weight-loss

Philosophical Transactions: Potato Serendipity (and FODMAP testing)

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In the beginning, scientific articles were just letters. Eventually Henry Oldenburg started pulling some of these letters together and printing them as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the first scientific journal. In continuance of this hallowed tradition, here at SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD we occasionally publish our own correspondence as a new generation of philosophical transactions.

Today’s correspondence is from a husband and wife who wish to remain anonymous. This account has been lightly edited for clarity, but what appears below is otherwise the original report as we received it. 

The potato diet has mostly been used for weight loss, but it’s also notable for involving mostly one food and being close to nutritionally complete, which means you can use it as an elimination diet to study things like food triggers. We’ve been interested in this idea for a long time, and we find this case study particularly compelling because it’s a rare example of someone doing just that!

Since around 2018, K had been suffering from stomach pain, bloating, gas, and chronic constipation. Chronic constipation worsened after two pregnancies, so K sought medical intervention again in Feb 2025. K was prescribed medication (Linzess) to treat the constipation, which initially improved symptoms but was unreliable and had unpleasant side effects. She had been on that medication for 1 month before starting the potato diet.

Family and friends were bewildered to hear our plan, warning us of muscle loss and blood sugar problems since potatoes are ‘bad’.

Her initial goal was to lose 5-10 pounds from a starting BMI of 23.4 and test out the claims we read online about the diet. K actually joked, “wouldn’t it be funny if this diet fixes my stomach problems?”

We started the diet on 21MAR2025. The first two and a half days were 100% potato for both of us. Morale was suffering by the afternoon of day 3, so we caved and had a potato-heavy dinner with our kids. Afterwards, we agreed to eat only potatoes until dinner so we could still have a normal family meal time. We did make sure potatoes featured heavily in the weekly meal plan.

Within a week, K noticed improved symptoms and regularity without any medication. Initially, she thought she might have a lactose intolerance, so she switched to lactose-free milk and quit the potato diet once we reached the end of our planned testing window.

Back on a regular diet (but still avoiding lactose), K’s symptoms came back worse, with constant stomach aches and bloating. K realized that she had unintentionally been on a low-FODMAP diet while on the potato diet and decided to do intolerance testing. 

Her methodology for intolerance testing follows:

  1. Ate a high-potato, low FODMAP diet until minimal symptoms were present.
  2. Used NHS FODMAP rechallenging protocol to isolate FODMAP groups (lactose, fructans from wheat, fructans from onions, fructans from garlic, fructans from fruit, fructose, galactooligosaccharides, sorbitol, mannitol, fructose + sorbitol) and identify foods to use for testing each group
  3. Spent 3 days of rechallenging per group: day 1 – small portion, day 2 – med portion, day 3 – large portion of challenge food (ex: 1/4 cup milk, 1/2 cup milk, 1 cup milk)
  4. Kept daily log of symptoms and severity
  5. Allowed 3 days of ‘washout’ after rechallenging
  6. Rechallenged next food group, but did not incorporate challenged foods into diet to avoid multiple FODMAP effects
  7. If symptoms appeared after a food challenge, waited till symptoms subsided and repeated the rechallenge over another 3 days

Incorporating lots of potatoes allowed K to test out food groups while still eating a well-balanced diet. The culprit for K is fructans from wheat, which is why cutting out daily servings of wheat has made her symptoms disappear.

K is finishing FODMAP testing (still a couple more groups to go), but has had reliable relief from all symptoms without any meds. Potatoes are a regular addition to meals these days. 

Below is the blank version of the log she used.

Philosophical Transactions: DECADENT Reader Reports Losing 50 Pounds Eating Buttery, Cheesy Potatoes

slimemoldtimemold, , , , , , , , , , , , 13 Comments

Previous Philosophical Transactions:

This account has been lightly edited for clarity, but what appears below is otherwise the original report as we received it. 

Hi Slimes,

I’ve recently wrapped up a year-long weight loss self-experiment. During this time I lost 50 lbs, most of it on a Potatoes + Dairy version of the potato diet.

This corroborates your recent case studies where Potatoes + Dairy caused just about as much weight loss as the standard potato diet. It certainly worked well for me. I found the diet really enjoyable, my meals were always delicious. I didn’t get tired of the potatoes, they remain one of my favorite foods. And there were a few other interesting findings as well, all described below.

I’m a longtime reader of the blog so this is me sending you my report, which you can publish if you like. Please list me as “Cole” (not my real name). I hope you find it helpful.

