Mom Test : Confusion

I'm now even more confused than usual

28/10/23 95.6

27/10/23 95.3

26/10/23 95.2

25/10/23 94.9

24/10/23 95.3

23/10/23 94.2

22/10/23 94.5

21/10/23 94.3

20/10/23 95.2

19/10/23 94.6

18/10/23 94.5

17/10/23 94.6

16/10/23 95.8

15/10/23 95.9

14/10/23 95.1

13/10/23 95.5

12/10/23 95.5

I really don't know what to make of these last two weeks, or what my 'Mom Test' is telling me.

I came back to Cambridge on the twelfth, to find that I'd added at least two kilos of weight in the three weeks I was visiting my parents.

That was no surprise, because for all the time at home I had a huge appetite and was eating lots.

In anticipation of this possibility I'd taken my largest pair of trousers. They were really ridiculously baggy when I left for home, and they're now only bit baggy. So I don't think there's any sort of measurement weirdness going on, the increased appetite and weight gain were real.

That tells me that any theories about ‘metabolic healing due to absence of PUFAs/sulphites’ are just wrong. Something else must be going on.

Mum had been feeding me pretty much what I ate for most of my life without trouble, PUFA-free and now mostly sulphite-free. There was lots of protein and lots of saturated fat, but mostly the excessive food was carbohydrates of one sort or another.

Pretty much the minute I got back, I managed to get COVID, my waking temperature jumped, and my appetite disappeared.

The fever only lasted a couple of days, but ever since I've had no appetite at all.

I've been pretty much living on occasional bits of cheese-on-toast. There's a beef-and-tomato-and-potato stew sitting on the stove, I've tried it and it's delicious. I keep heating it up to stop it from going off, but I'm not eating it. I don't want to eat it even though it tastes really good. I've got no urge whatsoever to eat it.

I bought a couple of pots of cream on the way home from the station when I got back, and they've gone off in the fridge and I've thrown them away. Just don’t want it.

Weirdly, I have several times fancied a baked potato.

The strange thing is that making baked potatoes in a coal stove (for it is Winter now, and the fire is in) is some minor effort and takes time, and yet several times I've done that instead of eating things that were already ready, could have been eaten instantly, were getting well past their sell-by dates, and that I usually like.

Twice I've just eaten a baked potato straight out of the fire, without anything on it. That's really weird for me. I don't usually even like them until I've put butter on them. But mostly I have managed to wait until I've added butter and cheese into them and let it melt.

So I wonder if I’ve got some sort of carb-craving that isn't a calorie-craving?

Anyway, even counting the potatoes and their calorific fillings, I don't think I've eaten very much at all over the last couple of weeks, and my appetite has been almost non-existent.

And yet....

Pretty much as expected, my weight crashed, from 95.5kg when I got back to 94.2kg on the twenty-third. A truly scary drop of more than a kilo in eleven days.

And then over the next five days it bounced. Right back up to 95.6kg this morning.

It wasn't like I started eating more over the last five days. I'm still not very hungry.

I'm currently sitting in the Picturehouse, and I came here specifically to get a pizza.

But I don't want a pizza. I'm just sitting here drinking coffee and writing blog posts and computer programs. I'm just not hungry. I'm having trouble remembering what hungry feels like.

As far as I can tell, for the last five days I’ve been eating very few calories and yet gaining weight very fast. I've absolutely no way to explain this. CICO is a law of physics for fuck's sake.

It's possible my metabolism has crashed in some way.

Midweek I got some weird symptoms which I'd usually put down to thyroid under-dosing: lethargy, sadness, plantar fasciitis, feeling too cold, acne (acne! I'm fifty three....).

I popped an extra thyroid pill to make them go away. That immediately caused my waking temperature to spike to 37C, and I felt too hot all the next day, and a bit annoyed. Been fine ever since though.

The symptoms might equally well have been due to sulphites though, I stupidly drank a cocktail last Saturday without checking what was in it and woke up with a headache and feeling lethargic. And it's all mixed up with COVID after-effects anyway....

But my waking temperature is where it should be, roughly 36.7, and apart from that strange three-day burst of hypometabolic symptoms I'm feeling fine.

Quite energetic, in fact. Items are disappearing from my to-do list, programs are getting written, blog posts are being made, chess games are being played and won, and chess puzzles seem interesting, none of which is consistent with hypometabolism.

So I'm just going to admit that I'm completely confused.

My precipitous drop in thyroid dose (which continued all the time I was at home) has stopped, and the dose needed to maintain the right waking temperature seems to have re-stabilized at around half what I've needed for the last decade.

My lack of appetite tells me I'm in serious relying-on-fat-reserves mode.

In flat contradiction, my currently rapidly-rising weight tells me that my body's trying to get back to 100kg.

I can't make any sense of it at all.

I'm tempted to leave it another week to see what happens next, but I also want to do another bout of ex150ish in the hope of going back to my previous state of everything-getting-better-for-no-good-reason.

Dither. Dither....

Again: I notice that I am confused.