Xmas Mom Test: Fiddled Results

What I have told you was true…from a certain point of view.

17/01/24 95.3 36.50 1 0

16/01/24 94.7 36.67 0 0

15/01/24 95.1 36.70 0 0

14/01/24 95 36.80 0 0

13/01/24 95 36.65 0 1

12/01/24 97 36.52 1 1

11/01/24 36.40 0 1

Pre-Mom Test I was 93.6kg / BMI 29.5

In my last post:

https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/xmas-mom-test

I wrote:

I think I've probably gained a bit of weight (no idea though). I can't really remember what hunger feels like any more, but I've not been obviously overeating, so I'll be surprised if tomorrow morning's scale reading is up 3kg like it was last time.

So almost inevitably, when I got home and weighed myself for the first time in weeks, I was 97kg / BMI 30.6

I was stunned. Up three and a half kilos in three weeks, actually worse than last time.

The previous Mom Test, I seemed to be hungry all the time and I noticed that in the evening I was eating about twice as much as seemed reasonable.

But this time, I hadn't even noticed I was overeating.

If we take the calorie value of body fat to be 7.7kcal/gram 3.4 kilos of fat is 26180 kcal, or an excess of 1138kcal/day.

I stared at this in disbelief for a while, checked and rechecked it. It was real. There's nothing wrong with my scales.

Oh well....

The following morning I was 95kg. Pretty much as I'd expected. And it's hovered around 95kg all week.

Now I could believe that I put on 3.4kilos of fat in 21 days without noticing, but I am damned sure that I didn't then lose 2kilos of fat in one day.

So I reckon that 97kg was just a strange spike, and Christ alone knows what the cause was. u/exfatloss says that he always gets strange spikes when travelling.

Anyway my graph looks totally silly now, the Xmas Mom Test looks like it was a period of catastrophic weight gain, followed by a bizarre two-kilo drop at the end.

So I'm going to fiddle my own data. A cardinal sin. I am shame.

The readings above are the real readings.

For the graph I'm swapping the 95 and 97 on the 12th and 13th, which make the Xmas Mom Test look like a period of gently gaining 0.5 kilos a week (which is still a lot!), followed by an inexplicable 2kilo spike.

I'm putting both versions of the graph above for comparison, going forward I'll use the fiddled version.

I think that's a better description of what really happened. But I still feel bad about doing it.

So I am making a big deal of it rather than just doing it quietly and not mentioning it.