Current Conclusions

I’m not sure that ‘current conclusions’ isn’t some sort of oxymoron, but here are the things that I am currently reasonably confident about, partly as a result of the things I’ve seen so far, and partly as a result of theoretical arrogance:

I reserve the right to change my mind about all this if I see new evidence. I can change my mind on a sixpence, and often do. And I can and do argue both sides of any debate that I’m interested in. Don’t trust me an inch. I’m not on your side. I don’t like sides.

Homeostatic Control of Weight

A healthy human being should never need to pay their weight or calorie intake or calorie expenditure a moment’s thought.

It should be under homeostatic control. If you need more energy, you should get hungry and eat until you don’t want to eat any more. If you don’t use enough energy then you won’t feel hungry.

If you’re male, your fat reserves should be about 10% of your body weight. If you’re female, about 20%. In both cases BMI around 20, with some variance for how naturally heavily built you are.

In both cases, by some weird coincidence, that’s the place you look most hot. Your homeostat will keep you there. You don’t need to do anything yourself except eat whenever you like.

Obesity and the Diseases of Modernity

Are modern problems, and therefore caused by some aspect of modernity. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was seed oilz. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something else. But it has to be something that happened in America in the twentieth century and then spread to Britain and is now affecting the rest of Europe and other parts of the world.

ex150

u/exfatloss’s mad diet:

where you just live off cream and beef and tomatoes is, for me, that holy grail, a weight-loss technique that requires no willpower.

I think that the load-bearing part is just the restricted protein, low-carb, high saturated fat bit.

My own version ex150ish is much laxer than his original rather severe diet, but it seems to get the exact same effect as the real thing.

It’s easy to sustain, fun and dead easy and cheap to do, and causes reliable weight loss at around 1/2 kg per week for as long as I keep it up, and the weight loss seems to continue for weeks after I stop doing it.

My renunciation of polyunsaturated fats and sulphites may or may not be prerequisites.

An Epidemic of Hypothyroidism

Ancient Madman Broda Barnes thought he’d discovered an epidemic of hypothyroidism.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hypothyroidism-Unsuspected-Illness-Berman-Laine/dp/069001029X/

I think he was right about an epidemic of hypometabolism, all sorts of mysterious diseases that look like the possible classical presentations of primary hypothyroidism.

These get diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Major Depression, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and a whole host of other “syndromes” that have no known cause, and get mainly get written off as psychological disorders or hypochondria.

And they almost always seem to go together with low body temperature.

I think the symptoms are real, common, and widespread; I think he was wrong about the cause.

I don’t know what the cause is, but it’s got to be something modern.

I had this, and for me, taking thyroid drugs fixed it or at least masked the symptoms. Just like Broda Barnes, John Lowe, Gordon Skinner all said it would, and almost exactly unlike every respectable doctor I talked to said it wouldn’t.

That worked well for about eight years, until it all started to come back during the pandemic, and raising my thyroid dose wouldn’t fix it any more.

I think what Broda Barnes must have been seeing was a ‘type 2’ hypothyroidism, like there’s a ‘type 2’ diabetes. The same symptoms, but a strange refusal of the body to respond to the hormones, rather than a gland disorder per se.

Some combination of no-PUFAs, no-sulphites, and occasional fortnights of ex-150ish seems to be fixing the underlying cause, and my thyroid dose is dropping precipitously. I’m literally being forced to take less and less of the only thing that’s kept me going for nearly a decade.

That’s All I Got

Big if true, as the saying goes……