Background

First, my demographics. I’m a white male American in my early-mid 30s. I’m about 5 feet 11 inches tall, but I have a large frame. While you should feel free to calculate my BMI at any point, I don’t think it’s a very accurate measure of adiposity in my case. 

My first baseline is in mid 2022, when I weighed about 220 lbs. I know this because I tried a version of the potato diet at the time and lost about 10 lbs over about 40 days. I wasn’t seriously concerned with my weight at the time, I was mostly just curious about the potato diet and what it feels like “from the inside”. But this turned out to be relevant later on because it let me know that I’m a potato diet responder. 

In mid 2022 I was about to start a new job, one that involved a lot of hard work, stress, and late nights, and also a longer commute / a lot more driving than I am used to (I mention this because I’m sympathetic to the hypothesis that obesity is linked to motor vehicle exposure in some way).

I didn’t notice at first, but after starting this new job, I started to gain weight. Around April 2024, I realized that I weighed almost 250 lbs. This was heavier than I had ever been before, and also quite uncomfortable. For anyone who’s never gained 10+ lbs before, let me tell you, it makes everything in your life just a little more difficult, including things like sleeping, and that sucks.

But this crisis turned into an opportunity: I was about to change jobs again, this time to a job with much more reasonable hours and that required almost no driving. I wanted to lose the weight anyways, so I decided to take this opportunity to run a series of diet experiments and investigate some of the findings you’ve presented on the blog. 

The Experiment

I began the study on May 12, 2024, with a starting weight of 247.6 lbs. Per previous potato diet experiments, I weighed myself in my underwear every morning for consistency. 

To track my weight and my progress, I used a google sheet based on the one you shared from Krinn’s self-experiment with drinking high doses of potassium. I found her columns tracking 7-day average, personal best, and “ratchet” to be pretty helpful. Would recommend for anyone else trying a weight loss self-experiment. 

I didn’t start any new exercise habit, though as I mentioned, I did start a new job and was driving less, I no longer had a weekly commute. So it’s possible that some of the weight loss is from “lifestyle changes” but I don’t think it could be much. According to my phone I’ve averaged about 7,000 steps per day the entire time, while gaining the weight and then while losing it. 

The self-experiment can be broken into three main phases: the high-potassium brine phase, the Potatoes + Dairy phase, and a short run-out phase at the end.

Potassium

I had already lost some weight on the potato diet in the past, so from the perspective of pure science, starting with the potato diet didn’t seem very interesting. Instead, I figured I would investigate the hypothesis that high doses of potassium are part of the reason the potato diet causes weight loss.

For the first 147 days of the experiment, I tried different high-potassium brines, and lost about 12 lbs. 

All brines started with a base of two 591 ml blue Gatorades, mixed in a liter bottle with whatever dry electrolytes or other ingredients I was trying. Potassium was always added as KCl in the form of Nu-Salt.

I tried a wide variety of different brine mixtures, using different amounts of KCl as well as NaCl, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), magnesium malate, iodine (as Lugol’s 2% solution), and glycine powder. But I don’t think these mixtures are worth reporting individually, because I wasn’t able to seriously distinguish between them. Regardless of the mix, I mostly kept losing weight at a very slow pace.

My impression is that magnesium is important, and that brines with added sodium work better than brines without, but I’m the first to admit that the data isn’t strong enough to back this intuition up. The most I can say is that I seemed to lose weight in kind of a sine-wave pattern, which you can see on the graph. These ups and downs roughly lined up with the 14-day cycles where I tried different brine recipes (i.e. I tried most recipes for 2 weeks), but I might have imagined a pattern where in reality there were just natural fluctuations.

While I originally hoped to get around 10,000 mg a day of potassium from my brine, like Krinn did, this wasn’t possible. I found doses above 6,600 mg/day K hard to drink, so I settled at that dosage, reasoning that Krinn lost weight even at lower doses. 

In general, the brines made me feel weird. I sometimes became anxious, sometimes fatigued, sometimes got headaches, and sometimes it did weird things to my sense of smell. I did sometimes feel very energetic, and sometimes it seriously reduced my appetite. Some days I ate almost nothing and had almost no appetite. But even with a clear reduction in my appetite, even when I was eating very little, I didn’t lose much weight. (This itself was kind of striking.) 

In terms of results, 12 lbs isn’t nothing. But over 147 days, it’s only about 0.08 lbs lost per day. That’s not very much. 

