weight log

My stupid low fat diet led me to losing at least 15 pounds down to 120 pounds. I developed brainfog as a result. Been trying to eat plenty of healthy fats from avocados, walnuts, ground flax seeds, soymilk, olive oil in soups, olives, etc, to gain it back. Been going outside daily in the 12:00-2:00 midday range to get sunlight for Vitamin D, sometimes with my shirt off. Trying to maintain my posture.

Day 1: Morning weight: 124

Just uploaded some newer music to my soundcloud. Got rid of all the old crap.

2:19 PM: I'm kind of foggy but feeling better after eating a little salsa, pretzels and a small pickle. Trying to bring my sodium levels up a bit since breakfast didn't have much. I ate like 4 pieces of bread, 2 with jam and then just 2 straight earlier, maybe around 12:00. I don't know why, just kind of had a craving for another jam sandwich. I think in general my cravings are really off. My body doesn't seem to know what it needs most of the time. So it would be best for me to more carefully plan out my meals and make sure they hit all targets.

8:31 PM: Didn't really log my meals today apart from breakfast. I had some soymilk a few minutes ago and I think I'm gonna probably stop drinking that stuff. The fact it makes my lips itch a bit indicates I'm probably slightly allergic to it. My mom has been making vegetable and bean stews lately. They have a good amount of sodium and are nutritionally complete so if I just eat them with good amounts of walnuts/ground flax for each meal of the day I'd probably be alright. I also think making a sandwich tomorrow with some hummus, walnuts and strawberry jam would work pretty well. The hummus adds salt to what is otherwise a pretty low sodium breakfast. It seems getting either too little sodium or too little fat can cause brain fog.

It seemed a bit weird to me how much avocado and nuts and seeds I'd have to eat on a vegan diet, but it seems eatthismuch.com has come to the same conclusion. Maybe this should be more stressed in onboarding? Only person I've heard encouraging healthy fats is Unnatural Vegan on youtube. eatthismuch gives a target minimum fat intake of 53g. I'm targetting about 80g, so I'm comfortably in their range. I think it would be reasonable for me to start eating 2 avocados a day. This guy seems to know what he's talking about.

Curious if it would be worth treating neocities as the sole repo for my blog, just using the online editor and neglecting my local copy. Up until now my process has been to write things in VS Code and check them with the live preview feature, then upload to neocities. But the aliasing gets annoying and I actually prefer the online editor as it doesn't constantly try to insert closing tags and word suggestions into my typing. Got the battery for this old digital camera my dad gave me charging. Listening to goyard bag.

Harvard recommends no more than 7% of your daily calories come from saturated fat. But the American Heart Association says no more than 5%. That means for my caloric intake of 2500 per day, I shouldn't exceed 13.89g of saturated fat. My dilemma is as I increase my fat intake, my brain starts working better, but my legs start swelling more. My hypothesis (untested) is that if I am able to increase my calories without significantly increasing my fat intake, I could get the best of both worlds. I could also spend less on food. The WHO recommends 20%-35% of calories to come from fat. That's a minimum for me of 55.6g total fat per day. Probably better to target at least 60g. Dialing this in seems tricky. Actually it might be best to make an app that could play with balances. 11:17 PM: Shit I stayed up too late. Time for bed. 3:00 AM: still up, trying to go to sleep. Went and ate a jam sandwich. I realized I've been eating WAY to little calories, and I can probably back off the fat a bit and just up my carbs. When I was on the low fat diet, I felt better and had much better sleep. But I wasn't eating enough to maintain my weight. I need to figure out an optimal 3000 calorie pot of food to make in the morning and finish by the end of the day. It will need vegetables and all the nice nutrients and shit. I've had trouble with oats and brainfog but I'm not sure it was actually the oats causing it. Maybe it would be best for me to cook a bunch of farro tomorrow instead. AHA recommends 1,500 mg sodium per day. Ezekiel 4:9 bread has 1500 mg per loaf, but that loaf only has 1600 calories. So it's actually too salty for my target. I heard mcdougall does 2000 mg, but even then the Ezekiel loaf is too salty, as I'd need 1.875 of them to hit 3000 calories (for gaining weight), which would be 2812.5 mg sodium. So that's out of the question. I don't have any beans soaking. Shit's TOUGH! lol.

