This makes me think about what the Snake Diet guy is now demanding of his clients, which is to ditch the scale entirely. He's pushing an old-school bodybuilder diet: chicken breast / white fish / round steak, and potatoes or rice, and veggies and fruit, all with loads of added salt.
The scale thing is the most interesting to me, because in the grand scheme of things you and I aren't even that big of guys, not even close really, but I had a similar blowup a couple weeks ago, almost 15 lbs within 2 days - not even that dramatic of an eating shift, either, and one that surely would end up producing fat loss over time. Its hard to take those weight shocks in stride and not over-correct, restrict food, or if you have less discipline/experience, crash out and binge.
Personally I'm doing none of the above at the moment, my bachelor party is in 5 days and wedding in 12, so I'm water fasting ATM, kill me. Enjoy some onigiri for me
I'm not of the "ditch the scale!" school of thought, but I do acknowledge that many people are having certain issues or that you need to play around/learn a bit before it becomes useful enough, and that there can be psychological impacts.
E.g. I remember not weighing myself when I was at my fattest. I just thought of myself as "250lbs" or so and didn't weigh myself for years. It was probably a psychological thing.
Then I lost a TON of weight, stepped on a scale - and was still 300lbs! So I must've been much heavier even, but I don't have a record of it, not even in my head, since I never stepped on a scale ten.
Later when I started experimenting more seriously, I started weighing myself every day, learning how the fluctuations work, and so on. So in a sense I overcame that psychological thing. But I know many people who have it.
So ditching the scale completely - I see why you would do it. It's just not my strategy heh.
Like you say these shocks can really shock & affect people. On the other hand, if you never weigh yourself, how do you know it's working?
I'd rather take the 19lbs "hit" and know from experience that it's just water/salt.
Go go go water fasting :D
If you're getting desperate/hungry and are keto adapted, you could try drinking some cream or eating pure butter. In terms of low water retention, pure fat is almost as good as water fasting.
Nice article! I went to Japan recently, and all I can say is yes to everything you've said: go there, try the food, take public transportation, take the shinkansen. Specifically about food price, Japan's food is cheaper than France, especially with the exchange rate. Especially convenience store stuff, in France there's some kind of "cheap food ready to eat will be terrible or pricey". Same for the location, in France a bottle of water in a train station will run you 3€ instead of 1€ in the supermarket, in Japan it'll be something like 130 yen in the vending machine in the train station instead of 120 everywhere else, and maybe 140 yen at the airport right next to your boarding gate.
Your graphs kind of make sense, and remind me of the people that did well on "mostly potato diet" (riff trials I think?) or the person on twitter that either you mentioned or talked to you about doing well on mostly exfatloss but not as strict as you. Seems like you in particular are more vulnerable to moving away from a strict diet. I have no idea what could explain that and how much it could be measure in people.
Yea I figured the exchange rate played into it. I do sort of like that you don't get ripped of in train stations etc. The Shinkansen ice cream was like $4 I think heh. Not particularly expensive given that you can't really get off the train and buy somewhere else :)
I am once again asking you to try living in the swamp. Maybe mix rice and cream? Cream fried rice? Butter rice? Plus you get to use shrek pictures in your blog posts.
It seems like a no-brainer for back home could be DIY sushi diet, or in more practical terms perhaps simply rice+fish in approximately the quantities found in sushi.
You already found a rice pipeline that works, and I'm sure you can find some fish, whether that be full-blown sliced salmon or any of a dozen canned options.
This can narrow things down on the loss of satiety, which is the driver of all this: was it purely the salt levels in the japanese sushi? Or was the novelty also a factor?
Logically, it makes sense that if the body is getting all nutritional needs met but from a very repetitive diet, then it may as well turn down the drives. But if you introduce some novelty, well that might be only a temporary windfall - better drive the body to accumulate as much as possible before it's gone!
I really think there's more to salt (sodium with the CHLORIDE anion, other sodium combinations do not count) than meets the eye. It's addictive for a reason, it will influence hunger, satiety and stress hormones. It's a preservative for a reason: it will also influence your gut microbiome. During a salt kick-of period you will get very mixed result, but after a handfull of weeks, steady weight and fat loss is to be expected. This can be done on any diet (low carb, high carb, swamp, carnivore, vegan, does not matter). Some people seem immune to sodium chloride, but most (percentage ?) are impacted. Try to go zero sodium chloride (not easy in today's food environment) for a long while (multiple weeks/months) and see if/how it affects you. Abstinence is not easy the first few weeks (it will mess with your mind, hydration, minerals and stress hormones like any other drug would. Consuming just a little bit of salt during the kick-of will ease symptons immediately, leading you to draw the wrong, short term, conclusions.
