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People took some potassium and lost some weight

slimemoldtimemold.com

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Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#81

Post by josephcsible »

JackFr wrote: post #66
actionablefiber wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is that it works well enough, most of the time, for most people. If you are trying to lose weight, you do not need an exact formula to compute the derivative of your weight with respect to time; you need a mental model of your diet and metabolism that moves you toward your goal. CICO basically tells you to look at your two most important levers for doing that (how much you eat and how much you move) and ad…

But people have an extremely poor mental model of calories out. In particular there is a great misunderstanding with respect to the role of exercise. It’s not the calories you burn during the period of exercise, rather it’s the changes to your body that exercise causes that encourage weight loss.

You don't need to have a good model of calories out. Just keep track of calories in and your weight over time, and reduce calories in until you're losing weight at an acceptable rate.

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#82

Post by srcreigh »

kleinsch wrote: post #44

Non-randomized sample and lots of reaching for stat-sig in the analysis. I gave up when they threw out the non-stat-sig result for their success criteria (29 days) and claimed victory bc 28 days was stat sig.

This is incorrect. The article had significant results for 2 groups (everybody and a subset of the participants) on the 29 day result, and also had significant result when looking at 28 days.

They claimed the opposite - since multiple end points and groups all had significant weight loss, it’s not p hacking

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#83

Post by onphonenow »

jwiz wrote: post #58
8note wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The missing measurement is how many calories you poop, and what relationships exist between what and how much you eat to the amount of calories you poop

You just track calories in, and weight. If you stop losing weight, reduce calories in. It doesn't matter if you "have a slow metabolism" or whatever, because that just means you don't get to eat as much as someone else who weighs the same as you. There are confounding factors so that you can't predict how much weight will be lost by a given calorie deficit. But that doesn't matter. You will lose weight if you eat les…

Just mixing in salads with some protein I love doing. We grow lettuce- you can dress it and then spend time chatting and crunching lettuce. It passes the time. No idea if it’s actually low calorie but a lot of roughage may help you move stuff out too?

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#84

Post by Beaver117 »

eitland wrote: post #60
dgfitz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m quite surprised you haven’t been accosted with the “calories in, calories out isn’t real” yet. Fwiw it is how I and others I know have lost significant amounts of weight. There was a “keto” thread on hn the other day and holy moly was keto/calories in, calories out attacked and rebuked.

I think I realized two things a while ago: 1. calories in / calories out is true when calories are around what you need or below. If you go above, a lot it the excess calories will, for many of us, just leave unused. 2. Many people consume a lot morr calories than they think, but because of 1. it can hide itself. When some of them cut a lot of calories (not count exactly how many they eat in total, but just cut the s…

Yeah this is why competitive eaters such as Matt Stonie stay lean while eating 20,000+ calories. His body will waste most of that, and he'll spend the rest of the week exercising and eating healthy.

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#85

Post by Gatsky »

After seeing this proposal a month ago, I contacted the authors of the large SSaSS randomized trial [1] (n ~ 21,000) which compared a potassium salt substitute (75% sodium, 25% potassium) to normal salt. There was no reduction in BMI in the potassium group.

Now the amount of potassium consumed was not directly measured, but assumed to be 20g salt substitute per day which equates to 5g KCL or about 2.5g potassium. This was enough to have other biological effects like reducing stroke risk, and was more than most people took in the slimemold study.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2105675

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#86

Post by hahajk »

8note wrote: post #55
Retric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some of us have far wider margins for how generously our body will burn off or otherwise not hold on to those calories. That’s always seemed like a nonsensical rebuttal. Nobody is actually measuring how many calories they burn per day or the actual content of their food down to 4 decimal places, but you can quickly get a baseline based on comparing rates of weight loss and total calories consumed because the differ…

The missing measurement is how many calories you poop, and what relationships exist between what and how much you eat to the amount of calories you poop

Actually you lose most of your mass through carbon dioxide, through breathing. (And similarly, trees and plants get almost all their mass through carbon dioxide, not the soil.)

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#87

Post by mym1990 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

Any time you have people start tracking their weight, it’s not surprising that they might start paying attention to their diet and lose some weight. Without a placebo or control group, these numbers aren’t really useful.

For me, I simply started tracking what I ate in terms of calorie count, and didn't focus so much on the day to day/week to week weight change. It helped out a lot in generally bringing to light what a "big" day looks like and vice-versa.

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#88

Post by raffraffraff »

Waterluvian wrote: post #9
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

Any time you have people start tracking their weight, it’s not surprising that they might start paying attention to their diet and lose some weight. Without a placebo or control group, these numbers aren’t really useful.

I lost 50 pounds in 2020 with this one trick: I counted calories and stayed under 2100 per day. I didn’t even pay attention to what kinds of food I ate. That came automatically as I would look at a treat and think, “130 calories? That’s so expensive.” I naturally learned what foods made me feel full for longer. It was fun. Diet can be complicated, but I have a feeling that for most of us, it really doesn’t need to be…

I used an app with a barcode scanner and a huge library of products. It not only tracked calories but gave a nice daily count on fat, protein, carbs and sugar. Simply staying under 2100 calories will drop your weight. No doubt!

However, if you want to be able to maintain that long-term, you need to figure out what to eat so that you get the right balance of carbs, sugars, fats and protein. If you don't then you're either gonna be continually hungry or malnourished (or probably both).

By using the app long-term I developed a set of recipes (that can be modified so I don't get bored) which make up my foundational diet. This is now sustainable without the app, and without cognitive load or will power.

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#89

Post by slowmovintarget »

22c wrote: post #47
Waterluvian wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thermodynamics is thermodynamics. However what I think people are meaning to argue is that “just don’t eat as much” can be akin to saying, “just stop being depressed.” It can basically be impossible if not dangerous for some. Also, our calorie furnaces all work a bit differently. Thermodynamics laws hold, but some of us have far wider margins for how generously our body will burn off or otherwise not hold on to those…

People also seem to think that "calories out" == "exercise" which it doesn't. For example, if you ate gasoline encased in glass marbles, you'd be eating a lot of calories. The body wouldn't use much of it, though! It's not really widely understood how much the caloric content of our food is actually converted to fat.

Calories out means exhaling carbon dioxide (that's the end of the chemical reaction chain of burning fat). So exercise certainly helps.
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