Four Months of the Heart Attack Diet
Feeling much better, gaining weight rapidly
So, just before Christmas last year, I renounced PUFAs in all their forms.
This was prompted by my shock at having measured my weight at 97.75 kilos. I'm afraid I didn't do this terribly carefully, so that's probably +/- a kilo or so.
And I very quickly felt a hell of lot better. I'd been having issues with tired-all-the-time before, and they got a lot better, although they didn't go away completely. (Much more on that to come...)
Another thing I noticed was that I greatly preferred this diet. In order to get PUFAs out of your diet, you pretty much have to give up all processed food and stop eating out.
That's fine, it's mostly ghastly. The only thing I miss is peanut butter. And the excellent chips from Gardenia's in town.
Still, sacrifices must be made in the holy name of science.
So I ended up doing a lot of home cooking. Baked potatoes with lashings of butter. Stews made with 80/20 ground beef (fried in butter or coconut oil) and chopped tomatoes and green vegetables. Steaks (fried in butter). Chips made by frying potato slices in coconut oil.
And it's all great.
One thing I deduce from this is that the hyper-palatability theory of obesity is just wrong. Real food as eaten by everybody until recently tastes much better.
And another thing I noticed is that whenever I do end up eating out, everything tastes of vegetable oil, and that is a really nasty taste, which I'd never noticed before.
I am going to keep this diet if I can, for reasons of palatability and well-being.
There is just one tiny fly in the ointment.
After a couple of months of it I went up a trouser size. From a shameful 38" to an even more shameful 40". And I felt heavier.
At that point I figured 'you are doing an experiment here, you must measure outcomes'.
The blog Experimental Fat Loss recommends an nice ordinary set of scales:
These:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01GDXF06G
Etekcity EB4074S Bathroom Scales
seem excellent and are cheap.
And I started keeping a log of my weight, measured first thing every morning.
98.7
98.4
98.1
97.6
99.1
98.1
98.4
98.4
98.5
99.2
Average 98.45 compared to 97.75 before Christmas, increase of 0.7 kg. (give or take)
That's actually not as bad as I feared subjectively. I seemed to have got quite a lot fatter.
But still, certainly not going down.