Placebo

Wednesday:

I only lost 0.1kg this week, even though I increased my Duromine dosage midweek, however in the two days since my official weigh-in my weight has started dropping again so I’m happy.

I just watched Dr Mosley’s show about placebos. In his experiment, building on the work of others, he told a group of back-pain sufferers that they would be randomly allocated either a new powerful painkiller or a placebo. They wouldn’t know if they got the real medicine or not. In fact everyone got a placebo - a pill with rice flour in it. Three weeks later something like 46% had shown improvement, some were now completely pain free. He told them it was a placebo, but many continued to get benefit even when they knew there was no active ingredient in their medicine. The only known thing that made it more likely to work was having more quality time with the doctor who gave it to them.

Another study was done with people on lifelong toxic immunosuppressants after an organ transplant. They were given a nasty drink every time they had their medicine (pink milkshake with lavender oil, dyed green). After a while their body associated the drink with the medicine, and just taking the drink  caused their body to react as if they had had the medicine as well (but wouldn’t they still get the side effects in that case? They didn’t say). Dr Mosley tried this on himself by drinking the same nasty milkshake and taking a caffiene pill every day for a week, then testing his reaction times. Sure enough after a week just drinking the milkshake was enough to speed him up - and make him feel a bit jittery.

I plan to do this with my Duromine. I only expect to be on it for two more months but I won’t be at my goal weight even if I lose an optimistic kilogram a week. But if I do something - it has to be something you don’t usually do... what about a blood sugar finger prick test? Little stab of pain and the ritual of checking... then I can keep doing that when I stop taking Duromine and my body should suppress its own appetite.

We are having an insect invasion today. This morning Jasmine’s school bag was full of tiny ants, I found and sprayed the trail coming from a ceiling light. And sprayed again an hour later when they kept coming. And I’m squishing an ant climbing my leg or investigating my water glass about every 4 or 5 minutes, but I can’t see where they are coming from now. And I’ve swatted six flies, and there is another one swooping around. And I stomped on a cockroach, we hardly ever get them in the house here. Very weird. And there is a wasp lurking outside the back door today, I’ll have to look for the
nest. I don’t know what is going on today.

I went to the gym this morning and did 20 mins on treadmill/rower/elliptical. Exhausting. I’m so unfit.