I don't understand, how do you get your required dose of bleached and unbleached enriched flour, palm oil, high fructose corn syrup, regular corn syrup, baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, corn starch, monocalcium phosphate (can't have enough phosphates!), calcium sulfate, natural and artificial flavoring, caramel color, and soy lecithin?!
Very interesting that you seemed to plateau on ex150ish-sour-cream. Of course could be too short of a period to fully test it, or could be another factor. But given my recent experience, it does seem to line up pretty well.
Also interesting that it does seem to still fix your thyroid thing. This kind of matches my own personal experience with diabetes/glucose control and obesity - I had perfect fasting blood glucose at 300lbs. So doing a diet may very well fix one issue (thyroid/diabetes), but not the other (obesity).
In fact, now that I think about it, this fits pretty well with the combined PUFA+BCAA theory. Ever since cutting out PUFA, your thyroid is getting better, no matter if you lose or gain weight in the meantime. BCAA restriction is just a hack on top of that to lose weight, and ketosis is a hack on top of that, giving you "free" satiety in some varieties (in my case, the cream one, but not the sour cream one).
There was never anything wrong with my actual thyroid gland, as far as I know, or its controlling homeostat. It was more that my body wouldn't respond to normal levels of the hormones so I had to jack them up with exogenous supplementation to keep everything running smoothly, or indeed at all.
I think 'thyroid resistance' and 'insulin resistance' and 'buggered fat homeostat' all have to be aspects of the same thing. It's the most elegant explanation, and I love elegance in my theories (for principled reasons of Bayescraft as well as an aesthetic attraction to neat ideas that explain everything).
Your recent mouse-study article most definitely has me thinking: 'Maybe it's just isoleucine?'.
(Glorious work by the way. I should link it here. (and will) And that lab is greatly to be praised, maybe medical "science" is on the way to becoming a science. They'll have to change the name...)
But no. How could a common amino acid possibly be that bad for all mammals in totally plausible quantities? It's got to be interacting with some novel chemical.
On the other hand, how can PUFAs be bad for mice at all? They eat PUFAs normally I think.
I wonder why the researchers didn't try them on a no-PUFA diet? Are they worried about their little hearts, or is there something else going on?
If it's 'we tried no-PUFAs but we can't get them to become obese and diabetic unless we put lots of soybean oil in there' I am going to laugh myself sick.
> I wonder why the researchers didn't try them on a no-PUFA diet?
I think mouse diets are pretty standardized, and they've standardized on medium-PUFA for "control chow" ("healthy") and very high PUFA for "high-fat Western Diets."
Basically, cultism.
I am in touch, and I have asked them several times - so far, no response on that point. :-/
Yes! I very much want us to solve this charming puzzle ourselves (no clues!!), but too many lives are being ruined by this problem. The sooner the questions are answered and become settled science with all the details filled in the better.
We're almost there, I think. Framing the problem right is the hard bit, asking the correct questions is the next bit, and sorting out all the details and proving it all should be routine.
I've had multiple people explain Bayes' theorem to me, and I just thought "I think that's wrong." Or at least, it's vastly misapplied. It might apply in narrowly defined games of chance like Blackjack or Poker, but not in almost any real-world event.
Bayes' Theorem is just a straightforward truth in probability, on which I think everyone who gets probability agrees, and it's very simple and intuitively obvious. I once explained it to a primary school teacher who'd come to me for help with multiplication. If you really don't get it then I can try!
As for the sort of woolier wider probabilistic reasoning it inspires, you do it yourself:
Keep a number of hypotheses and models in mind, don't believe too strongly in any of them, work out what each one predicts before you do an experiment, and increase your credence in the ones that made the right predictions and decrease your belief in the ones that made wrong predictions.
Gradually you come to lose confidence in theories that repeatedly make wrong predictions, and the ones that survive are your current best guesses.
It's pretty much impossible in any real world situation to actually do the calculations, far too complicated, far too many effects and interactions, but an awful lot of applied maths is like that, you just have to work with simple examples and toy models and work out what the important effects are until you get a feeling of how things might work in the messy and complicated real world.
> Very interesting that you seemed to plateau on ex150ish-sour-cream. Of course could be too short of a period to fully test it, or could be another factor. But given my recent experience, it does seem to line up pretty well.
Yes, I'm interested too. It could be that all that weight loss the last three weeks was just water-weight and nothing fat-burning has happened at all. We'll see. If I stabilize at 93kg, then something interesting happened. If I go back to 95kg, then it was just water and we know not to use sour cream. Shame though, it tasted so nice.
What I'm actually expecting is to stabilize at 93kg and then start dropping again.
I actually suspect that the thyroid thing is now fully fixed, and my own thyroid, which has been on welfare this last decade, is gradually coming back to life and forcing me off the drugs. I haven't taken thyroxine in ages, and I feel great. Last time I tried something like this it nearly killed me.
