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Thanks for this info. Ya this really goes in the direction of what I think is happening.
Not really. It's an ion. Your body easily eliminates anything which is water soluble in your pee.
Ya, all that sounds about right to me :) Thanks for writing out so clearly :)
I totally believe that a low potassium 500 kcal diet would see rapid and significant weight loss. My experience so far tells me that I would expect doing a 500 kcal diet on low K would be very difficult (my body would just painfully crave food) whereas with high K it would make it much easier.
Wow! Thanks for all the detail. You seem to have a precise and detailed knowledge of how your body works! I'm impressed.
I did it at the belly button, but I did it at lungs-full because I thought it would be harder for me to cheat myself at lungs full. lungs neutral felt like I could unconsciously be little less full when it would support my hypothesis and little more full when it wouldn't ...
Oh wow!! Great data! Thanks for that.
So my incomplete tests for the moment seem to indicate that if I take no potassium and no calorie-not-dense meal, then I gain weight. If I just take ~2500 mg K or more but no calorie-not-dense meal, I lose weight very slowly, if I just take one calorie-not-dense meal a day but no K I lose weight very slowly, but if I do both, then I lose weight visibly. Do you think something like that could be consistent with your experience?
Interesting.
Watermelon has 30 kCal and 112 mg K per 100g
(boiled) potatoes have 87 kCal and 380 mg K per 100g
So per calory they have roughly the same amount of potassium, but watermelon is clearly much less energy dense than potatoes.
Oh, and also comparing averages (patato consumption per capita) with the size of the tail of a distribution (obesity prevalence) can sometimes be problematic. See the following blog post for a good explanation: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q8hfzHjskaGknKLdn/the-average-north-korean-mathematician
I did measure my waist circumference. It went from 106cm (mid-filled lungs) at the beginning to 89cm (maximum air-filled lungs, I changed my method mid-way, I figured it was harder for me to decieve myself if always max-filled my lungs rather than doing it "mid"-way) at the end. But I quickly noticed that waist circ tracked weight surprisingly well, just that it had a ~3 day lag, so I ended up paying more attention to weight.
Very interesting observation. But I think a lot of things have this geographical correlation pattern that we are seeing in the above graph. The main one that immediately commes to mind is GDP/capita: https://i.redd.it/2m553hojgke11.png
There could be just so many confounding factors here.
Also note that my lazy potato diet was equivalent to ~180kg/year of potatoes, so appart from Belarus, no country on the graph about reach that.
As to the hypothesis you allude to of weightloss being either hard or easy for people, and that people who lose weight on the potato diet would have lost weight also if they tried something else:
If I understand @Elizabeth 's post which I just randomly read a few minutes ago, at least in her case, the potatoes worked where other things didn't. That's just n=1, but it does indicate that a strong version of the hypothesis isn't true.
It's possible that there is a distribution of people: some who would lose weight under any diet, some who wouldn't lose weight under most diets but yes with potatoes, and some who wouldn't lose weight under any diet including potatoes. The question is then is then what proportion of people are in each bin (and it's probably more a spectrum and discrete bins).
Ya. I agree, the low caloric density of potatoes (and even more so kidney beans) is an important componant to all this which I didn't bring up in the above article, but I'm convinced that it isn't the whole story. I will get to this in later posts, but here are some preliminary reasons why I think that:
* The SMTM drinking K diet helped a bit with weightloss: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/12/20/people-took-some-potassium-and-lost-some-weight/
* I'm trying a control (lentilles) which are low caloric density but don't have a lot of K, it works a bit (as much as K alone), but not nearly as much as potatoes or kidney beans.
* All my life, I've never felt full after eating an ice-cream cone, now on the days I take a lot of K, I feel really full afer eating an ice-cream cone, even the days where my K comes entirely from just coconut water.
Also, @Portia , you say you have never been overweight, I'm curious about you.
Is it easy for you stay thin, or do you need use willpower to stop yourself from eating? (i.e. do you count calories and then stop yourself from eating?)
Also do you think you could estimate your daily Potassium intake? (Many thin people I talked about this to said they had a really high potassium intake).
No need to answer those personal question if you are not comfortable answering.
The relevant part of the above article:
"“JOHNSON's surprising observation is that, in mouse models, high consumption of salt triggers the body's own fructose production.
Salt and glucose are very different compounds? Why would they trigger fructose production?
According to Johnson, because both act as distress signals.
If there is a lot of glucose or salt (or both) in the blood, the concentration of the blood changes, and this happens when the body dries out.
