Christmas Mom Test Results

The Glorious Success Continues in the Most Confusing Manner Possible

19/01/26 96.4 36.75 0.018 0.018 138/79/51

18/01/26 98 36.8 0.01 0.01 135/81/48

17/01/26 98.2 36.6 0 0

16/01/26 99.1 36.7 0.01 0.01

15/01/26 100.5 36.8 0 0

14/01/26 99.8 0.01 0.01

13/01/26 98.7 36.7 0.01 0.01

12/01/26 98.7 37 0.008 0.008

11/01/26 98.6 36.5 0.01 0.01

10/01/26 98.9 36.65 0.01 0.01

09/01/26 98.2 36.7 0.01 0.01

08/01/26 98.6 36.5 0.01 0.01

07/01/26 98.5 36.6 0.01 0.01

06/01/26 99.4 36.7 0.01 0.01

05/01/26 98.9 36.9 0.008 0.008

04/01/26 36.5 0.01 0.01

03/01/26 97.6 36.7 0.01 0.01

02/01/26 97.4 36.6 0.01 0.01

01/01/26 96.6 36.85 0.01 0.01

31/12/25 97.8 36.7 0.01 0.01

30/12/25 96 36.9 0.01 0.01

29/12/25 97.8 36.6 0.01 0.01

28/12/25 98.1 36.5 0.01 0.01

Predictions From The Last Post

I’ll be here another couple of weeks yet, and I’m expecting to gain even more weight. I’d expect it to start to slow down soon and I’d expect to stabilise somewhere below my all-time record of 99kg, but there’s no sign of that yet. If my seven-day average goes above 99kg and stays there for any significant length of time that probably means I’m wrong about a lot of things, in particular the idea that giving up PUFAs should eventually fix obesity. And I’m almost there! Current seven-day average is 97.4kg.

I’m still expecting my thyroid dose to come down at some point.

Once I’m back in Cambridge and in control of my own food, I’d expect to start losing weight quite rapidly, down to something like 95kg at least whilst still eating ad-lib, and I’ll be quite surprised if that doesn’t happen.

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Over the Christmas period, I continued my policy of accepting everything Mum offered as long as I could bear the thought of eating, and to my amazement my hunger levelled off and I actually lost weight slightly over Christmas and New Year, in spite of consuming more than half of a huge (8kg) turkey in various forms.

In spite of that turkey being the most heritage-breed tasty organic animal-ethics turkey that money can buy, that was probably the most PUFA I’ve eaten this year. Although ChatGPT tells me that there isn’t actually a great deal of PUFA in turkey and it was probably about 50g of PUFA in total over about ten days.

Come the New Year we finally ran out of turkey curry and it was back to the more usual roast beef and steaks and cheese and crumbles and ice-cream (the chips made with beef dripping continued in huge quantities throughout), and my weight started to rocket up again.

I felt really well throughout, no traces of tiredness or headaches at any point once the earlier sulphite poisoning had cleared. Went for a walk every day, felt comfortably warm all the time but not obviously overheated (it was cold up in the Pennines, close to zero most days, but I wasn’t feeling too hot at home either, and our house is well heated).

On the last day I was home my weight was 100.5kg and my seven-day average was 99.2kg, both record highs, and I did finally feel too hot, so I dropped a dose of thyroid.

In terms of seven-day averages over the whole period, that’s a gain of around 6.5kg in my four weeks away. A titanic amount, and more than I was expecting even given that I wanted to put on as much weight as possible for yo-yo purposes.

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If my weight had stayed there, slightly higher than it was at its worst point two and a half years ago, I would have been really very surprised.

Because lots of good things have happened over the last two and a half years. The almost complete remission of my once-crippling chronic fatigue is the best of them, but before that my weight was rising steadily at 4kg/year, and that stopped dead the minute I finally stopped eating peanut butter and thus actually gave up PUFAs.

So I’d have been in the position where stopping eating PUFAs stopped the uncontrollable weight gain, but two and a half years of pretty much zero PUFA had done nothing at all to fix the problem I already had.

The previous highs were also just after visiting Mum, so it would imply that my ‘equilibrium under maternal conditions’ had gone slightly higher that it had been two-and-a-half years ago.

And even that’s quite odd, because I’ve gone home for a month many times over the last couple of years, and although it’s always produced massive weight gain, I’ve never gone over 97kg before.

Which would all be quite weird in itself.

But it would also refute almost all the hypotheses about the cause of obesity being to do with modern food. Because my PUFA-free and sulphite-free diet is also by necessity a diet very very low in processed food of any kind. The only things I regularly eat that might count as processed food are dairy products (but only the sort where the only ingredient is milk), and bread (of the sort where the only ingredients are wheat, yeast, and salt).

