25/01/25 95.3 36.71 0 126/83/51
24/01/25 95.4 36.7 0.104 0.104 124/77/46
23/01/25 95.8 36.63 0.1 0.1 129/80/46
22/01/25 36.46 0.15 0.15 143/74/47
21/01/25 95.7 36.65 0.054 0.054 118/66/53
20/01/25 95.1 36.6 0.104 0.104 116/72/48
19/01/25 96.3 36.72 0.1 0.1 124/75/51
18/01/25 95.2 36.8 0.1 0.1 128/77/50
17/01/25 94.4 36.62 0.1 0.1 115/70/53
16/01/25 94.9 36.52 0.1 0.1 127/74/42
15/01/25 94.9 36.6 0.104 0.104 136/80/49
14/01/25 94.8 36.71 0.1 0.1
13/01/25 0 0.3333
12/01/25 94.5 37.1 0 0.3333
11/01/25 37.1 0 0.3333
10/01/25 95.1 37 0 0.3333
09/01/25 94.8 36.7 0 0.3333
08/01/25 36.8 0 0.3333
07/01/25 94.9 36.7 0 0.3333
06/01/25 36.8 0 0.3333
05/01/25 95.5 36.5 0 0.3333
04/01/25 95.9 36.9 0 0.3333
03/01/25 96 36.85 0 0.3333
02/01/25 36.7 0 0.3333
01/01/25 96.6 36.7 0 0.3333
31/12/24 96.1 37.05 0 0.3333
30/12/24 97 36.8 0 0.3333
29/12/24 96.6 36.7 0 0.3333
28/12/24 96.6 36.7 0 0.3333
27/12/24 96.6 36.6 0 0.3333
26/12/24 96.7 36.7 0 0.3333
25/12/24 95.9 36.85 0 0.3333
24/12/24 95.9 36.8 0 0.3333
23/12/24 95.7 36.6 0 0.3333
22/12/24 95.5 36.7 0 0.3333
21/12/24 94.7 37.6 0 0.3333
20/12/24 94.5 37.7 0 0.3333
19/12/24 95.3 36.9 0 0.3333
18/12/24 94.8 36.7 0 0.3333
If there's one thing I thought I knew for certain it's that when I go home to visit Mum I gain a huge amount of weight for no apparent reason.
The last time that wasn't true was just before I finally noticed, about 18 months ago, that peanut butter contains vast amounts of polyunsaturated fat and stopped eating it.
At that point, my weight was around 98.4kg, and had been rising steadily at a rate of around 4kg/year. Going to visit Mum didn't seem to have any real effect, I came back a month later with weight about 99kg, the heaviest I've ever been, and some of that gained weight dropped off almost immediately.
That was as expected. Visiting Mum always involves a certain amount of overfeeding, and while you'd expect to be able to gain weight that way, if you started out in equilibrium you'd expect that you'd just lose it all and go back to equilibrium as soon as the overfeeding stopped. So it would just be a blip on an underlying trend of slow but scary continuous weight gain.
But I've never been as heavy as that since.
What's been true since then is that going home has always caused very rapid weight gain, which often seems to start to fall immediately I get back, although usually at that point I feel so horrifically heavy that I do a bout to ex150ish to get rid.
Anyway I'd just kind of accepted that going home produced catastrophic weight gain, even though I've no idea why. And it's not just maternal overfeeding either, because even though I usually feel like I couldn't eat another thing while I'm at home, occasionally I get hungry and start raiding the fridge for cheese and other delicious things even when Mum's not actually explicitly offering food, just leaving it around where I can find it if I want it.
So this time I thought I'd try something different, and actually measure my weight while at home, to get an idea of what happens. Does the extra weight come on fast at the start, or is it a steady process?
My parents suggested that chips (steak fries in foreign dialects) might be the reason. I love chips, but I don't eat them usually because commercial chips are always fried in varnish, so I wouldn't eat them (no PUFAs!) and these days I actually find that quite an unpleasant taste, so I don't even have the desire to. If I do eat out then I'll have a baked potato or a salad instead. Chips are also quite hard things to make at home on a boat. I do sometimes shallow fry chips in coconut oil or beef dripping (tallow in foreign), but not often because it's effort and quite slow and the results aren't great.
Mum keeps a special chip pan just for me full of beef dripping, so in a few minutes she can mass produce excellent no-PUFA chips in enormous quantities. And I always take enormous advantage of this, because I really love chips.
Now I didn't think much to my parents' “chips are the problem” theory, but it's not like I had any better ideas, and when you're feeling confused and don't have any better ideas you should try other people's ideas to see if there's any truth in them, so we agreed in advance that Mum wouldn't cook any chips until Boxing Day.
Turkey and chips for the few days after Christmas until the breast runs out, and turkey curry and chips for about a week after that, have always been my favourite part of Christmas food, (Mum does the best turkey in the entire world1) so I didn't want to miss out on that, and anyway, I'd need to compare the two conditions somehow, so that arrangement, combined with sending them a decent set of scales off Amazon seemed to be a good experiment to try.
And my advance prediction was that the chips thing wouldn't make any difference at all, and that I'd either gain weight slowly all the time I was home, or gain weight quickly and then stabilize.
Unfortunately, everything went very wrong.
For the month or so before Christmas (see previous essays), I'd been feeling pretty good. Full of energy most of the time, a couple of minor colds but nothing serious, and weight glacially stable at about 94.5kg.
