I think there are some very strong selection effects involved in the info that generated your priors about weight loss.
It is in the interests of the diet industry to make people think weight loss is hard, and specifically that there is a secret they know and you don’t, or a product only they can provide.
The people who talk about how hard weight loss is are largely the ones struggling with it. They’re the ones thinking and talking about it for longer spans of time, and the ones that have the most need to be involved in a community talking about weight loss.
Much of the diet industry is also targeting the people for whom weight loss is hard, for obvious reasons.
I genuinely don’t know how far your results generalize to other people but would like to find out. My guess is not very far. But I think you’re analytical approach makes sense. Whether or not people used to eat different amounts of salt or K/NA ratio, we used to eat more food, and more fresh food, period. So as long as you ate the same mix and amount of foods as everyone geographically and genetically close to you had eaten for generations, and did similar work all day, you were going to be fine, and have enough of the various micronutrients that your body would deal with it well enough.
Of course, for everyone who is overweight, there is a(t least one) reason. The most common reason is “eating too much” and those people can lose weight by fixing that problem in a number of ways; they’ll differ widely in which of those ways will be easier or harder for them. Other easy to fix reasons include “inactivity,” “not enough water,” and “poor or insufficient sleep.” But there is a subset of people for whom that’s not the case. Some people find that reducing calorie intake and increasing activity doesn’t lead to weight loss, unless they push one or the other to (or close to) dangerous levels. That’s when you have to start thinking about micronutrients, fiber, electrolytes, refined sugars/starches/fats, omega 3⁄6 ratios, probiotics and prebiotics, meal size and timing, and a whole bunch of other things that seem to matter for some people but not others in a way that’s inconsistent between individuals and sometimes really hard to puzzle out for any given individual.
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).
I have a pet hypothesis that weight loss intervention studies are done almost entirely on
people highly resistant to weight loss (because people try multiple interventions before signing up for science), and that’s why the are so many programs with great anecdotal support that fail in rcts.
note: now pretty sure watermelon was necessary for the weight loss, and unclear if potatoes contribute or not. There are more complications but I don’t think this changes your larger point
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?
Define consistent? It’s definitely consistent with my broader experience that very little in weight loss or food in general makes sense. I can come up with stories that the key in me was potassium delivered in a high fiber/low cal package, but I put that as less likely than fiber + water + slow release sugar.
Ya. I think you are right about those 3 points influencing my priors about weight loss in a biased way.
However, and at this point I only have anectodal evidence for this, but I think (75% probability) that even the majority (50% + ) of people who have had a hard time losing weight could easily lose weight with a few easy guidlines that deal with 3 of what I think are very common causes for over-eating (Potassium deficiency / Sodium over-consumption in modern diet being one of the 3). The anectotal evidence I have for this is that most people on the potato diet lost weight, including many people who had tried to lose weight for a long time but failed. The other is that when I talked to some people who have always been thin, and I told them what I think works, they said that they have always been doing that naturally.
I think there are some very strong selection effects involved in the info that generated your priors about weight loss.
It is in the interests of the diet industry to make people think weight loss is hard, and specifically that there is a secret they know and you don’t, or a product only they can provide.
The people who talk about how hard weight loss is are largely the ones struggling with it. They’re the ones thinking and talking about it for longer spans of time, and the ones that have the most need to be involved in a community talking about weight loss.
Much of the diet industry is also targeting the people for whom weight loss is hard, for obvious reasons.
I genuinely don’t know how far your results generalize to other people but would like to find out. My guess is not very far. But I think you’re analytical approach makes sense. Whether or not people used to eat different amounts of salt or K/NA ratio, we used to eat more food, and more fresh food, period. So as long as you ate the same mix and amount of foods as everyone geographically and genetically close to you had eaten for generations, and did similar work all day, you were going to be fine, and have enough of the various micronutrients that your body would deal with it well enough.
Of course, for everyone who is overweight, there is a(t least one) reason. The most common reason is “eating too much” and those people can lose weight by fixing that problem in a number of ways; they’ll differ widely in which of those ways will be easier or harder for them. Other easy to fix reasons include “inactivity,” “not enough water,” and “poor or insufficient sleep.” But there is a subset of people for whom that’s not the case. Some people find that reducing calorie intake and increasing activity doesn’t lead to weight loss, unless they push one or the other to (or close to) dangerous levels. That’s when you have to start thinking about micronutrients, fiber, electrolytes, refined sugars/starches/fats, omega 3⁄6 ratios, probiotics and prebiotics, meal size and timing, and a whole bunch of other things that seem to matter for some people but not others in a way that’s inconsistent between individuals and sometimes really hard to puzzle out for any given individual.
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).
I have a pet hypothesis that weight loss intervention studies are done almost entirely on people highly resistant to weight loss (because people try multiple interventions before signing up for science), and that’s why the are so many programs with great anecdotal support that fail in rcts.
note: now pretty sure watermelon was necessary for the weight loss, and unclear if potatoes contribute or not. There are more complications but I don’t think this changes your larger point
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.
My overall potassium over the last year+
I was losing weight from July to November in 2022, and August 2023 -now, so potassium doesn’t look like an obvious driver.
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?
Define consistent? It’s definitely consistent with my broader experience that very little in weight loss or food in general makes sense. I can come up with stories that the key in me was potassium delivered in a high fiber/low cal package, but I put that as less likely than fiber + water + slow release sugar.
Ya. I think you are right about those 3 points influencing my priors about weight loss in a biased way.
However, and at this point I only have anectodal evidence for this, but I think (75% probability) that even the majority (50% + ) of people who have had a hard time losing weight could easily lose weight with a few easy guidlines that deal with 3 of what I think are very common causes for over-eating (Potassium deficiency / Sodium over-consumption in modern diet being one of the 3). The anectotal evidence I have for this is that most people on the potato diet lost weight, including many people who had tried to lose weight for a long time but failed. The other is that when I talked to some people who have always been thin, and I told them what I think works, they said that they have always been doing that naturally.