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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

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.

credit_guy 4y ago
> Without a placebo or control group, these numbers aren’t really useful. They are. In general with drugs, you want evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the benefits outweigh the risks. And double blind studies are the way to go. But potassium salt is just not that risky. I bet Tylenol or Ibuprofen are riskier. These guys put the result out there. They explain the protocol (increase dose only if absolutely comfortable). Some people might try and succeed. Some might try and fail. But it's very unlikely some people will try and suffer a heart attack, or some other dangerous side effect. Of course, please don't take medical advice from me, a random person on the internet. If you decide to try this, it would be best to discuss it first with your physician.
- ClassyJacket 4y ago
  It's not about safety, it's about knowing whether this is effective. We need a control group to know if it really makes you lose weight.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  The question is not "is this a low risk intervention". It's "is this a placebo, an effect of weight tracking, or an effect of potassium?" If it is due to tracking your weight and you just tell people to take potassium, they will not lose weight.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    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 in their body and regular diet) The dropout rate is significant too, both in general and in the specific case of this being a self-selecting sample of readers of a blog promoting fringe theories around weight loss(1). One way to get a statistically significant sample for a weight loss treatment being apparently effective is for people to be most likely to drop out of an experiment without submitting any further data the day the scales give them the disappointing news that they've put the pounds they lost back on again. Potassium is apparently already marketed as a weight loss supplement, so I'm guessing there are other studies of varying but generally better quality floating around though... (1)its rather tortuous reasoning why America's obesity rise can't be linked to the rise in average calorie consumption has been posted on here before...
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      > 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. So what change is it in our environment which seems to be causing the increased intake in calories? And some of the usual suspects that get trotted out: sweetened soft drinks served in huge quantities for basically free, extremely processed foods with surprising calorie density that still leave you hungry, maybe changes in some of the ingrediants we're using, so on. I suspect, given that lots of intelligent people have worked really hard on this and haven't landed on an obvious single answer, that it's a big combination of things. The more I talk to obese people the more I'm convinced there's some sort of sociological or psychological element as well as a food element.
      - landemva 4y ago
        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.
      - notahacker 4y ago
        To be honest, 'why, in the century in which most people had cheap, reliable food sources and motorised transport for the first time in history and many stopped doing manual labour did obesity start going up in many countries where people benefited from these changes?' doesn't seem like a question likely to have an especially counterintuitive answer. Ice cream may have existed in various forms for centuries, but the average person didn't eat 20L of the stuff every year before effective and near-universal refrigeration. (The same blog dismissed the standard claims around less healthy refined foods and people not needing as many calories because they lived more sedentary lifestyles anyway...) I'm sure there are individuals with metabolic issues that aren't related to their diet and it's not impossible that the "contaminants" this blog is obsessed with play some role. But I also think that sunspot activity plays some role in climate, and I wouldn't expect to stunning breakthroughs in sunspot science from a climate-skeptic blog motivated primarily by proving that the major step change over the last century that's consistent with the theory and the data can't possibly have made much of a difference...
- dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  But potassium salt is just not that risky. I bet Tylenol or Ibuprofen are riskier. I doubt it. Potassium chloride is the active ingredient in lethal injections, too much and it will stop your heart.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Too much $anything, and it will stop your $something you need to live. Having said that, most by mouth potassium supplements are delayed release so you don’t get it all at once (and absorption already slows things down a lot).