I take this as evidence in favor of the hypothesis that high doses of potassium are part of why the potato diet causes weight loss. Even on only 6,600 mg/day K, I experienced many of the effects of the potato diet (reduced appetite, weird anxiety) and I did lose some weight, though not much. 

But I also think my results suggest that potassium may not be enough, and that the “potato weight loss effect” really comes from something like high doses of potassium plus something else in potatoes / with potatoes—maybe high doses of magnesium, maybe sufficient sodium to balance the potassium, etc. 

Potatoes & Dairy

The brine seemed to work, but my rate of weight loss was really slow. It seemed like it was time to try the potato diet. In addition to hopefully losing more weight, I saw two benefits. 

First, I could compare the effect of the brine directly to the effect of the potato diet, to see if I was already losing weight as fast as I could, or if there was something missing from the formula.

Second, I could test out the success of Potatoes + Dairy. The original potato diet was very strict, but by this point you had already reported a few case studies where people had lost a lot of weight on versions of the potato diet where they also ate various kinds of dairy. 

My version of Potatoes + Dairy was decadent. Every meal was potatoes, but I always added as much butter, cheese, and sour cream as I wanted, which was usually a lot. For a while I made a lot of scalloped potatoes, but eventually I got lazy and from that point on I mostly ate baked potatoes or turned old baked potatoes into homefries. I didn’t get tired of this because butter is great. 

When I didn’t have time to prepare potatoes, I would have cheese, milk, or ice cream as a snack. Yes, I ate as much ice cream as I wanted, and still lost weight (which is in line with the literature).

In case anyone wants to replicate my approach, my mainstays were:

  • Kerrygold salted butter, or occasionally Cabot salted butter
  • Cabot sour cream
  • Cabot cheeses, especially Cabot Seriously Sharp Cheddar Cheese 
  • Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, most often Peanut Butter Cup

Despite this decadence, I lost about 40 lbs more over 187 days.

Looking closer, the weight loss really happened over two spans, one before the 2024 December holidays, and one after. I first lost about 16 lbs over 75 days, gained about 8 of that back during late December and January, then lost about 28 lbs over the next 86 days. At the point of greatest descent (early March 2025), I lost 10 lbs in two weeks. 

I wasn’t very strict and I did cheat pretty often. My notes mention times and places that I had pizza, candy, or sometimes burritos. Sometimes I had cheat meals where I would go out to lunch or get hot pot with friends. Sometimes I went on dates, where I ate normal food. This mostly didn’t make a difference as long as I also kept up with the potatoes. 

You might think that potatoes are a neutral food, and they just help you survive while your body returns to normal, or something. But my sense is that potatoes actively cause the weight loss. On days where I didn’t prepare potatoes, and mostly just snacked on ice cream and cheese, I didn’t seem to gain much weight back, but I didn’t lose it, either. 

This leads to another counterintuitive recommendation: the potato diet can really reduce your appetite, sometimes to the point where you don’t want to eat. But I think that you actually lose more weight on days where you eat potatoes than on days where you don’t eat at all. So if your goal is to lose weight, don’t assume that not eating is a good strategy—eat your taters.

I’m pretty confident that the potato diet was causing the weight loss, in part because I started losing weight right when I switched from brine to potatoes. Also, when I cheated for more than just a meal or two, it was obvious on the graph. Halloween, Thanksgiving week, and the December Holidays stand out in particular. Here’s version of the graph with those days singled out:

My holiday weight re-gain continued well into January because I was travelling and helping to organize some professional conferences, and I wasn’t able to keep up with the potatoes very well. As soon as I got back on potatoes around Jan 20, my weight started dropping again, this time faster than before. 

I was pretty surprised when I blew past not only 220 lbs, but 210 lbs. I had thought that 220-210 might be the healthy range for me, and expected the diet to stall out there. But instead I blew past those milestones. Turns out that 220 lbs is at least 20 lbs overweight for me. I had no idea, because I felt pretty healthy at 220, but I guess I had forgotten what it was like to be a normal weight.

Run-Out

I first dropped below 200 lbs on March 20, 2025. Soon after that, my weight started to plateau, never falling much below 200 lbs but showing no signs of increasing. 

I also noticed that I suddently started craving foods that weren’t potatoes, something that I hadn’t experienced on the previous 170 days. First I started craving fruit, and the next day, I started seriously craving Mexican food. Soon I was craving broccoli and chocolate.

