09/07/25 92.2
08/07/25 93 36.69 0.06 0.06
07/07/25 93.3 36.44 0.074 0.074 147/100/52
06/07/25 93 36.69 0.038 0.038 134/84/53
05/07/25 92.7 36.57 0.064 0.064 155/92/48
04/07/25 93.4 36.64 0.06 0.06 140/86/66
03/07/25 92.4 36.63 0.064 0.064 137/80/57
02/07/25 92.2 36.65 0.06 0.06 149/91/57
On the 2nd July I bought a loaf of Jason's Sourdough bread, renounced ice-cream and lollies, and ate mostly stew and toast and various forms of cream all week.
Almost immediately it seemed that I was much hungrier than I had been, a couple of times I've made dinner and at the end still been hungry and ended up making a second dinner and eating that too.
And my weight started rising, which after weeks of watching it steadily fall was quite noticeable, and neither of those things would have bothered me too much but after a couple of days I also suddenly started getting tired. Three times in the last four days I've started feeling really sluggish and brain fogged, gone to bed mid afternoon and slept for a couple of hours. And one day I got a really characteristic ache in my legs which has always been an early-warning chronic fatigue symptom. And I got a surprisingly low waking temperature reading one morning for no reason.
So I panicked, stopped early, ate my last bread on the seventh, and went back on the ice cream.
And I woke up this morning back at 92.2 kg which is what I started at. And actually I still have a mild ache in my legs and feel a bit sluggish.
So I'm now looking at my graph and thinking, "that could all have been just noise, and you have been lowering your thyroid dose recently maybe you took it too low".
I don't want to draw conclusions from five days that could have been just noise, but I had three loaves of bread over the six days it lasted, which is 1.5kg of bread, 150g of protein, or 30g/day.
Usually I'm eating around 1kg of minced beef a week, which is apparently 230g protein, so 32g/day. Probably a bit less than that because I keep forgetting to put beef in my stew, usually because there's no room. Plus probably a bit from the cream which I'm not counting.
So I reckon I pretty much doubled my protein intake last week. And I can't really see any other big differences between ice-cream and dextrose and potatoes vs bread, mostly they're just various sugars in various forms.
It seems to me like I've got two set-points, one at 97kg which applies whenever I'm eating lots of protein (and which used to be higher! 99kg and rising when I first started playing around), and one which is somewhere south of 92kg (but I've never reached it) which applies when I'm restricting protein.
If that's true, then that explains almost everything I've seen over the last two years, except for the bizarre rise and fall last christmas.
Maybe nothing except low protein actually makes a difference?
I had a theory once about excess protein needing to be disposed of through the same pathway as deals with excess PUFAs. So if you're eating loads of protein that makes the effective PUFA levels in your system (and probably in your blood) much higher, because the stuff getting released from your fat is hanging around rather than getting eliminated.
That could work as an explanation, if PUFAs are interfering with the leptin signal as it crosses the blood brain barrier.
But last week could just all have been noise. I need to do it again, but I'm not looking forward to it. On the other hand I'm going to go and visit my parents again soon, and the fatted-calf-diet is nothing if not high in protein.
And I'm interested in where this lower set point is, now. That exponential drop in weight over the last two months didn't look like it was going to bottom out any time soon.
So the next one is just ex150ish-swamp, usual restriction to no more than 1kg of beef a week, any other food that doesn't contain significant protein is ok. (No PUFA, no sulphites, obviously, hopefully that goes without saying?) Basically no bread, no cheese, no eggs, no milk, no yoghurt. I'll hunt round for other foods that are just fat and carbs, and try to notice if I'm eating anything else with protein in it and stop doing that.
Obviously the slightest sign of protein cravings and I am off for a pizza.
It could be that bread (or wheat more specifically) is bad/inflammatory. Lots of people think this.
For example potatoes have nearly the same amount of protein as bread, and you were eating loads of those?
You could try to recreate it by eating a similar amount of e.g. white rice.
Protein yes but I do want to point out, wheat itself bothers some people more than others. The same amount of additional protein from beef vs bread affects me differently