  - toad_master 4y ago
    Too much tylenol will destroy your liver. The dose makes the poison. I've been prescribed potassium chloride tablets before.
  - fbdab103 4y ago
    Intravenous potassium is significantly more hazardous than orally consumed. Wikipedia lists the LD50 of oral potassium at 2.6 g/kg. Meaning your standard 70kg dude would have to eat 182 grams (6.4 oz Freedom Units) to hit that limit. Which would be just beyond horrible to attempt to consume that in a sitting.
  - scythe 4y ago
    Potassium chloride is used in lethal injections to the tune of 75 mg/kg. For a typical adult, that's an injection of 4-6 grams all at once. You could never eat that much in a sitting: it would taste horrible and probably cause immediate vomiting, and still it's not so readily absorbed through the gut anyway. See: https://research.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SOP-KCl.pdf https://research.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SOP-KC...
    - yywwbbn 4y ago
      You could easily eat 4-6 grams (if you wanted to obviously). But absorption us much lower and slower you probably need over hundred grams or so to reach levels that would be lethal
Waterluvian 4y ago
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.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  “130 calories? That’s so expensive." That's exactly how I came to lose all the weight I have - I started counting calories which caused me to treat it like a budget. I never deprived myself of what I wanted, but new if I splurged on supper I'd not be able to do as much dessert.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    My favourite part of it is that it’s so simple you can barely call it a system. The diet industry/community really disinterests me because there is so much complexity.
    - andreareina 4y ago
      Unfortunately the simple thing is hard. To the extent that every system that isn’t counting calories works, it works by manipulating appetite and satiety to induce a spontaneous reduction in consumption. People will jump through all sorts of hoops to not feel deprived.
    - mkraft 4y ago
      Imagine trying to reign in spending without a budget by drinking lots of water to avoid buying starbucks and other similar indirect tricks. Without the budget you’d easily overspend. This is how I think of calorie counting as the only proper way and other diets as inefficient indirections.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      This method is simple, and works well enough for enough people, but it doesn't for some. I still kind of agree with you, because I have a sneaking suspicion that people mostly cluster into groups of "any diet / intervention works" and "none of them work". Unfortunately, the body itself is a complex system, and likes to throw curve-balls. Going by some of the things I've read over the years, it's clear the body has defense mechanisms against starvation - such as lowering metabolism and activity levels in lock step with diminished caloric input, or turning you into food-obsessed zombie, hardly capable of a non-food-related thought, until you feed the body enough to cancel red alert. Problem is, for some people, those defense mechanisms seem to kick in before they reach negative energy balance. As simple as calorie counting is, it's not helpful if the body hits the "override" switch before you reach Calories In < Calories Out. I don't know if there's a solution for this case, but I suspect all the variety of diets is really just people doing a blind search in hopes of finding specific tricks that shut down the defense mechanism in subgroups of individuals. (In a sense it's like a puzzle game: your goal is to sneak past a security system without raising an alarm. The security system consists of a great variety of sensors of all kinds - but only a random subset of them are in use, configured with random thresholds. Every player gets their own, unique puzzle.)
Havoc 4y ago
That was my first thought too. Even mild psychological crutches to limit snacking would do the trick. “I need to report my weight to someone else” def qualifies
paulpauper 4y ago
Even with a placebo and control group it still would not be that useful owing to all the confounders.
mym1990 4y ago
For me, I simply started tracking what I ate in terms of calorie count, and didn't focus so much on the day to day/week to week weight change. It helped out a lot in generally bringing to light what a "big" day looks like and vice-versa.
ljf 4y ago
I did exactly this about 10 years ago - weighed myself daily, and took fat and measured my circumferences at various points on my body, and wrote it down by hand each day in a table. That alone was all the encouragement I needed to consider what I ate, drank and did.

