Results Graph

I am a professional computer programmer, which is why it has taken me four months to write the short python script that produced this graph

I’ve been posting my raw data here, but it’s a lot easier to see what’s been going on as a graph, so here is a graph.

I started off at around 97kg just before Christmas with a “No PUFAs, plenty of salt, eat what you like” rule, which I called The Heart Attack Diet.

Over the next four months I added about a kilo and a half, but it felt like much more, so I started measuring my weight.

The first burst of squiggles are my initial daily weight measurements from April. They average out at 98.45kg.

The red bit is when I went to visit my parents, and ate far more than I actually wanted to for a month. I didn’t take scales, so no measurements from here, but it looks like Mum managed to add another half a kilo to my weight in the month I was home.

That’s actually about the rate I’d been gaining weight since Christmas.

That’s when my sister suggested adding “No sulphites” to the rules.

After coming back, my weight seems to start gently trending downwards for about a week and a half, until I tried ex150ish for the first time.

The blue bits are my first and second tries at ex150ish.

In both cases we see rapid weight loss, and once I stop ex150, rapid weight gain.

And then for the four weeks afterwards, I seem to have lost about a kilo without doing anything at all. Still “No PUFAs, no sulphites, plenty of salt, otherwise eat what you like”, but my weight is still falling “by magic”.

I’m perplexed by this.

Eyeballing the graph, I could believe that the ex150ish periods only stand out because of the water-weight loss, and that my weight has just been falling slowly and steadily since June.

But the start of that downwards trend is definitely the first bout of ex150ish, which turned an almost imperceptible downwards trend into a very obvious one.

Weird!

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EDIT: AFTERTHOUGHT

In the comments, both Lyle and u/exfatloss wisely suggest fitting a trendline.

I'm not sure what a trendline could tell me that I can't just see! And if it told me anything I'm not seeing I wouldn't believe it.

Intuition tells me that the simplest model for the data is probably two straight lines,

One from Christmas to roughly the beginning of June, which trend is to add 0.5kg every month.

And another one from the beginning of June to beginning of August, which looks like a steady drop at 2.5kg per month.

That means that my original 'heart attack diet' caused easily the fastest weight gain of my life. Something like 6kg a year rather than the kilo I seem to have been gaining every year since I was forty.

And then something reversed at midsummer, and the same 'heart attack diet, but no sulphites' is causing weight loss at a speed weirdly close to the NHS 'safe and sustainable' limit of 0.5-1.0 kilos per week, aimed at stopping people on starvation diets killing themselves by going too fast.

So now I'm wondering what that reverse was. Was it the roughly three weeks of ex150ish? Was it forswearing sulphites? Was it, as the anti-PUFA people claim, that six months of no-PUFAs has been enough to lift the polyunsaturated curse and now I'm just returning to normal, not feeling hungry because I'm burning excess fat reserves ?

Or is there some new thing going on? Was my weird ‘immediate sleepiness after carbohydrates’ thing refeeding syndrome after two weeks without carbs, as some have suggested, or have I managed to acquire some new metabolic deficiency?

And why have I had to drop my thyroid dose to maintain my usual comfortable temperature?

I am confused!

And as a very wise man once instructed me; I notice that I am confused.