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1 month ago
8
30/09/25 95.1 36.62 0 0 138/85/50
29/09/25 95.9 36.8 0 0 144/87/53
28/09/25 96.3 36.96 0 0 139/87/66
27/09/25 95.5 36.86 0 0 141/85/61
26/09/25 96.7 36.88 0 0 132/77/55
25/09/25 96.4 36.86 0 0 128/78/58
24/09/25 95.9 36.52 0 0
23/09/25 95.4 36.92 0 0 127/79/55
22/09/25 95.3 36.85 0 0 142/85/59
21/09/25 96 36.89 0 0 141/89/58
20/09/25 96 36.71 0 0 144/77/50
19/09/25 95.8 36.9 0 0 138/87/58
18/09/25 95.8 36.8 0 0 130/79/58
17/09/25 96.2 37.01 0 0 131/80/58
So I haven’t taken significant thyroid for about a month now, and my model of my blood levels now says that the amount of exogenous thyroid in my system should have decayed to effectively zero.
I’ve repeated my thermometer calibration a couple of times, and both times my digital thermometer has produced a reading in between the readings on my two mercury ones, so I’ve decided that it’s probably still calibrated and I must have messed up somehow when I decided that it had drifted. Maybe the reading is just a bit noisy despite my careful temperature-taking.
My waking temperature has stayed high. There didn’t seem much point in graphing it before, since I was adjusting my thyroid dose to keep it at 36.7C, but now I’m not doing that I’ve made it more visible as the waggly green line on the thyroid graph. You can see that after years of wobbling along noisily at roughly 36.6 it increased to around 36.7 over the last couple of years, then spiked when I went home a couple of months ago, then stayed high for the whole period that I was home, and has now dropped a bit. But it seems now to be wandering around at a new level of 36.8-36.9.
So assuming that my digital thermometer is trustworthy my temperature is now pretty much where Broda Barnes said it should be in a healthy person.
That’s actually quite weird in itself, I could never get my temperature that high before, any attempt to take enough thyroid to get it over 36.7C resulted in overheating and hyperthyroid symptoms.
Provisionally I suspect my long term metabolic curse is at least partially lifted? I wonder if I no longer have ‘Chronic Fatigue Syndrome’?
That’s quite remarkable, and I’m pretty sure that it’s due to giving up PUFAs, since the dose-drop started immediately I realised that I should stop eating peanut butter, and has been pretty much continuous over the last two years.
The only problem is that I seem to be tired all the time. More than usual, in fact.
For the first week I was back my notes say that I was mostly fine. But then I came down with yet another cold and started feeling sluggish and needing afternoon naps at around 1700 every day.
As soon as I felt better I for some reason decided it was time to try drinking a couple of beers to see what happened. I didn’t get the apocalyptic hangover I usually get from any contact with sulphites, but I did feel sluggish and get mild headaches for a couple of days. And just when that was over I got invited to a party with a load of old friends. I was very good and didn’t drink any beer at all, and contented myself with only a small bucket of gin and tonic. And after that I didn’t feel so good for a couple of days either. I seem to be ok today.
I’m not getting any thyroid symptoms except tiredness though, neither hyper nor hypo, so I’m going to provisionally put the recent tiredness down to viruses and dissolute behaviour and assume for the minute that I don’t need to take thyroid any more. But I’ll keep an eye on my waking temperature and see what it does.
My system may just need a while to settle down after the end of a ten-year period of taking vast quantities of ill-advised drugs to stay functional.
Weight-wise since I came back from the North I seem to have dropped a bit. I’m carefully eating lots of bread and cheese so that I’m ad-lib high-protein swamp, and it looks like my set-point is now about 96kg. If that’s actually a new set-point then that’s down a full kilo since the last time I was ‘at equilibrium’, but of course it’s hard to tell without just taking my hands off the controls for ages and seeing what happens.
But again, provisionally the yo-yo idea seems to have worked. I was cruising along at around 97kg for the first half of this year, I dropped about 5kgs mainly I think by going low-protein in June and July, and then I stopped doing that over August and September and went back up again but to 96kg, where it seems to have topped out.
If we take a generous estimate of 20% linoleic acid in modern body fat, then losing 5kg should have dumped a full kilo of linoleic acid, and then putting 4kg back on while trying to avoid the stuff should have put about 100g back on (there’s about 2% linoleic acid in foods, even if they haven’t had any added, and that’s probably the sort of amount that you’d want in your body fat too.)
And that does seem like the sort of thing that would cause a noticeable change, if we believe that linoleic acid in large quantities is bad news.
So amazingly, I don’t feel all that confused at the moment. Played for and got. Provisionally.
