Weight loss per day is nearly all water weight loss, and not informative as to what is causing fat burning.
If you are on a diet where you lose 1 kg of fat a week—which is good—your daily fat loss is 140 g. Most body weight scales only do 0.1 kg units, so that barely shows up at all. More importantly, your body weight shifts from morning to evening by about two kilograms—more by factor 20. If you are observing weight loss from one day to the next, you are de facto measuring water retention.
There is also a very simple alternate hypothesis for the potato diet that does not require a potassium hypothesis, but makes sense within established research. Potatoes are relatively low calorie density and high satiety. Give a person the same calories in potato, rice, and pasta, and they will feel fuller longer on the potatoes; they are also more likely to finish the pasta plate in one go, but not the potato plate, as they will feel full before they are done. 100 g of potatoes have 69 kcal, and 2,3 g fibre; 100 g of pasta have 137 kcal, and only 1,2 fibre. So you get double the calories, half the fibre. Meaning people who ate more potatoes rather than other carbs would have simply consumed fewer calories, but not been hungrier. I personally exploit this effect—I shift my carbs to pasta when I want to overconsume calories intentionally (e.g. prior to a marathon this is a popular strategy), and to potatoes when I want to drop weight. I feel in both cases that I am eating my fill, but if I track calories, it is obvious that I ate less.
You can learn your personal hacks here in quite an easy way. For a brief period, weigh everything you eat, to the gram, and track it. Eat as you please. Then review. You will find that even though each day you feel you ate your fill to your heart’s content, some of those days will be under your calorie budget, others over. Compare these, and identify the items that massively push the calorie count up, and you will find individual patterns. E.g. I automatically eat about 300 calories less per day on a keto diet than on a high carb diet, without noticing, because keto reduces my hunger. Or some people notice that if they eat a lot of fibre, especially veggies and pulses, their hunger is tricked and their calorie count goes down. Or that high protein days leave them feeling full sooner. Or that they easily consume extra calories in the form of oil, and when they reduce cooking oil, calories tank, but they don’t feel they are starving. Once you find out your hacks, you can plan your individual diet that gets you to a target weight without feeling miserable. (Target weight wise; if you are young, there are actually some benefits to going to the lower, not upper, end of the normal body fat range.)
This also holds true vice versa. In order to gain 1 kg of fat in a single day, you would need to consume a caloric excess of 7000 kcal. Assuming your daily burn is 2000, that means eating 9000 kcal in a single day. This is practically impossible if your diet is remotely healthy. For the record, 9000 kcal in potatoes is 13 kg of potatoes. (Not 1,3 kg.13 kg. That is 8+ bags of potatoes.)
But of course, you scale can go up by 1 kg within a day. Heck, it can go up by several kg in a day. This happens e.g. if you go from ketosis to reintroducing carbs (carbs bind to water and are stored in your muscles, massively upping your water weight), if you overconsume salt (ups water retention), if you are sleep deprived, stressed or getting stick (ups inflammation, which ups water rention) or eat pro inflammatory foods (again, ups water retention), if you have not passed stool due to constipation (meaning there is literally more material inside you when you step onto the scale), if you step onto the scale on the evening rather than morning (you lose water overnight through sweating and breathing, have fasted for 8 hours, and likely went to the toilet before weighing yourself) and at certain parts of your menstrual cycle. So naturally, people have a day where they are stressed, and eat a big serving of inflammatory carbs with salt, think oh dear, that was tons of calories, then step onto the scale the next day, and are horrified when the scale shoots up by several kilograms, and think, yep, I was right, carbs/salt/… makes me fat. And then go on a clean diet low in salt and with ketosis, the water weight drops… and they go, hey, look, the fat is just melting off me! Meanwhile, your body fat has barely shifted at all, you are just adding and dropping water. Similarly, when you have a plateau, if you are still reducing calories as before, your fat loss has not changed—but you are retaining enough water to cover it up; this can sometimes happen simply because the stress of the diet itself leads to water retention.
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.
I believe your correlations, but would offer an alternate explanation.
High volume low calorie foods trick a lot of people into stopping to eat earlier than the same calorie foods with less volume would have achieved. Doesn’t work on everyone; some people feel like their stomach is cramped full, but they still feel hollow and hungry, and will get pushing in food, anyway, even past the pain limits, because they feel they are filled with empty garbage. But works on many people. That is the basic idea behind a high fibre high water diet, e.g. all those diets incorporating things like cabbage soups (magic cabbage soup) and giant salads and heaps of kale and platefuls of cucumber and celery.
Part of what tricks your body is not just the sheer volume that works as a “I had lots of food” cue, but also the composition. There are foods that are harder to digest than others. E.g. if you had either 1 liter of kale, or 1 liter of water mixed with enough ice cream to get to the same calorie count, I would predict you would be hungrier again much earlier after the ice cream slurry, while the kale would still keep your body busy. Same volume, same calories, but one of these would keep you full longer. The kale is less compressible and movable and processable, essentially.
