I would be interested to see how far down the BMI ladder the potato / potassium diet experiment can take someone.
I have read the posts you refer to as being your starting point, by Slime Mold Time Mold, discussing their potato diet experiment. Their data set has little data for how the diet works at lower BMIs : Most people who participated in the experiment had BMIs in the overweight or obese range to start with, or in the upper range of normal BMIs. Those with the lower BMIs lost less weight.
No one had a BMI in the low reaches of healthy range, as defined by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute :
BMI Categories: Underweight = <18.5 Normal weight = 18.5–24.9 Overweight = 25–29.9 Obesity = BMI of 30 or greater
The potato / potassium diet has worked for you for going from 30 BMI to 25 BMI. Would it work to go from 25 BMI to 20 BMI?
Do you intend to continue or to resume your nutritional interventions?
It would be interesting to see if the low-effort, no-hunger nutritional interventions you discuss are still efficacious at lower BMIs, or more accurately, at lower total body fat percentages.
You don’t mention being particularly athletic or a workout schedule, so I’m assuming that you have an average muscle mass. Is it the case?
For an average muscle mass and 24.5-25 BMI, on average a body of someone in their forties would have a total fat percentage of around 23%.
Body fat % table for age 40-49 sourced from Medical News Today :
Category
Percentage
dangerously low
under 8%
excellent
8–17.4%
good
17.5–20.6%
fair
20.7–23.4%
poor
23.5–26.6%
dangerously high
over 26.7%
My hypothesis is that weight loss would continue on the diet at 25 BMI, but that the rate of loss will slow down as the lower range of healthy BMIs / fat percentage is reached.
It would be interesting to see if the diet would continue to work linearly for you or if it stops at a given BMI.
Perhaps the model you are developing could calculate precisely how, in your case, the rate of weight loss maintains itself (or not) as the body goes through the range of healthy BMIs.
I’m interested to see how far this dietary approach can go, because many people are already slim (like myself, my BMI is a stable 19.5-20), but may still wish to lose ″the last″ 5-10 pounds.
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 would be interested to see how far down the BMI ladder the potato / potassium diet experiment can take someone.
I have read the posts you refer to as being your starting point, by Slime Mold Time Mold, discussing their potato diet experiment. Their data set has little data for how the diet works at lower BMIs : Most people who participated in the experiment had BMIs in the overweight or obese range to start with, or in the upper range of normal BMIs. Those with the lower BMIs lost less weight.
No one had a BMI in the low reaches of healthy range, as defined by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute :
BMI Categories:
Underweight = <18.5
Normal weight = 18.5–24.9
Overweight = 25–29.9
Obesity = BMI of 30 or greater
The potato / potassium diet has worked for you for going from 30 BMI to 25 BMI. Would it work to go from 25 BMI to 20 BMI?
Do you intend to continue or to resume your nutritional interventions?
It would be interesting to see if the low-effort, no-hunger nutritional interventions you discuss are still efficacious at lower BMIs, or more accurately, at lower total body fat percentages.
You don’t mention being particularly athletic or a workout schedule, so I’m assuming that you have an average muscle mass. Is it the case?
For an average muscle mass and 24.5-25 BMI, on average a body of someone in their forties would have a total fat percentage of around 23%.
Body fat % table for age 40-49 sourced from Medical News Today :
My hypothesis is that weight loss would continue on the diet at 25 BMI, but that the rate of loss will slow down as the lower range of healthy BMIs / fat percentage is reached.
It would be interesting to see if the diet would continue to work linearly for you or if it stops at a given BMI.
Perhaps the model you are developing could calculate precisely how, in your case, the rate of weight loss maintains itself (or not) as the body goes through the range of healthy BMIs.
I’m interested to see how far this dietary approach can go, because many people are already slim (like myself, my BMI is a stable 19.5-20), but may still wish to lose ″the last″ 5-10 pounds.
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 :)