Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

People took some potassium and lost some weight

slimemoldtimemold.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 156 posts

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#71

Post by landemva »

vorpalhex wrote: post #57
notahacker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people that saw the most weight loss were those that also claimed the supplements reduced their appetite looks like supporting evidence for the placebo/weight-tracking effect to me (and if there is an actual mechanism linking potassium intake and appetite, it might be one which only affects the subset of people in a study with a high dropout rate that had something particularly wrong with the levels of potassium…

> why America's obesity rise can't be linked to the rise in average calorie consumption I think most (certainly not all) folks agree with the general "people gain weight because they're eating too many calories". I think the interesting question is "Why did people seem to start doing this now?" Ice cream and butter and so on are not new inventions. We as a species have never hurt for desserts or calorie dense foods.…

HFCS and seed oils were not consumed in quantity by humans 40 years ago. These seem to be linked to both inflammation and enlarging waists.

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#72

Post by spirit557 »

I don't understand the purpose of this "study" in the sense that if you practice some forms of water fasting whether for multiple days or practice eating only one meal per day OR a short 6 hour feeding window per day... you will know the role potassium plays in your body. You need water, salt, potatassium and magnesiums. If you're eating healthy whole foods your liver should have enough nutrients stored away. So basically your body is designed to go between feasting and fasting - to produce and burn ketones from your fat stores versus burning food you consume. The belief that you need to eat 3 meals a day or or snack small meals all day long (constantly producing insulin) is just nonsense. It is not that hard to supplement salt, potassium and magnesium and not eat for a day or more it is actually extremely benefifical for long term health to fast for about 3 days or more once or twice a year. Look up the fat lies by pradip jamnadas on Youtube.

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#73

Post by dbt00 »

ankaAr wrote: post #56

First thing that came on my mind was The Martian book/movie and How the guy was eating only potatoes. I need that diet now.

FWIW I did the potato diet in 2018 (Penn Jillette's book).

6'1.5" 250#.

Lost 17# in 2 weeks. Lost 35# in 2 months.

Stayed off as long as I was eating vegan, high-potato diet.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to stick with it for other reasons and I've since regained the weight. I need to cook for people for whom it's not a reasonable diet and enjoy eating meat too much.

The conceptual model here intrigues me. I'm pondering maxing potatoes but also eating whatever else I want and see if it helps.

(My coworkers literally called it the martian diet. It was funny. I would come to meetings at work eating a baked potato like an apple.)

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#74

Post by LargeCompanies »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#75

Post by squarefoot »

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 lost 50 pounds in 2020 with this one trick: I counted calories and stayed under 2100 per day.

Same here. I lost 30 Kg since Jan 2022 when I suffered a heart attack and was installed 2 stents (one more necessary but too risky at the moment). Still need to lose some more weight, although it is becoming more difficult, but counting calories does indeed work. I succeeded only because my soon-to-be wife helped me immensely, or I would have failed miserably if left by myself.

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#76

Post by nsxwolf »

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…

And here’s where the problem comes in for me - when I reach that level, where weight loss begins to be measurable, I am so miserable I can’t think about anything but food 24/7. It’s like being in a staring contest where the other person never, ever blinks.

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#77

Post by matthewdgreen »

melling wrote: post #27
Waterluvian wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 didn’t even count calories and lost 30 pounds last year. Eat less food. Stopped snacking between meals, and ate a salad for dinner a few nights a week. Also, tried to reduce my meal size, in general. Getting that hungry feeling between meals that I would always satisfy meant I was creating a deficit.

This worked beautifully for me when I was in my 20s. Now that I’m in the second half of my 40s it doesn’t work well at all. My body requires a starvation diet before I see even a little weight loss, and I can’t keep it up while remaining productive in my job.

This is one of the useful lessons of age: you essentially get to experience living in more than one body within your lifetime. Younger-me would have posted the same confident advice as you did, and it would have seemed just as intuitively obvious - how could it be wrong when I experienced it myself! But in practice for someone with a different metabolism (at any age) it’s deeply unhelpful, even demoralizing.

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#78

Post by matthewdgreen »

fbdab103 wrote: post #40
trashface wrote: post #7

If its the potassium, you could test the idea with something else like bananas. I remember hearing years ago that Weight Watchers had reformulated their diet and one of the changes was that you could eat "unlimited" bananas. My personal anecdote is I eat a lot of bananas (at least one a day almost every day) and a few potatoes and I'm actually having a bit of trouble keeping my weight _high_ enough (150lbs for 5'10"…

A quick search is showing bananas have ~400 mg potassium. The study goal was to consume 2600 mg daily potassium, or the equivalent of 6.5 bananas. Bananas also have ~100 kCals, so that would require consuming 600 kCals daily to try and hit the potassium target. It is worth remembering that potassium was identified as a potential target from their potato diet experiment. Potatoes have ~900 mg potassium.

Behold Japan’s Morning Banana Diet. Not a recommendation! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_banana_diet

Re: People took some potassium and lost some weight

#80

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

paulpauper wrote: post #20
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.

Then why not just eat nothing? That way you only have to focus on the calories out portion? Obviously, some people find it much harder at this than others. Some average-sized adult males get overweight with just 1300-1700/calories a day due to slow metabolisms or other genetic factors.

Can you post a link to that study? My first thought is that 1300 cannot be a caloric surplus. 1700 maybe if we are generous with "average-sized" and assume a completely sedentary person. To me that just sounds like people who aren't counting properly.
Post reply on HN