Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you get through the initial pains? Hunger is absolutely intolerable for me. When I go out for breakfast I will often have two eggs...and a couple of big pieces of toast, mushrooms, hash browns, spinach etc. I have great difficulty believing that two eggs alone would be sufficient.
It’s so weird how different we can be. I pretty much never get hungry. I eat because I’d die and I can only enjoy food having consumed massive doses of thc. I wish Soylent was more trustworthy or the jetsons pill was real. It means I can lose weight very easily but combined with severe adhd before I was married I was often in trouble and hospitalized a couple times. Now my wife keeps an eye on me to make sure I eat a…
Thoughts on the potato diet
521–529 of 529 posts
Re: Thoughts on the potato diet
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...
Thanks! I'm not completely sold on the lithium hypothesis, either. But I find their arguments for some kind of environmental contaminant compelling, especially for the ways in which they refute some of the other major hypotheses for the increase in body weights (e.g. food variety, processed food, etc) Note that the SMTM folks recently published an article responding to the TDS data referred to by "It's Probably Not L…
That SMTM post only addresses 5 of the ~17 studies about food lithium concentration that I mentioned in my post. It ignores several studies that did not use ICP-MS to measure lithium and found very low concentrations of it in food.
Moreover, as samatman mentioned, the post doesn't seem to understand that wet and dry weights are substantively different measures, and cites Magalhães et al. (1990) and Hullin, Kapel, and Drinkall (1969) as if they were reporting wet weight measurements of lithium, when they're reporting dry weight measurements. This makes a huge difference, because watercress (measured in Magalhães et al. (1990)) and lettuce (measured in Hullin, Kapel, and Drinkall (1969)) are both over 90% water by weight.
So that post is largely just based on cherry-picking and misrepresentation of studies.
Moreover, as far as I could tell, only *two* of their sources *actually attempt to estimate dietary lithium intake*, whereas almost all of my ~17 sources do. This is important because the SMTM post references a lot of studies that are not available on the internet, so we don't know whether they reported lithium concentration in dry or wet weight of food. Moreover, one of those sources based its estimation on hair lithium concentration rather than actual food measurements, using a regression model whose accuracy at low levels of dietary intake is unknown.
The vast majority of studies that actually attempt to estimate dietary lithium intake based on lithium concentration in food estimate it to be lower than 100 mcg/day, regardless of methodology. The only exceptions I am aware of are two studies from Manfred Anke.
Re: Thoughts on the potato diet
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mark Pimentel's lab which studies disorders of the gut has hypothesized that people with extremely slow transit times can absorb 2-3x the amount of energy from food in comparison to people with regular transit times. I think there is a high amount of variability; and importantly in the context of losing weight, people who are overweight often have slow intestinal transit due to their dysregulated gut microflora. I'm…
is it just caloric absorption, or are various essential nutrients also absorbed more and less? asking because coffee can speed up my transit time dramatically, and I'm always down for cutting calories!
Re: Thoughts on the potato diet
#524There's actually some science behind this diet. Potatoes are the highest scoring food on the satiety index. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/15-incredibly-filling-f... Basically they're the most filling food per calorie. So if you subscribe to the idea that losing weight is mainly about how many calories you consume, a potato heavy diet should be effective. And an all potato diet, while monomaniacal, even more ef…
The biggest parts to losing weight are the things you didn't mention - portion size, snacks, alcohol, and sugary drinks. Most people would lose weight on any diet diet if they control those. I think I've lost about 20 pounds over the past 2 months just from reducing those things (not even eliminating).
Re: Thoughts on the potato diet
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right and wrong. Many obese people have done this and lost weight... and then gained it right back again. Over, and over again. There is a persistent myth that the obese person lacks some spiritual strength or willpower. I think your comment implies this. And yet they do have the willpower to lose weight? And something happened in 1980 which turned 30% of adults into weak-willed moral degenerates, and more and…
My favorite hypothesis is that it is big refrigerators at home and perhaps widespread use of preservatives that made people fat as it provided uninterrupted access to high calorie food like meat, cookies etc.
Re: Thoughts on the potato diet
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
Family history of developing type 2 diabetes. I take the CGM results as a sign of my pancreas having to pump out insulin to counter the blood sugar. From what I understand, consistently exceeding certain level (110/120? forgot) for prolonged periods (an hour was the warning given by the device) eventually leads to insulin resistance.
I see, sounds reasonable. I definitely learned a lot about how my body responds to different foods and other reasons glucose can rise (besides food, glucose also rises in response to metabolic activity). Which CGM are you using? I have a Dexcom, which has configurable alarm thresholds. I have type 1 diabetes. Generally I try to avoid being over 140 for very long, and over 200 is considered dangerous. My Tandem insuli…
Levels just puts a nice UI on top of Librelink, like scoring meals and days, finding associations between meals and giving you tips.
I stopped using these because they are expensive (at least 100 per month if I only used Librelink, think it depends on country as my moms buys hers in Colombia not the US) and I was just looking to learn about certain meals/timing/etc.
Re: Thoughts on the potato diet
#527Re: Thoughts on the potato diet
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Potatoes are so utterly boring. That is exactly the point. Dieting should be boring: Figure out what your nutrition your body needs and move on with your life to spend time thinking about other things.
I completely disagree. Boring diets only increase the chance of relapse. It's perfectly possible to diet on enjoyable food if you do some research. And it will be much easier to stick to it.
For me, two weeks of plain potatoes, a little oil, and one piccolo per day was to reset my unhealthy relationship with food. I avoided common toppings (sour cream, bacon, cheese) and anything to flavour them up (salt, rosemary, thyme).
After a couple of weeks, I found I was no longer desperately craving the flavours I previously did. I attribute this solely to the blandness of the food - potatoes being the delivery method is just incidental.
Re: Thoughts on the potato diet
#529potato diet?!?! what is this. Can we just come out and say, the recent increase in price of food is too damn high instead of hiding it behind a veneer of clever diets that choose lesser costing food?