I had to step on the scale a few times this morning to make sure what I was seeing was accurate. It was. Somehow, I managed to gain 5.5 pounds yesterday! The math just doesn’t add up, though. A pound is 3,500 calories according to conventional wisdom (although, according to new research, things are a bit more complicated than that). Based on that formula, a gain of 5.5 pounds would require consuming around 17,000 calories (that’s 19,250 calories in from food minus about 2,000 calories out from metabolic processes). While yesterday wasn’t a low-calorie day, there’s no way I consumed that many calories, so I started thinking about inflammation.

Yesterday, not long after eating, I noticed that I felt sluggish. Additionally, my back and muscles were stiff and aching, and I just didn’t feel very good. I ate the same thing yesterday as I did the day before (another reason why the significant weight gain is a mystery as I gained much more the second day than the first), and I had noticed a marked difference the day before between how I felt in the morning (prior to eating) and how I felt after eating my lunch of pro-inflammatory cheeseburger (beef and cheese are both inflammatory).

What’s interesting is that inflammation can cause weight gain, and weight gain causes inflammation (see: https://tinyurl.com/yun7zkza). I still need to read a lot more about inflammation and diet, but the relationship between the two appears to be a circuitous one. Anyway, my expectation (and hope) is that I’ll see a substantial drop in weight after fasting today that will reverse the sudden upward trend caused by my eating choices over the weekend.

I’ve given up on building the perfect cheeseburger. I tried, but in the end it’s a lot quicker (and much cheaper) just to drive to a good burger spot to satisfy that particular craving. But it’s a craving I won’t be indulging for the rest of this project (not regularly, anyway) since a cheeseburger and fries is a highly inflammatory meal (potatoes aren’t inflammatory, but the oil they’re cooked in is). We’ll see how that goes….

I should mention that I had a very funny (yet frustrating) dream last night. I was at Trader Joe’s shopping, and my bag of groceries kept disappearing. I’d put the bag down to grab something else from the shelf, and, when I returned to the location where I’d left the bag, it would be gone. This happened a few times, and I was convinced that someone was stealing my groceries. When closing time came, everything that I wanted to buy was out of stock—including the chocolate-covered peanut butter pretzels I had so been looking forward to. I even checked with the employees to see if I could just find the pretzels, and they confirmed that they were sold out. I left the store dejected.

Needless to say, I had sugar on my mind, even as I slept. That particular craving will always be there, I know, it’s just a question of how often I will indulge it. I’m trying to avoid it for the rest of this journey, but I won’t be surprised if I slip up at some point. Bad habits are hard to break.