I suspect you might be right. I'm just now watching a video called "Nature wants us to be Fat (part 2)" and the researcher explains how high salt intake can stimulate the body to produce fructose endogenously and become insulin resistant, obese, and diabetic.
And the tricky parts in all these salt studies is 1) a large group of humans have no problem with salt whatsoever (so they skew the results and conclusions) 2) short term (2-4 weeks) studies often give the opposite results as longer term (months) studies which gives mixed results and conclusions 3) If you are young, salt is not so much of a problem: you still have plenty of ways to store excess, but if your salt stores become full this will become a problem, so a mix of young and old in these salt studies give mixed results and conclusions. 4) Sweating removes salt, so gym bro's, sporty individuals and sauna enthusiasts skew the results and conclusions PS. For infants, growing teenagers and sweating adults (some) salt is imperative for developing and maintaining a functional body, that is why we humans have acquired a literal taste for it. However, if you are an adult and you don't sweat daily (=your audience ?), your functional need for salt drops to zero.
Yes, probably. I do think much of it is homeostatis. There might be a smaller long-term effect, i.e. if I ate the rice diet and then went on the high-salt diet I might gain 19lbs to begin with, and lose maybe 10-15lbs again over the next few weeks. But potentially the homeostatic equilibrium is higher. Not sure.
my use of the term ‘falsify’ is not directed against you as a person
these men and women had very high salt intake, and their BMI’s were low.
therefore Japanese men and women eating high salt does not lead to higher BMI
Question: is it possible that the body has a salt management system?
[1] That if people are habitually low in salt reserves, that the body will overcompensate by storing water when some above ‘normal’ intake of salt is ingested?
[2] people whom have a habitually high salt intake, the body will not overcompensate by fluid retention?
Observation:
[1] I have gone on very low salt intake for months, then I went on 5 grams per day for 30 days. I did not weigh myself. My ‘observations’ of this time are therefore not fresh, nor reliable.
[2] I was eating higher fat in the form of restaurant pizza made from Italian flour, and fresh ingredients. My eyesight would diminish for 2 hours after each meal, which matches the decreased blood viscosity with the consumption of a high fat meal.
[3] My feet would get bloated in the evenings. Either high salt [1], or high fat [2], or both, caused the fluid retention (first time in my life). I stopped both [1] and [2] at the same time, so I do not know which caused which
Conclusion:
You may be right when you said “you can easily test it for yourself” by my above observations of my N=1 study above. I can and will repeat the test using only increased salt added to water, once per day. No oil will be consumed in said test.
I never said that high salt intake leads to long-term BMI increase. Just in the short term, and only when coming from a low-salt diet or otherwise changing the salt levels pretty dramatically.
That doesn't seem falsified by all, in fact I think that's pretty accepted by everyone.
This does, technically, constitute a short-term BMI increase.
Can people raise their salt homeostasis ‘set point’ over time, and cease salt induced water retention? Japanese people with long term high salt intake (4 to 7 grams per day) shows low BMI’s matching the lean appearance of Japanese people circa 2002, which suggests no water retention as experienced by the author.
Nit pick: they could have a higher BMI than they would have eating a low-salt diet. Maybe they'd all be at BMI 19 if they dropped the salt completely.
But certainly you don't get an obesity epidemic from high salt intake, at least not via the water retention mechanism. It seems to be limited to about 5-10% of total body weight as a one-time effect.
But it is a funny thought experiment: if all Americans did a BMI test today, and then went on a 2 week plain rice diet and repeated the test, I do think we would lower the average BMI by several points.
This makes me think about what the Snake Diet guy is now demanding of his clients, which is to ditch the scale entirely. He's pushing an old-school bodybuilder diet: chicken breast / white fish / round steak, and potatoes or rice, and veggies and fruit, all with loads of added salt.
The scale thing is the most interesting to me, because in the grand scheme of things you and I aren't even that big of guys, not even close really, but I had a similar blowup a couple weeks ago, almost 15 lbs within 2 days - not even that dramatic of an eating shift, either, and one that surely would end up producing fat loss over time. Its hard to take those weight shocks in stride and not over-correct, restrict food, or if you have less discipline/experience, crash out and binge.
