Have you considered putting some of your posts on Less Wrong? I think you'd be very welcome there. You'll get some strong but well-informed criticism, and I get the impression that you're a clear thinker who would welcome such.
The 'real purpose' of the site is worrying about AI, but we are interested in many things, mostly about arguing correctly and working things out from limited information.
It's not a 'diet site', but interesting stuff of all kinds is often welcome. (And it seems that all Americans are interested in losing weight!) For instance the slimemoldtimemold chemical hunger series was very well received, and prompted this post which seems to me to have pretty much destroyed the lithium hypothesis.
I did see that reply to the Lithium Hypothesis. I also don't believe in lithium specifically at this point. As I posted somewhere, I only drank distilled water for 30 days and it did jack sh*t for weight loss. Feels like it should've at least done SOMETHING.
Yea if you want to post one that you think will be well received there, why not :) I have no clue what they're into so you're probably a better judge?
"troll diet" is too old school internet for the kids these days. I like calling them "meme diets". That's how I introduce ex150 and TCD to others when I talk about them.
(I'm looking at venturing into the world of flavored cream cheese spread.)
This may be the key to everything.
FYI I'm taking high dose thiamine to maintain a condition, and it inhibits the BCKD kinase - but inherently the BCKD is lazy, like I suspect most fatties would have it.
It only makes sense that I've felt less need for thiamine during the ex150 -copycat diet.
This is my sixth day, unsurprisingly my clothes fit almost a size too large now.
I don't use the scale because I have a habit of getting obsessed - I go by clothes sizes. Fluctuation is normal and initial drop is expected.
Why I'm excited about it are some observations;
- I gain weight with low carb high protein
- have a hard time getting into ketosis on LCHP, almost never without fasting
- I sure as hell gain on HPHF
- I have been obesity resistant for two years, during which I was able to clock 6000 calories a day (occasionally )and my shirts became oily after - as if I literally sweat the fat out. My skin is oilier again, I know this sounds bogus but it's my experience and I have no way to measure it other than I know what a T-shirt heavy with sebum feels like. That's not the usual amount of grime.
fwiw, a possible “it’s low protein and low carbs doing it, but insulin is not the mechanism” would be mTOR inhibition and downstream of that, AMPK activation. iirc protein and carbs suggest to your body it’s time to build things, which activates mTOR and can lead to not breaking down things like fat. The reason Bulletproof Coffee works for so many (very similar to your cream in your coffee) is fat does not really activate mTOR, or at least we think that’s why it works for people. Many fasting benefits come downstream of mTOR de-activating when you haven’t eaten in a while. You can search for anecdotes of people adding protein to Bulletproof Coffee to see what people say, it ruins some weight loss but not for everyone. You might find useful stuff comparing results of people who added collagen or gelatin versus something higher in BCAAs!
Oh, you may already know this too but just in case: people maybe actually die when their *only* source of protein is gelatin, so when you get into low BCAA experiments DEFINITELY make sure you dig into that. iirc the first time I heard about it decades ago, someone tried making a meal replacement drink with only gelatin for protein because it was cheap, and people died trying it for weight loss. Looks like this is it, it’s not totally conclusive: https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/data-suggest-tie-between-15-deaths-and-liquid-diet.html
I know there are genetic disorders that require low BCAA diets, like maple syrup urine disease, so they’re possible. It might also interest you to know that’s treated with thiamine, which is really important for regulating blood sugar, and which deficiency leads to type 2 diabetes and exercise intolerance and congestive heart failure and all sorts of metabolic problems, not mention digestive and mood disorders (including psychosis in severe cases of alcoholism). The modern American diet is typically deficient in thiamine because it gets depleted digesting carbohydrates, and by drinking alcohol, or consuming foods high in anti-thiamine factors like tea, coffee, and raw fish.
The forms of protein matter a lot beyond BCAAs too, because you need things like tryptophan, tyrosine, glycine, glutamine, glutamate, etc to make neurotransmitters and hormones and such, and iirc some regulate heart rhythm and maintain circulation and clotting etc. Some of them, like taurine, are necessary to even break down fat because bile doesn’t work without them. Amino acids are an area where I think it’s okay to see what happens on lower amounts but you really don’t want to eliminate most even for a relatively short experiment.
fwiw, ime the idea of “essential” and “nonessential” amino acids is dumb because there are so many reasons (genetics, other micronutrients in the diet) a person may not be able to *keep pace* with synthesizing *enough* of a “nonessential” amino acid to do various things in the body, even if they can make some. Outright fasting is different because your body switches tons of levers to survive by unblocking access to scavenge your cells/tissues for resources, but when you’re digesting food you’re signalling your body to prioritize doing stuff with the food coming in, so it keeps other resources locked away. You can run out of stuff to potentially dangerous effect if the ratios of what’s coming in really imbalance anything you might be low in; even if it’s in the short term, if it’s something critical to say heart rhythm or clotting, it may not matter if *hours later* your cellular signaling finally unblocks access to things your body needs, because you had a heart attack or stroke before it settled. So just be careful to research any amino acids you may be lacking when you start doing protein experiments!