Meta post (3:16 AM): You can see me ping-ponging between McDougallism and Unnatural Veganism. The problem is when I start eating a lot of fat, my sleep schedule gets totally fucked up, my swelling gets a lot worse, and my anxiety and ocd shoot through the roof. But when I go off the fat I get brainfog and get dangerously skinny. So I keep wanting McDougall to be right. But I don't know. I do know that I have never tried actually counting my calories for the day to make sure I got enough. So that's the thing to try next. I need 5 meals, 600 calories each, evenly spaced over the day.

Day 2: forgot to weigh myself before eating breakfast

Meal 1 (9:30 AM, 600 calories, 368 mg sodium): 4.875 slices of Ezekiel 4:9 bread, 2 bananas. Feels pretty good to eat that much carbs. I never really have before. My carb intake was stuck in childhood where you have just one sandwich in the morning and maybe some chips or whatever. Totally stupid. Next meal needs to happen at 11:36 AM, aiming to eat all my calories by 8:00 PM. 368 * 5 is 1840 mg of sodium for the day, so I can keep eating these meals and be fine. According to the package though that's only 12.18g fat for the day. This is what's weird to me. If fat is so necessary, why isn't the instruction to eat it with every meal? But I really don't know what I need. I don't know if McDougall is totally off course. I'm trying to be careful. But one serving of walnuts and flax seeds isn't enough to bring this shit up to 60g fat.

Meal 2 (11:36 AM, 600 calories, 368 mg sodium): Same as meal 1. Actually ate it a bit later at like 11:44 AM or something, since I originally messed up my math on the meal times. Next meal at 1:42 PM. Out of bananas, I think I'll have a cup of blackberries with the next meal.

Just realized I did the math wrong again. I think 4 meals per day is a better plan, and you actually have to divide your eating span by 1 less than the number of meals. But today I'm already on the 5 meal per day course, so my next meal will be at 2:45 PM.

Meal 3 (2:45 PM, 600 calories): 6.5 slices of Ezekiel 4:9 bread with about a cup of blackberries. I'm not a fan of the seeds in blackberries. But they're a good source of vitamins. I'm glad Ezekiel has some beans in it. I think for my next 2 meals I will incorporate some of the soup my mom made. I'll just have to estimate the calories in it, but it's not too hard. I'll strain out the farro, sweet potato and chickpeas to concentrate them, and use that mix as the calories. Along with that I will add a good amount of the greens that are in the soup. Also will add a tablespoon of B12 fortified nutritional yeast. A real, measured tablespoon, not one of our eating spoons. And probably 2 tablespoons of ground flax seed.

Meal 4 (5:22 PM, 600 calories): Kind of fucked up this one, ran out of ezekiel bread after 3 slices, so I ate some of that soup I mentioned and some pasta. Should be enough calories.

Meal 5 (8:00 PM, 600 calories): 3.5 cups of whole wheat spaghetti in tomato sauce (passata (yeah I should have got crushed tomatoes but the ones we have are too salty)).

Day 3: ate before weighing again. But I'm 126.5 after eating.

Made oil-free whole wheat spaghetti and green peas with crushed tomatoes. If I finish the whole thing it's about 1800 calories, but I don't really want to eat all the peas. I've eaten most of the spaghetti by now at 2:37 PM, so that on its own is close to 1440 calories, plus a fair amount of peas so I'm probably around 1600 calories so far. Need to basically do that again before bedtime to hit 3000 calories, will probably cook more pasta and add it to the remaining peas, and add some more tomatoes. I've already had my tablespoon of B12 fortified nutritional yeast.