The body therefore thinks that the creature is suffering from a lack of water.
The body prepares for the threat of dehydration by accumulating fat, because fat is not only an energy store but also a water store.
When fat is burned, water is produced, which the body can use. For the same reason, camels accumulate a hump of fat on their back - to get water.”"
Thanks for looking up the historic NaCl intake of Europeans. That's super useful. For reference also, modern people in the USA (particularly overweight) daily salt intake is only ~3.4g.
> weight loss is almost completely determined by caloric intake
I don't at all disagree with that. But emperically it seems really hard for people to eat fewer calories, so the question is what makes it so hard? And how can taking fewer calories be made easy and require no willpower? Populations who struggle to get enough calories available to them are not relevant in answering this question.
> what working mechanism are you even assuming?
For the moment, at least experimenting on myself, and from the two SMTM experiments, it seems like Potassium might have something to do with making it easier to consume fewer calories than are expended. I'm currently experiencing with lentilles as a control (low caloric density but very little K compared to potatoes or kidney beans) and the data is still very provisional but they really don't seem to work as well. I also did a period of going back to my pre-potato diet but adding Coconut water (lots of K but otherwise just sugar water) and it actually helped lose weight (or in this case stop gaining weight), it provisionally seems to work as well as one meal day of lentilles. So the key, it seems is both low caloric density + enough K.
The modern Western diet is K poor, my current working hypothesis is just that if people are lacking a nutrient, they continue to eat to get enough of it (eating not for calories but for getting the nutrient).
The info you turned up on historical NaCl intake is evidence that if that hypothesis is correct it might not be the ratio of K:Na that is relevant, but just the quantity of K. Which sounds plausible, given that any excess ions should be easy enough to eliminate in pee.
On the other hand this article says that exess sodium triggers the body's emergency system trying to get it to store more fat: https://www.hs.fi/tiede/art-2000009775452.html
By the way, I really appreciate your passion for finding the truth, and not having people be mislead on their diets.
Ya coconout water is great. I just finished a week or so of going back to my pre-potato diet but substituting most of my drinks (usually water) for coconut water which gave me between 2800 mg and 6000 mg of K per day (so at least as much as one meal of potatoes).
A few questions:
Have you tried losing weight before and what was your experience then? (I ask because some people have legitimate doubt that this only works for people who haven't really tried to lose weight before.)
Is your main goal in doing this to lose weight or to experiment?
If you want to just test out K and are curious about the role of K for you, you're intervention is perfect.
If you mainly want to lose weight, then as Portia pointed out in some other comments here, there is another thing which is critical (as I will get to in future posts, I'm still finilizing some experiments) is a high volume/weight meal low in calories. Considering that you heat up stuff in the microwave, let me give you some good options which are also high in K
* Canned or boxed tomatoe soup (as long as they don't add too much Na in it)
* Canned Red/Black kidney beans (add a bit of sour cream, hot sauce, herbs, to make tasty)
* Really any type of canned beans or legumes (just look for low sodium content).
Looking forward to hear about your experience.
Super good point. So to add to this, coffee is another thing I tracked, and coffee also seemed to have an effect in weightloss.
I don't really want to go to unhealthy levels of BMI so I don't really want to go down much lower. I'm currently doing some more experimentation for the next posts so I'm intentionally back at a BMI of 26. Maybe eventually I will try to get to 24 after I'm done the current experiments, but I doubt I will want to get lower than that.
To answer your question about can it get me to 20. I don't really know, everything shows me that it was not harder to lose weight when I was at 29 than when I was 26 BMI but I subjectively felt that at 25.5 it started getting harder, but it might later it felt like it was just a plateau which eventually went away. So I'm not sure.
Yes, I have an average muscle mass.
According to my new and improved body scale which claims to test body fat %, when I was at BMI of 24.7, my body fat % was 19,8% , but I don't know how much I trust this figure, I don't think those scales a reliable way to track absolute values even if they are probably ok to track relative change in those values.
I'd also love to know if it would work for you. I'd would be great if you would test it and report back :)
I had 500g of potatos a day and didn't change the other meals.
Strong agree with potatoes being tasty and being able to make them in so many ways.
Thanks. That changed my mind about pickles and vinegar.
The original reason of talking about that was the person who brought it up thought old diets had a higher Na:K than modern diets, I'm highly unconvinced by this still, I think it is the opposite. You seem to know a lot, what is your take on the original point @Portia ?
