Xmas Mom Test

And No Idea What to Expect

19/12/23 93.6 36.22 0 1

18/12/23 93.8 36.87 0 1

17/12/23 94.8 36.91 0 1

16/12/23 93.5 36.59 0 1

15/12/23 93.2 36.59 1 1

14/12/23 93.2 36.71 0 1

13/12/23 93.2 36.16 1 1

So, I'm back home in the bosom of my family. Fatted calves have been slaughtered, crumbles and pies have been prepared. A chip pan full of beef dripping sits on the stove, and there are bags and bags of potatoes waiting to be cooked. A huge turkey has been ordered. There are loads of cheeses and yoghurts, all ruthlessly optimized to be the answer to the question: 'What does John really really like to eat?'. I'll be here for about three weeks probably.

I will eat whatever I am given, and if I am hungry, I will eat whatever seems most appetizing that comes to mind. I will not measure my weight.

The sternest test a man trying to lose his spare tyre can wish for. A deliberate attempt not to use any willpower whatsoever while facing Mum's best attempts to make my favourite foods in unlimited quantities.

I can't over-emphasise how fair a test of my ideas I think this is.

For all my life, I ate this exact food, completely ad lib, and never really budged from 85kg. Details ad naus throughout this blog, but see in particular:

https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/what-we-can-learn-from-made-up-history

The first time this year, when I went to visit Mum, I was 97kg, and by feeding me amazing stuff, she managed to stick about 0.5kg on me in three weeks, and I felt bloated and appetiteless after three weeks of overfeeding, and it came off almost immediately. That's what should happen if you're in equilibrium, with a happy homeostat, and you overeat.

The second time was on the back of several months of apparently effortless weight loss and reduction in needed thyroid, and I was sure I was in equilibrium and hadn't been undereating in those months, so I expected the same thing to happen again.

But what actually happened was that my appetite went through the roof and my weight rocketed, but surprisingly I was far too hot and my thyroid dose dropped a lot: https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/mom-test-pass-and-fail

At that point my faith in my ideas was badly shaken. Clearly whatever was going on, it wasn't just PUFA depletion causing my weight set point to drop while fixing my metabolism.

I still think PUFAs must be involved in the modern obesity crisis and epidemic of pseudo-hypothyroidism somehow. But it's obviously not as simple as 'you go monotonically back to normal as you clear them from your fat stores'.

I still believe in the idea of a homeostat that keeps weight stable in healthy people eating what they were designed to eat. I pretty much have to believe that. I had one for most of my life and it worked fine, people seemed to have worked like that for all of history no matter what they ate, and it's the only sensible design for an animal.

But I don't really have any good ideas for why it's broken, or why visiting home should have broken it so badly the second time.

It's not just PUFAs, certainly. Mum is being careful not to feed me any, and although I'm sure some are sneaking through, there won't be much.

I wondered if it might be some interaction between stored PUFAs and excess protein, but recent events seem to have refuted that idea.

So I'm left without a good theory of what's going on, about all the good things that have been just effortlessly happening by magic since I finally realised that I shouldn't be eating peanut butter at some point in the first half of this year. (And I'm cursing myself for not making a note when I finally realised! Write things down, all ye self-experimenting persons.)

So now I'm facing this 'Xmas Mom Test', and I have no theory that can make predictions, and no real idea what's going to happen.

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In the last week, before I left for home, my weight seemed to be stable and possibly even dropping a bit, at 93.5kg/BMI 29.5. And my thyroid dose seemed to be falling a bit as well (after its surprising rise post ex150ish-4-sour-cream).

So the best guess I've got is that things will just go the same as last time:

I'll feel really hungry, gain weight at about 1kg/week, and my thyroid dose will fall.

But I want to see what the previous two theories I've had would predict. Just in case I've rejected one that shouldn't have been rejected on the basis of some unknown source of noise.

Theory One: PUFAs Bad, or Sulphites Bad, or both.

I'm not eating any PUFAs or sulphites, so my thyroid dose should drop, and my weight should also drop, at about 0.5kg/week, which is what it did from June-September last year.

So I'll come back to Cambridge about 92kg, with a thyroid dose considerably lower than it is now.

Fat chance. It looked that simple last September, but it isn't that simple. If it was, that effect should just have continued for the last three months, and it unambiguously hasn’t. If it had I’d be a normal weight by now, with a very low thyroid dose, and feeling very smug indeed.

Theory Two: PUFAs Bad, Protein Involved

I'm not eating any PUFAs, but eating lots of protein (which I most definitely will do over the next few weeks) should stop any further PUFA clearing, and also dysregulate my 'how fat you are' signal because it stops PUFA burning.

Thyroid dose should stay roughly the same, weight homeostat should go mental, appetite should go through the roof, weight should rise quickly.

But as soon as I get back to Cambridge and start eating as I normally do when left to my own devices, my homeostat should normalize, my body should realise that it's now vastly over-provisioned with fat stores, my appetite should disappear and my weight should start falling fast.

Again, I don't believe this, because after the last bout of ex150ish-4-sour-cream my weight and thyroid dose seemed to spike even though I was eating low protein throughout.

But I think I *can* still just about believe it. Because after the last Mom Test, my weight did seem to be falling quickly, and maybe the whole ex150ish-4-sour-cream thing just did nothing and stopped any further progress, for some reason to do with the difference between sour cream and double cream.

I don't think that's the way to bet though. There's something funny going on that I don't understand here. I just don't think there's enough protein in sour cream to have had that much effect.

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Anyway, one thing that absolutely has to be true if PUFAs are involved in any way at all in any of this is that my weight has to stay below its record value of 99kg, achieved last June, and my thyroid dose has to remain lower than it has habitually needed to be over this last decade..

If I come back from the north weighing more than 99kg (averaged over a week) or with my thyroid dose back up to its usual amount of 100ug T4 + 1 grain NDT per day, then I'll probably just abandon PUFA theories completely and look for some other explanation of what's going on.