Brainfog hit hard after the spoon of nutritional yeast. I also got some gas. So I'm thinking nutritional yeast might be the culprit. Not gonna eat it tomorrow, we'll see what happens. But to know for sure I will have to eat each component of that spaghetti dish in isolation to see what happens. It was barilla whole wheat spaghetti, trader joe's organic green peas, chopped tomatoes (forgot the brand, it's in the fridge), and black pepper.

10:22 PM: Anyways I'm feeling quite a bit better now. I'm confident I hit about 2500 calories today so I shouldn't lose any weight. Didn't feel like eating as much due to the gastric distress of the brainfog episode. Got some new Tops oatmeal and it's really good. Had a cup of it a while ago and it doesn't seem to be giving me any brainfog. Just realized I labeled this day 2 originally. Jesus.

Day 4: Morning weight: 123

Well I seem to be lighter than when I started. Not sure I like this trend. I feel decent though. Gonna target 3000 calories today, mainly from oatmeal, which is 10 cups dry. Last night I went out with my family to vote on local politicians. We just circled all the "democratic party" candidates 'cause that's what my mom said to do. I don't know any of the candidates so whatever.

I ended up eating mainly Ezekiel bread because I didn't have any pots clean to make a good amount of oatmeal. I put a bunch of pots in to wash in the morning and got one cup of oatmeal out of a small pot that was clean. But the rest of the day I ate bread, until I realized it was making me foggy and made some sweet potatoes for dinner.

Day 5: Morning weight: 121

Fuck. I switched to sweet potatoes last night. If they don't work and make me feel better, I guess I'll reintroduce some walnuts?? My mom keeps telling me to eat more fat. She says I need a "balanced diet", but when I grill her on what exactly that means she doesn't seem to know. She said, "beans", I told her I've eaten beans every day so far, in the Ezekiel bread and the pasta and peas. Then she said "fruit!", I told her I've been eating fruit every day so far as well. Then she says "oil!", because to her anything without oil in it is unpalatable. So I ask, "how many servings of oily soup would make you happy?" and she can't tell me. So fuck it. I think the brainfog is caused by gluten. I've been eating a ton of wheat lately so I wonder if I'm just not digesting it well due to gluten intolerance. I'm not sure I really have to gain weight to feel good but I am technically in the underweight range for my height so it would probably be good if I gained some. Hopefully sweet potatoes will digest better and I'll gain some weight.

Asking people in the King's Crook Discord if they have the symptoms common in severe OCD patients found here.

Filled a 1.18 liter bottle with water that I'll try to finish by the end of the day. Ate 1.5 bananas for breakfast. Gonna try to just eat when I'm hungry and count up the calories. I've been hitting 2500 pretty easily just doing that, and it feels more natural.

Speaking of sweet potatoes, my mom cooked a purple yam a while ago (a real yam, not a sweet potato) and it was delicious. Twice the sweetness and twice the density of a sweet potato.

Eating a pickle (42% DV sodium) did not improve brainfog. So low sodium is very unlikely to be the cause. I think once I poop out all this gluten crap I'll feel better.

Meal	Calories	Total Calories
1.5 bananas	158	158
1 cup sweet potato	250	408

Eh I got tired of tracking all this shit. I don't know, I'm not forcing myself to eat a bunch of calories. Just gonna eat when my body tells me to. I feel pretty good at 6:18 PM. Pooped earlier. I'm still a bit foggy but my mood is good. Watching Peter Rogers videos.

Ate some masa porridge since I was craving something like that. We'll see what happens.

Day 6: Morning weight: 122.5

Haha. My weight is rising. Feeling pretty good after eliminating gluten and oats (a lot of gluten intolerant people also have trouble with oats, even gluten-free oats). Ate some dates this morning. My masa harina is this by the way. Yesterday I ended up drinking about 2 liters of water, and some more overnight.