This made me think that I might have reached a plateau, possibly my “natural” weight. According to BMI I am still “overweight” at < 200 lbs, and I am definitely not “lean”. But I do feel trim, and the girl I’ve been dating keeps putting her hands on my chest and talking about how good I look, so I’ll take this as some evidence that “just under 200 lbs” is a reasonable weight for me. 

Because I already seemed to have hit a plateau, I decided to spend the last 31 days on a run-out period to see what would happen as I eased off the diet. During this time I still ate potatoes pretty often, but I started bringing in other foods, and I went whole days without eating any potatoes at all. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn’t gain back the weight as I relaxed the diet. 

I do kind of wonder if my weight would have fallen even further if I had remained on Potatoes + Dairy, but the fact that I was developing cravings for other food suggests to me that I had encountered a real state change. It might have been possible to force my weight lower, but the magic of the potato diet is that the weight loss happens without any force. If you start forcing things, you’re back in the territory of restriction diets. 

I officially ended the experiment on May 12, 2025, 365 days after I started, weighing 198.8 lbs. This was down from an original high of 247.6 lbs, and my all-time low was 194.4 lbs on April 22nd. 

I’ll probably keep eating a diet high in potatoes, since even after several months, I still love them very much (and you wouldn’t believe how much I’ve saved in groceries). But I seem to have reached a plateau and a healthy weight, and also, while potatoes are powerful, they come at a terrible cost (mostly joking but read on).

A Few Things People Should Know

Hair Loss

When you lose a lot of weight very quickly, you often lose some hair. I’d never heard of this before but apparently it’s common knowledge among women. Who knew? It’s called “telogen effluvium” and it definitely happened to me. In early January, after my first period of intense Potato + Dairy weight loss, I noticed my hair was seriously thinning on top and in the back. 

The good news is that hair lost in this way usually grows back on its own, though it can take a couple of months. That seems to be happening for me too. My hair is clearly thicker now than it was in January. And it’s pretty weird: looking at my scalp, I can see short hairs and even some very short hairs mixed in among the long ones. While my head hasn’t returned to normal yet, the hair is clearly growing back.

So in the end this doesn’t seem to be a serious concern. And it’s not specific to the potato diet, this just happens when you lose weight really fast. Even so, anyone who wants to copy my results should be aware that this might happen, but also that it’s usually temporary. 

Emotional Effects

Some people get really intense negative feelings of fear or anxiety while on the potato diet. This also happened to me. 

I’m glad I read Birb’s account of her experience with the potato diet before trying it for myself, because it really prepared me for my own experience. Here’s what she said: 

To anyone who wants to do this diet, or is considering it after the benefits I described above: I encourage you to do it, but please be extra cautious that your mental state might be altered and that you are not necessarily in your right mind. The feelings you experience during this diet may not be how you actually feel.

Like I said above, potato diet is fucking weird. I mention this and the above because towards the end of the third week, I found myself crying every day. I was having actual meltdowns… five days in a row. 

I am not talking “oh I am so sad, let a single tear roll down my cheek while I stare out of a window on a rainy day” levels of gloom and general depression. I am talking “at one point I couldn’t fold some of my laundry in a way that was acceptable to me, and this made me think I should kill myself, so I started crying”. 

Is this a really dark to drop in the middle of a sort of lighthearted post about potato diet? Yes. I am sorry if you are uncomfortable reading it. Personally, I think I have a responsibility to talk about it, because the mentally weird aspect of this diet cannot be stressed enough.

My experience was somewhat different from Birb’s, manifesting more as a sense of overwhelming dread or doom than as a feeling of depression. And unlike Birb, I didn’t start to seriously feel this way until several months into the diet. But I definitely recognize her description.

As far as I could tell, these feelings were somewhat related to how quickly I was losing weight, though maybe not in the way you expect. The faster I was losing weight, the more of an overwhelming sense of doom I felt. Hooray. That said, it wasn’t a very strong relationship. I still felt the doom during times when I was cheating on the diet, and even when I was losing a lot of weight, I sometimes felt ok. 

I suspect that these feelings may have something to do with how the body uses epinephrine and norepinephrine to release energy from adipose tissue, which would explain why you feel so crazy anxious and such intense dread when actively losing the most weight, but I’m not a doctor™.

