Sunday 8 January 2006

Pic of the day: That's right! HAPPINESS IS LUNCH! Women have known this for a while, whereas most men tend to prioritize another interest much of the time. Well, once you get thin enough, you get your priorities straight.

Weight gain

The human body is nothing if not pragmatic. In May when I cut down my fat intake sharply, my body tried to compensate by making me more hungry. This was not quite effective, because my digestion was simply not dimensioned for that much eating after all those years of nibbling. So if I ate as much as I wanted, the food would pass through at unpleasantly high speed, which is no good for the calorie intake either. I simply could not absorb that much carbohydrates. Well, this has gradually changed.

After months of slow but steady weight loss, my weight evened out late in the fall. This past month or two it has started to rise just as slowly, despite the activity of carrying stuff pretty much every day in the winter cold during my gradual moving from one apartment to the next. What has happened, it seems, is that my digestion is finally fully rebuilt for its new demands. I can still overload it, but it takes more. Where I could only eat 2-3 cups for breakfast, now it is more like 4-5. I also grow hungry sooner. Often the last thing I do before I go to sleep is eat, and then when I wake up I may be too hungry to stay in bed.

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I am certainly not immune to gastrointestinal troubles, but my digestion now functions on the new and higher level of throughput. I may still overload it, but this rarely ever happens anymore. I may still eat something that for some reason sets off a bad reaction, but it is rare. Then again, I am rather careful about what I eat. I wouldn't even try citrus fruits, for instance, because I know from decades of experience that they give me diarrhea. Bananas are OK in moderation, when they are mature but not rotten. This is a pretty short interval but usually I make it. Pears are also OK in moderation, like one a day or so. Probably apples too, but the problem with apples is that they don't really taste good enough to risk. They are good in salad and stir-fry and such, but not something I would go around gnawing on ... the way I'll happily do with a pear.

And of course, fat. This was the whole thing. I don't know how many years fat has hurt me and I haven't noticed. I just was sick a lot, as in I used up all my sick days and most of my vacation days, and would often not be able to get to work on time in the morning because I was sick either in the morning or during the night. (Quite apart from my day rhythm being quite incompatible with normal working hours, but usually I only oversleep a couple hours every few days. That's in addition to the sick days.) I suspect that fat had an hand in my frequent sickness even before the horror weeks this past spring, when I was so ill so often that I started to fear for my life. At the end of that nightmare, I realized that fat seemed to set it off. But it may be that this was not something that suddenly happened to me, but just suddenly got worse. After I almost stopped eating fat, I have occasionally been sick, but not the same combination of symptoms as before. I also don't have chronic gut pains anymore... so far. We shall have to wait and see. Of course, I'll die in the end like anyone else. But perhaps I can have a better life for a while now. If the fat really makes this difference, it is a very small price to pay indeed.

It is not as if I cannot eat fat at all. I just have to be very careful to not eat much of it. There is fat in so many ready-made foods. But my "fat-consciousness" has expanded greatly through practice. Pain and fear are excellent teachers. Luckily I am not dieting to lose weight, at least yet. I can eat as much carbs I want, even the evil white sugar which makes your blood sugar spike wildly. I may have to cut that out when I get insulin tolerance, the precursor to diabetes II. Since both of my parents and at least one grandparent had diabetes II, I expect it to be only a matter of time. Having lost this much weight will probably cause that time to come later, while on the other hand the sugar will possibly make it happen faster.

(Actually diabetes II is almost unknown in lean people. You don't have to be obese to get it, but it helps greatly. As in, almost anyone can get it if they are fat enough, and the fat does not necessarily need to show on the outside either. The most reasonable theory I have seen so far goes approximately like this: When the body is lean, insulin will cause the sugar to be greedily grabbed by muscles and liver which convert it to "animal starch", glycogen. Then when some time has gone since last meal, the body will convert the glycogen back to sugar and burn it, while hoarding the meager store of fat for more essential uses. Fat, after all, is an important building block in our cells, especially the brain cells. And it cannot easily be synthesized in the human body, unlike many other animals. (To some extent we can make fat from sugar, if we have fat already, but it is a very energy-consuming process so the body far prefers to just save the fat if there is little of it.) If you however are as chubby as your genes say is enough for you, then the body will not bother to save the fat. It will burn it freely, meaning that it will use less glycogen, meaning that there will be no need to sponge up all the sugar from a sweet meal. Instead it will continue to circle in the blood. The pancreas will worry and increase the amount of insulin. Eventually your body learns to ignore the insulin entirely, and you have a full-blown diabetes. This is a totally different disease from diabetes I, where the immune system destroys the cells that produce insulin.)

My family seems to burn fat even when not obese. On the bright side, this means it takes more for us to grow fat in the first place. On the other hand, we will develop insulin tolerance eventually even if we never become shapeless blobs of fat. I suspect that this is not quite a fundamental difference between us and ordinary humans, but simply that our balance point is set lower. If we become skeletal enough, we will surely save our fat like anyone else. (And also put it on more easily if we eat some.) I have not been seriously underweight since high school, though. But having lost 10-15% of my body weight in fat may be enough to cause some change in my body chemistry.

At least it has caused enough change that the situation is now slowly correcting itself. Whether I will be able to eventually return to my normal weight remains to see. It will likely be a very slow process, since the amount of fat I can eat is limited in grams per day rather than as a percentage of total food intake. My body may have gone into fat-saving mode now, but it is not yet in fat-making mode, and probably never will be. So at most I can add those grams each day. At this speed it will take me a couple years to get back up to a body mass index of 27. That's fine by me. Also I enjoy the food. There's a lot of tasty carbs out there! I'll be sure to write about them from time to time, God willing. Actually I don't think God has a problem with carbs, so it is probably enough that He just lets me stay alive and with most senses and limbs intact, and I'll continue to lead y'all into carb temptation. I'm sure some of you are already hungry just from reading this much about food. "Food! Glorious food!" ^^