When I went home on the train on the 16th of December, I was feeling pretty fine, and it was a pleasant journey and I turned up in the evening with armfuls of flowers that I'd bagged on the way back.
That night I slept for fifteen hours, and woke up feeling groggy and awful. I managed to go for a walk to the local pub for a coffee but it was exhausting, and as soon as I got home I went back to bed and slept for a couple of hours.
And then I spent the next three days in bed feeling appalling. The worst cold I've had in years. Might have been COVID, might have been flu, but probably not because I'd been recently vaccinated against both, and I didn't get the characteristic muscle ache that you'd expect from either. I did run a high temperature for a couple of days, feeling cold while being hot, which is classic fever. I did feel well enough to read2.
I was terrified that I'd give this horrible thing to Mum and Dad, who are getting on a bit and would be in serious trouble if they got something that could floor me. If I'd felt like that before getting on the train I would have stayed in Cambridge until it had resolved, but by the time I knew I was ill it was far too late. Luckily Mum didn't get it at all and Dad did get it, but quite mildly compared to me.
I am still fucked up by that cold, still coughing and suffering from post-viral fatigue and it's been about a month now.
Relevantly for this blog, it completely killed my appetite.
So for a week, no chips and no appetite either. I was well enough to measure my weight every morning as usual, so I did.
By Christmas I'd recovered enough to go for one walk, but it was sufficiently arduous and exhausting that I didn't even attempt to get involved in the village carol-singing, which is usually a highlight of Christmas for me3.
On Boxing Day morning I measured my weight at 96.7kg. I'd put on two whole kilos in nine days, despite mostly not having any appetite at all and not having eaten a single chip.
Which I think at least fairly well refutes the 'chips are the problem' theory, but I've got no idea what to replace it with. This vast weight gain seemed to be perfectly linear over the nine days I'd been home, despite I wasn’t hungry and wasn’t eating much of anything.
Anyway it got weirder after that. I still wasn't very well for the few days after Christmas, but getting better and going for my daily walk usually, and my appetite came back.
Chips were reintroduced on schedule, and Mum made a huge turkey curry.
And almost exactly at that point, appetite restored and limitless quantities of my favourite food in all the world there for the eating, my weight seemed to plateau and stay stable at roughly 96.5kg.
And that was the point where my Mum fell over and broke her back. She spent several days in hospital, and when she returned to us she was almost completely disabled.
This whole experience was awful, but I don't want to go into details here. I am not a religious man, but if anything could have broken my lack of faith and had me praying that would have done it.
Mum's still laid up in bed as I write, she does seem to be on the mend, and a full recovery is predicted. My current client (Midsummer Energy) was very understanding and told me not to come back to work until I wanted to. Thanks Guys!
For our purposes here, the upshot of this from a diet point of view was that for the next couple of weeks I was doing all the cooking.
Eating roughly the same food as I would have done anyway (there was a lot of curry left and after that the various fridges were well supplied with steaks and cheese and fruit and chocolate already purchased).
In exactly the quantities I wanted to eat, and at the time I felt hungry.
And all that weight came off again.
By the time I decided that I wasn't actually being much use to my parents by staying and came back to Cambridge on the 13th January I was back to 94.5kg. The weight came off in the same linear fashion that it had gone on, maybe a little slower.
Pretty much exactly as you'd expect, if you believed that 94.5kg was your current 'set-point' and that something had disturbed that set point for the first couple of weeks and then stopped disturbing it for the second.
And when I got home, I went almost immediately back to work (thanks Andy for your patience!) and resumed doing exactly what I'd been doing for all of November, which is to say largely living on coffee-and-cream during working hours (occasionally croissants and cheese for lunch if I felt the need of something solid). And then eating something proper in the evening (usually steak and baked potatoes or a pizza). All completely ad-lib, do what you feel is the whole of the law (but no PUFAs).
Which had previously produced a month of stability so solid that I'd got bored of measuring it.
So obviously for the last two weeks my weight has been rising rapidly again, for no apparent reason. And now I'm up to 95.5 kg and who knows what happens next?
I'm just bewildered. No idea what's going on here at all.
Happy New Year Everybody!
And indeed the best turkey curry, which is a separate art. Mums are great.
Thank you Amazon and Robert Harris for Act Of Oblivion, which I read on Mum's Kindle Paperwhite while I was ill, it's excellent and Kindles are great for reading while you're ill because they're very light and the backlight is very bright and the battery lasts ages and you can make the text very big so you can make yourself very comfortable while hiding under covers. Without those two things being really ill would have been much less pleasant.
I’m from a little village which has its own tradition of harmony carol singing, and the songs are beautiful. I’m always slightly surprised that no-one else seems to know any special carols that have been sung in their home parish for a century and a half, but it seems to be true. I think there was some sort of Victorian standardisation attempt, which my people just ignored. Because Yorkshire.
Dear Lord! All the best to you and your Mum. Hope she makes a full recovery soon. Please give her my best wishes.
Regarding your temporary gain, that could be related to the infection. I also had a little flu attack over the holidays, and on one day I registered 3-4lbs higher than before/after. Probably fluid retention due to the infection or the fever? Yours took much longer overall, so it would make sense that the fluid retention effect also took longer. Just an idea.
I have no idea about the recent 1kg gain back at work, though otherwise it just seems like you're pretty settled (heh) on your current weight, pretty much independent of what you do.