The feelings might also be the result of a vitamin or mineral deficiency. We know that the potato diet is deficient in Vitamin A, and while I wasn’t rigorous about testing this, I found that eating some sweet potatoes (high in vitamin A) often made me feel better. I also found during the run-out period that eating mushrooms (selenium?), broccoli, and spinach (iron?) maybe helped as well. So if you’re having a bad emotional time on the potato diet, think about trying sweet potatoes or one of these other foods.

It’s interesting to me that these feelings of doom got stronger the further along I got in my weight loss. Maybe this is just because I was losing weight faster over time. But another (kind of crazy) possibility is that something is stored in our fat reserves and as I dug deeper into them, I released more of it. Or in general that something is flushed out from somewhere? I don’t know if I believe this but I wanted to mention it. 

That’s just my speculation. It could also have been ordinary anxiety from other causes that happened to line up with the weight loss. I’ve got some personal things going on in my life right now, maybe the anxiety is coming from those. Plus, a few friends have recently had similar feelings of dread, and they’re not losing extreme amounts of weight on a highly unusual diet.

Conclusions

My results make me very confident that Potatoes + Dairy works. The potato diet makes you lose weight, and that still works even if you add dairy, including butter and ice cream, no matter if you’re eating as much of it as you want.

While my data can’t speak to how well Potatoes + Dairy will work for anyone else, I hope this ends the idea that the potato diet works because it’s unpalatable. I lost 50 lbs and every meal was delicious. I also hope this finishes the idea that the potato diet works because it’s a “mono diet”. You can’t reasonably call something a mono diet when it includes potatoes, sour cream, and ice cream with tiny peanut butter cups.

I also think this is some evidence for the potassium hypothesis. I lost weight when I was taking high doses of potassium, though not nearly as much as on the potato diet. Maybe this was because I was taking too small of a dose, and a higher dose would have caused a similar amount of weight loss as what I eventually saw on the potato diet.

But I suspect this is because the potato effect doesn’t come from potassium alone, but from an interaction between potassium and something else, possibly other electrolytes like sodium and magnesium. 

If you could find the right mixture, maybe you could reproduce the potato effect in a brine. But if so, I wasn’t able to find it. For now, the state of the art is Potatoes + Dairy.

Krinn Post 2: A Year and Change

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Last time you heard from her, Krinn had just put out a tumblr post titled An Ad-Hoc, Informally-Specified, Bug-Ridden, Single-Subject Study Of Weight Loss Via Potassium Supplementation And Exercise Without Dieting. After losing 6 lbs in our Low-Dose Potassium Community Trial, she decided not to stop as planned but instead to keep going, and in fact go even harder. Eventually she ramped up to around 10,000 mg potassium a day, and lost even more weight. 

Krinn also added an exercise habit that she described as a “naïve just-hit-the-treadmill exercise regimen”. Even with this in mind, her results still seem remarkable, because most people do not lose 50 lbs from starting a moderate treadmill habit: 

We published a short review of that original post on this here blog of ours. That was in July 2023. Now, Krinn is back, and more powerful than ever, with an untitled post we’ll call A Year And Change After The Long Post About The Potassium Experiment (AYACATLPATPE). 

The long and short of it is that Krinn kept taking high doses of potassium and kept losing weight, eventually reaching her goal of 200 lbs. There was a long plateau in the middle after she first brushed up against her goal, but she maintained the original weight loss and eventually lost the remaining weight:

In personal communication (see very bottom of this post), Krinn noted that:

One of the few things the graphs say really, really, really loudly is “Krinn lost 30+ pounds _and stayed that way for at least a year._” … one of the overwhelmingly common failure modes of existing interventions: people lose some weight and then gain some weight and end up fairly close to where they started. Whatever else happened in my experiment, it sure wasn’t that: I lost a significant amount of weight and then _stabilized._ That seems important.

This time we don’t have much to add, but as before we wanted to reproduce her post for posterity. And we do have a few thoughts, mainly: 

This seems like more evidence that high doses of potassium cause weight loss. It suggests that potassium is probably one of the active ingredients, maybe the only active ingredient, in the weight loss caused by the potato diet. Krinn was taking about as much potassium as you would get if you were eating 2000 calories of potatoes per day, and experienced similar weight loss. 

It’s good to be skeptical of single case studies, however rigorous and careful they may be, but here are a few things to keep in mind: 

Remember that participants in the Low-Dose Potassium Community Trial lost a small but statistically significant amount of weight (p = .014) on a dose much lower than what Krinn was taking — only about 2,000 mg of potassium a day on average, compared to Krinn’s ~10,000 mg per day. This can’t confirm the effects of the higher dose, but it is consistent with Krinn’s results, and the final sample size was 104 people.