Totally off thyroxine, which was most of it, and now nervously starting to drop occasional doses of the desiccated thyroid, which is much faster acting and thus trickier to taper.
I will let waking temperature and feelings of overheating and general well being be my guide in this rather than trying to move the dose one way or the other. I want to be forced off, rather than take myself off because I think that would be great. And I'm going to err on the side of hyper-, because hyper- is risky but hypo- is awful. And if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.
I think this kind of mirrors the old timey guy whom you've mentioned, who diagnosed everybody as hypothyroid. I don't think he was right about it being literally the thyroid gland at fault, but I'm sure the huge drop in metabolic rate in the West over the last 50-100 years would be fixed if everybody took a bit of your meds.
Ah, I had read about the King's College/Eton thing, that's why I guessed. Friend of mine went to Cambridge (physics or something) and he said there are different houses like in Harry Potter, and King's College is one of the best/most elite ones.
> I don't think he was right about it being literally the thyroid gland at fault, but I'm sure the huge drop in metabolic rate in the West over the last 50-100 years would be fixed if everybody took a bit of your meds.
I'm sure he was wrong about it being literally the thyroid gland at fault, or even the thyroid control system in general. We have excellent tests for that sort of thing.
But I'm confident that what he was seeing *was* the huge drop in metabolic rate in the West. I only used to have his word for it, and I only believed it because I thought him both clever and careful. But I've seen corroborating evidence from several sources recently.
Meds-wise I'm not so sure. It should work, and it sure seemed to work for me, and there are various thyroid-people who've had it work for them, and various doctors who've tried it and claimed it works for most people.
But I've personally seen a couple of people with all the right symptoms try it and get nothing but a feeling of over-stimulation like drinking too much coffee.
And again, if it's that obvious, why don't we already know? Giving people with thyroid symptoms thyroid drugs used to be the standard of care. Why did medicine abandon it? I've got no good answer to that question.
> Wheat, butter, sugar, salt.
I don't understand, how do you get your required dose of bleached and unbleached enriched flour, palm oil, high fructose corn syrup, regular corn syrup, baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, corn starch, monocalcium phosphate (can't have enough phosphates!), calcium sulfate, natural and artificial flavoring, caramel color, and soy lecithin?!
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Salerno-Original-Butter-Cookies-8-oz-Box/23619726
Very interesting that you seemed to plateau on ex150ish-sour-cream. Of course could be too short of a period to fully test it, or could be another factor. But given my recent experience, it does seem to line up pretty well.
Also interesting that it does seem to still fix your thyroid thing. This kind of matches my own personal experience with diabetes/glucose control and obesity - I had perfect fasting blood glucose at 300lbs. So doing a diet may very well fix one issue (thyroid/diabetes), but not the other (obesity).
In fact, now that I think about it, this fits pretty well with the combined PUFA+BCAA theory. Ever since cutting out PUFA, your thyroid is getting better, no matter if you lose or gain weight in the meantime. BCAA restriction is just a hack on top of that to lose weight, and ketosis is a hack on top of that, giving you "free" satiety in some varieties (in my case, the cream one, but not the sour cream one).
There was never anything wrong with my actual thyroid gland, as far as I know, or its controlling homeostat. It was more that my body wouldn't respond to normal levels of the hormones so I had to jack them up with exogenous supplementation to keep everything running smoothly, or indeed at all.
I think 'thyroid resistance' and 'insulin resistance' and 'buggered fat homeostat' all have to be aspects of the same thing. It's the most elegant explanation, and I love elegance in my theories (for principled reasons of Bayescraft as well as an aesthetic attraction to neat ideas that explain everything).
Your recent mouse-study article most definitely has me thinking: 'Maybe it's just isoleucine?'.
(Glorious work by the way. I should link it here. (and will) And that lab is greatly to be praised, maybe medical "science" is on the way to becoming a science. They'll have to change the name...)
But no. How could a common amino acid possibly be that bad for all mammals in totally plausible quantities? It's got to be interacting with some novel chemical.
On the other hand, how can PUFAs be bad for mice at all? They eat PUFAs normally I think.
I wonder why the researchers didn't try them on a no-PUFA diet? Are they worried about their little hearts, or is there something else going on?
If it's 'we tried no-PUFAs but we can't get them to become obese and diabetic unless we put lots of soybean oil in there' I am going to laugh myself sick.
If you're in touch could you ask them?
Did I mention I don't believe in Bayes?
> I wonder why the researchers didn't try them on a no-PUFA diet?
I think mouse diets are pretty standardized, and they've standardized on medium-PUFA for "control chow" ("healthy") and very high PUFA for "high-fat Western Diets."
Basically, cultism.
I am in touch, and I have asked them several times - so far, no response on that point. :-/
> I am in touch, and I have asked them several times - so far, no response on that point. :-/
Ah, I bet they've got something cooking on this very subject and don't want to give away hints of their new results before they publish.
