No weight gain after 4 months of no diet control

And way less exercise

In the last four months, I have gone on vacation, spent holidays with friends and family and been really busy with my startup. I didn’t stick to any specific diet then and was pretty lazy about my eating. I still mostly ate food from home and followed some general, vague principles of what worked well and what didn't work well with me, especially with the genetic analysis tooling I’ve been developing at Patchwork.

I’ve still been working out and doing strength training and have become slightly more muscular. I’ve recovered the lean mass loss from the McDougal diet. But honestly, I’ve been working out less overall and have not focused on my health much. I’ve been far more casual about it. I would call this ‘easy maintenance after the diet’ mode.

And I’ve been eating like this for many of those days:

• 🍨 A nightly ice cream bowl or two

• 🍫 Chocolate bars

• 🌙 Most of my food in the evening

• 🥩 Beef jerky

• 🥔 A ton of starchy carbs, mostly bread or potatoes

• 🍯 Jam out of the jar

• 🫐 500 calories of frozen berries some days

What is significant is my weight has stayed stable within a band of 181-185lbs during this time despite eating like that. I had another DEXA scan recently, which also showed that my body fat % stayed at a stable 23.7%.

tap the DEXA scan link to see a lot more details

Most people regain weight by now

Most people, when they stop their diets, regain their weight. According to some sources, the percentage of people who successfully maintain their weight loss, especially large amounts of it, is under 10%. Previous times when I had a major amount of weight loss like this, they all started going back up within months. This feels like something that is far more stable, and I’m still the slimmest I’ve ever been in my life. Everyone is surprised when I say I must lose about 20 lbs more fat to get bodybuilder-style abs.

My key saving grace is discovering what foods work best with my body, and the key food is starch. I keep starch as my staple and target ‘healthier’ desserts like ice cream, chocolate bars, frozen fruits, and foods with emulsifiers. If we buy pastries from Trader Joe’s, we make sure to only get pastries that are made in Europe or Canada. I also ensure that I get organic starches, as they avoid many additives that cause havoc for most people, such as glyphosate.

A Critical Look at Glyphosate 50 years on

I’m avoiding seed oils, pork, and chicken on most days. I do notice whenever I go out to eat unless I’m in the EU or some other healthier country, I tend to feel worse, and there is some predictable weight gain. Returning to my lazy defaults at home, it also predictably comes off again in a day or two. I’ve also developed a vague physical sense of “this food will cause me weight gain” after I finish eating a food in my body, probably from doing this for so long.

I’ve also made a Vitamin D lamp and use it daily, which has noticeably improved my energy levels. I’ve also been experimenting with supplements, such as choline, benfotiamine, and other MTHFR genetic methylation-related supplements, and I’ve also found that they improve my energy levels. Benfotiamine and Choline are my biggest winners. I was taking creatine for a while, but having to make a powder soup with it put a wrench in my usage of it. I find I get sick of the soups fairly quickly. Synthesizing creatine is the other major methylation demand on the body, along with choline creation, so it is something I need to figure out again.

Going for fat loss again by fixing health indicators

this is going to take a while

I’ve reached a milestone in my startup recently, so I will start focusing on fat loss again. With my muscle gain calculator, I realized that fat loss will still be much faster than any muscle gain, even with my relatively newbie starting point. If I lose 20 lbs more of body fat, I will be around 15% and finally have abs. I hope with a 4-month break, my body has replenished whatever unmeasurable micronutrients I was not eating and has had enough of a break to continue with the same kind of fat loss I saw on my mostly potato diet.

16lbs of fat loss & 2.5 months later on the potato diet

This time, I’m not an obese human in protein-sparing mode. It will be exciting to see how my response changes! I suspect what will cause my weight loss is mostly manipulating my micronutrition, giving my body foods that work best with it and fixing other more generic health issues like:

Thyroid

• Improving my thyroid health through iodine, selenium, magnesium, copper and zinc supplementation and by reducing my goitrogenic food intake. Although my thyroid lab numbers have been within range whenever I test it, my thyroid is enlarged and has some nodules, which were detected before I lost about 30 lbs in May. I also often have cold hands and feet. I had an ultrasound of my thyroid last month, and it’s still the same enlarged size with multiple nodules, which is associated with goiter.

