In which I visit my parents

who are surprisingly sympathetic to my plans

My mother, like her mother before her, as a working class girl from the North, considers the existence in her vicinity of any male capable of consuming food to be both an insult to her competence as a cook, hostess and mother, and as an opportunity to practise wiles.

She is an excellent cook, and has over the years developed many techniques to make sure that I am stuffed at all times.

The cupboards and fridges are filled with my all-time favourite foods, massive meals are cooked, carefully tailored to meet my exact desires. Plans are made. I believe statistics are informally kept.

Any attempt to take a reasonable sized dinner is met with tempting side dishes, and irresistible puddings.

There are very high-class ice-creams, there are home-made crumbles. There is a huge bowl of fruit every morning for breakfast without fail.

There are steaks, there are curries, there are gigantic joints of roast beef. There are stews with dumplings therein.

There are great piles of chips. I love chips. I love them even more with grated cheese on them.

Favourite condiments are laid in.

A lot of work and thought has gone into these things. And I hate wasting food for any reason.

Attempts to read quietly are interrupted with offers of cheese-on-toast.

I say cheese on toast, but actually blue cheese lovingly melted onto toasted buttered muffins would be a more accurate description. To reduce the possibility of refusal, the muffins are often made before the offer.

You get the picture.

There is no defence. One must simply roll with it.

Usually after about three days at home I get the feeling that I simply cannot eat any more food, and this continues as long as I stay.

At the risk of perturbing my experiments, I went home for three weeks.

Mum was very much on board with my mad plans, and set up a special chip pan full of beef dripping to cook chips in. No polyunsaturated ingredient was permitted in any dish. Steaks were fried in butter.

It was all wonderful. I ate like a pig. Thanks Mum!

I took a regular walk in the Pennine Hills every day, about four miles up and down and about an hour and twenty minutes of elapsed time. But that's about the same amount of exercise that I get walking into Cambridge and cycling to the office and back every day at home.

I didn't take scales home, I didn't measure my weight or keep records or anything. Just enjoyed an idyllic break and didn’t worry.

This time I took extra large trousers so that I wouldn’t have to sit on the train with my buttons undone like last time.

When I got back I felt like I wouldn't ever be able to eat again, but that only lasted a couple of days or so. Then it was back to my normal routine.

Including weight measurements.

From 12/04/2023 to 22/05/2023 (latest first)

100.3

99

99.4

98.8

98.3

98.6

99.2

Average 99.08kg

The average for the week before I left was 98.34, so I reckon that's a gain in weight of around 3/4 of a kilo in three weeks.

I'm not too worried about this per se, because I always come back feeling like I've ballooned, and it always seems to fall off again fairly quickly.

But I am worried that that the trend over the first week back is distinctly upwards!

That's a surprise. I no more believe that it's possible to gain weight long term by deliberately overeating than I believe that it's possible to lose weight long-term by deliberate starvation.

There should be a homeostat. Appetite should decrease, weight should return to normal.

And I didn't eat much that first week back. I just wasn't hungry.

I would have expected my weight to go back down to what it was.

I notice that I am surprised.

This no-PUFAs diet, which I have been strictly observing for four months now, seems to reliably lead to rapid weight gain. I have gained about 2kg over four months.

Over the course of my fifth decade, not paying much attention to what I ate at all, I managed to put on about 8kg, without really noticing. Less than 1kg/year.

Maybe actually less than that. I don't actually know what I weighed when I was forty. But I was in robust good health, and photos from the time look that way.

My adult weight was always about 85-90kg.

I might have only put on 3kg in all that time.

My weight didn’t change over the year of the pandemic. 93kg at the start, 93kg at the end.

Since my second vaccine in Summer 2021, accompanied by terrible feeling of tiredness, it’s gone up 4kg, in maybe two years?

Now, 2kg in four months!

I notice that I am surprised.

First of all, although I have mysteriously been gaining weight fairly rapidly these last two years, the no-PUFA diet seems to be making that effect much stronger.

Secondly, it looks like deliberately overeating can cause permanent weight increase.

I wasn’t expecting either of these things.