Accidentally Testing the Lipostat Idea
If By Whisky...
28/01/24 96.5 36.62 1 1
27/01/24 0 1
26/01/24 95.4 36.5 1 1
25/01/24 95.9 0 1
24/01/24 96.7 36.44 1 1
23/01/24 95.2 36.75 0 1
22/01/24 95.5 36.61 1 1
21/01/24 94.8 36.62 0 1
20/01/24 94.7 36.47 1 1
19/01/24 95.6 36.76 0 1
18/01/24 95.2 36.43 0 1
17/01/24 95.3 36.5 1 1
For about ten days or so after I got back, my weight seemed stable at 95kg. For most of that I was eating so many potatoes that I think I actually managed to give myself solanine poisoning, which is another story for another post.
I can actually believe that it's been stable at 95kg since last August, and that the various ex150-type experiments and Mom Tests haven't done anything but cause temporary fat loss followed by return to equilibrium while eating ad lib.
My friend u/exfatloss keeps telling me that I'm talking rubbish about homeostats, and that he thinks it's important, but I can't understand what he's trying to tell me.
I've noticed that my ideas make a prediction.
If something I did last year partially fixed the homeostat that controls my fat level, so that last August it started actually working as a homeostat rather than causing continuous slow fat gain, and it's now for some reason decided to defend 95kg, and I'm not doing anything to derange it, then my weight should never again rise above 95kg.
There is always noise, but in the last eight months I've never seen a weight measurement more than 2kg above the trend, so my recent maximum of 97kg should be a fairly hard limit on daily weight measurements.
I'm mainly living on whole foods these days. Things like beef and cheese and milk and bread and cream and potatoes and butter and tomatoes and fruit and yoghurt.
Since I'm of mixed English-Irish ancestry, these should all be pretty much what my metabolism was designed to run on. I don't have much of a sweet tooth, so even though I think that sugar and honey should be fine, I'm not actually eating much of either.
There are also added spices and sauces, and coffee and tea in appallingly large quantities. But I think these sorts of things, although they weren’t eaten by my ancestors over evolutionary timescales, get a pass because there were European-descended populations before the second world war eating them, with no apparent bad effects, and also because I've been eating most of them all my life with no previous bad effects.
I also occasionally use coconut oil, mainly for frying when I don’t have any beef dripping around. But coconut oil is more saturated than animal fat, so I think it should be fine, and also Americans used to eat it by the bucket, back when Americans seem to have been unusually thin despite being probably the richest and best fed people in the world.
The only dietary sources of evil I can think of are contaminants potentially leaked from plastic packaging, which I've decided not to worry about because there's no easy way to avoid them. If the problem is something like microplastics then we're screwed beyond hope. And anyway, I didn't do anything noticeably anti-plastic last year, all my food still comes wrapped in plastic and will contain tiny amounts of horrid things.
On the 23rd, I got sloshed on vodka with some old friends over a curry (possibly containing PUFAs. Don’t be a psycho!). The 25th was Burns night, and my choir decided to celebrate it because Stef is Scottish, so there was quite a lot of whisky. On the 27th Kate invited me round for dinner and I ate a vast amount of her delicious spaghetti bolognese (also possibly containing traces of PUFAs. Don't be a psycho!) and we got so pissed I passed out.
I haven't been repeatedly drunk like this for a long time. It used to be normal behaviour for me, but for years I've been almost teetotal since I thought I had a problem with alcohol and largely avoided it. When I did drink it was hellish and I certainly had no desire to do it again any time soon.
At the start of the pandemic I became almost teetotal and even though I now think that the problem was sulphites all along, these days I usually only have a couple of vodkas with no after-effects.
Hangover-wise all was as expected. All I drank was spirits, and all three times I had the sort of hangover that teenagers get: "I feel a bit feeble: coffee and some toast will sort it out.", rather than the apocalyptic two-day horror that I get if I drink wine or beer.
Since this week-long bender started on the 23rd, my weight measurements have been high. I've seen 96.7 and 96.5, both of which are close to what I think should be the highest possible readings if I'm currently defending 95kg. And also my waking temperatures have been low so I've been taking extra thyroid to compensate.
I think this is just noise caused by booze and weird eating patterns. I actually woke up hungry in the middle of the night at one point and scoffed half a pan of leftover porridge. (No willpower! No unsatisfied hunger ever!)
But I'm not sure.
If the homeostat idea is true, then that should just go back to normal over the next few days, and my weight should start hovering around 95kg again.
If something more like CICO-the-stupid-plan is true, then the extra energy from alcohol and overeating should be permanent gain.
This seems important. I'm very keen to try another bout of ex150ish, but first I'm going to leave it a bit to see what happens….
Plenty of space between "homeostat" and "I gained weight doing the thing that originally made me gain weight."