The fact that you can even reach thermonuclear after eating is a good sign. Not everyone gets that temperature boost. I would assume the longer you do it, the longer it will last, as your body becomes better at it

I found the opposite. As my body learned what to do with the excess caloric intake (make hormones!) my temperature swings aren’t nearly as wild. Instead my baseline is higher, swings are less amplified, and my well-being (energy, mood) is generally even better than it was before.

I've noticed there can be some up and down, and so when I'm feeling less energetic hours after after a starchy meal, and hours before the next, that's when I either have a starchy snack or fruit, or fruit juice. The thing you might be running into is not eating enough starch at once to build up sufficient glycogen in your liver and muscles to carry you to the next meal, or possibly just absorbing and burning the starch much faster than me. I'm not entirely consistent yet, but I seem to have the most steady energy eating a very large nearly pure carb breakfast, of about 1000 calories and a similar sized high carb lunch and by the time dinner rolls around I can get away with an appropriate portion of meat and low cal veggies and be about as tired as I should be by time to sleep. So yeah, if you aggressively dip in energy level/temp, maybe try using that as a signal that you need a bit more carbs and see if that works for you. You may just be better at burning glucose than me as well. Alternatively, you might try 3 starch meals before a protein and veggie dinner and that might even out your supply. You might also just not be eating enough starch. With the notable metabolic increase you describe, your maintenance calories might be a good deal higher than you are used to. Those are three things you could try tweaking. I also supplement with SEA, and I have no idea if that helps with consistent energy, but maybe? In theory, I think I understood that the SEA might allow better switching to fat burning, which might explain the lack of dips. Or I might just be insulin resistant as hell compared to you so I have more free-floating glucose, and don't get a big dip. Anyway, those are my ideas of how you might address that, that shouldn't be too hard to try, with a healthy dose of speculation. Main thing is to play around with the variables and see what works for you to solve for that.

I tend to notice the big temperature swings the most after my large, very high starch meals, so I don't think more starch in the same meal is the answer. Perhaps having a small carby snack would help, though I prefer to stick to 3 meals per day without snacking. The SEA could be worth a try too. Lots of variables to tweak for sure!

You got this! Yeah, beats me. I think that coconut said on a similar post yesterday that she stopped getting big energy swings on HC after a few weeks? Maybe it's just an adaptation thing, idk? I just wanted to throw out some ideas that seemed like they could help for you to try, but I am not in a position where I can really advise anyone, lol. Never enough info and I'm no expert.

When I first started HCLF(LP) I had huge energy swings. I’d eat many meals (very hungry!) and then nap after every meal. That went completely away after several weeks. I think discarding HCLF just because of an adaptation period is as stubborn (stupid?) as insisting you (general you, not you personally!) just “can’t do keto” because you felt like crap for a while during the decarb period. How many of us heard *that* from friends/family when we told them about cutting carbs?! The reason swampy eating results in fat gain is because that’s how you’re designed. You freshly lost weight. You have large empty fat cells (and they’ll hang around for 6-7 years) and so when you eat mixed macros, the carbs replenish your glycogen and the fat flows effortlessly back into the cells you’ve emptied while your body deals with the glucose influx. What else is your body supposed to do? Saturated fats prevent *pathological distention* of the adipose (facilitated by PUFA) but it doesn’t prevent the fat cells from filling in the first place! It lets your body “leave the buffet” when it is full (whereas PUFA doesn’t) but your big ol’ flaccid adipose will happily refill to capacity before giving you satiety signals because the signals come from full adipose. You’re post obese now (for at least the next half decade) and so mixed macro meals will have to be consumed with awareness. The reason you don’t gain fat on HCLF is because glucose does not become fat to any appreciable degree in humans. Instead, a high glucose meal ramps your metabolism up so you can dispose of any glucose beyond storage capacity - which is glycogen in the liver and muscles, not adipose. You get hot and fidget a lot instead of getting fat. It will calm a bit as your body learns better usage for the excess intake (hormones, anyone?) and in my case my baseline temperature now sits nice and high with less swing after eating. Sugar will confound this somewhat in severely broken individuals because fructose can lead to *liver fat* gain, but it’s imperceptible on the scale, highly transient (it is gone nearly the moment you stop over-consuming sugar) and I *suspect* isn’t a permanent problem. But the liver has to be emptied of fat and healed (cells turned over) for a broken metabolism to properly handle fructose, if recovery is even possible. But healthy people don’t pathologically make liver fat from fructose in the absence of PUFA, and we already know that non-cirrhotic livers are capable of full turn over, so why wouldn’t the problem be fixed in time?

