One Year of the Heart Attack Diet II: Metabolism

Doing Well

So almost everyone who reads this stuff cares mostly about weight loss, where my results are good, but rather mixed and inconclusive.

Don't get me wrong, I care about weight loss too, I'm still about 10kg heavier than I'd like to be, and losing weight is a nice-to-have.

But what I really care about is the metabolic curse that seemed to come over me around the time of my fortieth year.

By symptoms I seemed to very slowly develop hypothyroidism over the next five years, but there was nothing wrong with my thyroid.

Whatever it is, it involves most of these symptoms anyway:

https://stopthethyroidmadness.com/symptoms/

Since it's not a thyroid problem, call it 'hypometabolism of unknown cause'.

Doctors would call it Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or Fibromyalgia, or Major Depression, or any of a number of similar things, all of which involve all these symptoms in various combinations, but no-one knows what's going on.

Eventually it got so bad that I decided to try taking thyroid drugs anyway, against strong medical advice from a really good doctor.

This worked much better than I had any right to expect, and for the last seven or so years I've taken 100ug of thyroxine and 1 grain of desiccated thyroid every day, and I've been largely unbothered by the dreadful condition ever since.

See here for more details:

https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/thyroid-trouble

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During 2021, all that started coming back, along with a new tendency to gain weight, and this time extra thyroid wouldn't fix it.

But some combination of no-PUFAs, no-sulphites, and occasional ex150ish things does seem to have fixed it, and not only that, the dose of thyroid that I need to take to feel normal has been coming down for the last six months.

I've kept records of my thyroid dose for a long time, and up until May 2023, it had been absolutely stable for a long time.

After May, when I simultaneously stopped eating peanut butter and thus finally cut out most PUFAs from my diet, started avoiding sulphites, and started experimenting with ex150-type diets, I started showing symptoms of hyperthyroidism. Too hot, anxious, trouble sleeping. And so I started to reduce the amount of thyroid I was taking. Was forced to reduce it, in fact. And it's been falling ever since.

In fact it started to fall just before I first started to play with ex150. ex150's good, but it's not so good it works backwards in time.

I wonder if my sulphite intolerance is part of that dreadful syndrome, rather than the cause of it.

And if polyunsaturated fats really are an unnatural and unsuitable energy source for humans, I'd actually expect them to cripple metabolism in some way, as well as sodding up cell membranes, and thus affecting hormone transport and various other processes.

Which would be sufficient explanation for all of it.

I'm sure ex150 and the various periods of weight loss have interacted with this effect, they could hardly help doing, since I've doubtless got considerable stores of PUFA in my body fat. My thyroid dose has gone up and down at various times over the last six months. But mostly it's been falling, and it's now a bit less than half what it used to be.

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I'm pretty sure that my 'Heart Attack Diet' is lifting my curse.

There are doubtless many horrible chemicals in our food and in our water that disrupt our metabolism and development in various ways.

And it could be that whatever's going on was caused by something else, that I've accidentally removed from my diet as a side-effect of renouncing polyunsaturated fats.

But the cure seems to have started working when I stopped eating (very good quality) peanut butter.

https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/peanut-butter

Which narrows it down to peanuts, palm oil and salt.

I've seen a lot of evidence in this last year that PUFAs are involved in obesity and metabolic dysfunction.

So I'm confident it's PUFAs.

Not certain. I am never certain of anything.

But it would take some fairly overwhelming evidence at this point to make me start eating polyunsaturated fats in large quantities ever again.

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I have seen enough.

This is medical advice and you should take it:

Forswear Polyunsaturated Fats.

They are bad news and they will hurt you. Introducing them to our diet was one of the greatest mistakes ever made.