Agreed on "essential" things (not just AAs). I mean it's a bar, but a very low one. Probably not useful except in starvation situations.
Thanks for the gelatin tip; I wasn't going to reduce my regular protein intake, only add gelatin (or collagen?) to it. So I should be getting at least the same amounts of everything, unless the ratios matter a lot here.
The mTOR thing is interesting, yea. It's so complicated and influences pretty much anything.
I actually did bulletproof coffee for years before just switching to cream, as cream is easier, cheaper, no need for a blender, and tastes better :) Plus exact same effect, unless you're out for the extra ketones from MCT oil. (Which isn't a problem I have, since I'm doing a ketogenic diet anyway, unlike Asprey.)
not to be banal, but I think this is very important, not just for nutrition science:
"It’s hard to describe reality if you don’t know what matters. You have to describe every atom.
That’s why even the most basic diet descriptions already imply some sort of mechanism or root cause."
This is where almost every nutritional study has issues: they are checking how variable X affects Y, without understanding the mechanism by which that might happen (or not). This is okay in a lot of other fields, if you can control for everything else - but if you don't currently have an accurate understanding of what A's B's or C's affect Y, you can't control for them. In physics, I think it is a mature enough science (mostly?) that we can do "does X affect Y" experiments, because we understand very well lots of the (thankfully more transparent) simple mechanisms to "physics" - the apple always falls from the tree. There's lots of advanced physics that says we might not truly understand gravity, but our theory holds up well enough that we can fly planes.
Not in nutrition. I think the high level studies put too many mechanisms in the blender, and are always going to lead us astray until we understand the simple (hopefully) building block mechanisms: "when chemical X encounters protein Y then this produces effect Z" and then build up to the more complex chemistry until we understand the process well enough that we can make predictions about what happens when I eat that croissant, and truly test (and control for) the things that cause the effects.
100% agreed. IMO the basic problem is that the beginnings of physics aren't complex/chaotic, so you can make a lot of headway. But the basics of obesity are already complex/chaotic.
1) There's no controlling variables
2) Even if there was, you wouldn't know which ones to control
3) We don't even know which ones to record - so many studies say "high fat diet fattens mice" and when you dig in, they didn't bother to record the type of fat used..
4) Feedback can take months to years, for some side effects even decades (heart disease)
This environment is basically poison for the scientific method as used in physics. I've tried reading a bunch about how physicists and mathematicians handle chaotic systems, but I honestly haven't seen a good solution.
Pretty much the best thing I've seen is what you could call "cultural evolution" engineering, the type of thinking that tells you not to eat pork because pork meat spoils in hot weather and has worms. It has a bunch of false positives, but it's pretty decent at not giving too many false negatives.
I think this is a good point: "This environment is basically poison for the scientific method as used in physics"
I think there's another aspect: physics is a mechanical system where we can trust that the various molecules don't have a goal (different than our own) they are trying to accomplish, and instead one day decide they wish to fall up instead of down. Whereas in nutrition, not only does the patient have free will, but their brain and stomach have evolutionarily-guided goals they "want" to achieve.
If you change the length of the lever in physics, it will always have the same effect - it can't just decide to do something different. But in nutrition, if you provide less calories, the body may, in order to maintain enough stored energy to survive a famine, just burn less energy. It has a strategy it is pursuing, and it can measure things we do to it, and react accordingly, within its limited abilities.
Ha, good question. I do kind of switch between the two. Being at 240lbs is already so much better quality of life than 290-300lbs that it's an amazing win and if I stayed here forever, I'd probably be pretty happy. But of course something in me wants to get back to <200lbs and maybe even hit "normal" weight at 188lbs :D
I did 185-ish once. That's my goal now. I figure water weight will take me back up to ~195 and that'd be great. Lower would be even better.
Keep doing what you're doing. I think you've got a good balance going, where the drive for fat loss and the drive to inquire are reinforcing each other in a virtuous cycle. Not only is it helping you, but it's helping us, too. I've already mentioned this, but you've inspired me to make some changes and I've dropped ~13 lbs in a little over a month.