Let's hope so :)
Yes! I very much want us to solve this charming puzzle ourselves (no clues!!), but too many lives are being ruined by this problem. The sooner the questions are answered and become settled science with all the details filled in the better.
We're almost there, I think. Framing the problem right is the hard bit, asking the correct questions is the next bit, and sorting out all the details and proving it all should be routine.
Yea, it's very exciting. And people say there's no frontier left in science! I feel like Isaac Newton every morning when I step on the scale lol.
> Did I mention I don't believe in Bayes?
To me that sounds a bit like: 'I don't believe in multiplication'. Do expand?
I've had multiple people explain Bayes' theorem to me, and I just thought "I think that's wrong." Or at least, it's vastly misapplied. It might apply in narrowly defined games of chance like Blackjack or Poker, but not in almost any real-world event.
Bayes' Theorem is just a straightforward truth in probability, on which I think everyone who gets probability agrees, and it's very simple and intuitively obvious. I once explained it to a primary school teacher who'd come to me for help with multiplication. If you really don't get it then I can try!
As for the sort of woolier wider probabilistic reasoning it inspires, you do it yourself:
Keep a number of hypotheses and models in mind, don't believe too strongly in any of them, work out what each one predicts before you do an experiment, and increase your credence in the ones that made the right predictions and decrease your belief in the ones that made wrong predictions.
Gradually you come to lose confidence in theories that repeatedly make wrong predictions, and the ones that survive are your current best guesses.
It's pretty much impossible in any real world situation to actually do the calculations, far too complicated, far too many effects and interactions, but an awful lot of applied maths is like that, you just have to work with simple examples and toy models and work out what the important effects are until you get a feeling of how things might work in the messy and complicated real world.
> Very interesting that you seemed to plateau on ex150ish-sour-cream. Of course could be too short of a period to fully test it, or could be another factor. But given my recent experience, it does seem to line up pretty well.
Yes, I'm interested too. It could be that all that weight loss the last three weeks was just water-weight and nothing fat-burning has happened at all. We'll see. If I stabilize at 93kg, then something interesting happened. If I go back to 95kg, then it was just water and we know not to use sour cream. Shame though, it tasted so nice.
What I'm actually expecting is to stabilize at 93kg and then start dropping again.
I actually suspect that the thyroid thing is now fully fixed, and my own thyroid, which has been on welfare this last decade, is gradually coming back to life and forcing me off the drugs. I haven't taken thyroxine in ages, and I feel great. Last time I tried something like this it nearly killed me.
Time will tell.
Nice! Are you completely off the meds or just tapering it down?
Totally off thyroxine, which was most of it, and now nervously starting to drop occasional doses of the desiccated thyroid, which is much faster acting and thus trickier to taper.
I will let waking temperature and feelings of overheating and general well being be my guide in this rather than trying to move the dose one way or the other. I want to be forced off, rather than take myself off because I think that would be great. And I'm going to err on the side of hyper-, because hyper- is risky but hypo- is awful. And if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.
That's awesome :)
I think this kind of mirrors the old timey guy whom you've mentioned, who diagnosed everybody as hypothyroid. I don't think he was right about it being literally the thyroid gland at fault, but I'm sure the huge drop in metabolic rate in the West over the last 50-100 years would be fixed if everybody took a bit of your meds.
Or went off seed oils, or whatever else it was.
Btw did you go to Eton?
> Btw did you go to Eton?
Rather emphatically not! I'm a state school boy. My family was very opposed to private education, and I went to a comprehensive school in Sheffield.
I did go to King's College though, which was Eton's sister foundation. There's not much connection between the two these days.
In American terms think a good public high school in Detroit, followed by some combination of Harvard and MIT.
Ah, I had read about the King's College/Eton thing, that's why I guessed. Friend of mine went to Cambridge (physics or something) and he said there are different houses like in Harry Potter, and King's College is one of the best/most elite ones.
> I don't think he was right about it being literally the thyroid gland at fault, but I'm sure the huge drop in metabolic rate in the West over the last 50-100 years would be fixed if everybody took a bit of your meds.
I'm sure he was wrong about it being literally the thyroid gland at fault, or even the thyroid control system in general. We have excellent tests for that sort of thing.
But I'm confident that what he was seeing *was* the huge drop in metabolic rate in the West. I only used to have his word for it, and I only believed it because I thought him both clever and careful. But I've seen corroborating evidence from several sources recently.
Meds-wise I'm not so sure. It should work, and it sure seemed to work for me, and there are various thyroid-people who've had it work for them, and various doctors who've tried it and claimed it works for most people.
But I've personally seen a couple of people with all the right symptoms try it and get nothing but a feeling of over-stimulation like drinking too much coffee.
And again, if it's that obvious, why don't we already know? Giving people with thyroid symptoms thyroid drugs used to be the standard of care. Why did medicine abandon it? I've got no good answer to that question.