Mom Test: Mixed Results

Epic Weight Gain / Metabolism Fine

14/10/23 95.1

13/10/23 95.5

12/10/23 95.5

So, I don't need to see a week's weight records to form an opinion on what happened here!

Before I left I guessed that I was around 93kg "really", by adding 1.5kg of "water weight" to the average of the last few days of ex150ish-3

So I've pretty clearly gained over 2kg in three weeks. That wins the prize for my fastest rate of weight gain ever.

Mum has been overfeeding me, but last time that added about 0.5kg in the same three weeks.

All she's been doing is making/buying loads of delicious food and giving it to me, or leaving it around where I can find it.

I've been following my usual plan of eating when I want to, and not eating when I don't. There have been a couple of occasions where I ate food I didn't really want in order not to waste it, but I don't think it's been a big effect.

So there's an extra weight gain of at least 0.5kg/week to explain on top of any maternal overfeeding effect.

Weirdly that's roughly the same speed as I've been mysteriously losing weight for the last few months, and roughly the same speed as the surprising period of rapid weight gain that followed heart-attack-keto.

As far as thyroid dose/general metabolic health goes, I've been feeling consistently "fine", with occasional days full of energy, and occasional bouts of being "too hot" (as in taking cold showers too hot) despite my occasional T4 pills getting further and further apart. The last one was a good six days ago now, and my waking temperature's still good, (36.63 this morning), and I still feel fine.

The blip of three days tiredness just after getting home was probably sulphite poisoning from "fake Maraschino cherries". It didn't recur.

Apart from that, my three weeks at home didn't involve any sulphites or any PUFAs as far as I know.

So it looks like my metabolism is still slowly repairing itself. I’m still taking a grain of desiccated thyroid every day, and I predict that continuing overheating will start to force me to give that up too, eventually handing back control of my metabolic rate to my own autonomic systems.

That might well be an effect of decreasing the amount of PUFA stored in my body fat and cell membranes, or it might be a slow recovery from sulphite poisoning, or it might be something else to do with avoiding processed food, or it might be something completely unrelated that’s just happened by coincidence this year.

Weight-wise I don't know what to think at all.

Pretty clearly "No PUFAs, no sulphites" is not on its own causing my weight loss, or it would just have carried on while I wasn’t paying attention.

I’m also not convinced by any sort of “naive CICO” explanation. If that was the case then I’d have gained the same 0.5kg that I gained last time I went home for three weeks, but no more.

I didn’t do anything different! It has to be some sort of rebound effect.

My current best guess is that I have two states.

One where my body wants to carry a reasonable percentage of body fat, where my weight would be something like the 85kg it was for most of my life, or even 80kg or less, allowing for the fact that men lose muscle mass as they age. That's probably around 15% body fat and so around 12kg of fat.

And one where my body wants to be around 100kg. That would then be roughly 30kg of fat, so more like 30%. (All figures just pulled carelessly out of the air without even using the back of an envelope, don't take them too seriously).

And in either state, my appetite adjusts to try to make that so, and as a result I either gain or lose fat at around 0.5kg a week, just by eating to satiety.

ex150ish seems to switch me into the "reasonable" state, and it seems that I usually stay there even after stopping ex150ish and going back to eating normally.

Both heart-attack-keto (cutting out all carbs but eating loads of protein) and "going home" (which seemed mainly to involve an awful lot of extra carbohydrates in various forms) seem to have switched me into the "become very fat" state. I really can’t imagine why that would be.

The same sort of model would also explain u/ex150's weight graph (https://exfatloss.substack.com/p/progress), where he consistently loses weight doing ex150 and all its variants, and gains weight at a spectacular rate every time he goes back to “ordinary keto”.

But I’m completely at a loss as to what would explain such a model. I’d guess something is interfering with whatever fat-percentage measure my homeostat is using. But what?? Not PUFAs, or not PUFAs alone anyway.

At any rate, I’m now fairly convinced that the ‘weight loss’ and ‘metabolic speedup’ effects, despite both starting at exactly the same time, when I simultaneously gave up sulphites and tried ex150 for the first time, are different things. I can have one without the other. They’re not both manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon.

The next thing to try is obviously another bout of ex150ish. But I'll leave it a few days first, out of curiosity and to let everything stabilize.