that later).
Weight Gain
I gained 4.3kg or 9.46 lbs. Started at 78.4 kilos and now weigh 82.7 kilos.
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</figure>Is it fat or muscle? What does your DEXA scan show? Unfortunately I don’t have access to one here in Tokyo. I’ve explained in my fasting video why the bioimpedance InBody device I do have access to is pretty much garbage, so I didn’t bother with that either.
<figure>The InBody put me at 6% body fat when I certainly was not.
</figure>Increased energy and worse (?) sleep
I definitely feel more energetic, driven, assertive and unreserved than usual. If you take a look at my previous Substack posts, you’ll see what I mean by “unreserved.” Normally I try and stay as neutral as possible and not criticize others and would shy away from writing things like Kurzgesagt receiving $570,000 from Bill Gates doesn't make them biased. Though at some point I just said fuck it, enough is enough, someone needs to call these types of things out.
Hard to say if it’s more “energy” or just more zeal in general. When I wake up, I’m excited to get to work researching and writing. Normally writing is something of a chore for me and I over-research topics as a form of procrastination. It takes me a while to actually sit down and write out a script for a video even though I may have three scripts worth of material in my head. Yet, over the past 20 days or so I’ve written about 10 scripts worth on my Substack. I also have come to enjoy and look forward to the gym quite a bit more than before. This all reminds me of how Andrew Huberman said that “testosterone makes effort feel good.”
The downside is that because my routine is to wake up, get to work straight away, take a break to meditate, go to the gym, eat a big lunch and then eat eggs and work on and off straight until 10PM… my sleep hygiene is not so great. A lot of the things I recommended here I haven’t been doing. In the past if I woke up 90 minutes before I should have, I would check the clock and just comfortably fall back asleep. Now I often wake up too early and I’m disappointed when I see that it’s still not time to wake up. I’m just too eager to start the day and am mostly annoyed by my sleep needs. On a couple days I've tried to fall back asleep for a little while, then said screw this I’ll just take a nap later and started my day with 90 minutes less sleep … but then I never took that nap.
<figure>This night is October 26th
</figure>Ironically, the point of this egg video is testing the question whether eating tons of eggs will get you jacked or not. Sleep is very important for muscle growth.
Gut Destruction
<figure>Mangoes with their evil FODMAPs
</figure>I have been asked about this many times and have seen tons of comments like “how’s the constipation” or “your farts must be like biological weapons.” I won’t lie, there have been some days where my stomach was absolutely wrecked. However, I don’t think it was for the reasons you would assume.
The first incident was a couple days in when I woke up in the middle of the night and had so much gas that I couldn’t sleep for 2 hours. Initially I thought OK these eggs are going to be a problem. However, that day I had eaten about a half kilo of frozen mango because I was throwing it in a blender with egg yolks and making a kind of mango soft serve (egg) ice cream. It was pretty tasty. The thing is that’s way too much mango for my system. I suspect I’m sensitive to FODMAPs (fermentable short-chain carbohydrates) which mangos have plenty of. FODMAPs can cause a lot of gas buildup in the gut as well as diarrhea and constipation. I calmed down on the mango the next day and I was fine after that - no insomnia inducing gas.
I was pretty badly constipated another day but if I recall correctly I’m pretty sure I was upping the mangos and bananas that day. I’m not really trying to defend the 30 eggs and be an apologist for their potential constipation effect. After all I don’t claim 30 eggs is particularly sustainable; this is just an experiment. It’s just while there were plenty of days where I was fine and some days where I had diarrhea or constipation, the only thing that didn’t change was the 30 eggs.
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</figure>There were two instances where I puked. The first was after making the mistake of eating a 12 egg smoothie and then doing Crossfit (which ended in sprints on the assault bike). Another time I had just done Crossfit, came home and then ate a gyuudon (basically a bowl of rice with beef on top) with six egg yolks mixed in and had some other experimental egg dishes. It’s happened to me before that I do a bout of high intensity aerobic exercise, go home to eat a large amount of calories and then feel ill later in the day. That was the case here too and I felt much better after my gut grumpily expelled its contents.
Blood Test Results after 1 week
<figure>Did not expect the uric acid lowering or triglycerides halving.
</figure>The image above shows my October 11th blood lipid test and my October 18th test. So, a test at the start and a test one week later.
Total cholesterol 156⇨177
LDL to HDL ratio 2.75⇨2.5
LDL 102⇨108
HDL 37⇨43
Triglycerides 87⇨44
Blood Urea Nitrogen 22.6⇨16.7
Uric Acid 4.3⇨3.5
・My total cholesterol went up a fair bit, but even the conventional view acknowledges that total cholesterol isn’t that relevant.
・My LDL to HDL ratio improved.
・Surprisingly, there was only a modest rise in LDL. 108 is 8 points over “optimal.” However, LDL isn’t so relevant as I’ll explain in a moment.
・My HDL “good” cholesterol improved, increasing 6 points.
・It’s generally better to have lower triglycerides. 87 is already good but these reduced dramatically. 44 is quite low. I shot Dr. Ken Berry a message about this and he said it’s probably thanks to the high fat diet and lifting.
・Based on the BUN and UA, my kidney function improved after eating 210 eggs in a week.
Why LDL isn’t that big of a deal
<figure>
</figure>Dave Feldman appeared on my channel about 3 years ago where he explained an experiment he did called the “Tandem Drop Experiment.” In 7 days he took his LDL cholesterol from 297 (which is bonkers and would most definitely freak your doctor out) all the way down to 83. 83 is considered an “optimal” LDL level. Yet, he achieved this by eating what he called the “prison food diet” - tons of white bread and processed meat.
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</figure>Dave explains that LDL here is simply indicating that he switched his metabolism from burning mainly fat to burning mostly glucose. That is, contrary to popular belief, LDL doesn’t necessarily indicate whether your diet is going to prevent heart disease or not.
This is a slide from a talk of Peter Attia’s showing that of 106,000 patients admitted to the hospital for a coronary artery event, half of the patients had low LDL cholesterol.
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</figure>HDL and triglycerides are also recognized as important markers for determining your heart disease risk. You want your triglycerides to be lower and your HDL to be higher. Dave has found through his extensive research that having high HDL and low triglycerides is a far better indicator of low cardiovascular health than LDL. That is, if you have high HDL and low triglycerides, LDL doesn’t really matter.
On Dave’s prison food diet, his LDL became “optimal,” but his triglycerides went from 78 (good) to 221 (terrible). His HDL dropped from 55 to 38.
</figure>I recommend checking out my interview with Dave from 2019 for more on this:
