ex150ish+fruit+chips+sour-cream+crème-fraîche+ice-lollies
There might have been a kebab and a bucket of vodka in there somewhere too...
24/06/25 93.4 36.52 0 158/92/52
23/06/25 93.4 36.71 0.09 0.09 126/82/54
22/06/25 93 36.61 0.086 0.086 149/91/57
21/06/25 93.5 0.08 0.08 140/81/58
20/06/25 93.4 36.63 0.09 0.09
19/06/25 92.5 36.55 0.04 0.04 126/81/56
18/06/25 92.2 3.72 0.05 0.05 125/80/53
17/06/25 92.7 36.51 0.1 0.1 145/86/62
16/06/25 92.9 36.65 0.084 0.084 133/84/54
15/06/25 93.5 36.75 0.09 0.09 135/86/52
14/06/25 94 36.99 0.09 0.09 134/80/62
13/06/25 94 36.81 0.05 0.05 132/85/59
12/06/25 93.5 0.13 0.13
It's been very hot here (around 30C) and I've been consistently overheated for the last week, sometimes super-energetic, sometimes very tired, sweating and walking around with no shirt on even though other people seem to be managing ok and some weirdos seem to have managed to feel cold at times. That is pretty clear hypometabolism/thyrotoxicity, I've got no hypo symptoms, and I've been dropping doses of thyroid to try and deal with it and that seems to have worked.
Irritatingly from an anti-PUFA psycho point of view, I've managed to get a slight sunburn. The only thing we all seem to agree on in the PUFAs evil camp is that about six months after you stop eating the things you become pretty much immune to sunburn.
I've never been much of a burner anyway, and last year I deliberately tried as hard as I could to get sunburn during a heatwave and couldn't. (https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/sunburn-test)
This year I seem to have managed it by accident, just by walking around topless in a heatwave for a week. Nothing serious, just a faint itching between my shoulder blades one day, no peeling or anything, but more than I managed last year. Hmm....
It has been pretty damned hot here. A friend e-mailed from Southern Turkey where he's gone on holiday to say how nice it was to be out of the English heat. Still....
Friday 13th involved an unexpected bucket of vodka and a kebab. It was a kebab in a good cause, Sam the dog was hungry because we had got drunk and forgotten about dinner. So I went and got myself a kebab and asked if I could just have tray of meat for him. Amazingly the kebab man handed over what must have been nearly half a kilo of grilled lamb in a big tray and then wouldn't take payment for it.
I have never seen half a kilo of lamb disappear so fast. There is a phrase "wolfing it down", and I know where it comes from now. At which point the nice man produced a second trayful. I was like "you absolutely have to let me pay for this", and he said: "Dog is hungry. God is watching.". Dog was indeed hungry. The second tray went only slightly less rapidly than the first. Anyway the "Super Kebab House" next to the Champion of the Thames on King Street now has my eternal loyalty. They are good people. I do hope God was watching and acts appropriately. My own more modest kebab was very good, and I know Sam enjoyed his two because now he has started to really pay attention to polystyrene trays whenever he sees them.
That's got to count as a 'cheat day', I suppose.
I think it was Saturday 14th when I made the amazing discovery that Tesco sell a brand of ice lolly whose ingredients are 'orange juice, dextrose'. They are absolutely delicious in the way that food made from real things always seems mysteriously to be and I've been troughing them like there's no tomorrow, I reckon I've had something like twenty or thirty in the last week. As I say, it's been hot.
Dextrose is the correct stereoisomer of glucose, and starch as found in potatoes is just long chains of dextrose, so I reckoned there was no harm in eating loads of ice lollies if I was eating chips anyway. Dextrose shouldn't even be bad for teeth.
Additionally since I can make sour cream just by adding vinegar to double cream, I've decided that there's no possible harm from eating commercial sour cream or crème fraîche either (ingredients cream, lactobacilli), so they've gone on the regular shopping list too.
By an amazing coincidence the miraculous weight loss that I've been experiencing recently has stopped and indeed reversed this week.
I'm now seven-day-averaging 93kg and rising. Might be noise, I suppose....
