Accidental Lipostat Test: I Concede
Still Not Working Properly
15/02/24 96.0 0 1
14/02/24 95.5 36.52 0 1
13/02/24 95 36.45 1 1
12/02/24 95.2 36.72 0 1
11/02/24 95.8 36.63 0 1
10/02/24 95.8 36.73 0 1
09/02/24 96.6 36.59 0 1
I'm bored of this, and I don’t think I’m going to learn anything new by carrying on, so I'm going to stop here and call it, and u/exfatloss’s prediction wins.
The signal is quite noisy, so even the seven-day moving average is wandering around a bit.
I could keep it up for a bit and stare at more weeks of data but it starts to feel pointless and dishonest.
The most honest story, having stared at the graph for a while seems to be:
When I came back from the Pennines after Christmas, the seven-day moving average was 95.3kg. At one point it dropped to 95.2.
Three closely spaced incidents of 'eat vast meals and get drunk for social reasons' pushed it up to a mighty 96kg.
In spite of a separate similar incident later it dropped back to 95.5, but it's no longer falling and it seems to be wandering about between 95.5 and 95.7.
I'm currently eating a "whatever, whenever" diet, except for the two golden rules of 'no-PUFAs, no-sulphites', and I haven't received a single dinner invitation or had more than a couple of vodkas in the last week.
Average for the last seven days is 95.7kg
I think u/exfatloss' prediction:
'I predict that eating ad-lib high-protein swamp, even without PUFAs, will consistently make you gain weight until you get to at least the fattest you've ever been.'
can be supported by this data.
Overall I've gained 0.4kg in the last month, that's 5kg/year, which is roughly the problem that first caused me to start worrying about my weight.
So it may be that if I just kept doing this, I'd slowly head back to 99kg, the heaviest I've ever been, over the next ten months.
I think my own prediction of:
'I think I'll come back down to 95kg.'
Cannot be supported by this data. My weight went up to 96kg and then came back down again, but not all the way to 95kg yet, and the downward trend seems to have stopped.
I want to give it another week, to see if it comes down more or goes up, but that seems intellectually dishonest. I should notice that my prediction has failed. That's why it's worth making predictions in the first place.
In fact I think that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I put on weight by overeating, some of it has come back off 'by magic', but not all of it.
I am still fairly sure that humans in their natural state have homeostatic weight regulation.
I am no longer sure that mine is working properly again.
It certainly doesn’t look like the ‘all diets fail’ thing, where as soon as you stop dieting your weight just shoots back up to the highest it’s ever been.
Neither does it look like the ‘naive CICO’ prediction where if you change your weight somehow up or down it will then stay there until you do something to move it.
If I’ve got a set point at all, then that set point seems to be quite a lot lower than it was last year, but it may be rising slowly again like it was before I started doing all this.
If that's true, it's curtains for 'No-PUFAs alone will fix the problem'.
I think I already knew this.
No-PUFAs seemed to work spectacularly well for the first four months after I finally noticed peanut butter and stopped eating it.
I was losing weight without doing anything to cause that to happen. At the time I was just thinking ‘Clearing out the stored PUFAs, homeostat set-point going back to where it should be.’
But then the effect stopped. It shouldn't have stopped. Slowed down maybe, but not stopped, and certainly not reversed.
I'm not eating PUFAs, or at least I'm not eating many PUFAs. PUFA stores must be falling.
It also looks like bad news for ‘PUFAs caused the problem’. If PUFA stores are falling, then any associated problems should be getting less bad.
So:
What the hell was going on last year between June and August? Something apparently did me a hell of a lot of good. What was it? Just something randomly fixing itself, after I gave up peanut butter but before the first time I tried ex150ish?
That's a bit too much of a coincidence to be true.
| "What the hell was going on last year between June and August?"
Summer, maybe? My annual lows for the past 3 years have been in August. Then Autumn and torpor (sigh).
1. Still very small impact on a noisy variable. 0.4kg is nothing. Even I would have to run this for 30 days to see a real effect size, and your weight is much less variable than mine. So I don't think this is a slam dunk either way (yet).
2. There are at least 2 effects on body fat by PUFAs. One is that they oxidize into 4-HNE which gives you the munchies. That's a short-term effect. Second, they get incorporated into your various cells, including the mitochondria, and mess with energy production there. The 4-HNE effect will be very short-term if you drastically reduce your PUFA intake, probably on the order of days if not hours until you see an effect. The other effect can take half a decade, over which it'll slowly get better, but not drastically.
3. "What happened between June and August" could've been effect #1. That doesn't mean effect #2 wasn't causing any issues. My hope is still that, in half a decade, when both of us are entirely dePUFA'd, we'll be "back" and can eat everything under the sun as long as it's PUFA free and not gain weight.
4. Your observation is pretty compatible with my observations, except your weight is much less variable than mine (then again I seem to be an outlier in both directions). Your crazy beginning weight loss mirrors mine, just at a smaller scale. Remember, I lost 20lbs the first month and 10 the next 2. 40lbs down in 3 months. I was sure I'd have abs by the summer! But even during the successful trials after that, it was much slower, to the point where -5lbs is now a good month for me. So maybe I maxed out effect #1 in the first 1-3 months, and am now slowly (over half a decade) working on effect #2, and until then, I have to restrict protein to lose weight (though probably not to dePUFA).