Easter 2026 Mom Test Results

A Record!

05/05/26 100.3 36.7 0 0

04/05/26 100.5 36.8 0.005 0.005

03/05/26 101 36.7 0 0

02/05/26 101.2 0 0

01/05/26 100.1 36.8 0 0

30/04/26 100.4 36.75 0 0

29/04/26 100.2 36.7 0 0

28/04/26 100.9 36.75 0 0

27/04/26 100.8 36.6 0 0

26/04/26 100.7 36.6 0.005 0.005

25/04/26 100.3 36.85 0 0

24/04/26 100.3 36.8 0 0

23/04/26 100.2 36.6 0.01 0.01

22/04/26 99.7 36.7 0.005 0.005

21/04/26 100.2 36.8 0 0

20/04/26 99.7 36.8 0 0

19/04/26 99 36.85 0 0

18/04/26 99 36.85 0 0

Predictions From the Last Post (Edited for clarity)

For the last two weeks I’ve been starving hungry and I’ve eaten a truly enormous amount.

My weight has gone up like a moonshot. Apparently linearly.

Every day for the last sixteen days I’ve gone for a walk and come home tired, and most days I’ve gone for a lie down, but I’ve only actually gone to sleep a couple of times. Most days I just lie down for half an hour and then feel fine. At all other times I’ve been quite lively and bouncy, not much trace of fatigue except immediately after walks.

I’ve often been too hot and my waking temperatures have consistently been higher than 36.7C.

Often eating makes me break into sweat, which is not at all normal.

I’ve dropped my thyroid dose in an attempt to control this, and it seems to have helped with the tiredness as well as the overheating. No obvious hypometabolism symptoms so far.

I predict that this all continues until I go back to Cambridge. So I expect to set a new all-time high weight record some time next week!

What Actually Happened

I carried on being hungry, but the effect lessened and the weight graph as a whole for the last five weeks looks like an exponential decay. I can’t tell by looking at the graph whether I actually reached a plateau or whether there was more to come. But my current seven-day average is 100.6kg which is indeed a new all-time high! That’s a BMI of 31.82, class I obesity.

My appetite is back to normal, no strange hunger pangs at weird times, and my poor Mum is wondering why I’m suddenly eating about half as much as I was at first. A crumble went uneaten and has had to be thrown away. A jar of my favourite sulphite-free Maraschino cherries is only half-finished. There is, however, no ice-cream left, I ate the last pot a couple of days ago.

Five weeks ago I was around 94kg, not in ketosis, and perfectly happy at BMI 29.7 which for me is about 9kg overweight but not really a problem.

I’m now about 16kg overweight, and I look it. I’m disgusted by my own body, there are great rolls of fat on my belly and even though my special very large trousers still have plenty of room in them, sitting down is rather uncomfortable even if I undo my belt.

I can believe that my actual ‘set point under maternal conditions’ could be 100.6kg, and I’m now weight-stable, or there might actually be more to come.

I’ve basically been forced off the thyroid. Even the tiniest amount now seems to be making me overheat so I’m just not taking it any more, and by my calculations the amount still in my blood is about 1/700th of what was once my daily dose.

Fatigue-wise nothing much happened, still mostly fairly lively, but still getting really tired after going for a walk and needing to lie down, then recovering quickly.

I found a stash of placebos in a cupboard and have been taking ribose for about two weeks, which didn’t seem to make much difference.

For the last week or so I’ve also been taking vitamin B12 and floradix tablets (iron and various B vitamins in small quantities). They did seem to help a bit, but not dramatically. So I think they really are placebos, but I’m going to keep taking the B12 for a bit just in case it does help.

At no point did I try the obvious experiment of not going for a walk and seeing what happened, the weather’s been great and I like my walks. I get a bit stir crazy if I don’t go out during the day. So it may actually be that I’ve been basically fine but just no longer have the energy for an hour and a half of gentle exercise without needing to recover afterwards.

Today I am on the train back home, so I won’t find out anything more about weight presumably. At 1600 I felt suddenly tired and lethargic, and that state carried on for about half an hour and now I feel fine again. So it’s not just the walking making me feel tired in the afternoons.¹

Conclusions

I’m not reading too much into being off the thyroid, this has happened twice before when visiting home and both times eventually the symptoms have come back and I’ve started needing it again. But it’s definitely a positive sign that something about avoiding PUFAs and sulphites is fixing my long-time curse of hypometabolism.

Weight-wise I’m perplexed. The heaviest I’ve ever previously been was a seven-day average of 99kg, and that was back in 2023, almost exactly three years ago. At that point my stable weight was rising at around 1kg/quarter, and had been for a year and a half. I’d just come back from visiting my Mum, and so I imagine that I was eating roughly what I’ve been eating for the last few weeks. And I also imagine that that was a real equilibrium weight, I don’t ever remember trying not to eat when I was hungry.

And that was the point I realised that I was still eating loads of PUFA in the form of peanut butter. When I gave that up I was finally eating a PUFA-free diet, and my weight’s never been that high since.

Since then visiting Mum has always caused me to gain weight, but the last two visits home have been absolutely spectacular, as if the effect has been supercharged and the ‘equilibrium under maternal conditions’ is suddenly much higher than it ever has been before.

And the only explanation I can come up with is psychological. Last year I came up with the idea that yo-yo dieting might be good, actually, and since then I’ve been happily watching myself balloon on the basis that gaining weight is diluting the PUFA content of my body fat.

I don’t like psychological explanations for things, not because psychology is irrelevant, but because you can explain absolutely anything that way.

And it doesn’t feel right. On previous visits home I wasn’t trying to eat less than I wanted or anything, I’ve always believed that that’s a mug’s game. You’ll be hungry until you hit the equilibrium your body is trying to reach, and there’s no point in fighting it. Trying to eat less is just fiddling your own results and leads to false conclusions. And these last two times it’s not like I’ve been deliberately over-eating, I ate whenever I felt peckish and not otherwise.

So I am as usual utterly confused. Something about this PUFA-free, sulphite-free diet has seemed to have been slowly lowering my equilibrium weight over the last three years, and yet suddenly I’ve found that this ‘maternal equilibrium’ is higher than it used to be. And I have no idea what is going on.

Predictions

Once I’m back in Cambridge and in control of my own diet again:

I predict that my appetite will collapse, I’ll lose all interest in food and my weight will start to fall at around 1kg/week.

At that point I’ll be living on my own considerable body fat, which is still full of PUFAs.

I predict that that will make me feel unwell in various ways, most notably a remarkable increase in fatigue.

I predict that I’ll start suffering from hypometabolism symptoms again and need to take small amounts of thyroid again to make them go away.

If the fatigue is really unpleasant, then I might try going into ketosis (which reliably gets rid of the fatigue) and see if that helps.

Otherwise I’m just going to ‘take my hands off the controls’ and see what happens next.

I imagine that the weight loss will continue until I get down to about 96kg, which is where things seemed to stabilise last time.

1. And in fact when I got back home I was incredibly weary and went to bed at 2100. And then woke up feeling fine at 2400 and stayed up until four in the morning.