ex150-7: Recarb and Results

An Unambiguous and Surprising Failure

03/10/24 96.3 36.65 0.12 0.12

02/10/24 96.3 36.83 0.06 0.06

01/10/24 96.5 36.57 0.11 0.11

30/09/24 96.5 36.93 0.06 0.06

29/09/24 96.8 36.51 0.12 0.12

28/09/24 96.8 36.59 0.12 0.12

27/09/24 96.1 36.71 0.06 0.06

26/09/24 95.3 36.72 0.06 0.06

A couple of weeks ago I wrote:

So next week, ex150ish-7, the 'let's take off and nuke the site from orbit diet'.

I expect this to work.

Mild headaches on ketosis entry, so a few days of keto-electrolytes to moderate this 'keto flu'.

Non-existent appetite, rapid weight loss, excellent mental clarity [...], the "two fuels" problem where I can get my mind tired while still having plenty of physical energy. If any of these things don't happen I'll be surprised.

Mostly that's a bit subjective, but weight-wise I can make predictions.

I expect it to work like ex150-5 did, when I started from a similarly ponderous position, except without the disruptions caused by pickled cabbage.

So I expect to lose around two kilos of actual body fat in two weeks, plus a 1.5kg water-weight loss due to glycogen depletion, followed by a 1.5kg water-weight regain at the end.

Current seven-day average is 96.6 kg, so in two weeks time I expect to be 93.1 kg, and then to bounce back up to 94.6kg in the following week.

Things initially seemed to go according to plan, keto-entry was very smooth, assisted by electrolytes, no noticeable keto-flu effect.

My appetite disappeared, and my weight, which had already been dropping at around 0.5kg/week, started dropping faster, and I did at one point get the "two fuels" problem while spending the whole evening playing chess.

I got some days of excellent mental clarity, but also four half-days where I felt sluggish and shattered. I think that was a sign of having taken my thyroid dose too low.

But weight-wise it was a complete wash.

Even during the two weeks of ex150ish-7 I felt that it wasn't really doing anything, it just seemed like the weight loss that had already been happening for mysterious reasons was just carrying on as it had been doing plus I was slowly losing 1.5kg of glycogen-and-water stores on top of that.

That in itself was really surprising because I had no appetite at all and was hardly eating. I didn't get through much cream at all. Quite a lot of it just went off because I couldn’t face eating it.

So I don't think I was eating very many calories compared to normal, and CICO is a law of physics, and all that, so I should have lost quite a bit of weight.

But I didn't. Apart from the water-weight, my weight just carried on going down at roughly the speed it had been going down anyway.

I think I must have tanked my metabolism somehow, maybe again by taking my thyroid dose too low?

Apart from the maybe-too-low thyroid dose, there was nothing unusual going on. I did have some steaks and black puddings, but in total the non-cream protein I ate added up to 42 grams a day. That's nothing I haven't done before, and certainly counts as low-protein.

I might have PUFA'd myself a bit, those black puddings don't actually list a polyunsaturated fat content, and the peppercorn sauce that came with the steaks tasted a bit oily, but the ingredients lists looked fairly innocent, and I don't think it would have been more than a few grams of PUFA in total.

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At the start, my seven-day average was 96.6kg.

So on the last day of ex150ish-7, at 94.3kg I was thinking: "That was all a bit pointless. I'll add back 1.5kg of water-weight and be 95.8kg, which is roughly where it looked like I would have been if I hadn't done this."

And at that point, I was already quite surprised, because the previous six bouts of ex150ish have reliably stripped off a couple of kilos of weight.

And then I recarbed, and my weight went up to 96.8 over three days. Two and a half kilos of "water-weight" regained. Which is too much. You only have about half a kilo of glycogen when your stores are full, bound to a kilo of water.

The average over the next seven days was 96.6kg, exactly where I started.

I was and am really really surprised by this.

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ex150ish just works for weight loss is one of the things I thought was true for sure.

A thing that was obviously true and needed explaining. It's been obviously true for the last year and a half.

Whenever I've tried it it's been water-weight off, lose weight rapidly, water-weight back on, and I've ended up quite noticeably lighter at the end. Usually a kilo or two.

And now, for no reason I can see, it's not only not worked, but it appears to have stopped the weight loss that I was experiencing anyway.

My weight is now roughly where it was, almost two years ago, when I first noticed that I was gaining weight rapidly and started messing about trying to fix it.

It hasn't quite reached its all-time peak of 99kg, but it's not far off, and now my reliable magic weight loss trick has stopped working.

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On the plus side, over the last week I've been eating loads of carbs and feeling completely fine, all traces of hypometabolism gone, I'm lively and alert and have plenty of energy.

I've not been high-carb low-fat because I had quite a lot of stew to finish off, and toast and potatoes are much better with butter, and I'm not getting the 'too energetic' feeling that I had last time I tried high carbohydrates. I just feel pretty well.

Something about visiting Mum made me overheat constantly, and I think I dropped my thyroid dose too far in response, thinking that I didn't need it any more. But I've felt quite sluggish ever since.

My dose is now back up to what feels like a comfortable level, at roughly a tenth of what it once was, and my plan of dissolving thyroid tablets in water so that I can take a small dose twice a day instead of random bits of tablets every so often has smoothed out the effects nicely.

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The reason I gave up polyunsaturated fats in the first place was because they looked like an obvious possible cause of the 'obesity crisis' in modern times, and I was rapidly becoming obese and wanted to stop that.

To my happy surprise, no-PUFAs appears to be fixing the metabolic curse that I've been living under for the last decade. That's happened smoothly and steadily over the last eighteen months.

But I'm beginning to suspect that no-PUFAs isn't doing anything at all to fix my newly developed weight problem.

And that's despite the fact that there's a pretty straightforward reason why PUFAs should cause obesity: https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/pufas-cause-obesity.

And if that's true, then no-PUFAs should smoothly and steadily fix obesity. Maybe it should fix it slowly, maybe it might take years to clear the PUFAs out of your system, but it should fix it, gradually, and if you’re eating ad-lib, as I always am, then you should see your set-point going down slowly.

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And I still have to explain the period from May-September 2023 when I first managed to cut out the last PUFAs I was eating (in wholesome-looking peanut butter) and I immediately just lost about half my excess weight so fast and so smoothly that I stopped worrying about it at all.

That's mostly all come back now, even though I haven't touched a PUFA for about eighteen months, so I don’t think no-PUFAs can possibly explain that.

But I can't think of anything diet-wise that I was doing in those five months that I'm doing differently now. So I’m just confounded.

What is going on? Why did it initially seem to work so well? Why has it stopped working? And why has ex150ish also apparently stopped working?

I am very very confused and surprised, and I notice that I am confused.