been on sema for 11 weeks, and i’m cold basically constantly. not shivering, just this baseline of wearing a sweatshirt indoors in april that i don’t normally experience. haven’t seen this talked about much. GI stuff gets all the air time, but this feels metabolic. it started week 3 and hasn’t stopped. down 14 lbs total, so it’s not just from weight loss. my OB said ‘metabolic adjustment.’ which. okay. but i’m also 7 months postpartum with a toddler waking me twice a night, so hard to separate ‘sema is rewiring my metabolism’ from ‘sleep deprivation is doing weird things.’ is this normal? does it regulate, or am i cold for the next 20 weeks?
anyway.
Week 11 with no change suggests multifactorial more than adjustment. Thyroid dysregulation postpartum lasts months and doesn’t get mentioned enough, reduced intake means less heat generation, and sleep deprivation independently wrecks temp regulation. ymmv but tracking whether it’s actually stabilizing week-to-week matters more than the cause because you don’t need one answer here.
the ‘reduced intake means less heat generation’ part actually made something click, bc i haven’t been tracking calories on sema at all, just eating when i’m hungry, and that’s definitely less than my baseline. already tracking sleep hours versus cold week-to-week and it does shift, so yeah, the stability trend matters way more than nailing down which factor is responsible. less scary when the question is just ‘is it stable’ instead of ‘is this forever.’
Something worth adding to the tracking picture that doesn’t come up much: leptin and adaptive thermogenesis. When fat mass drops, leptin falls with it fairly quickly, and leptin directly signals the hypothalamus to regulate core body temperature. The body reads falling leptin as a famine signal and actively lowers its thermal set point to conserve energy - which is a separate mechanism from the “reduced intake means less heat generation” part you mentioned. It’s been documented in weight loss research for a couple of decades, though it rarely gets explained to patients. So the cold may not just be a byproduct of eating less, but your hypothalamus literally running you cooler as a defensive response to perceived energy deficit. The reasonably hopeful piece of that framing is that it tends to stabilize as weight plateaus and leptin recalibrates, rather than getting progressively worse over time. Your tracking approach sounds exactly right for watching this, fwiw. The week-to-week stability trend will surface that pattern if that’s what’s happening. The postpartum hormonal flux still muddies the picture, but this could be a piece running independently of intake entirely, which might explain why the cold started week 3 rather than day one.