[Concerning] ferritin 9. i was eating 1,100 calories and calling it discipline.
Reference range on my lab is 15–200 ng/mL. Mine came back 9. Haemoglobin was still just inside range, which is why nobody had caught it.
| Marker | Month 0 | Month 8 | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ferritin (ng/mL) | 48 | 9 | 15–200 |
| Haemoglobin (g/dL) | 13.8 | 12.1 | 12.0–15.5 |
| MCV (fL) | 90 | 81 | 80–100 |
Every one of those month-8 values except ferritin is technically normal. The trend across three of them is not, and the trend is the finding.
I was eating around 1,100 calories a day, feeling virtuous about it, and losing weight fast. Under-eating is a real risk and this community talks about it far less than it talks about nausea.
best — the order this archive was captured in
The MCV dropping from 90 to 81 while staying "in range" is the textbook picture and it is exactly why single results are less useful than trends. A first-time ferritin of 9 gets treated. A ferritin of 9 with a documented 48 eight months earlier gets taken seriously.
Which is the whole argument for baseline labs. You cannot go back and collect them, and without them everything is a snapshot.
the baseline was almost an afterthought and it is the only reason the picture is legible.
get baseline labs before you start. i will keep saying it in every thread until it stops being necessary, which will be never.
1,100 kcal is not a win and the community reward structure makes it feel like one. faster loss gets more upvotes than sustainable loss.
and iron specifically is hard to hit on a small appetite because the best sources are dense and unappealing when you are full after four bites.
supplementing now, under supervision, and eating deliberately rather than by appetite. it feels like a chore and that is apparently the correct amount of effort.
Concerning flair is right. Reminder that nobody here interprets a stranger's results — we can say what a pattern usually means, which is a different sentence. Bring the numbers to whoever ordered them.
this is very likely the mechanism behind half the hair-shedding threads on this site and almost nobody checks it first.
same category: my cramps were sodium, not magnesium, and i spent £40 on the wrong mineral before checking anything.
and mine was partly dehydration and partly a BP med that had become too strong. edit: three of the four "is this the drug" questions i have asked turned out to be something adjacent.
1100 calories is fine if you are not hungry, hunger is the signal
hunger is precisely the signal these drugs suppress. that is the mechanism. using it as your intake guide is using a broken instrument.
- 1The MCV dropping from 90 to 81 while staying "in range" is the textbook…6 comments in this branch · started by u/lipid_panel_larry