Continuing Rapid Weight Gain

Scio Me Nescire

01/03/25 96 36.62 0.05 0.05 134/74/46

28/02/25 96.1 36.46 0.104 0.104 136/85/46

27/02/25 96.7 36.84 0.05 0.05 126/74/46

26/02/25 97.3 36.51 0.054 0.054 146/80/48

25/02/25 97 36.79 0.104 0.104 141/79/49

24/02/25 96.3 36.66 0.05 0.05 126/84/53

23/02/25 96.9 36.91 0.1 0.1 142/81/50

22/02/25 97.5 36.44 0.054 0.054 134/72/56

21/02/25 97.2 36.72 0.05 0.05 136/82/52

20/02/25 97.3 36.85 0.104 0.104 140/85/60

19/02/25 97.2 36.72 0.104 0.104 134/80/51

18/02/25 97.2 36.6 0.1 0.1 129/75/51

17/02/25 96.1 36.77 0.054 0.054 135/85/51

16/02/25 96.1 36.78 0.1 0.1 129/77/45

15/02/25 96.3 36.84 0.1 0.1 136/84/56

14/02/25 96.4 36.88 0.104 0.104 133/79/60

13/02/25 96.6 36.77 0.054 0.054 136/77/58

12/02/25 96.4 36.72 0.1 0.1 134/79/58

11/02/25 96.3 0.11 0.11

10/02/25 96.2 36.73 0.11 0.11 125/77/50

09/02/25 97.1 36.72 0.1 0.1 135/80/47

08/02/25 96.2 36.78 0.1 0.1 141/82/47

I have, as usual, no idea what's going on here. I'm doing pretty much exactly what I have been doing since last November (Christmas period excepted), when everything was boringly stable and my weight was around 94.5 kg and seemed locked there.

I've been gaining weight steadily since I came back from my Christmas break, and then my last couple of days' weight measurements have been surprisingly low, as if I'd suddenly dropped a kilo overnight for no reason. Probably just noise.

Anyway, seven-day average weight is now 96.6kg, about where it was at its highest point over Christmas. I've gained 2kg in six weeks for no obvious reason at all, after the original weird rise-and-fall over Christmas itself.

I'm now uncomfortably heavy and my clothes don't fit properly and I don't like it and it’s getting worse. I'm tempted to do a couple of weeks of ex150ish to bring my weight down to something more reasonable, but I'm too curious about what's going on to intervene, so I'm going to carry on the same way and just watch and see what happens.

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The fatigue I've been suffering from since Christmas seems to be clearing up. I've had one genuine forced afternoon nap in the last three weeks, and a couple of occasions where I felt so tired I that I went to bed during the day, and then lay in bed for half an hour, didn't sleep, and then realised I was feeling fine, and got up feeling lively again.

Apart from that I feel OK except for a vague malaise and a feeling that I'm not quite as clever as I'd like to be. Although my client is quite happy with my current progress on our project, so I'm at least up to programming and vector calculus. Also last weekend I suddenly got interested in continued fractions for no reason and started playing about with them and writing little programs recreationally, which is a sign that my brain is at least occasionally working adequately.

My waking temperatures have been on the high side, and a couple of times I've just felt far too hot in the middle of the day, so even though I'm still suffering from fatigue which I'd usually take as a sign of thyroid-dose-too-low, I'm nervously reducing the thyroid dose by feels to try to keep my temperature under control.

I am still fairly confident that no-PUFAs (or some other side effect of avoiding everything with PUFAs in it) is fixing my main underlying fatigue/hypometabolism problem. I think this current fatigue problem is after-effects of the horrible virus I had over Christmas, and it does seem to be fixing itself so fingers crossed there.

I am enormously less confident that no-PUFAs is doing anything for my weight problem. At the moment I can still say that my original scary weight rise stopped at exactly the time I stopped eating PUFAs and I've never been that heavy since. If my weight ends up going over the 99kg that was the highest moving average I ever recorded just before I finally renounced the polyunsaturated evil, then I think that idea's just dead in the water. If PUFAs were the original cause of the problem then how can it be getting worse in the absence of PUFAs?

Which leaves me with a big problem/opportunity. What on earth did cause my weight to head rapidly back to sensible levels in the initial few months of giving up PUFAs? How do I get that to happen again? What is actually going on?

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Predictions

Thyroid-wise my feeling is that the post-viral fatigue is masking continuing underlying improvements in metabolism. I expect the post-viral fatigue to slowly go away on its own, and my necessary thyroid dose to keep dropping until I don't need to take thyroid any more to feel well. But I'm not at all confident about this, and I won't be too surprised if something else happens.

Weight-wise I don't feel able to make predictions. I know nothing.

If I've just been fooling myself about all this, and giving up PUFAs doesn't help, presumably my weight will continue to rise until I decide that I need to ex150ish it off again.

If somehow something (virus maybe?) has disturbed my lipostat in some really complicated and incomprehensible way, on top of an underlying problem that is ever-so-slowly fixing itself due to no-PUFAs, then presumably eventually that will recover and my weight will go back down to 94.5kg on its own and then carry on falling.

I don't think I'd be too surprised by either of these eventualities. What would be really surprising would be to find my weight suddenly deciding to settle down at a new equilibrium that's higher than the previous equilibrium from November. I really couldn't explain that, and at the moment I'm so confused that I find that that's actually what I expect to happen. I have achieved epistemic despair and am one with Socrates.

Blood Pressure

I've been measuring my blood pressure for the last six months as well. I am after all writing a blog called 'The Heart Attack Diet', based on ignoring and indeed reversing all medical advice on the subject, and I am sensitive to the dramatic irony inherent in suddenly dying of a heart attack while writing it.

My blood pressure has been falling ever so slowly as far as I can tell. Now it seems to be on the rise again. I ought to write an essay about blood pressure at some point but I'm just too sodding busy as well as tired-all-the-time. Sorry. Normal service will be resumed as soon as I'm safely unemployed again.