Good question. As Portia says, I didn't. The whole point of this is to not use willpower, so restricting calories when you feel like eating goes against that. I didn't measure, but I'm willing to bet that how it works is that this diet makes me eat fewer calories without actively trying to eat fewer calories. What I tracked, was only things which were "easy" to track, for example how many meals (light, medium, heavy), how many "snacks", etc. Super imprecise measurements, what was really superizing in the end is despite that, how high and R^2 I could get on my linear model next day (or next few days) weight prediction. Will talk about this more in detail hopefully in a future post.
Absolutely :) I agree with all that you are saying in both your comments. Excellent remarks.
What I will get to in future posts: Potassium is not everything (hence why the SMTM experiment on K showed only light results), kCal/food_weight is the other very important factor. I'll show some control experiments I did for that. But even controlling for kCal/weight, K still plays a role. (I still have to finalize my experiments on that).
Re body-weight scales precision, water etc.: absolutely totally correct, and what is super fantastic and incredible is that with enough data, you can get results sub measurement scale, I will get to that later. Also to deal with 1 error issue I do two things: look at models which predict weight change many days ahead. And for promising interventions, do the intervention for many days in a row (for example 2 weeks) to see the cumulative effect.
Ya. I think you are right about those 3 points influencing my priors about weight loss in a biased way.
However, and at this point I only have anectodal evidence for this, but I think (75% probability) that even the majority (50% + ) of people who have had a hard time losing weight could easily lose weight with a few easy guidlines that deal with 3 of what I think are very common causes for over-eating (Potassium deficiency / Sodium over-consumption in modern diet being one of the 3). The anectotal evidence I have for this is that most people on the potato diet lost weight, including many people who had tried to lose weight for a long time but failed. The other is that when I talked to some people who have always been thin, and I told them what I think works, they said that they have always been doing that naturally.
My current belief is that Potassium is only part of the answer, but it does have an important contribution. I will get to this more in future posts in the series. In the meantime some people did indeed try only adding KCl to their diet, and for some people, it did have an effect:
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/12/20/people-took-some-potassium-and-lost-some-weight/
You are right that KCl should be measured by weight if you want to do it properly. But I used measuring spoons to measure it, not a scale which would have been a lot more tedious. Thus I really mean 2 mililiters which was roughly 3.2g of KCl (at least with my crystals) which corresponds to roughly 1600 mg of K.
For comparison, my typical potato meal was 500g of potatoes which corresponds to 2700 mg of K.
Ya, I know ... by the time I thought it might be nice to get one of those because it really worked much better than I ever expected so I was going to write about it thus have more data might be nice, I had already reached my target weight.
- I'm in my forties.
- Unfortunately not. I only had a normal scale at my disposal. Subjectively it feels like it was mostly fat, but it was probably muscle too, My push-up count and chin-up count didn't change, and I would have expected them to go up had I lost only fat and kept all my muscle.
Comment on taste: I always made my potatoes tasty, adding butter to taste or a bit of sour cream, or hot sauce or other sauces and spices or herbs I liked. I just didn't add table salt (or MSG). Also remember that it is only one meal a day, all other meals are unchanged.
Comment on other things: Sorry, my typo, I meant to say Cacao (chocolate) not the precursor to cocaine is what I used after christmas (fixed in the text), basically making myself a cup of hot chocolate. Other things also worked too which I mentioned such as red or black kidney beans meals that worked even better than potato meals.
yes :)
My model of the past (for example talking with my grandparents) is different to yours. Before refrigeration I don't feel people ate more salted (that was salted meats on a boat), people ate roots and tubers in winter (as those can keep a long time in the cold, in winter you have natural refrigeration) and fresh veggies in the summer when there was no refrigeration.
As for meat, you would slaughter it "just in time" most of the time (except on a boat).
And pickles (as in pickled vegetables, ketchups, chutneys, etc) are more vinegar than salt.
If you do find a source saying people of old ate more salt than now though, I would find super interesting.
Ya. I have the same feeling with cacao, one cup cuts my appetite for 2-3 hours usually.
Ya, I think it's a little bit more complicated than just K, but I think K plays a critical role. I'll get to this point when get into the effects of various things I tried both according to my internal model and my mathematical model. But for KCl SMTM already did a trial :
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/12/20/people-took-some-potassium-and-lost-some-weight/
Louie & Glimcher (2010)
A link to the paper: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/16/5498.short
The temporal discount factor, d, which they find is hyperbolic, i.e., of the form d = 1/(1 + k T), where k is some constant and T is the time to reward.