Foods that keep you full longer than their volume alone would predict tend to be high in fibre. Foods high in fibre tend to be incidentally high in potassium. Foods highly processed, meanwhile, tend to be both low fibre, and high in salt. So you would see quite a robust correlation. But I would predict that if you ate high volume high fibre low calorie foods that are low in potassium and added salt, your fat loss would be the same. (Though you would gain water weight. But that could be dropped quickly after a week long intervention.) Examples of relatively low potassium foods that are still diet food classics and which I would expect to remain so even if paired with salt to get the ratio clearly in favour of natrium would be blueberries, cranberries, watermelon, alfalfa, celery, cucumber, onion.
So you’d see a correlation between food volume and weight loss, and a correlation between potassium sodium ratios in favour of potassium and weight loss. But the weight loss would be solely due to consuming fewer calories, because you were less hungry, because you tummy was filled with volume, and kept busy with fibre.
We can illustrate the volume issue not being causative easily. One of the most effective weight loss interventions is stomach surgery. The goal of this surgery is to reduce your effective stomach size. As a result, these people are eating a lower volume of food. Yet they lose weight. Because they are forced to stop eating sooner than they otherwise would have, or they get a stomach ache. They might eat their regular, unhealthy, incidentally high salt items—say French fries—but they can only get down a tiny quantity before they feel crammed full, and have to stop. So they lose weight.
Models also tend to avoid high volume foods during shoots, because they need their abdomen as flat as possible. And yet, they stay very skinny (though not effortlessly). They just don’t eat very much, and deal with the misery through the pressure of their job depending on it, plus tend to be tall and work out a lot, so they have more breathing room calorie wise.
That said… aiming for a diet with foods that have relatively high volume to calories tends to work well for most people who wish to reduce calories without feeling proportionally hungry. So again, I think your interpretation of the causal chain was slightly off, but your solution totally worked, and you should absolutely keep it if you like it. (I use volume changes in my food to keep my weight at its optimum, too. And many historic figures swore by it. Marilyn Monroe essentially lived off raw carrots (with some raw egg to meat her protein and fat needs) for this reason.)
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:
* 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.
Weight loss per day is nearly all water weight loss, and not informative as to what is causing fat burning.
If you are on a diet where you lose 1 kg of fat a week—which is good—your daily fat loss is 140 g. Most body weight scales only do 0.1 kg units, so that barely shows up at all. More importantly, your body weight shifts from morning to evening by about two kilograms—more by factor 20. If you are observing weight loss from one day to the next, you are de facto measuring water retention.
There is also a very simple alternate hypothesis for the potato diet that does not require a potassium hypothesis, but makes sense within established research. Potatoes are relatively low calorie density and high satiety. Give a person the same calories in potato, rice, and pasta, and they will feel fuller longer on the potatoes; they are also more likely to finish the pasta plate in one go, but not the potato plate, as they will feel full before they are done. 100 g of potatoes have 69 kcal, and 2,3 g fibre; 100 g of pasta have 137 kcal, and only 1,2 fibre. So you get double the calories, half the fibre. Meaning people who ate more potatoes rather than other carbs would have simply consumed fewer calories, but not been hungrier. I personally exploit this effect—I shift my carbs to pasta when I want to overconsume calories intentionally (e.g. prior to a marathon this is a popular strategy), and to potatoes when I want to drop weight. I feel in both cases that I am eating my fill, but if I track calories, it is obvious that I ate less.
You can learn your personal hacks here in quite an easy way. For a brief period, weigh everything you eat, to the gram, and track it. Eat as you please. Then review. You will find that even though each day you feel you ate your fill to your heart’s content, some of those days will be under your calorie budget, others over. Compare these, and identify the items that massively push the calorie count up, and you will find individual patterns. E.g. I automatically eat about 300 calories less per day on a keto diet than on a high carb diet, without noticing, because keto reduces my hunger. Or some people notice that if they eat a lot of fibre, especially veggies and pulses, their hunger is tricked and their calorie count goes down. Or that high protein days leave them feeling full sooner. Or that they easily consume extra calories in the form of oil, and when they reduce cooking oil, calories tank, but they don’t feel they are starving. Once you find out your hacks, you can plan your individual diet that gets you to a target weight without feeling miserable. (Target weight wise; if you are young, there are actually some benefits to going to the lower, not upper, end of the normal body fat range.)
Potatoes aren’t just satiating, they’re weirdly satiating.
You can of course say that satiety explains the weight loss, but then you have to ask… what explains the satiety?