Have you considered putting some of your posts on Less Wrong? I think you'd be very welcome there. You'll get some strong but well-informed criticism, and I get the impression that you're a clear thinker who would welcome such.
I didn't even know you could put up posts there. I'm basically only familiar with the name. Do they have diet stuff? I thought it was more about AI.
The 'real purpose' of the site is worrying about AI, but we are interested in many things, mostly about arguing correctly and working things out from limited information.
It's not a 'diet site', but interesting stuff of all kinds is often welcome. (And it seems that all Americans are interested in losing weight!) For instance the slimemoldtimemold chemical hunger series was very well received, and prompted this post which seems to me to have pretty much destroyed the lithium hypothesis.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium
I judge your stuff to be interesting. If you'd prefer I can make a link post there to a favourite post here and see what sort of reception it gets.
I did see that reply to the Lithium Hypothesis. I also don't believe in lithium specifically at this point. As I posted somewhere, I only drank distilled water for 30 days and it did jack sh*t for weight loss. Feels like it should've at least done SOMETHING.
Yea if you want to post one that you think will be well received there, why not :) I have no clue what they're into so you're probably a better judge?
I ran something up the flagpole to see if anyone would bite:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gFBuxhydiwfbyhAN8/experimental-fat-loss
"troll diet" is too old school internet for the kids these days. I like calling them "meme diets". That's how I introduce ex150 and TCD to others when I talk about them.
Haha, I guess I'm dating myself. No idea what the kids do nowadays ;)
As well as Alfredo sauce with bagged lettuce.
(I'm looking at venturing into the world of flavored cream cheese spread.)
This may be the key to everything.
FYI I'm taking high dose thiamine to maintain a condition, and it inhibits the BCKD kinase - but inherently the BCKD is lazy, like I suspect most fatties would have it.
It only makes sense that I've felt less need for thiamine during the ex150 -copycat diet.
Interesting about the thiamin, I also just started taking some (well, a B-complex including it).
How long have you been doing the ex150 analogue diet? Any results?
This is my sixth day, unsurprisingly my clothes fit almost a size too large now.
I don't use the scale because I have a habit of getting obsessed - I go by clothes sizes. Fluctuation is normal and initial drop is expected.
Why I'm excited about it are some observations;
- I gain weight with low carb high protein
- have a hard time getting into ketosis on LCHP, almost never without fasting
- I sure as hell gain on HPHF
- I have been obesity resistant for two years, during which I was able to clock 6000 calories a day (occasionally )and my shirts became oily after - as if I literally sweat the fat out. My skin is oilier again, I know this sounds bogus but it's my experience and I have no way to measure it other than I know what a T-shirt heavy with sebum feels like. That's not the usual amount of grime.
- body temp is up again
I should mention that the two years was 2017-2019 and I'm again a fatty.
Well, 1 clothes size sounds great :) Best feeling in the world, isn't it haha.
If you don't mind, can you roughly record your progress over time if you keep doing this? Even if it's just clothes size :)
Would be a nice data point.
Sure, planning on it.
I'm doing what you're doing.
Eating whipped heavy cream, you mean?
fwiw, a possible “it’s low protein and low carbs doing it, but insulin is not the mechanism” would be mTOR inhibition and downstream of that, AMPK activation. iirc protein and carbs suggest to your body it’s time to build things, which activates mTOR and can lead to not breaking down things like fat. The reason Bulletproof Coffee works for so many (very similar to your cream in your coffee) is fat does not really activate mTOR, or at least we think that’s why it works for people. Many fasting benefits come downstream of mTOR de-activating when you haven’t eaten in a while. You can search for anecdotes of people adding protein to Bulletproof Coffee to see what people say, it ruins some weight loss but not for everyone. You might find useful stuff comparing results of people who added collagen or gelatin versus something higher in BCAAs!
Oh, you may already know this too but just in case: people maybe actually die when their *only* source of protein is gelatin, so when you get into low BCAA experiments DEFINITELY make sure you dig into that. iirc the first time I heard about it decades ago, someone tried making a meal replacement drink with only gelatin for protein because it was cheap, and people died trying it for weight loss. Looks like this is it, it’s not totally conclusive: https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/data-suggest-tie-between-15-deaths-and-liquid-diet.html
I know there are genetic disorders that require low BCAA diets, like maple syrup urine disease, so they’re possible. It might also interest you to know that’s treated with thiamine, which is really important for regulating blood sugar, and which deficiency leads to type 2 diabetes and exercise intolerance and congestive heart failure and all sorts of metabolic problems, not mention digestive and mood disorders (including psychosis in severe cases of alcoholism). The modern American diet is typically deficient in thiamine because it gets depleted digesting carbohydrates, and by drinking alcohol, or consuming foods high in anti-thiamine factors like tea, coffee, and raw fish.