  • Looking back on my diet for the past few years, there was a period when I regularly ate a lot of broccoli and cauliflower and not much seafood due to my partner’s distaste for it. I also use a lot of soy sauce. These are all goitrogenic foods, and not eating seafood usually means little iodine in your diet. I also did not use iodized salt much and was hopping on the pink salt trend.

  • Avoiding goitrogens like fluoride, lithium and bromide in my diet via my remineralizing reverse osmosis water filter and not eating foods with potassium bromide in them, which is a common additive to flour in the USA.

  • Every source said to be slow with iodine supplementation to not shock your thyroid, so I will go slow on that part specifically.

• Getting my Vitamin D levels to 70 with my Vitamin D lamp and retesting to see where I am. It was 29 back in October, which is still not enough. Vitamin D is linked to the thyroid and many other health indicators.

• Subclinical hypothyroidism can make weight loss difficult.

Inflammation

• Continue reducing my ferritin via blood donations, which will help reduce my general inflammation.

• Improving my Omega 3 ratio to help reduce inflammation via eating fatty fish.

• Continue my general avoidance of seed oils and linoleic acid. I’m still going to eat eggs due to their choline content, but I might experiment with just taking choline supplementation to see if it accelerates my fat loss.

Toxicity & Oxidization

• Investigate why my copper levels are low at 76mcg/dL. I do have some genetics for lower copper, but it can also indicate toxicity issues or just a dietary thing. My hair is greying in my late 30s, which is a bit early and also associated with low copper levels and oxidative stress. I will need to test ceruloplasmin specifically.

• I will do an EnviroTox Complete to rule out potential blocking toxicity issues and see if it can explain my copper levels. I recently tested my blood for aluminum, lead, arsenic, and mercury; fortunately, it came up negative. Stubborn weight can sometimes be explained by such toxicity.

• I ordered some cheap petri-dish home mold test kits. Although I don’t have much faith in their accuracy, they would be a good first pass to see if there are actual mold issues in my house. I somewhat doubt I do.

• I continue to avoid using plastic as much as I can and filter my shower water.

• I don’t cook with non-stick PFAS pans anymore

• I might try adding purple potatoes to help reduce my cravings for blueberries, which seems to pause my weight loss like fruit tends to do.

Gut

• I will do a Genova GI-Effects since I still have some non-optimal gut function despite it improving a bunch. Gut function issues can also block fat loss.

• I will finally do the Viome test box I have sitting in my house.

• Continue avoiding non-lecithin emulsifiers.

Indirect fixes

• I want to improve my testosterone levels by removing whatever insults are causing them to be lower, which is probably a combination of all of the above. They’ve always hovered around the 400s, and I think this is partly explained by my potentially suppressed metabolism, especially considering my low LH number in May 2024. Strength training, vitamin D, and sunshine will continue to help here, too. There are probably a bunch of direct interventions I can do for this, but I want to try fixing all the more generic stuff above before focusing on this specifically.

  

  Steroidogenesis, wheeee!

• As part of my startup, I’m researching how steroidal hormones work and how they can be genetically and lab-tested to see if something is off beyond the standard sets. After that project, I think I might gain some insights for myself here. Some people have very interesting genetics that can really change how they work in unintuitive ways, and I don’t see people talking about this much. Did you know some trans people “naturally” have Estrone (E1): Estradiol (E2) ratios of 30:1, while the more typical ratio in most non-menopausal women is more 1:1 or 1:2?

• Continuing to reduce ApoB and my other bad cholesterol numbers by improving my general health. The fact that my visceral fat went back up a bit compared to October is an indication that this is not as healthy as it should be.

• I have a slightly enlarged liver with a few simple cysts, which is probably indicative of NAFLD and other metabolic syndrome issues. I think improving all of the above will help my liver here, too. I never drink alcohol and try to avoid toxic things, so at least I don’t put too much direct load on it.

• Improve my HOMA-IR & insulin resistance by continuing to get fitter.

• If after all of the above still leaves room for improvement, I might try a very comprehensive nutritional lab set + DUTCH urine test, but this will probably cost $2500, so I want to fix more obvious things first before going that route.