Anyway yesterday 23rd I was at the Picturehouse to watch one of those boring black and white foreign films out of a grim sense of duty, and I realized I'd forgotten to eat all day and was hungry, and I had twenty minutes to kill so I ate a croissant, a cheese roll, a bagel and a pepperoni pizza in that order, and only just made it into the screen in time for the film.
Which foods are definitely not within the harsh restrictions of ex150ish+fruit+chips+sour-cream+crème-fraîche+ice-lollies either. So that's another 'cheat day'. Willpower *is* evil, I guess....
I do wonder if I've been neglecting the beef angle and was a bit protein deficient? I can't remember the last time I added beef to my stew, too many vegetables to deal with, there's no room. So maybe my appetite decided that it was time for some bread and cheese yesterday and has now gone back to 'everything's fine' mode. But it didn't feel like that. I think I was just hungry and they were nearby. Also I can't see a rule without wanting to break it, even if I made the rule myself. (Wistfully remembers various youthful acts of anarchy...)
They were all nice, but I didn't feel any kind of carb-shock or release from an unwanted restriction or anything like that. And my weight this morning was the same as it was yesterday.
I haven't yet decided whether that was just a one-day lapse or whether that ends the experiments for a bit and I'll go back to eating normally now.
I'm not even slightly bored with loads of cream and stew and chips and ice lollies yet. Even though it involves eating roughly the same every day it's not monotonous psychologically and it all tastes great. Easy to stick to.
So I'll just go by feels for the next couple of weeks. Stew and chips for breakfast, and at the moment the feels are: 'That sure was a nice pizza but I don't really want another one and I'm not missing bread or cheese at all'.
30°C? *laughs in American*
"Bucket of Vodka?" Have we found the English version of "mere gallon of ice cream?"
Btw, I think nobody is really claiming you will be completely immune to sunburn from avoiding PUFAs. It's just a pretty drastic reduction for most people. I used to burn SUPER easily. The first afternoon in the sun after a long winter would usually mean painful deep pink to red burns, including days of peeling and barely being able to fall asleep from pain.
Now, it's either absolutely nothing or, like you describe, a mild pinkness that doesn't really hurt and goes away after a day. I actually had that this spring when I went into real sun for the first time. Since then I haven't managed to produce any sunburn.
So it might just be a 85% resistance or something like that, and if you survive the first extreme exposure for the year, you're used to it enough to never get something serious the rest of the summer.
> "Dog is hungry. God is watching."
Haha, was he a Turk? They do love pets & God.
> They are absolutely delicious in the way that food made from real things always seems mysteriously to be
I have noticed this too. My latest fascination, now that I can eat crabs, have been Walker brand "shortbread" cookies.
Progress is a lie; the 5-ingredient foods made like Grandma did taste WAY better. And what about that shelf life? If they managed to ship this shortened bread to the New World and have it sit on the shelf in the "Exotic Food" aisle until I buy it, the shelf life cannot be THAT bad. Are they cheaper? Maybe by the pound, but I'd much rather eat 200 grammometers of Scottish shortbread than an Imperial ton of caragenan, matrodexrin, corn starch, and hydrogenated vegetable oil (soy, corn, sunflower, canola, ..) in the form of a cookie-adjacent Orio.
So why the heck are we eating any of this industrial food simulacra shit?! Never forget what they took from us.
> commercial sour cream or crème fraîche either (ingredients cream, lactobacilli)
This must be some cultural issue. Many times, the American commercial sour cream will also contain whey powder, skim milk powder, 3 emulsifiers, mono- and diglycerides..
I think it's related to that "Dog hungry, God is watching" thing. Many Americans don't seem to believe that God is, in fact, watching them. So they do shit that one would not tell their mother about. Imagine you go home on Sunday or you're at the silver gates and you say "Oh, I replaced the natural ingredients in sour cream with dehydrated skim milk powder and whey isolate and carrageenan to save 2c per gallon and improve profit margins."
On the "boring diet" not being all that boring, I think exciting was a psy op. If you actually eat a delicious & nutritious meal, you can eat it every day and it's great every day. That's what it evolved to be like, ain't no stone age man importing agavas and cod and cassava all over the place cause he was bored by his food.