Nick Norwitz replicated a Nature Metabolism study showing that cutting protein to 9% of calories triggers FGF-21, a hormone that burns an extra 600 calories daily. He added cream, butter, and nuts to eat hundreds more calories than usual, yet kept losing weight anyway.
Okay, this is crazy, but I ate buckets of cream, goat butter, and nuts. I added hundreds of calories per day to my diet, and I kept increasing my intake, but I kept losing weight. Why? I was actually running a self-experiment to confirm published controlled human trial data from 2025. I slashed my protein intake from 18% of my caloric intake to only 9% to trigger a hormone called FGF-21. FGF-21 is released from your liver and tells your fat cells to burn more energy. About 600 calories per day without changing activity level. And no, this isn't bro science, this is published, peer-reviewed data in Nature Metabolism, a pretty prestigious journal. I even spoke to the senior author behind the study. And then when I tested it on myself, I literally could not eat enough to stop losing weight. And I haven't even told you the weirdest part, which is