Personally I'm doing none of the above at the moment, my bachelor party is in 5 days and wedding in 12, so I'm water fasting ATM, kill me. Enjoy some onigiri for me
Congratulations!
I'm not of the "ditch the scale!" school of thought, but I do acknowledge that many people are having certain issues or that you need to play around/learn a bit before it becomes useful enough, and that there can be psychological impacts.
E.g. I remember not weighing myself when I was at my fattest. I just thought of myself as "250lbs" or so and didn't weigh myself for years. It was probably a psychological thing.
Then I lost a TON of weight, stepped on a scale - and was still 300lbs! So I must've been much heavier even, but I don't have a record of it, not even in my head, since I never stepped on a scale ten.
Later when I started experimenting more seriously, I started weighing myself every day, learning how the fluctuations work, and so on. So in a sense I overcame that psychological thing. But I know many people who have it.
So ditching the scale completely - I see why you would do it. It's just not my strategy heh.
Like you say these shocks can really shock & affect people. On the other hand, if you never weigh yourself, how do you know it's working?
I'd rather take the 19lbs "hit" and know from experience that it's just water/salt.
Go go go water fasting :D
If you're getting desperate/hungry and are keto adapted, you could try drinking some cream or eating pure butter. In terms of low water retention, pure fat is almost as good as water fasting.
And congratulations that's awesome dude :)
Nice article! I went to Japan recently, and all I can say is yes to everything you've said: go there, try the food, take public transportation, take the shinkansen. Specifically about food price, Japan's food is cheaper than France, especially with the exchange rate. Especially convenience store stuff, in France there's some kind of "cheap food ready to eat will be terrible or pricey". Same for the location, in France a bottle of water in a train station will run you 3€ instead of 1€ in the supermarket, in Japan it'll be something like 130 yen in the vending machine in the train station instead of 120 everywhere else, and maybe 140 yen at the airport right next to your boarding gate.
Your graphs kind of make sense, and remind me of the people that did well on "mostly potato diet" (riff trials I think?) or the person on twitter that either you mentioned or talked to you about doing well on mostly exfatloss but not as strict as you. Seems like you in particular are more vulnerable to moving away from a strict diet. I have no idea what could explain that and how much it could be measure in people.
Yea I figured the exchange rate played into it. I do sort of like that you don't get ripped of in train stations etc. The Shinkansen ice cream was like $4 I think heh. Not particularly expensive given that you can't really get off the train and buy somewhere else :)
I am once again asking you to try living in the swamp. Maybe mix rice and cream? Cream fried rice? Butter rice? Plus you get to use shrek pictures in your blog posts.
Yea I will have to do it one of these days lol. At this point just cause I'm curious what the heck it is that destroys my satiety!
Shrek pics is actually a heck of a motivator lol ;)
Interesting!
It seems like a no-brainer for back home could be DIY sushi diet, or in more practical terms perhaps simply rice+fish in approximately the quantities found in sushi.
You already found a rice pipeline that works, and I'm sure you can find some fish, whether that be full-blown sliced salmon or any of a dozen canned options.
This can narrow things down on the loss of satiety, which is the driver of all this: was it purely the salt levels in the japanese sushi? Or was the novelty also a factor?
Logically, it makes sense that if the body is getting all nutritional needs met but from a very repetitive diet, then it may as well turn down the drives. But if you introduce some novelty, well that might be only a temporary windfall - better drive the body to accumulate as much as possible before it's gone!
I really think there's more to salt (sodium with the CHLORIDE anion, other sodium combinations do not count) than meets the eye. It's addictive for a reason, it will influence hunger, satiety and stress hormones. It's a preservative for a reason: it will also influence your gut microbiome. During a salt kick-of period you will get very mixed result, but after a handfull of weeks, steady weight and fat loss is to be expected. This can be done on any diet (low carb, high carb, swamp, carnivore, vegan, does not matter). Some people seem immune to sodium chloride, but most (percentage ?) are impacted. Try to go zero sodium chloride (not easy in today's food environment) for a long while (multiple weeks/months) and see if/how it affects you. Abstinence is not easy the first few weeks (it will mess with your mind, hydration, minerals and stress hormones like any other drug would. Consuming just a little bit of salt during the kick-of will ease symptons immediately, leading you to draw the wrong, short term, conclusions.
I suspect you might be right. I'm just now watching a video called "Nature wants us to be Fat (part 2)" and the researcher explains how high salt intake can stimulate the body to produce fructose endogenously and become insulin resistant, obese, and diabetic.
