Still Rising? Lipostat??

Another Favourite Aphorism Bites The Dust

29/02/24 96.4 36.3 0 1

28/02/24 96.1 36.72 0 1

27/02/24 95.7 36.69 1 1

26/02/24 96.1 36.69 0 1

25/02/24 96.2 36.62 0 1

24/02/24 95.7 36.8 0 1

23/02/24 95.8 36.44 1 1

22/02/24 96 36.74 0 1

Eyeballing my graph, it looks to me like my thyroid dose is stable or possibly falling, and my weight is still rising.

If I take seven-day moving averages back to the last Mom Test, this week was 96.0, last week was 95.96, the week before 95.7, before that 95.5, before that 95.7, before that 95.5, before that 95.3.

And in fact if I look back to the last time I tried intervening in November, it was around 93kg, and I can sort of see a sort of exponential decay upwards from there to here.

So maybe it's just been rising smoothly ever since then, and has now reached an equilibrium and stopped.

Or maybe I'm just fooling myself.

Either way, it's unambiguously higher than it was last August, which is the last time I'm confident that I was in some sort of equilibrium state at around 95kg.

So that knocks "One of {no-PUFAs/no sulphites/ex150ish} causes weight set-point to drop" on the head as a theory. I renounce it. It is not true.

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It seems strange to think that only last September I'd completely stopped worrying about my weight, confident that the problem was solved, that most of the damage was undone, and that losing what was left of my mild overweight would be no trouble at all.

I often say: "If you need statistics to tell whether something's true then it probably doesn't matter if it's true or not."

In this case that's flat wrong.

(And I dutifully notice that one of my favourite sayings is flat wrong!)

"Heading back to equilibrium at somewhere above 96kg" is very different to "Unexplained rapid weight gain". And I think those are the two possibilities.

However I'm not sure that statistics are going to help me decide which of these is the case.

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I'll find out more over the next few weeks. I've been summoned home, so I'm going to do the usual, stop recording my weight and stop thinking about it, and let Mum feed me up to her heart's content.

When I go home, I usually end up getting stuffed to the gills, and come back unable to remember what it's like to be hungry, and so I sometimes lose a bit of weight after I come back.

Let's say that the target I'm predicting is the second seven-day-moving average after I get back.

"Unexplained Rapid Weight Gain" predicts that will be 97kg, or possibly higher,

"Return to Equilibrium" predicts that will be somewhere above 96kg.

So even then, I don't think I'm going to be able to decide what's going on.....

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At this point, I think I owe u/exfatloss an explanation of why I still believe in equilibria and weight set-points and lipostats and all that. It's starting to seem irrational even to me.

And I think the answer is "Because that's what it feels like".

My whole life, I have not generally been very interested in food. Occasionally if I haven't eaten for a bit, I get hungry, and at that point the smell of food and the sight of food suddenly make me ravenously hungry. And at that point I eat and I don't stop eating until suddenly the desire goes away like turning off a light.

I've always called that sudden cessation of desire 'feeling full'. And I think that's what my whole generation (of Englishmen born around the Moon Landings) mean when they say they 'feel full'.

But over the last year I've become aware that that's not what a lot of young people, especially young fat people, or young people who are trying to control their weight by starvation dieting mean when they say they feel full.

They mean: "My stomach is full, I am in pain, I would like to eat more but it hurts so I'm stopping".

That's a psychological state which I don't think I've ever been in. I can only really imagine someone doing that if they've been in a state of starvation for a long time.

And I still work the old way.

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Yesterday I got up around lunchtime, and I noticed that I had a load of potatoes that were going past their best.

So I cut all the potatoes up into chips (steak fries, US readers), shallow fried them in coconut oil, and ate the lot with salt and vinegar and grated cheese. Delicious!

For the rest of the day, I wasn't hungry. I spent all day in the café of the Picturehouse, famed for its excellent pizzas which I love and often eat. I drank lots of coffee but at no point did I want a pizza. If I had wanted one I would have had one. That is one of my rules!

And then I went to see the film "The Taste of Things". This film is all about the sensual pleasures of food. It is one long sequence of French people either cooking or eating amazing wholesome food with great care and love. And it was kind of lost on me because at no point did I fancy any of the food. I actually thought: "What a waste, I should have not eaten for a few hours in preparation for this film, in order to feel the intended effect." But of course I hadn't eaten for at least five hours by that point.

When I got home around nine o'clock, I was finally feeling slightly peckish, so I heated up the pot of everlasting stew on the stove and made a couple of pieces of toast to go with it. But the toast was ready before the stew heated up so I just ate buttered toast, and then I suddenly wasn't hungry so I let the stew go cold again without touching it.

This, I think, is u/exfatloss's 'cement-truck satiety'. That to him was a revelation, a feeling that he'd never had before. It's been a constant of my life.

It feels, to me, that there is something that is not me controlling whether I am hungry or not.

Sometimes I am hungry, and if there is food around I will eat it. I can resist this urge, but it takes willpower.

Sometimes I am so unhungry I won't eat. I can override that urge and eat anyway, there is usually plenty of space, but I'm not motivated to.

That, to me, feels like a subconscious system-one type homeostatic mechanism working by influencing the motivations underlying my behaviour. Like all such motivations, I can override it using my conscious mind. If the motivations are weak, this is easy. If they are strong, it is hard.

So I think that there is something in my unconscious being (which is almost all of my being) which wants to be a certain weight. For most of my adult life it wanted to be 85kg.

The whole mystery, to me, is why that certain weight is now higher than it used to be. Why it started rising when I was around forty years old. Why it stopped rising during the pandemic. Why it started rising again afterwards. Why it fell 4kg in three months last year. Why it seems to have risen a kilo or so over the last seven months.

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Something funny is going on. It may be something to do with polyunsaturated fats, it may be something else entirely.