LW - My Effortless Weightloss Story: A Quick Runthrough by CuoreDiVetro

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My Effortless Weightloss Story: A Quick Runthrough, published by CuoreDiVetro on October 1, 2023 on LessWrong.
This is Part I in a series on easy weightloss without any need for will power.
The Origin: listening to the dark corners of the internet
Loosing weight is supposed to be really hard and require a lot of willpower according to conventional wisdom. It turns out that it was actually really easy for me to go from a BMI of above 29 (30 is officially obese) to below 25 (normal is 18 to 25) in 3½ months. And knowing what I know now, I think I could easily do it again in a 1½ month.
I'm not someone who ever tried dieting before. Dieting sounded like a lot of effort and willpower for very uncertain results. Not a good use of my very limited willpower. This belief changed after reading Slime Mold Time Mold's results of their potato diet experiment.
They asked the participants in their experiment to eat only potatoes for 4 weeks to see if they would lose weight. There was no way I was going to eat only potatoes for 4 weeks, so I didn't enrol in their experiment. After reading the blogpost about their results, two things surprised me which motivated me to go on this journey.
The first surprise was that is wasn't necessary to eat only potatoes. Slime Mold Time Mold had been very gentle with their guinea pigs, and they told them "it's ok if you cheat and don't eat potatoes, just tell us when you cheat". It turned out that even people who cheated almost every day, eating something other than potatoes, ended up loosing a lot of weight and there wasn't even that clear of a trend between weightloss and number of cheat days (see Figure 1). So a strict eat-only-potatoes-diet which is something I would never do, didn't seem to be necessary.
Figure 1: Weightloss of participants as a function of the number of days (out of a total of 28) where they cheated (i.e. ate other things than potatoes). Source.
The second surprise was that people's weight seemed to go down linearly, not attaining a plateau, at least for the 4 weeks of the experiment. I was expecting diminishing returns as people started to lose weight, that further weightloss would slow down but their data didn't seem to indicate any slowdown. I was super curious to find out how long such a linear weightloss could go for. As we will see later, linear weightloss went on for me for a surprisingly long time.
Figure 2: Weightloss as a function of time on the potato diet. The blue line is those who completed the whole 28 days of the trial while the red line is those who dropped out before the end. Source.
Somehow, before starting my experiment, more wisdom from some dark and seemingly unreliable corner of the interwebz came to my attention, the following tweet by some Mickey Shaughnessy: . The tweet claims that the cause of obesity might be related to the potassium:sodium ratio in the diet. That earlier diets had a very high potassium to sodium diet in comparison to the modern euro-north-american diet. That maybe the potato diet works because potatoes are very high in potassium.
This is a super interesting hypothesis, that it's all about the potassium sodium ratio. This is also something that would be interesting and relatively easy to investigate. So we will try to investigate that a bit in this blogpost series.
So of course, at the time I didn't check the source of this tweeted statement, I just went with whatever was written by an unknown person on the internet. But now that I'm writing this blogpost, I thought it might be nice to check a bit.
It turns out that Mickey Shaughnessy had the idea of it being related to the K:Na (potassium to sodium) ratio because of the Slime Mold Time Mold blogpost about Li (Lithium) having an effect on obesity and both sodium and potassium being very similar chemically to Li (the same column in...