Diet Experiment Preregistration: Long-term water fasting + seed oil removal

I strongly recommend against water fasts exceeding 5-7 days, though I'm sure you've already heard many such objections. Even a small amount of calories from the modified fasting mimicking protocol (the easy version is just guacamole) + electrolytes is dramatically safer.

https://empoweredbeyondweightloss.com/fasting-mimicking-diet-do-it-yourself/

I assume you have vitamins planned already and know some symptoms of malnutrition that would cause you to end early?

how did this go? any update?

This seems to carry unnecessary risks for your health and well-being, and it's not clear how you'll be able to confidently conclude anything meaningful from the results.

If you don't end up gaining the weight back, what particular reason would you have to attribute that to this seed oil theory? You would be starting a novel diet consisting of mostly whole foods correct?

I don't see how this would provide any evidence regarding a specific mechanism where seed oils supposedly increase obesity above and beyond their quality as a highly refined calorie source.

Have you consulted any medical professionals?

Diesnt that hypothesis run counter to observed health benefits and lower obesity in say japan and countries that could broadly be described as engaging with the mediteranean diet?

Both with lots of linoleic acid / PUFA's

Water fasting strikes me as an inefficient way to do what you want to do. Sure, obviously, if you keep on getting no calories, eventually the body is going to burn fat, but paradoxically it prefers to burn protein from the muscles first (!) and the only way to stop that is with sufficiently intense exercise of the muscles, i.e., weight lifting, while trying to lose fat.

This next Andrew Huberman lecture describes how to burn fat via "using cold to create shiver", exercise, "non-exercise movements such as fidgeting", supplements and prescription drugs. I don't recall any mention of fasting in this lecture though it has been a few months since I listened to the lecture. To be precise, because I would not have been surprised to hear Huberman warn against water fasting, I probably would not have remembered that, but I would've been quite surprised to hear him recommend it, and almost certainly would've remembered that. (So, he almost certainly does not recommend it in the lecture.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqPGXG5TlZw

(Sadly, to burn fat using exercise, you have to exercise continuously for about 90 minutes IIRC.)

I did 6.5 days of water fasting once out of ignorance of the risks and disadvantages, and I'll never voluntarily go that long again without protein and without calories.

There's a natural human tendency to believe that if one is basically healthy, one's health interventions should be mild whereas if one is severely ill, drastic health interventions should be chosen. In reality, for most cases severe chronic illness, it takes great expertise or a heroic efforts of rationality sustained usually over years to identify or imagine any intervention that has more than a negligible chance of positively affecting the illness, and people dealing with severe illness should spend a significant fraction of their thinking time and mental energy on avoiding making the situation worse.

Happily for you, there are probably people with very deep expertise on fat loss although I don't know enough about the subject to tell you who those people are. (And the fact that the drug companies hope to make a lot of money on fat loss makes it much harder to identify the deep experts.)

I personally have had 2 friends who've killed themselves by being overly aggressive about trying to rid themselves of chronic illness: one was being prescribed an anti-coagulant and either took more than he should have because of a strong desire to return to his previous healthy lifestyle; the other was enamored of smart drugs, and one of the many combinations of drugs he tried gave him Parkinsonism.

I've stayed completely the hell away from seed oils for decades: it's just your plan for a long water fast that alarms me.

Anecdotal stuff: started doing daily yoga in the morning lost 12kgs in 3 months without any change in my diet