Xmas Mom Test: Conclusions and Mysteries
Yet Another Autobiography
Anyway, let's pretend that this fiddled graph is all ok and above-board. And try to draw conclusions from it.
What happened?
Well, it looks to me like:
Thyroid dose is continuing to fall, as it has done for eight months now. Probably PUFA depletion is continuing to fix my broken metabolism.
I'm now firmly convinced that PUFAs are bad news metabolically, and that giving them up is lifting the metabolic curse that thyroid drugs patched over.
Weight-wise, it's much stranger, and I'm yet again going to try to tell the story of the Heart Attack Diet from the beginning as it now appears to me:
For most of my life, my weight was under perfect autonomic control. I never worried about it or measured it. When I became fully adult at the age of twenty-five, I was 85kg/BMI 27, and that never really changed.
At around the age of forty-five, 2015, I was struck by a curse. All the symptoms of a thyroid disorder without any actual thyroid disorder.
I fixed it, or rather patched over it, with thyroid drugs and felt fine.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Spring 2020, when I was fifty, I was 93kg/BMI 29. 8kg had somehow snuck on in the last five years.
All through the pandemic, up to at least Spring 2021, a year later, I stayed around 93kg. I figured my set point had gone up as I got older. Middle-aged spread is a thing, and I didn't really care.
In retrospect, I wasn't eating much processed food during the pandemic. I felt great throughout.
Lockdowns ended, I got my first vaccine, which made me feel tired for a week but didn't have any long term effects. Things went back to normal, I started eating commercially prepared food again, and discovered that I really liked peanut butter while eating through the emergency supplies that I'd bought at the start of the pandemic.
In Summer 2021, something bad happened about a week after my second coronavirus vaccine; Initially I had no side-effects whatsoever, but a week later I played five sets of tennis one Saturday, and afterwards I was more tired than I have ever been.
That tiredness got better, of course, but it never really went away, my curse came back, and more thyroid didn't help. I was tired-all-the-time again. It was nowhere near as bad as it had been, and it did improve after the initial attack, but it was clear I was ill again.
December 2022, a year and a half later, I was still tired a lot, and I noticed with horror that my weight was now 97kg / BMI 31, officially obese.
It wasn't so much the weight as the trend. Something must be done, I thought.
I tried giving up PUFAs. In retrospect what I actually did was to give up all processed food and replace it with perfectly wholesome high-quality peanut butter.
I immediately felt way better. In retrospect I think that was probably something to do with cutting out processed food. Lots of things have small quantities of sulphites in them, after all.
But my weight continued to rise. I visited my parents for about three weeks and the rise continued steadily.
My weight hit a high of 99kg / BMI 31 in May 2023. Fucking hell, I thought, I’m turning into an American.
That was around the time I noticed that peanut butter was full of PUFAs and stopped eating it.
I also noticed that I was intolerant of sulphites, so I cut out everything that contained them.
I tried ex150ish for the first time around then too, first for about ten days, and second for about two weeks.
ex150ish completely fixed my tiredness issues while I was doing it. It was amazing. I was full of energy. And although the tiredness came back a bit when I stopped ex150ish, it was never again as bad as it had been before.
Weight wise, ex150ish not only produced effortless weight loss, the effortless weight loss continued for about three months afterwards.
From May to August 2023 I dropped from 99kg to 95kg, without ever feeling hungry. I just didn't have much of an appetite, as I remember.
Since I'm always eating when I want to, and never allowing myself to be hungry, weight loss and gain should only happen because the set point of the homeostat that controls my weight is dropping or rising.
My tiredness improved remarkably, and to my amazement the thyroid dose I needed / could tolerate started to drop for the first time in years.
Largely I was eating perfectly normally and ad lib, apart from avoiding anything containing PUFAs or sulphites.
One of those three things (no PUFAs, no sulphites, ex150ish) must have not only have started to fix my broken metabolism, but also caused my set-point to track slowly downwards.
In fact the thyroid dose drop started just before the first ex150ish experiment, so I think that that must have been caused by either the PUFAs or the sulphites.
Around August 2023, both weight and thyroid dose seemed to plateau. Thyroid dose about 2/3 of what it had been, weight 95kg/BMI 30.
Noticing that the effect had stopped, I tried heart-attack-keto. Which seems to have caused a bit of fat loss, but the effect wasn't as dramatic as with ex150ish, and the experience felt different. Thyroid dose didn’t move.
But immediately that was over, I speedily regained the lost weight as fast as it had come off.
So I thought 'Well that didn't work', and tried actual proper ex150ish-3, which worked exactly as usual, seems to have started another period of thyroid improvement, and caused rapid fat loss. This time I ended up about 92 kilos/BMI 29.