There’s also at least one successful replication. Inspired by Krinn’s first report, Alex Chernavsky did a shorter potassium self-experiment and lost about 4 pounds over a two-month period, otherwise keeping his diet and exercise constant. He also provided this handy table: 

Finally, we know of two other people who are losing weight on high-potassium brines, at least one of them without any additional exercise. They’re both interested in publishing their results, probably in early 2025. So watch this space. :​) 

As before, we want to conclude by saying that Krinn is a hero and a pioneer. She is worth a hundred of the book-swallowers who can only comment and couldn’t collect a data point to save their life. If you want to do anything remotely like what Krinn did, please feel free to reach out, we’d be happy to help.

Here’s a reproduction of Krinn’s full report as it appears in her tumblr post:

A Year And Change After The Long Post About The Potassium Experiment 

A year and change after the long post about the potassium experiment, I reached my weight-loss goal. This is a quick, minimally-structured thought-dump about it. As before, this is part of a wider conversation that starts with A Chemical Hunger.

Methodology: I mostly kept doing what I’d been doing. Turned up the exercise dial a bit, turned down the potassium dial a bit. Both still, AIUI, quite high compared to American baseline. Some bad news — in addition to whatever confounding factors were present last time, there’s a few extra ones now from my life in general going very poorly. As before, here’s the data, Creative Commons Zero, good luck with whatever you try on it. After making it to one year of being fairly diligent, I decided to let things vary and see what happened — on the one hand, I’d gotten far enough towards my personal goal that I wasn’t too fussed about the last 10%, and on the other hand, if this works in general and even work when you’re kinda half-assing it, that too is great news.

Interpretations: There’s multiple ways this could go. Here are a few that were easy to think of.

  1. Potassium or potassium-plus-exercise caused me to lose weight
  2. Exercise caused me to lose weight and potassium was irrelevant
  3. Something else caused me to lose weight

I would prefer to believe that potassium-plus-exercise caused me to lose weight. The data I have and my experience of gathering/being that data, to some extent support that conclusion. Flipping that around, if I ask “does that data rule out this conclusion?” no it absolutely does not. But it’s important to note that the exercise-only conclusion is only slightly less-well-supported and the none-of-the-above explanation is much-less-well-supported but certainly not ruled out. I have a preferred explanation, but all three of these explanations are live.

My subjective experience of the thing was that there was an easy part and a hard part. In the easy part I lost weight at a pretty rapid and consistent pace. In the hard part, my weight changed less and went back and forth more than it went down. If you buy into SMTM’s “something is screwing up people’s lipostats” theory, this is very consistent with that theory: potassium reduced or removed the something, my weight briskly dropped back to a healthy range (the first 9 months of the graphs) and then stabilized. However, the competing theory of “Krinn was super out of shape and then she started exercising” is also supported by the graphs (not shown on the graphs: my fairly poor 2022 exercise habits — my long-term exercise habits have had some good stretches, but the plague years did not do good things for me there!). I’m not sure whether it matters that I shifted from mostly treadmill time to having a couple of walks around the neighborhood that I can do pretty much on autopilot (shout-out to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions, this show is the first time podcast as a medium has clicked for me and it’s a great show). I do think, though, that exercise is a bit more complicated than I was really grasping. That, in turn, makes me glad that I’m tracking three exercise metrics rather than just one — if I was going to track only one, it’d be exertion, but exertion, exercise minutes, and step count, together make it possible to at least take a guess at what qualities a day’s exercise had.

Regarding my own questions from the first post: 

• How safe is this? When I made the first post I was antsy about “adding this much potassium to your diet is probably safe for people in generally good health” but now I’m pretty sure it’s true. Some health problems can take a long time to present themselves, but adding this much of something to your diet for two years and having it be fine, is pretty persuasive evidence that the thing is probably fine. It could still easily turn out to have negative health impacts that are important, but a huge swath of the things you’d be worried about, are vanishingly unlikely once you’ve hit the point of “I’ve been taking this for two years and I’m fine.”

• Does this replicate? Well, it’s self-consistent for me, and I don’t want to gain 50 pounds and try again. I did not like the shape of my body at +50 pounds from where I am now! So this is a question for others.

