ex150ish-3

Ketosis in Paradise

10/09/23 92.1

09/09/23 93.1

08/09/23 93.3

07/09/23 93.5

06/09/23 94

05/09/23 94.2

04/09/23 94.4

03/09/23 94.8

So, the sun came out, and I decided to head for Wicken again in what looks like the last week of proper Summer.

It's currently about 33C, and the cool waters of Wicken Lode are very tempting.

And also the National Trust Café, the "Docky Hut", which for some reason is a great place to write angry blog posts about diet and obesity and thyroid issues.

Today is Sunday and I am feeling slightly sad because I am not going to the Maid's Head for their excellent Sunday Lunch. Although this is not in fact much of a sacrifice, for reasons explained below.

Going out into the Fens for a week provides an opportunity to play silly buggers with food again before I go and visit my parents, so I'm doing another bout of ex150ish until I get back to Cambridge.

I started on Tuesday 24/09/2023, by giving away all my perishable carbohydrates to my recently arrived new neighbours. The milk, the PUFA-free sourdough bread, the potatoes, the oranges. Throwing them overboard would have made me sad, but giving them to newly moored-up neighbours was much less painful.

I have to confess to not giving away a certain packet of Waitrose's amazing black pudding slices. And I also kept a bit of cheddar cheese, which I've been grating onto boiling stew for decorative purposes.

So this is really ex150ish-but-slightly-more-protein, but it's not very much more, and I'm not expecting it to make a difference, so I'm going to call it ex150ish-3 unless it doesn't work the same!

And it does seem to be working the same.

The first seven days of ex150ish-3 have been very like the first seven days of ex150ish-1. This time I've got my keto-electrolyte pills with me, and I started taking one a day at the point where I got rid of my carbs.

Entering ketosis involved a few mild headaches, which seemed to go away with a bit of salt water. Nothing like the horrible and long-lasting headache I got the second time I tried it. One episode of listlessness that fixed itself in a couple of hours, which is nothing out of the ordinary for me and may or may not have been keto-flu.

And the expected spectacularly rapid weight loss occurred on schedule, dropping a terrifying 2.7 kilos over the week.

That's going to be mostly illusionary, probably about 1.5 kilos of water that was previously bound to glycogen, and probably some noise in the readings that's conspired to make it look more than it is.

But I think there's probably some genuine fat loss going on, because I'm profoundly not hungry.

It's a weird feeling. My stew tastes absolutely delicious (beef and tomato and cream and coconut oil and butter and herbs, yum!), and I'm thinking: "You should eat!!, you haven't eaten for hours and hours.", but there've been several occasions where I've heated some up thinking "Time for the one real meal of the day", and I've had a spoonful and then not been able to eat the rest.

Double cream just seems really bland. I'm having to force myself to eat it.

One thing I tried was to freeze some solid and add vanilla essence, which makes a passable ice-cream, although it could use some sugar.

Even that just doesn't engage my enthusiasm any, although I think it would if I was hungry. I even tried it with mint sauce, which can usually make absolutely anything more appetising to me. I grudgingly managed half a pot that way.

And I'm thinking: "This is weird, but also pretty consistent with the idea that ex150ish fixed my fat-homeostat and heart-attack-keto broke it again."

Energy-wise I'm absolutely fine. I cleaned the whole outside of my boat in one great six-hour cleaning frenzy while I was getting water in Upware, and I've tidied up all the stuff I brought home in plastic bags when my office 'closed for refurbishment' and they threw me out. There was a lot of it, I'd been there ten years. And it had been sitting on the floor, taking up all the space in my sitting-cabin, for about two weeks.

This is evidence that I'm feeling unusually energetic.

Those sorts of things only get done when I'm feeling on top of my game. In my usual slightly tired state they can get put off for months.

And I'm also feeling far too hot. I'm currently taking about four 100ug thyroid pills a week, plus one grain of NDT daily, and I'm wondering if I should reduce that even further.

That's beyond belief.

For the last ten years any attempt to reduce my thyroid dose has produced a rapid crash into exhausted apathy, which some doctors would call ‘Chronic Fatigue Syndrome’, and some doctors would call ‘Major Depressive Disorder’, and some loonies would call ‘Type 2 Hypothyroidism’. The loonies kind of include me, although I’ve never fooled myself into thinking I really had a thyroid problem.

The last time I tried it, during the pandemic, I killed all my pot plants. I remember noticing that they needed watering, and thinking that I'd get round to it when I was feeling better. I'm slightly amazed that I had the wit to notice what was happening and put the dose back up.

When I came back to myself, all the plants were dead. They were all pretty close to the sink.

I wildly guess that I'm burning lots of body fat, and getting my energy from that and so not needing to eat much.

Almost as if something has decided that I'm carrying far too much weight and need to shed it rapidly.

So, new hypothesis:

ex150-type (low protein, very low carb, very high fat) diets fix my fat-homeostat, at which point it realises that fuel stores are too high and starts to get rid as fast as it can by burning it for energy. Presumably it would like to get back to its mysterious downward trend-line.

heart-attack-keto (high protein, high fat, very low carb) doesn't actually induce ketosis very fast if at all, and it also somehow breaks that homeostat again, so it decides that my weight is too low (presumably it would prefer to be back at 99kg) and starts piling it on as fast as possible.

All of that is against a constant background of no-PUFAs, no-sulphites, no-willpower, no-goodharting and don't-be-a-psycho, which are my five constant golden rules that I am fairly sure about.

I hold this new hypothesis very lightly indeed! But it is my current best guess.

I can't see any theoretical reason why it would be true, and I didn't really leave myself in the hypothetical fast weight gain state for very long, so I could have just fooled myself entirely.

Time will tell.

Next week I face the ultimate test.