What Goes Up...
Dead Cat Bounce
09/02/26 95.2 36.44 0.01 0.01 130/80/60
08/02/26 36.29 0.01 0.01 127/81/50
07/02/26 96.3 36.86 0.01 0.01 142/77/47
06/02/26 97.3 0.01 0.01
05/02/26 97 36.72 0.014 0.014 135/79/59
04/02/26 96.1 36.65 0.016 0.016 131/81/52
03/02/26 96.6 36.24 0.012 0.012 128/83/45
02/02/26 96.7 36.75 0.01 0.01 136/82/54
01/02/26 97.3 36.82 0.01 0.01 132/76/56
31/01/26 97.7 36.94 0.01 0.01 131/78/59
30/01/26 97.7 0.026 0.026 125/72/53
29/01/26 98.1 36.64 0 0 128/72/50
28/01/26 98.7 36.84 0.01 0.01 117/71/65
27/01/26 97.7 36.8 0.014 0.014 141/81/52
26/01/26 97.6 37.18 0.01 0.01 130/78/57
25/01/26 98.1 0.008 0.008 123/77/52
24/01/26 96.2 36.74 0.019 0.019 127/69/58
23/01/26 98.3 36.6 0.009 0.009 135/76/58
22/01/26 97.2 36.76 0.01 0.01 139/88/52
21/01/26 97.2 36.74 0.008 0.008 132/81/52
20/01/26 97.3 36.92 0.01 0.01 135/81/51
19/01/26 96.4 36.75 0.018 0.018 138/79/51
Predictions from the last post
I expect my lack of appetite to continue, I’m massively visibly overweight and my body appears to have suddenly noticed this. Weight should continue to fall, at least until I get back to my previous free-living equilibrium which seemed to be lower than 95kg. I’ll be really surprised if that doesn’t happen.
I expect to need to reduce my thyroid dose. At the moment I’m torn between ‘I’m too hot’ and ‘I feel really tired’, but I don’t have any other low-thyroid symptoms, in particular no sign of plantar fasciitis, which is usually one of the first symptoms of ‘too low’, so I think the feeling awful must have some other cause. I’m going to leave it where it is for a bit but I expect to be back soon to feeling fine except for being too hot, at which point I’ll start to reduce it again.
My near-total lack of appetite carried on for a week, during which I mainly ate bits of toast and butter. Despite what must have been a terrifying calorie deficit I didn’t seem to lose much more weight. I was sometimes lethargic and sometimes too hot.
And then suddenly on the 24th my appetite came back all of a sudden, like someone turning on a light, and I bought a big bag of potatoes and baked the lot and started eating them ravenously. And then carried on doing the same thing for days. They were just delicious. I still wasn’t eating very much in terms of calories I think, although I wasn’t counting, but potatoes aren’t very energy dense and probably most of the energy was from the vast quantities of butter I was putting on them. I also made a new batch of beef and vegetable stew just in case I was missing out on protein or vitamins, but I didn’t actually eat much of it, it was more of a sauce for the potatoes, and I never put any more beef in it so it just got thinner and thinner as I added vegetables and tomato passata.
And my weight started to rise, and continued to rise for a week. I was writing a post in my head where I announced that my confident predictions had failed so catastrophically that I was abandoning all my beliefs and deciding that I just knew nothing, and that people really were just a big bag of calories, equilibria didn’t exist and appetite was totally mysterious and must be controlled by the whims of the gods.
But after about five days of this, the trend reversed and my weight started to fall again. This morning I was 95.2kg and if you ignore that and only look at the seven-day average I’ve lost a bit less than 3kg in the three weeks since I came home.
In hindsight I think a week of not eating hardly at all had emptied my guts and my glycogen reserves and as soon as I started eating potatoes in vast numbers all that just filled up again and caused a ‘dead-cat bounce’ to appear over what’s actually been three weeks of losing fat at about the fastest rate I’d be happy doing so. There doesn’t seem much point in trying any sort of intervention until that rate of descent has slowed, so I’m just going to carry on eating ad-lib.
In total I’m going to take that as a confirmation of my prediction. I was pretty confident of that, and very surprised when it seemed to not be happening. The interesting question now is where it will stop.
The only fly in my ointment is that I’ve been feeling absolutely awful. I’ve had a couple of mild sniffles in the last couple of weeks, and maybe they were something to do with it. I can’t believe that a couple of weeks ago I wrote ‘the near-complete remission of my chronic fatigue syndrome’. It’s totally back now.
It’s not nearly as bad as it was before I started taking thyroid, and I’ve got none of the many other symptoms apart from the tiredness, but most days for the last couple of weeks I’ve been waking up feeling a bit sluggish, and then by five o’clock I’m so tired I go to bed for a couple of hours, and usually wake up fine and end up going to bed late and the cycle repeats. I feel more tired than I have done for years, and I’m ignoring all sorts of things that need doing.
A couple of days ago I noticed that I hadn’t eaten anything but plants and butter for weeks and I wondered if I’d somehow managed to give myself a vitamin B12 deficiency. So I went and bought some more beef and some cheese, and ate a load of ancient methylcobalamin pills which I had lying around because they used to really help. And that does actually seem to have helped. The last couple of days I’ve been almost back to normal. It doesn’t really fly as an explanation though, since B12 deficiency should come on very slowly, and I should be craving foods that contain it.
I am feeling a bit hot during the day, but that’s not showing up in morning temperature readings which have been curiously low.
Predictions
Last time I came back from Mum’s I was around 96kg and my weight fell to 94.75kg under its own power before I started messing. Now I look at it there was even a little dead-cat bounce back then, although less noticeable. That was last September and the situation should have improved since then, especially since there’s been a massive weight yo-yo since then.
So I expect that to happen again at least, and if there’s anything to the yo-yo theory it should go a bit lower than that this time. The rate of weight loss should drop a bit as I approach a new lower equilibrium, at which point I’ll probably switch over to ex150ish or some variant and see how low I can get.
Fatigue-wise I guess I expect that this is some sort of transient effect of God-knows-what and I’ll recover and feel well again soon, but since I have no idea what’s causing it I’ve got no idea whether that’s true or how fast it will happen. If it doesn’t get better on its own I might start doing the full keto ex150ish just to see if that helps, because I usually feel great in ketosis.
Wish me luck. I know most people who read this substack are interested mainly in the weight loss part, but for me the metabolic effects of giving up PUFA are most of the benefit. The weight is cosmetic. I want my energy back. I want my mind back. The very fact that I’ve finally got round to writing this post is a hopeful sign I guess.
Never catch a falling cat