Restarting — a week of stomach flu, 79 kg, and rethinking iron

Where I've been for a week. I've been sick. Bad stomach flu — the kind that keeps you close to home and empties the tank. For the past **seven days** it's been almost nothing but **porridge and soup**. That's the whole menu. Anything heavier and my stomach wasn't having it.

What I stopped. Everything. **No boxing. No running. No lifting.** Not a single training session in a full week. And because I couldn't hold real food down consistently, I also **stopped the supplements** — creatine and the multivitamin both. Taking pills on an empty, angry stomach felt like a bad idea, and I'd rather pause cleanly than half-take things and muddy the log.

The weight. **Down to 79 kg.** I was at 80 and trying to work my way toward 85. A week of porridge undid weeks of eating on purpose. Not surprising, but still frustrating to see on the scale.

The frustrating part. The whole point of this log is a clean n=1 — one variable at a time, consistent doses, honest observation. A week-long break in the middle of the creatine + multivitamin run means **I lose a clean read** on what those two were actually doing. The pump, the recovery, the morning heaviness — I can't cleanly compare "week 3 on creatine" against "week 5 on creatine" now, because week 4 was a hole.

That's just how real life goes. You don't get to control for illness.

Restarting today. Starting today I'm back on the stack:

- Creatine 5 g, daily. - Multivitamin, one cap with a meal.

No loading phase, no doubling up. Just picking up where I left off and letting the levels come back over the next couple of weeks. I'll ease back into training too — probably a light run before I go back to full boxing rounds.

The new thing I'm thinking about — iron. Here's what's been on my mind. Over the last little while, before and during the illness, I've been noticing what feels like **mild anemia symptoms** — a bit lightheaded standing up too fast, more fatigue than the training alone should explain, that generally washed-out feeling. Being sick and under-eating for a week almost certainly made it worse, so I can't fully separate the two.

But it's enough of a pattern that I want to think seriously about adding iron to the stack.

I'm not going to just start swallowing iron pills tomorrow. A few things I want to work through first:

- Iron isn't like a multivitamin — too much is genuinely harmful, and men in particular don't clear excess iron well. - The right move is probably a blood test first. Ferritin, hemoglobin, the basics. Guessing on iron is a bad idea. - If I do end up supplementing, dose and timing matter a lot — iron with vitamin C helps absorption, but iron next to calcium or coffee fights it.

So for now: iron is on the "next candidate" list, but it goes in after I get labs, not before.

Overall condition. **Weak, but on the mend.** Stomach is finally cooperating. Appetite is coming back slowly. Energy is still low. Today's the reset — real food, restart the two supplements, no training yet, and start planning the iron question the right way instead of the fast way.

Back to the log properly from here.