Mom Test

Wondering About Protein

06/08/24 36.6 0 0.25

05/08/24 36.8 0 0

04/08/24 36.8 0 0

03/08/24 36.8 0 0

02/08/24 36.7 0 0.25

01/08/24 0 0

31/07/24 0 0.25

30/07/24 0 0

29/07/24 92.7 36.49 0 0.25

28/07/24 92.7 36.77 0 0

Off North to visit my parents, so not keeping weight records for a bit to see what happens when I'm not measuring it.

My thyroid dose has continued to drop, I'm now taking basically homeopathic amounts every so often, but my waking temperature is staying high.

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When I got home, Mum and Dad remarked that I seemed quite cheerful and energetic, which has been true for a while now.

And that continued for about three days, after which I suddenly got all fatigued and noticeably hungry.

I've been wondering about some sort of protein/PUFAs interaction for a while now (https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/protein-restriction-paradox ). I can see ‘no evidence’¹ that such a thing exists, except that it would explain an awful lot if it did.

I realised that since I'd been home I'd pretty much been drowning in fatted calves, so I tried to remember all the protein-containing things I'd eaten over the previous three days and it came to 350g, or 120g/day, and that's almost certainly an underestimate because who can remember everything they've eaten for the last three days?

There's them that say:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-019-0274-7

that the actual requirement for protein is 0.6g/kg/day

But I don't know if they mean per kilo of actual weight or per kilo of lean mass.

And I don't know how much lean mass I have.

But I'm 5'10", or 1.78m in SI units, so to achieve an ancestral-type BMI of 21 I should be about 67kg², and 10% of that would probably be fat mass, so call it 60kg of lean mass. i.e. I am currently carrying about 33% fat.

So let's go with 60kg of lean mass requiring 0.6g/kg/day is 36g of protein per day. Or if it's total mass 54g/day.

I'd been eating somewhere between two to three times what I actually needed for three days.

Something needs to happen to that extra protein. Maybe getting rid of it interferes with whatever you do to get rid of PUFAs.

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I asked Mum if she'd lay off the fatted calves and just do me baked potatoes with butter as an evening meal, and I avoided eating anything else with protein in it that day.

And that did seem to bring me back to life.

I don't want to obsess about food while I'm home, it rather ruins the idea of a Mom Test where you just take your hands off the controls and see what happens.

But on the other hand I don't want to feel 'tired all the time' either. Because that sucks, and is no state to visit one’s parents in.

So while I'm here, I'm going to react to any sort of sluggishness or unexpected hunger by going over to eating protein-free foods, and see whether that keeps me cheerful.

1. “No evidence” is medical jargon for “a lot of evidence but we haven’t checked”. Except that occasionally it means “We checked and it’s not true”. I’m not convinced that medical people are actually conscious that these are two different things.

2. That actually is what I weighed when I was nineteen years old. The only reason I know that is because my college boat club got me drunk enough to sign up one night in spite of the obvious risk of early morning outings (they sneakily put several attractive yet sinful women on the case). And then having persuaded me to take the King’s shilling, they weighed me. For some reason the phrase: “Oops, ten and a half stone, too light to row and too heavy to cox.” has stayed with me all these years.