• How much do other nutrients matter? I don’t know. Mostly not equipped to rigorously check.

• Does HRT matter? I’ll let you know if I can get back on HRT. I would definitely like to investigate this.

• Does dieting matter? Probably: my diet changed involuntarily over the course of two years and that certainly matters to some extent, but one of my ground rules is that I’m focusing on controlling exercise and potassium, the things I can control. Diet is far more complex and also in my life particularly, more susceptible to unplanned, involuntary change, so I’m writing it off as a factor.

• Does this help with cannabis-induced hunger? I think I was off-base/over-optimistic with this one and it either doesn’t matter or matters a small amount.

• Is there a point where I get really hungry/tired or start accidentally starving? I did not reach such a point. I felt basically fine the whole time.

I was cooking with this though:

If you tell someone you want to lose weight and would like their advice, it is overwhelmingly likely that the advice will involve exercising more. Everyone has heard this advice. And yet, as Michael Hobbes observes  in a searing piece for Highline, “many ‘failed’ obesity interventions are successful eat-healthier-and-exercise-more interventions” that simply didn’t result in weight loss. Even if we as a society choose to believe “more exercise always leads to weight loss, most people just fuck up at it,” that immediately confronts us with the important question, why do they fuck up at it? and its equally urgent sibling, what can we learn from those who succeed at it to give a hand up to those who have not yet succeeded?

Conclusion: I’m gonna keep writing things down in my spreadsheet for the same reasons as last time. I’m not sure what exactly I’m going to do as far as twiddling the factors, because now my main goal is somewhere between “don’t gain weight again” and “see what happens,” but I do know that writing down what happens is Good Actually, so I’m going to keep doing that.

Slightly after publication, Krinn sent us these comments, which she agreed we could publish: 

Personal Communication

Dangit now I’m having the first draft effect: writing the first draft and sleeping on it tells me things I should have written. In this case, I think there’s a plausible reading that my experience supports the “potassium does something good at a high enough effect size to care about” line of argument because while the peaks of how much effort I put in were fairly high — the periods of combined high exercise and high potassium intake — the most noticeable effect was when I was ramping up on both of those in the first 9 months, and when I was in just-bumbling-through-like-an-average-human mode, the effect didn’t reverse itself. There were plateau periods and there were slow-reversion periods, but there was definitely no “you slacked off and now there’s rapid weight gain mirroring the rapid weight loss” effect. I think that’s positive? I think it’s plausible to read it as “once I got the majority of the weight loss effect, locking in that benefit was easy.”

In any case one of the questions I was interested in was “if this works, does it work well enough that an average person can successfully implement it?” and I am now convinced that that’s a clear “Yes”.

I wouldn’t say there’s any part of this experiment that I’m actively unhappy about, but I do find it a little frustrating that this is basically just another piece of evidence on the pile of “here’s something that is consistent with the lithium/potassium hypothesis, but that is also consistent with some other stuff, and my main observation is that Something Happened” — intellectually I feel sure that much solid science is built by assembling big enough piles of such evidence and then distilling it into “now we know Why Something Happened,” but putting one single bit of evidence on the pile is still something where I need to make my own satisfaction about it rather than having a well-established cultural narrative rushing to bring me “yes! you did the thing! Woohoo!”

Also thinking more about the potassium experiment I’m having one of those “hold on a minute, this should have been obvious to me” moments — one of the few things the graphs say really, really, really loudly is “Krinn lost 30+ pounds and stayed that way for at least a year.” That’s one of the crucial parts of the whole obesity thing, that second half, right? That’s one of the overwhelmingly common failure modes of existing intervention: people lose some weight and then gain some weight and end up fairly close to where they started. Whatever else happened in my experiment, it sure wasn’t that: I lost a significant amount of weight and then stabilized. That seems important.

Yessssss I get the smug clever-kitty feeling, this is exactly why I have that “ratchet” column in the spreadsheet: the last ratchet-tick day from more than a year ago (i.e. it’s locked in) was July 10th 2023, on which day my week-average weight was 212.4lbs, down 33.6lbs from the start of the year.

So that early period of dramatic weight loss is noteworthy because we can be confident that whatever the cause was — potassium, exercise, or something else — it caused durable weight loss, which is exactly the thing we are looking for.

This is a conclusion we couldn’t have reached in July 2023, with the major writeup I did, because at that point “something else happens and Krinn gains the weight back” was very possible, was one of the likely answers to “what comes next?”