credit_guy 4y ago

> Without a placebo or control group, these numbers aren’t really useful. They are. In general with drugs, you want evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the benefits outweigh the risks. And double blind studies are the way to go. But potassium salt is just not that risky. I bet Tylenol or Ibuprofen are riskier. These guys put the result out there. They explain the protocol (increase dose only if absolutely comfortable). Some people might try and succeed. Some might try and fail. But it's very unlikely some people will try and suffer a heart attack, or some other dangerous side effect. Of course, please don't take medical advice from me, a random person on the internet. If you decide to try this, it would be best to discuss it first with your physician.

ClassyJacket 4y ago
It's not about safety, it's about knowing whether this is effective. We need a control group to know if it really makes you lose weight.
vorpalhex 4y ago
The question is not "is this a low risk intervention". It's "is this a placebo, an effect of weight tracking, or an effect of potassium?" If it is due to tracking your weight and you just tell people to take potassium, they will not lose weight.
- notahacker 4y ago
  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 in their body and regular diet) The dropout rate is significant too, both in general and in the specific case of this being a self-selecting sample of readers of a blog promoting fringe theories around weight loss(1). One way to get a statistically significant sample for a weight loss treatment being apparently effective is for people to be most likely to drop out of an experiment without submitting any further data the day the scales give them the disappointing news that they've put the pounds they lost back on again. Potassium is apparently already marketed as a weight loss supplement, so I'm guessing there are other studies of varying but generally better quality floating around though... (1)its rather tortuous reasoning why America's obesity rise can't be linked to the rise in average calorie consumption has been posted on here before...
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    > 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. So what change is it in our environment which seems to be causing the increased intake in calories? And some of the usual suspects that get trotted out: sweetened soft drinks served in huge quantities for basically free, extremely processed foods with surprising calorie density that still leave you hungry, maybe changes in some of the ingrediants we're using, so on. I suspect, given that lots of intelligent people have worked really hard on this and haven't landed on an obvious single answer, that it's a big combination of things. The more I talk to obese people the more I'm convinced there's some sort of sociological or psychological element as well as a food element.
    - landemva 4y ago
      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.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      To be honest, 'why, in the century in which most people had cheap, reliable food sources and motorised transport for the first time in history and many stopped doing manual labour did obesity start going up in many countries where people benefited from these changes?' doesn't seem like a question likely to have an especially counterintuitive answer. Ice cream may have existed in various forms for centuries, but the average person didn't eat 20L of the stuff every year before effective and near-universal refrigeration. (The same blog dismissed the standard claims around less healthy refined foods and people not needing as many calories because they lived more sedentary lifestyles anyway...) I'm sure there are individuals with metabolic issues that aren't related to their diet and it's not impossible that the "contaminants" this blog is obsessed with play some role. But I also think that sunspot activity plays some role in climate, and I wouldn't expect to stunning breakthroughs in sunspot science from a climate-skeptic blog motivated primarily by proving that the major step change over the last century that's consistent with the theory and the data can't possibly have made much of a difference...
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
But potassium salt is just not that risky. I bet Tylenol or Ibuprofen are riskier. I doubt it. Potassium chloride is the active ingredient in lethal injections, too much and it will stop your heart.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Too much $anything, and it will stop your $something you need to live. Having said that, most by mouth potassium supplements are delayed release so you don’t get it all at once (and absorption already slows things down a lot).
- toad_master 4y ago
  Too much tylenol will destroy your liver. The dose makes the poison. I've been prescribed potassium chloride tablets before.
- fbdab103 4y ago
  Intravenous potassium is significantly more hazardous than orally consumed. Wikipedia lists the LD50 of oral potassium at 2.6 g/kg. Meaning your standard 70kg dude would have to eat 182 grams (6.4 oz Freedom Units) to hit that limit. Which would be just beyond horrible to attempt to consume that in a sitting.
- scythe 4y ago
  Potassium chloride is used in lethal injections to the tune of 75 mg/kg. For a typical adult, that's an injection of 4-6 grams all at once. You could never eat that much in a sitting: it would taste horrible and probably cause immediate vomiting, and still it's not so readily absorbed through the gut anyway. See: https://research.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SOP-KCl.pdf https://research.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SOP-KC...
  - yywwbbn 4y ago
    You could easily eat 4-6 grams (if you wanted to obviously). But absorption us much lower and slower you probably need over hundred grams or so to reach levels that would be lethal

Waterluvian 4y ago

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.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
“130 calories? That’s so expensive." That's exactly how I came to lose all the weight I have - I started counting calories which caused me to treat it like a budget. I never deprived myself of what I wanted, but new if I splurged on supper I'd not be able to do as much dessert.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  My favourite part of it is that it’s so simple you can barely call it a system. The diet industry/community really disinterests me because there is so much complexity.
  - andreareina 4y ago
    Unfortunately the simple thing is hard. To the extent that every system that isn’t counting calories works, it works by manipulating appetite and satiety to induce a spontaneous reduction in consumption. People will jump through all sorts of hoops to not feel deprived.
  - mkraft 4y ago
    Imagine trying to reign in spending without a budget by drinking lots of water to avoid buying starbucks and other similar indirect tricks. Without the budget you’d easily overspend. This is how I think of calorie counting as the only proper way and other diets as inefficient indirections.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    This method is simple, and works well enough for enough people, but it doesn't for some. I still kind of agree with you, because I have a sneaking suspicion that people mostly cluster into groups of "any diet / intervention works" and "none of them work". Unfortunately, the body itself is a complex system, and likes to throw curve-balls. Going by some of the things I've read over the years, it's clear the body has defense mechanisms against starvation - such as lowering metabolism and activity levels in lock step with diminished caloric input, or turning you into food-obsessed zombie, hardly capable of a non-food-related thought, until you feed the body enough to cancel red alert. Problem is, for some people, those defense mechanisms seem to kick in before they reach negative energy balance. As simple as calorie counting is, it's not helpful if the body hits the "override" switch before you reach Calories In < Calories Out. I don't know if there's a solution for this case, but I suspect all the variety of diets is really just people doing a blind search in hopes of finding specific tricks that shut down the defense mechanism in subgroups of individuals. (In a sense it's like a puzzle game: your goal is to sneak past a security system without raising an alarm. The security system consists of a great variety of sensors of all kinds - but only a random subset of them are in use, configured with random thresholds. Every player gets their own, unique puzzle.)

Havoc 4y ago

That was my first thought too. Even mild psychological crutches to limit snacking would do the trick. “I need to report my weight to someone else” def qualifies

paulpauper 4y ago

Even with a placebo and control group it still would not be that useful owing to all the confounders.

mym1990 4y ago

For me, I simply started tracking what I ate in terms of calorie count, and didn't focus so much on the day to day/week to week weight change. It helped out a lot in generally bringing to light what a "big" day looks like and vice-versa.

ljf 4y ago

I did exactly this about 10 years ago - weighed myself daily, and took fat and measured my circumferences at various points on my body, and wrote it down by hand each day in a table. That alone was all the encouragement I needed to consider what I ate, drank and did.