At that point I was pretty much thinking 'Home and dry, that was too easy. Obesity and hypometabolism are both caused by PUFAs, and ex150ish is a good tool for rapid weight loss and depleting stored PUFAs'.
And then I went home for the first Mom Test, became noticeably hungry, and my weight went rapidly back to 95kg.
The first two ex150ish experiments seem to have coincided with the start of a period of rapid permanent weight loss, and fast decline in thyroid dose.
That period of ex150ish-3 and the first Mom Test combined seems to have also been a period of rapid thyroid dose drop.
But set-point wise, the whole combined period of heart-attack-keto, ex150ish-3 and my first Mom Test seem to have done absolutely nothing.
My weight sure went down, and I absolutely wasn't hungry at any point while it was falling, but while I was at home in the Pennines, I was unusually hungry, and my weight went right back up to 95kg.
It then stayed pretty stable at 95kg for about three weeks.
At that point there was a lot of talk on r/saturatedfat about the importance of BCAAs, a type of protein, and I wondered if there was some interaction going on between BCAA and PUFA metabolism.
Then I tried ex150ish-4-sour-cream, and that worked just like ex150ish, taking me down to roughly 92kg again.
It also caused a fairly steep drop in thyroid requirements.
Afterwards I deliberately didn't let my protein intake rise much, and in fact I experienced protein cravings in the aftermath.
But all that weight came back on again. And my thyroid dose rose to what it had been before.
I don't think the Xmas Mom Test really made any difference weight-wise. I just put back on the missing three kilos over a couple of months, and that process ended while I was at home, leaving me at 95kg.
But my thyroid dose did start gently to fall again.
I am currently 95kg and seem to be stable there. My body seems to be defending that weight whatever I do.
Various ex150ish-like things have all worked in the sense of 'removes two or three kilos of fat', and failed in the sense that 'it all comes back on again fairly quickly'.
The famous yo-yo dieting that I was hoping to avoid by never allowing myself to be hungry.
That's probably pretty good from a PUFA-clearing point of view!
The thyroid dose that I need to function properly, after a brief rise after ex150ish-4-sour-cream, does seem to be trending downwards again and is currently about as low as it's ever been, at about one third of the amount it has been for the last decade or so.
There are mysteries here:
What initially caused the curse, about eight years ago?
Why did thyroid drugs seem to fix it completely?
What caused my weight set-point to start rising, maybe starting gently eight years ago, not rising at all during the pandemic, but definitely rising rapidly two years ago and continuing right up to May 2023?
What re-awoke the curse in Summer 2021, and why did that seem to happen just after my second COVID vaccine (but not the first dose?)
What caused my weight homeostat to partially fix itself from May-August 2023, so that it now seems to be defending 95kg/BMI 30?
Why on earth has that homeostat-fixing now stopped, when the metabolic recovery that initially went with it seems to be continuing, albeit not monotonically?
I am confident PUFAs are involved somehow. The coincidence of giving up peanut butter at the time everything started to get better is compelling on top of the theoretical arguments that caused me to try it in the first place.
But is the sulphite thing involved causally, or is that causally downstream of a general metabolic curse caused by PUFAs?
And what is the role of ex150ish and its variants? Are they just decorating a general improving trend, are they causing faster PUFA depletion and accelerating that trend, or are they actually doing something different and important of themselves?
And what about the BCAA thing? r/saturatedfat seems to be reporting good things about BCAA avoidance. Is the protein restriction part of ex150ish having important effects?
I am mystified.
Any ideas anyone?
You might be able to remove your thyroid dose completely.
Remember your body isn’t producing enough since you’re taking the thyroid.
As you know, I don't believe in a "set point." I simply haven't seen any evidence for it.
Your experience (and mine, and that of many people) seems much more compatible with an equilibrium, and slowly declining PUFA of mitochondria.
Say your mitochondria are messed up if enough PUFAs are in their cell walls. You can't turn over 100% of them at the same time. As you start avoiding PUFAs, for the next years, you're rebuilding some new cells and mitochondria every day.
So if mitochondria built with PUFAs ruin your metabolism (by leaking fuel, or not producing enough ROS, or whatever the mechanism is) you'd expect a long, slow, arduous process that would look like a set point slowly slid down and down and down.
There is likely also a short-term effect from PUFA and at least some of its oxidation products producing hyperphagia via endocannabinoids. So just cutting out PUFA likely leads to a short-term stopping of chemically driven overeating, but that doesn't mean your "set point" (in which I don't believe) will go down - that might take years as your cells turn over.