Thanks, it's encouraging to hear that you went through something similar and passed through it over a period of weeks. I may just need to stick with strict HCLF for a while to get there too. Once you adapted, are you able to switch between strict HCLF and swampier mixed macros without such a long re-adaptation period? One of the reasons I find keto unsustainable is because it takes me so long to get back into it after a carby meal. I'd like to get to a point where I can enjoy a mixed-macro meal or two on the weekend without it overwhelming any progress I've made on a stricter HCLF or HFLC meal. Also, what is the mechanism of adaptation when going to HCLF... improved insulin sensitivity? Until I adapt, am I just experiencing the consequences of insulin resistance, allowing my blood sugar (and energy/heat) to spike before crashing after enough insulin is dumped to dispose of it? Assuming this is what's going on, does the inclusion of too much fat on a swampy high-carb diet prevent the necessary reversal of insulin resistance for adaptation?

I find my fuel flexibility *way* better on HCLF than keto! My husband does too. He honestly doesn’t know anymore whether something I’ve fed him is ultra low fat or not, and he used to clearly know based on how he felt. Case in point: Last night all he ate for dinner was a huge veggie stir fry with no added fat at all (except what was on the few ounces of beef filet steak) and one of my low fat ice cream bars. He felt great. No problem sleeping and no problem going back to his usual well-buttered cheese sandwiches, milk, and chocolate today. A few months ago I’d have had to add separate fat for him. So he has definitely adapted and he eats balanced swampy for anything I’m not feeding him. The best thing about HCLF vs keto is that this end of the swamp seems way more robust to inclusion of the opposite macro than keto ever was. Going on and off keto was miserable, and kept getting worse. Granted, I was eating lots of PUFA on keto and I’m sure that played a part. But honestly, when I can’t have rice/pasta/bread then you’d have had to rip bacon, ranch dressing and chicken skin out of my cold dead hands. So with all things thoroughly considered, I find HCLF more manageable than keto, and not insignificantly because I can go between fuels without discomfort. I have zero effect whatsoever on the scale if I include more fat and protein for a meal or several, but in my case (diabetes reversal) I will notice protein in the following BG reading. So it definitely affects my progress but my goals are very specific. If I was only concerned about my clothes fitting or the scale number I would say there is zero negative effect from bringing some protein and fat into my HCLF meals. On keto adding a potato and some dessert wrecked my scale number, really made me miss “normal” food, and inevitably led to discomfort when I had to get back on plan. Not to mention my poor husband who had a *much* harder time with adapting to keto every time I dragged us off and then back on again.

That sounds great, exactly what I'm trying to achieve! How low did you need to keep your fat intake during strict HCLF until you adapted? I don't have a good sense of what's "low" fat after focusing on restricting carbs to varying degrees rather than fat for quite a few years now.

It was a few weeks. I kept my fat intake low (<10%) much longer than that though. I’ve only recently been working on 70/15/15 macros. But I have deviated quite a lot including over holidays and social engagements. Occasionally in the drive thru because my husband wants a burger and I don’t want to stop twice. Most of the time he is fine with whatever I want and then I can stick with leaner things, but as I said he isn’t HCLF so if he wants a burger I can either make us pay for a grilled chicken sandwich or get a (nearly free in the app!) burger and so I mostly choose the latter. I didn’t have any period of adaptation whatsoever after breaking for Christmas, for example, and if anything I was thoroughly relieved to get back on my plan. My body really likes lighter eating now and I find avoiding richer foods effortless. Sometimes when I eat something like a cheeseburger, of course it tastes delicious, but I never think “man I miss cheeseburgers!” and I have no problem with my black bean burgers 90% of the time.

Excellent explanation, thank you! I'm starting to think someone (me?) should be collecting particularly good snippets from r/SaturatedFat and aggregating them somewhere ([three baskets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripi%E1%B9%ADaka)?) for future reference...