Pretty fascinating.
Here's the study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1713837115
And the tricky parts in all these salt studies is 1) a large group of humans have no problem with salt whatsoever (so they skew the results and conclusions) 2) short term (2-4 weeks) studies often give the opposite results as longer term (months) studies which gives mixed results and conclusions 3) If you are young, salt is not so much of a problem: you still have plenty of ways to store excess, but if your salt stores become full this will become a problem, so a mix of young and old in these salt studies give mixed results and conclusions. 4) Sweating removes salt, so gym bro's, sporty individuals and sauna enthusiasts skew the results and conclusions PS. For infants, growing teenagers and sweating adults (some) salt is imperative for developing and maintaining a functional body, that is why we humans have acquired a literal taste for it. However, if you are an adult and you don't sweat daily (=your audience ?), your functional need for salt drops to zero.
Hmm
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/01.str.0000130425.50441.b0
2002 study, published in 2004
"In 1992, usual diet including sodium intake was determined in 13 355 men and 15 724 women in Takayama City, Gifu"
please refer to table 1, body mass index
both males and females were between 21.9 and 22.6 BMI (all normal, not overweight nor obese)
their salt intake was observed, and was between 4g to 7g per day
therefore, salt intake leads to increased BMI is not causative
thus falsified
NOTE: study showed that salt intake appears causative to strokes, but not causative to increased BMI
Massive changes in salt intake can obviously cause massive changes in water retention - which is measured by BMI (tragically?)
I just demonstrated it and you can easily test it for yourself. This study does not inform on this.
“massive changes in salt intake”
hypothesis: Can a person consume high salt, for an extended period, and their body loses the initial water retention, after an adaption period?
Support for theoretical homeostasis - see journal article
Yes, probably. I do think much of it is homeostatis. There might be a smaller long-term effect, i.e. if I ate the rice diet and then went on the high-salt diet I might gain 19lbs to begin with, and lose maybe 10-15lbs again over the next few weeks. But potentially the homeostatic equilibrium is higher. Not sure.
my use of the term ‘falsify’ is not directed against you as a person
these men and women had very high salt intake, and their BMI’s were low.
therefore Japanese men and women eating high salt does not lead to higher BMI
Question: is it possible that the body has a salt management system?
[1] That if people are habitually low in salt reserves, that the body will overcompensate by storing water when some above ‘normal’ intake of salt is ingested?
[2] people whom have a habitually high salt intake, the body will not overcompensate by fluid retention?
Observation:
[1] I have gone on very low salt intake for months, then I went on 5 grams per day for 30 days. I did not weigh myself. My ‘observations’ of this time are therefore not fresh, nor reliable.
[2] I was eating higher fat in the form of restaurant pizza made from Italian flour, and fresh ingredients. My eyesight would diminish for 2 hours after each meal, which matches the decreased blood viscosity with the consumption of a high fat meal.
[3] My feet would get bloated in the evenings. Either high salt [1], or high fat [2], or both, caused the fluid retention (first time in my life). I stopped both [1] and [2] at the same time, so I do not know which caused which
Conclusion:
You may be right when you said “you can easily test it for yourself” by my above observations of my N=1 study above. I can and will repeat the test using only increased salt added to water, once per day. No oil will be consumed in said test.
I never said that high salt intake leads to long-term BMI increase. Just in the short term, and only when coming from a low-salt diet or otherwise changing the salt levels pretty dramatically.
That doesn't seem falsified by all, in fact I think that's pretty accepted by everyone.
This does, technically, constitute a short-term BMI increase.
Let me know how the test goes!
you are using weak evidence to justify a strong claim
please see the thread with the author and myself.
the tweaked hypothesis is interesting.
Can people raise their salt homeostasis ‘set point’ over time, and cease salt induced water retention? Japanese people with long term high salt intake (4 to 7 grams per day) shows low BMI’s matching the lean appearance of Japanese people circa 2002, which suggests no water retention as experienced by the author.
Nit pick: they could have a higher BMI than they would have eating a low-salt diet. Maybe they'd all be at BMI 19 if they dropped the salt completely.
But certainly you don't get an obesity epidemic from high salt intake, at least not via the water retention mechanism. It seems to be limited to about 5-10% of total body weight as a one-time effect.
But it is a funny thought experiment: if all Americans did a BMI test today, and then went on a 2 week plain rice diet and repeated the test, I do think we would lower the average BMI by several points.