A Data-Driven Path to Effortless Weightloss: Potatoes, Potassium, Drugs, Chocolate, and much much more
Alternate Misleading Click Bait Title: Eating Fries and Chocolate five days in a row can help you easily and permanently loose weight.
TL;DR: Loosing weight is supposed to be super difficult, requiring a lot of willpower according to the general culture. I lost a lot of weight, super easily, without any will power. This blogpost series will be looking into that.
When I started this experiment, I had a BMI of 29.3 (almost "obese"), after 3months my BMI fell below 25 ("normal" range is supposed to be 18-25) for the first time. And with what I have learned since, I think I could easily do it again in half that time. I expended zero willpower, barely modified my habits, and definitely didn't count calories (which sounds like a lot of work). I did however collect a lot of data along the way, and this is the story of what I learned along the way about how potatoes, potassium, coffee, nicotine gum, exercise, drugs, and a bunch of other things, including supplements found in pharmacies and advertised for weightloss.
Preview of results: Replacing one meal a day on average with potatoes, using potassium salt (KCl) instead of sodium salt (NaCl), taking hot cacao drinks, and weighing myself once a day, significantly (how much is quantified later) helped with weightloss. Exercise does absolutely nothing. Eating heavy holiday season meals, or any dessert significantly hinders weightloss (as expected).
Warning: These results are for me. Not all bodies work the same way, so there is no guarantee that what worked for me will work for you. That being said, the potatoes have definitely replicated across various people, and the general principle of tracking what you consume and seeing what works for your body should work for anyone.
The current plan (might change) for the series are the following blogposts:
- My Effortless Weightloss Story: A Quick Runthrough
- A Spreadsheet with very Noisy Data: On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Crude Measurements, Lots of Data, and a Linear Model
- From Nicotine to Bananas: A Detailed Look at Significance and Effect Size for All Interventions (including useless Exercise)
- The Discovery of the Sticky Empirical Lipostat: A Theory on how to loose/gain weight permanently and a Very Simple Explanation to the Obesity Epidemic in the Modern World
- Yogurt, Bananas, Coffee, Potatoes, Chocolate: Is it all just the Potassium?
- Store-bought Weightloss Supplements: Are they Effective?
- Investigating the Variations in my Metabolic Rate with a Shitty Scale
- More Frequent Pooping? Higher Metabolic Rate? Restricting Hunger? What is/are the Causal Mechanism(s)?
- Future Work and More Mysteries to Investigate