The magic of eggs; how egg fasting is shaking my believe in the applicability of control-feedback theory to nutrition.

I have spent many years, tested out many diets and until now, the use of control-feedback theory has helped me a lot at finding out what works for me and what does not. The basic idea of control-feedback theory for diet and workout is simple. Pick a variable to tune, for example, the protein/carbohydrate ratio of your diet, figure out what output metrics truly matter, do a run-in for a few weeks to establish a stable baseline, then introduce a disturbance to your input variable, wait a bit to see how the output responds, then adjust the input again. There is a bit more to it than that, a tiny bit of basic math, easy enough to do with a simple spreadsheet program, but I'm not going to bother the reader with that now, at least not in this post right now. The base thing to remember here is that making a stupid choice should auto correct through a simple feedback look. The delay in (fully) responding is an essential part of the feedback loop math. It is what makes the difference between slowly moving towards what might be a personal optimum, and getting caught in the oscillating insanity induced by undampened feedback loops. So basically we have a single input variable that we wish to tune, one or more output variables that we want to optimize, and a feedback loop that is sufficiently dampened to keep from oscillating but preferably not so much that it takes years to slowly move to our fully tuned input variable. In my case the output variables I have been steering on have been:

• My body fat percentage
• My body strength

So what did I find out using control-feedback theory so far? Well, a lot of things. I found out that other than what the main nutritional internet tribes were advocating, not fat or carbohydrates but rather protein is the most important macro for me. Wherever I started out with a given diet, once I got to macro ratios involving protein, the feedback loop was working overtime to get my protein intake up, always stabilizing well above the 200g/day mark. As far as the other two macro's were concerned, I found timing mattered that much more than macro split. Not that macro split didn't matter, it did, but without having timing of my macro's well established first, the effect of carb/fat macro split was dwarfed by the effects of timing.

So summing up some of my most prominent finding using control-feedback theory on my own diet and workout routine:

• Protein intake should be at least 200g/day
• Resting days should be relatively (approximately 15%) low carb high fat.
• Workout days should include two low (<10%) carb meals.
• Both the pre-workout and the post-workout meal should be high carb low fat instead.
• I should NOT EVER go on a caloric deficit.

Now all was nice and dandy for a while keeping to this routine, but there was already a problem I had introduced. While my target outcomes were doing quite well, I was getting stronger quickly, muscles growing, and even my belly kept shrinking even though for as far as I could trust good old Katch-McArdle, I was on a continued mild caloric surplus. The problem was, I had gotten it into my head that next to my personal health, my dietary choices should also aim at being kind to the planet and its creatures. I had gone my own unique brand of vegetarian that I was proud to refer to as ovo-ento vegetarianism. That is, I didn't eat meat or fish or any kind of vertibrate animal, but what I did eat in large quantities were eggs, insects, mollusks and crustations. My targets loved it, they did absolutely fine. My gums though did not. When at one moment in time someone brought to my attention that I might be vitamin K deficient, I had to refrain myself from laughing in their face. I was eating shitloads of veggies rich in K1, and while K2 was a non-essential vitamin, I was eating lots of eggs as well, so how could I be K deficient. Well not wanting to be a stubborn ass, I added K2 and D3 supplements to my diet, and guess what, things improved quickly. Not wanting to fall for the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy I went off and on K2 for two more times and the time series responsiveness was undeniable, I had to be K2 deficient after all. So reluctantly I added some meat, organ meat, back to my diet, ending my ovo-ento vegetarian identity.

But now to the magic eggs. Before trying an egg fast, I tried a few of the macro extreme diets before. Tried going 80/10/10 high carb once, quickly being pushed back by my feedback loop into the safer higher protein regions and time separated additional fat. The other side of the spectrum, a keto diet even got two equally fruitless attempts, and just as the high carb diet, my feedback loop immediately started pushing me away from the extreme, back to the time separated reality where all of my attempts eventually ended up.

Then something happened, my keto friends kept telling me all of this couldn't be right, that I had to maybe hang in there longer, but given the drop in strength and LBM and rice in BF% that accompanied the start of both keto experiments that far, hanging in there longer before letting the feedback loop kick in wasn't all that appealing. Then multiple people in my Twitter feed were discussing egg fast at virtually the same time, and I got really intrigued still being a big fan of eggs. So I decided to give the egg fast a try. Use a 10 day egg fast as bootstrap for my third and probably last keto experiment.

The results were mind-boggling and totally unexpected. While my strength, again suffered when on keto, and while during the egg fast my lean body mass dropped significantly, when after the 10 days bootstrap I started on regular keto, my strength didn't actually drop any further, my LBM even recovered part of the way and my body fat was melting away as it had never melted away before, and for the very first time I was actually making some progress on a mild deficit. This was making zero sense from an engineering point of view. What was this egg magic? Two complete and utter failures on keto had made this outcome totally unexpected. After upping my caloric intake in an attempt at fully regaining my LBM I found out that keto still doesn't scale up for me, so I am now condemned to perpetual cycles of alternating diets, but that is not the point I am making in this blog.

The point is, the human body, my human body seems to be significantly more stateful than I had ever expected, even after years of nutritional hacking. A 10 day egg fast seems to make such profound changes to the state of my body that I need to reflect on my whole approach of basing my personal health strategies exclusively on analog control-feedback theory with feedback loops and the likes. This whole experience has been a very much humbling experience. If there is one such state transition possible affecting how my body responds to a diet, how much more possible unexplored state transitions might my body hide from me? For me, this is a much bigger failure of my model of exploration than my K2 deficiency apparently was. This statefulness is important. This statefulness is strong to the extent that it might invalidate years of carefully executed control feedback based engineering on my own diet and workout routine.

I am sorry if this post provides you with more questions and uncertainty, it also does so for me. For now, I am sticking to my egg-fast/keto/timed-carb cycles, as the result seem to allow me to finally get actual positive results on a deficit, rather than relying mostly on lean gainz to reduce my body fat percentage. If you happen to have any clue on what might have happened to induce this state transition.If you know the secret of the magic of the egg, then please comment below or drop me a message on Twitter.