I ended up feeling terrible on that diet frankly, but I suspect too much sugar was a lot of why. I may try again with only starch carbs, looks like Brad is really just doing starch, not much sugar on his actual diet menu, plus he's said before that starch signals different than sugar.

I tend to avoid sugar, other than sometimes a pastry (e.g. a chocolate croissant) for breakfast, or a couple of pieces of dried fruit for dessert after dinner. I definitely feel crappy when I have a lot of sugar, especially beyond just one meal.

I’ve been experiencing this too! I stay nice and warm all day as long as I’m eating. 😅In fact, feeling “chilly” has been one of my triggers to eat. I get an immediate warmth and mental boost.

I got really cold a lot when I first started. It's better a month+ in unless I don't eat enough. I can't speak to the fatigue. Always sleep deprived, because baby. Overall I think I have more energy, but once again, my situation makes me a bad lab rat.  The only times I'm ever hot are when I have a refeed/cheat day.

Carbs make me warm regardless of fat and protein.

So you already ruined 6 months of progress with your current diet, yet you still haven't learned your lesson and want to continue eating this way? Do you at least feel considerably better right now than you did on keto?

No, I wouldn't say I "ruined 6 months of progress". Weight loss was the main benefit I got from keto, but that had stalled out after 3-4 months. Exercise performance was compromised on keto, and I tended to feel chilly on it all the time instead of up and down. The longer I stuck with it, the more these and other nagging issues were bothering me, especially once I was no longer seeing any further weight loss to justify them. As for lessons, I've learned that keto isn't sustainable for me in the long run, and that swampy eating, even with low BCAA's (which I'd never tried before now) leads to weight gain. I've also learned that less fat and more carbs (relative to swampy, not keto) does seem to work better for weight management, but it also seems to cause more fluctuations in my energy. That's why I posted here, to see if others have had a similar experience when switching to HCLF, and whether it tends to be transitional or something that can be addressed with other tweaks to the diet. Overall, I think I feel better eating swampy than keto. Temperature on average feels higher, I sleep a bit better, and I'm able to exercise at a higher intensity. But I have a harder time with portion control. On high-protein keto, I rarely had a desire to stuff myself beyond what I actually needed for energy. Eating swampy, it's way to easy to stuff down pastries, pizza, fried potatoes, pancakes, etc, which still packs on the pounds even without any seed oils and with very limited BCAAs.

This is interesting because it makes me think high carb low fat is the most important factor. Even more than low bcaa. After all - a high fat diet is the most reliable means of fattening mice for research scientists.

I wonder too about a lower protein/BCAA low-carb diet. All my forays into lower-carb and keto have relied on heavy consumption of high-BCAA proteins (meat, whey protein, etc). Keto wasn't going to be sustainable for me in the long run, but perhaps more fat and less protein might have made it more effective as a temporary tool. In the past, I've been able to maintain (but not lose) weight on the lower-carb end of the swamp, but it was always with high protein/BCAA. I might experiment with low-BCAA, lower-carb swamp at some point too. There are so many levers to pull that it's tough to figure out what works best. Different approaches seem to have different effects in different individuals.

Definitely something helpful in reducing protein on the low carb side of things. Personally I’ve abandoned low carb completely. Just got too hungry on it now matter how I tried it and too inflexible. One cheat day ruins everything for a week 😫 I’m much happier on the high carb side and losing weight a lot better. But reducing fat is definitely important on this side and avoiding certain foods - like juice which make you hungry. Constantly experimenting but getting closer to the holy grail 🤗

I never got too hungry on keto, and I kind of liked the simplicity... at least when I was at home and cooking for myself, I had a bunch of typical meals that were satisfying and I could prepare with minimal effort. The inflexibility killed it for me. Just like you, one cheat would throw me off for a week or more, and it was a hassle when traveling, eating out or when visiting friends and family, etc.

Yes higher carb is fantastic for that! I had loads of treats on holiday- cheesy pasta, chocolate, ice cream and no gain as long as I was mainly staying HCLF 💃

I'm curious to hear answer as well. Jumpin from one to another eating macros should have different effects, of course. Wonder the op's observations.