Unnecessary Mom Test: Results

Further Enigma

09/04/24 96.1 36.68 0.5 0.5

08/04/24 97.8 36.64 0.5 0.5

07/04/24 97.3 36.79 0.5 0.5

06/04/24 96.6 36.92 0 0.5

05/04/24 97.9 36.8 0 0

04/04/24 98.2 36.92 0 0.5

03/04/24 96.9 36.43 0.5 0.5

Metabolically, it looks like I'm still recovering slowly.

I started feeling badly overheated this week, together with high morning temperatures, so I dropped a couple of thyroid doses and that's brought everything back to normal.

That's pretty consistent with no-PUFAs slowly fixing something, and since that's been going on for nearly a year now, I am starting to just believe that that's actually what's going on.

And generally speaking, I'm feeling pretty well most of the time. I absolutely wouldn't describe myself as 'in good health' in the way I used to be; a certain bouncy enthusiasm is still missing, and exercise still tires me out more than it used to do, but the debilitating tiredness that I've suffered for such a long time seems to be quite gone. I feel better than I have in years.

Shun the polyunsaturated abomination, oh my brethren.

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Weight-wise, the situation has become very confusing.

After a week back, I have enough data for a seven-day moving average, and that average is 97.25kg, up almost exactly 1kg from the previous 96.3, and that was about five weeks ago.

That looks to me like a clear win for the 'your weight is rising steadily at about 1kg every six weeks' prediction.

Just before I left I wrote:

I guess I expect my weight to carry on rising at roughly the same rate that it's currently rising, plus a bit of overfeeding that should come off quickly once back, so I'm expecting to be around 97.3 kg (BMI 30.7) in a month's time.

And that looks absolutely bang on, there even seems to be downward trend over this week.

I've been surrounded by delicious food and a certain amount of emotional pressure to eat it for nearly a month, and I've been eating whenever I felt the slightest bit hungry, happily eating enormous dinners and raiding the fridge for cheese in the middle of the night whenever I felt like it, and it's made practically no difference.

So things like naive-CICO-the-stupid-plan or hyper-palatability just make no sense at all as explanations. Not that they ever did.

I'm apparently in equilibrium, and whatever was happening before I went home is just continuing at the same rate.

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So I'm pretty convinced that what's going on here is homeostatic control but with a slowly rising set-point.

And that's a real puzzle.

When I started all this, I think I was originally in equilibrium, but had a slowly rising set-point.

And that just continued at the same steady rate for six months, in spite of renouncing all vegetable oils, until I finally cut out peanut butter (and sulphites). At which point it seemed that my thyroid dose started to drop, and the set-point of my weight-regulating system started dropping fairly rapidly all on its own.

I was thinking last year that ex150ish, although it very clearly works as advertised in the sense of weight-comes-off, wasn't actually doing anything long term to that set point, which was just slowly dropping as a result of stopping eating PUFAs.

But that now makes no sense at all. If lack of PUFAs caused my set point to drop, why is it now rising again?

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On the other hand, if giving up PUFAs made no difference, why did my weight fall so much 'by magic' last year, and why isn't my set-point now where it looked like it was heading a year ago? It should be around 102kg now, and it very clearly isn't. If that was true I'd be starving hungry and putting weight on at a rapid rate.

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I'm very tempted to just hang on, do nothing, and see what happens next, expecting a certain amount of overfeeding weight to come off before the slow rise resumes. It seems important to know what’s going on here.

But I'm also absolutely avid to have another go at ex150, to check that it still works. And more importantly and more interestingly, what happens afterwards.