This also holds true vice versa. In order to gain 1 kg of fat in a single day, you would need to consume a caloric excess of 7000 kcal. Assuming your daily burn is 2000, that means eating 9000 kcal in a single day. This is practically impossible if your diet is remotely healthy. For the record, 9000 kcal in potatoes is 13 kg of potatoes. (Not 1,3 kg.13 kg. That is 8+ bags of potatoes.)
But of course, you scale can go up by 1 kg within a day. Heck, it can go up by several kg in a day. This happens e.g. if you go from ketosis to reintroducing carbs (carbs bind to water and are stored in your muscles, massively upping your water weight), if you overconsume salt (ups water retention), if you are sleep deprived, stressed or getting stick (ups inflammation, which ups water rention) or eat pro inflammatory foods (again, ups water retention), if you have not passed stool due to constipation (meaning there is literally more material inside you when you step onto the scale), if you step onto the scale on the evening rather than morning (you lose water overnight through sweating and breathing, have fasted for 8 hours, and likely went to the toilet before weighing yourself) and at certain parts of your menstrual cycle. So naturally, people have a day where they are stressed, and eat a big serving of inflammatory carbs with salt, think oh dear, that was tons of calories, then step onto the scale the next day, and are horrified when the scale shoots up by several kilograms, and think, yep, I was right, carbs/salt/… makes me fat. And then go on a clean diet low in salt and with ketosis, the water weight drops… and they go, hey, look, the fat is just melting off me! Meanwhile, your body fat has barely shifted at all, you are just adding and dropping water. Similarly, when you have a plateau, if you are still reducing calories as before, your fat loss has not changed—but you are retaining enough water to cover it up; this can sometimes happen simply because the stress of the diet itself leads to water retention.
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.
Thank you. :)
I believe your correlations, but would offer an alternate explanation.
High volume low calorie foods trick a lot of people into stopping to eat earlier than the same calorie foods with less volume would have achieved. Doesn’t work on everyone; some people feel like their stomach is cramped full, but they still feel hollow and hungry, and will get pushing in food, anyway, even past the pain limits, because they feel they are filled with empty garbage. But works on many people. That is the basic idea behind a high fibre high water diet, e.g. all those diets incorporating things like cabbage soups (magic cabbage soup) and giant salads and heaps of kale and platefuls of cucumber and celery.
Part of what tricks your body is not just the sheer volume that works as a “I had lots of food” cue, but also the composition. There are foods that are harder to digest than others. E.g. if you had either 1 liter of kale, or 1 liter of water mixed with enough ice cream to get to the same calorie count, I would predict you would be hungrier again much earlier after the ice cream slurry, while the kale would still keep your body busy. Same volume, same calories, but one of these would keep you full longer. The kale is less compressible and movable and processable, essentially.
Foods that keep you full longer than their volume alone would predict tend to be high in fibre. Foods high in fibre tend to be incidentally high in potassium. Foods highly processed, meanwhile, tend to be both low fibre, and high in salt. So you would see quite a robust correlation. But I would predict that if you ate high volume high fibre low calorie foods that are low in potassium and added salt, your fat loss would be the same. (Though you would gain water weight. But that could be dropped quickly after a week long intervention.) Examples of relatively low potassium foods that are still diet food classics and which I would expect to remain so even if paired with salt to get the ratio clearly in favour of natrium would be blueberries, cranberries, watermelon, alfalfa, celery, cucumber, onion.
So you’d see a correlation between food volume and weight loss, and a correlation between potassium sodium ratios in favour of potassium and weight loss. But the weight loss would be solely due to consuming fewer calories, because you were less hungry, because you tummy was filled with volume, and kept busy with fibre.
We can illustrate the volume issue not being causative easily. One of the most effective weight loss interventions is stomach surgery. The goal of this surgery is to reduce your effective stomach size. As a result, these people are eating a lower volume of food. Yet they lose weight. Because they are forced to stop eating sooner than they otherwise would have, or they get a stomach ache. They might eat their regular, unhealthy, incidentally high salt items—say French fries—but they can only get down a tiny quantity before they feel crammed full, and have to stop. So they lose weight.
Models also tend to avoid high volume foods during shoots, because they need their abdomen as flat as possible. And yet, they stay very skinny (though not effortlessly). They just don’t eat very much, and deal with the misery through the pressure of their job depending on it, plus tend to be tall and work out a lot, so they have more breathing room calorie wise.
That said… aiming for a diet with foods that have relatively high volume to calories tends to work well for most people who wish to reduce calories without feeling proportionally hungry. So again, I think your interpretation of the causal chain was slightly off, but your solution totally worked, and you should absolutely keep it if you like it. (I use volume changes in my food to keep my weight at its optimum, too. And many historic figures swore by it. Marilyn Monroe essentially lived off raw carrots (with some raw egg to meat her protein and fat needs) for this reason.)
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.