back in the rut again - sadly

Its now March 2009 and its been a long time since any posting here from me.

The situation has changed and not entirely for the good.

The good news is that the diet seemed to work. Here is an update on the weight situation


09/2005 96 Kg (= 211 pounds or 15 stone 1 pound)
12/2005 89 Kg (= 196 pounds or 14 stone exactly)
02/2006 86 Kg (= 189 pounds or 13 and a half stone)
06/2007 84 Kg (= 185 pounds or 13 stone 3 pounds)
06/2008 79 Kg (= 174 pounds or 12 stone 6 pounds)
03/2009 85 Kg (= 187 pounds or 12 stone 5 pounds)

So in effect my steady weight loss continued right through until the summer of last year, but then started to rise. Somewhat spectacularly. And that spectacular rise has been associated with just about the worse depression I have ever had. Its certainly the longest lasting. I first noticed that my concentration levels were dropping alarmingly. As I was driving for a living at the time, and carrying passengers, this was potentially very dangerous. I therefore had to stop driving. The depression has just got worse and worse. My concentration levels are low, I have very little energy to do anything and the old patterns have returned. I have a bulbous belly, I find it hard to sleep at night, and I just seem to be dead in the head until about 10 pm when I become alive. The sleep pattern is such that I am awake most of the night and even if I do manage to get to sleep, I wake up often so the sleep is very light. I can sleep in the mornings.. Typically 4 or 5 hours from about 6 or 7 am until 11 am. Then I am either awake the rest of the day, or as with today (having forced myself to do few miles walking) I flopped on the bed at about 7pm dead tired and woke up at about 11pm fairly wide awake.

All the time my weight has been falling I have been fairly OK. I even managed to start a new relationship this last year which has been very nice. But the dreaded weight gain that has come on since is clearly associated with depressed mood.

The interesting question again is why? Did the weight gain CAUSE the depression? I don't think so. Or does the depression CAUSE the weight gain? Again I don't think so. I am now clearly of the view that the weight gain and the depression are both symptomatic of something else that is going on. As I have hinted in previous posts I think that this other factor is the key to understanding depression.

I strongly suspect that it is a powerful genetic and environmental interaction associated with stress. In my case, stress triggers a powerful change in my metabolic rate. The process which go on in our bodies and enable us to be active and burn energy, are forced to slow down. As a result, I am no longer able to spend energy in the way that I used to. Food that I would normally eat, which gets converted to energy in metabolic processes instead gets stored as fat. This process of slowing down happens due to stress. I believe that the survival of genes that cause a reaction to stress which slows down metabolic process during the day (but speeds them up at night) is because this helped my genetic ancestors survive the sharp winters. In winter, food could have become scarce and winter nights are cold. Winter time brought on particular stresses for our ancestors. What better strategy for surviving winter than to gain weight but speed up metabolism at night (to generate internal heating) and prevent sleep (which could lead to fires going out and death through hypothermia). So I believe I have these genes. They were a blessing for my ancestors, but they are a curse for me. The good thing is this. Now that I know the reason for this is natural, it does make it a bit easier to deal with. There is no point blaming oneself for gaining weight and becoming depressed in winter time. Its natural. Just should look at in the same way as sleep. Its just a natural process. Yes it would be nice to have better control of it, and one day I suspect we shall be able to switch off the gene that causes this to happen. But until that happens, I am not going to beat myself up over it.

Now I think that this "stress reaction" can become associated with winter, and that is certainly a pattern in my depression. But it is also associated with stress. (And as I say, in the past, winter time was stressful, so there may be some automatic linkage between stress and this genetic process). In my case I have had down periods in the winter, but in the last few years these have been short lived. A month or so is normal for me, and these depressions can be fairly mild. For instance in December/January of 2007/8 U was training as bus driver and the depression was relatively mild and did not affect my ability to get up early in the mornings or go out driving. But looking back over the last year I have faced some quite unusual stresses. I had started a new job as a bus driver in March 2008 I found myself almost immediately in conflict with my boss. Two specific matters were at the root of that, one of which was work related and the other personal. We seemed to get those sorted by the summer but later on the year there came a dispute over unpaid working hours. Due to a change in working times imposed by the employer (not specifically by my boss - he was just following orders) I found myself having to work extra time every day. Other drivers were affected by this too. When I added up the extra hours I was working it was quite shocking to discover that, over an average two week working period, I was being paid for 10 days work, but I was actually working unpaid hours equivalent to 11 days. On top of that, the shifts I was working were sometimes unreasonably long and therefore not only stressful, potentially dangerous to me and the passengers on the bus. I tried to get these hours paid, but no luck. And for reasons which I won't go into, it was not practical proposition to go to court to try to get the money owned to me paid back. The company has, I hear, been in trouble before over the payment of salaries. I hear that in the last year the company employed over 90 different permanent employees (a statistic that is needed for the company accounts). However, the average number of drivers at any one time is between 50 and 60, so the driver turnover is an incredible 50% per annum. I think staff turnover in other industries is normally of the order of about 5 per cent per annum. So I am not the only one. But I probably react to this kind of situation more badly than other people.

I have tried to stay faithful to my strictly low carbohydrate diet, but because I am in a new relationship, it is much harder to control my diet because it is unfair for me to impose my diet restrictions on my new partner. So it has been less strict, but not so very different. Well spring time is coming and I am hopeful that the depression will lift soon. But it has not done so yet. I have been depressed now since last October, thus making this at least as bad as the worst of the depressions I have previously suffered from - maybe even the worst.