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.
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.