The only modern food-related things left would be contamination from plastic packaging, or the fact that modern flour is different to ancient flour.¹

And even they don’t fly, because almost everything comes in plastic packaging, and that’s just as true now as it ever was, and I’ve carried on eating modern flour as much or more than I ever used to do, so why would my weight have stopped rising at all?

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Luckily for my sanity, the minute I got back to Cambridge my appetite fell off a cliff. On the way from the station to the boat I bought a packet of wholegrain rye bread ( https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/schneider-brot-german-vollkornbrot-bread-10-slices/055009-27625-27626 ), some milk and some butter to make toast before I went to bed.

And that’s about all I’ve eaten for the last three days. I did have a steak ciabatta in the Fort St George with friends on Saturday, but it wasn’t very big. Last night I bought another packet of rye bread and a pot of ice-cream, but I’ve only had the ice-cream and a couple of slices of toast since then. I’ve only eaten about half the butter.

And not entirely unpredictably, my weight has started to fall off a cliff.

This morning I was 96.4kg and the most recent seven-day average was 98kg.

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So provisionally I think my anti-PUFA (or at least something in modern food) beliefs have just survived, with the extra wrinkle that this time I was actively trying to gain weight, and so not refusing food just because I wasn’t hungry (there is always room for ice-cream, it seems...).

And so I think I’ve managed to push myself over my previous record by accidentally willpowering myself to eat even more than I usually would at home, and now I’m suffering some sort of mad rebound where my body has suddenly noticed that I’m very overweight and switched off my appetite almost entirely.

The only surprise is that I felt fine on Saturday the day after I got back, and spent a lovely day talking to people and bouncing around energetically, but on Sunday I felt absolutely awful, sluggish, lethargic, too hot, depressed, listless and headachy. I dropped another dose of thyroid because I was feeling too hot, but then decided that was a bad idea and took double this morning to make up. Today I feel better than yesterday but still pretty ropey.

I wonder if despite the fact that most of what I’ve eaten has been rye bread toast with butter, I’ve actually eaten so little that I’m going into ketosis and have got “keto flu”. Or it may be a virus, I do have a slight sore throat.

Christ knows. Anyway let’s see what happens next. I’ll take an electrolyte pill just in case.

I’m not going to do anything deliberate for a while, just eat what I want when I want (no-PUFA, no sulphites). I want to see what happens if I take my hands off the controls.

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Predictions

I expect my lack of appetite to continue, I’m massively visibly overweight and my body appears to have suddenly noticed this. Weight should continue to fall, at least until I get back to my previous free-living equilibrium which seemed to be lower than 95kg. I’ll be really surprised if that doesn’t happen.

I expect to need to reduce my thyroid dose. At the moment I’m torn between ‘I’m too hot’ and ‘I feel really tired’, but I don’t have any other low-thyroid symptoms, in particular no sign of plantar fasciitis, which is usually one of the first symptoms of ‘too low’, so I think the feeling awful must have some other cause. I’m going to leave it where it is for a bit but I expect to be back soon to feeling fine except for being too hot, at which point I’ll start to reduce it again.

Current Beliefs

I continue to believe in CICO, it’s a law of physics and if I’m certain of anything in this world it’s that classical physics applies almost perfectly to questions of nutrition, but I also think it’s useless as an explanation of the modern epidemic of obesity or as a method of losing or gaining significant weight.

I continue to believe that my weight is under homeostatic control, and that one of the main things that my appetite is for is to control the amount of body fat that I carry. I’d be amazed if that wasn’t true.

I continue to believe that PUFAs (or something else in modern food) were the cause of my metabolic curse, and that no-PUFAs has pretty much fixed it over the last two-and-a-half years. I’m pretty sure of this.

I continue to believe that PUFAs (or something else in modern food) are the cause of obesity. Eating lots of PUFAs raises² the set point that your appetite is aiming for, but since they’re stored in your body fat in large amounts renouncing them only fixes the problem very slowly. Again I’d be quite surprised if this wasn’t true.

I continue to believe that something about what you eat (very possibly the protein content) can also change that set point. This seems very strange, and shouldn’t be true, indeed doesn’t seem to have been true historically, so I think there must be some interaction between e.g. protein and PUFAs. I’ve seen this apparently happen so many times that I’d be quite surprised if that wasn’t true.

I am puzzled by the fact that my metabolic curse appeared long before I started to have any sort of obesity problem, and yet has been almost fixed while I still have a weight problem. If they have a common cause, that is very strange. This is my main reason to suspect that my whole framework is wrong somehow.

In short, my experiences over the last month or so have shaken my faith but haven’t been enough to destroy it. I’m still convinced that the same things are true, indeed I can’t think of any other explanations that hold water, but I’m less confident than I was.

1. In the UK, using hormones as growth promoters is flat illegal, we don’t even import that stuff, and we use antibiotics only for veterinary purposes, not routinely as growth-promoters.

2. Or in fact can lower it, due to some paradoxical reaction. I think this is most of what is going on with underweight/anorexia.