ex150ish-4: Second Week
All confounded, but weight loss unmistakeable
11/11/23 91.6 36.73 0 1
10/11/23 91.9 37.07 0 1
09/11/23 91.4 36.93 0 1
08/11/23 91.6 36.91 0 1
07/11/23 92.3 36.9 0 1
06/11/23 92.6 36.61 1 1
05/11/23 93.3 36.86 0 1
I've had that cold all week. Sniffles, sore throat. I missed choir. Didn't fancy going out in the cold, throat too raw to sing anyway, mood vile.
High waking temperatures, but I feel constantly cold. Which is probably a helpful virus-killing fever so I'm not reacting to it. I'm keeping my thyroid dose where it is.
I've got no appetite at all. I'm occasionally eating a bit of stew, and it tastes great but I don't want much of it. There's minced beef stacking up in the fridge waiting to go in.
I'm mainly living off Lemsips and coffee and pots of sour cream and crème fraîche, and I'm mainly eating them because I feel I ought to eat, rather than because I want to. Usually I can finish a small pot, sometimes not. Tonight I managed about four spoonsful of crème fraîche and then put the pot down and forgot about it. It still tastes good, but I'm just not interested. An hour or so later I noticed the pot by the fire and ate a bit more.
The very thought of eating double cream is revolting. Too bland. Too rich. It's just going off in the fridge and getting thrown away.
Thyroid dose is rising slightly if anything, but as I say, I've abandoned 'controlling that' to allow the fever to run its course.
I'm absolutely not getting the usual ex150ish mental clarity and energy. I feel drained and sluggish and lethargic and cold. Is that just this virus, or am I in a state of starvation?
I did cheer up to the point where I fancied a game of chess online yesterday night, and I won comfortably against someone of my own rating, so obviously my mind was working ok yesterday evening. But generally speaking I'm in a state of brain fog.
Weight loss is unmistakeable and fast.
Eyeballing that graph, I could believe that my body is trying to get back on to the previous downward trendline.
Homeostat working properly, and thinking: "We've got immense stored energy reserves, far too high in fact, let's burn that instead of eating".
If that's true, and it certainly fits my model of what is going on, then the question is:
What was it about Mum's cooking, and the heart-attack-keto experiment, that put me into "Eeeek, no fat stores, eat as much as possible" mode?
The r/saturatedfat guys are very very into Branched Chain Amino Acids these days.
I frankly have no idea what they're talking about, but I get the impression that the general idea is that it's hard to metabolise PUFAs in the presence of BCAAs.
High BCAA foods are beef, chicken breast, tuna, turkey, eggs, cheese, milk and yoghurt. Notably not cream!
That's pretty much a list of my favourite foods, exactly what Mum feeds me because she knows I like them, and exactly what I was eating for 'heart-attack-keto' (except the yoghurt, because carbs)
If it's true, then that would make sense of my two weird periods.
I think we know that PUFAs are preferentially released from fat stores.
If high BCAA levels mean you can't burn the PUFAs, then when you try to burn fat it doesn't work!
So your body panics and concludes that your fat reserves are dangerously low.
Your appetite goes through the roof, partly just to provide day-to-day energy needs by burning carbs and protein, and partly to store fat as fast as possible.
So now it looks like I need to find out about BCAAs, and how they might interfere with PUFA metabolism.
I flat out don't believe that BCAAs by themselves are in any way bad. That's the whole 'animal products cannot be bad for a predator' thing again.
But there's no reason why they shouldn't interact badly with PUFAs. There just wasn't much PUFA around before the 20th century for them to interact with.
This new idea seems to retrodict all my experiences of the last year or so.
Just cutting out PUFAs made no real difference weight-wise, and my pre-existing weight gain continued for six months.
But I did see improvements in general well-being. Presumably more saturated fat and less PUFA in my bloodstream helped metabolically.
Discovering the sulphites thing probably helped too.
After about six months, my metabolism had improved to the point where I needed to start backing off the thyroid dose because I was too hot.
Then I tried ex150ish, and the sudden loss of BCAAs meant I could suddenly burn PUFAs at speed.
Suddenly all that stored energy becomes available. My appetite collapses, and the weight starts to fall off.
And more importantly, my PUFA stores were probably severely depleted, because they get released first and so burn off preferentially if they can be burned at all.
After that, I got months of weight loss for free, because I'm not releasing as much PUFA, so my body can burn some fat, realises that my fat reserves are far too high, and acts to bring things back to normal by lowering my appetite.
And the longer that goes on, the lower my PUFA reserves become, so everything just gets better by magic.
As the PUFAs deplete, then I can burn more and more fat, and my body's idea of how much fat I'm carrying becomes more and more like the true situation where I've got huge energy stores if only they can be burned.
As my weight goes down and the situation gets better, my ‘set point’ keeps dropping. I'm never very hungry. A virtuous circle.
But on the two occasions where I've eaten unreasonably high amounts of animal protein, I'm suddenly unable to burn PUFAs properly any more, I can't access my fat stores, and my body panics and I go into 'eek gain weight as fast as possible' mode.
Strong appetite. Very rapid weight gain.
Time will tell, I guess.... Christmas is coming, and with it another 'Mom Test'.
I also wonder, if such ideas are close to the truth, whether this explains why my guru u/exfatloss is having such trouble losing the rest of his weight after his initial spectacular successes.
He's losing faith in his own ideas, and starting to talk about calorie counts and excessive cream in coffee from Starbucks, and weight lifting and such. None of which should make the slightest difference.
Which is a shame, because his original ideas are working very well indeed for me, and I'm just doing occasional two-week bursts and not even being that strict about it!
We read his graphs very differently, he and I.
I see steady weight loss whenever he's on ex150 or a close variant.
The problem comes when he's not doing that. At which point his weight skyrockets.
He's very wedded to the idea of ketosis as the natural state of man, so I think in his non-ex150 periods he's probably eating a huge amount of animal protein.
Lots of BCAAs, PUFA metabolism blocked, body thinks no fat reserves, panic, appetite through the roof, pile on weight.
But for him, it's a self-defeating cycle. Because as soon as he goes back to his normal high-animal-fat keto, he can't burn PUFA anymore, so he's 'starving with a full fuel tank'.
Next time he has a non-ex150 break, I think he should keep his BCAA-containing protein restriction going, but eat whatever else otherwise without worrying about it (no PUFAs!). As much non-BCAA protein as he likes, but keep the BCAAs low. Maybe even try some carbs?
I predict that if he does that, he'll find he just continues to lose weight effortlessly.
(Of course, re-carbing will instantly stick around 1.5kg of water-weight on to carry newly built glucose reserves, but neither of us think that matters in the slightest.)
Ha, you've summarized my current "thoughts about obesity and how they interplay" better than I can!
As a reminder, I can't eat carbs because of my Non-24.