Cuore di Vetro is one of my favourite Gelato places, it is located in Berlin near Rosa-Luxemburg Platz. Another great Gelato place in the world is Gelato Blue in Newton, Sydney, Australia, it is the only vegan ice-cream I know of which is on par with normal ice-cream, and this one is so good it is on par with Gelato in Italy.
CuoreDiVetro
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Yes. That is still planned!!! I’m just very bad at writing.
Primer: I’ve been collecting more data since and something super weird happened. I tried to gain more weight again to redo experiments, it was suprisingly harder than expected to gain more weight, but I managed. But super weird. After gaining more weight, going back on the half-assed potato diet didn’t work as well anymore. I still didn’t manage to loose the weight I intentionally gained! If I went on a total potato I would loose weight. But the semi-potato diet is not enough to compensate the days where I go to a party (or there is some sort of event with lots of food)! Super interesting because previously the semi-potato diet could easy compensate for those big meals days.
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.
This is coherent with my experience. I’m pretty sure there are other problems solved by self-deception other than hostile telepaths. One other such problems solved by self-deception which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen in people is preserving motivation: if something is really important for me and I need to put in a lot of effort to make it happen and probability of success is very low (let’s say epsilon), and if know that the probability of success is epsilon would totally annihilate my motivation to work towards it, then maybe hiding to myself that low probability safeguards my motivation to put in all the work necessary.
Think here at a situation where there is an natural catastrophe, and someone’s loved one is caught below the rubble, the person refusing to believe that the person might be dead and doing everything to remove the rubble as fast as possible.
Maybe this is also where the planning fallacy comes from in some cases.