The forms of protein matter a lot beyond BCAAs too, because you need things like tryptophan, tyrosine, glycine, glutamine, glutamate, etc to make neurotransmitters and hormones and such, and iirc some regulate heart rhythm and maintain circulation and clotting etc. Some of them, like taurine, are necessary to even break down fat because bile doesn’t work without them. Amino acids are an area where I think it’s okay to see what happens on lower amounts but you really don’t want to eliminate most even for a relatively short experiment.
fwiw, ime the idea of “essential” and “nonessential” amino acids is dumb because there are so many reasons (genetics, other micronutrients in the diet) a person may not be able to *keep pace* with synthesizing *enough* of a “nonessential” amino acid to do various things in the body, even if they can make some. Outright fasting is different because your body switches tons of levers to survive by unblocking access to scavenge your cells/tissues for resources, but when you’re digesting food you’re signalling your body to prioritize doing stuff with the food coming in, so it keeps other resources locked away. You can run out of stuff to potentially dangerous effect if the ratios of what’s coming in really imbalance anything you might be low in; even if it’s in the short term, if it’s something critical to say heart rhythm or clotting, it may not matter if *hours later* your cellular signaling finally unblocks access to things your body needs, because you had a heart attack or stroke before it settled. So just be careful to research any amino acids you may be lacking when you start doing protein experiments!
Agreed on "essential" things (not just AAs). I mean it's a bar, but a very low one. Probably not useful except in starvation situations.
Thanks for the gelatin tip; I wasn't going to reduce my regular protein intake, only add gelatin (or collagen?) to it. So I should be getting at least the same amounts of everything, unless the ratios matter a lot here.
The mTOR thing is interesting, yea. It's so complicated and influences pretty much anything.
I actually did bulletproof coffee for years before just switching to cream, as cream is easier, cheaper, no need for a blender, and tastes better :) Plus exact same effect, unless you're out for the extra ketones from MCT oil. (Which isn't a problem I have, since I'm doing a ketogenic diet anyway, unlike Asprey.)
not to be banal, but I think this is very important, not just for nutrition science:
"It’s hard to describe reality if you don’t know what matters. You have to describe every atom.
That’s why even the most basic diet descriptions already imply some sort of mechanism or root cause."
This is where almost every nutritional study has issues: they are checking how variable X affects Y, without understanding the mechanism by which that might happen (or not). This is okay in a lot of other fields, if you can control for everything else - but if you don't currently have an accurate understanding of what A's B's or C's affect Y, you can't control for them. In physics, I think it is a mature enough science (mostly?) that we can do "does X affect Y" experiments, because we understand very well lots of the (thankfully more transparent) simple mechanisms to "physics" - the apple always falls from the tree. There's lots of advanced physics that says we might not truly understand gravity, but our theory holds up well enough that we can fly planes.
Not in nutrition. I think the high level studies put too many mechanisms in the blender, and are always going to lead us astray until we understand the simple (hopefully) building block mechanisms: "when chemical X encounters protein Y then this produces effect Z" and then build up to the more complex chemistry until we understand the process well enough that we can make predictions about what happens when I eat that croissant, and truly test (and control for) the things that cause the effects.
100% agreed. IMO the basic problem is that the beginnings of physics aren't complex/chaotic, so you can make a lot of headway. But the basics of obesity are already complex/chaotic.
1) There's no controlling variables
2) Even if there was, you wouldn't know which ones to control
3) We don't even know which ones to record - so many studies say "high fat diet fattens mice" and when you dig in, they didn't bother to record the type of fat used..
4) Feedback can take months to years, for some side effects even decades (heart disease)
This environment is basically poison for the scientific method as used in physics. I've tried reading a bunch about how physicists and mathematicians handle chaotic systems, but I honestly haven't seen a good solution.
Pretty much the best thing I've seen is what you could call "cultural evolution" engineering, the type of thinking that tells you not to eat pork because pork meat spoils in hot weather and has worms. It has a bunch of false positives, but it's pretty decent at not giving too many false negatives.
Right, and cultural evolution takes generations!
I think this is a good point: "This environment is basically poison for the scientific method as used in physics"
I think there's another aspect: physics is a mechanical system where we can trust that the various molecules don't have a goal (different than our own) they are trying to accomplish, and instead one day decide they wish to fall up instead of down. Whereas in nutrition, not only does the patient have free will, but their brain and stomach have evolutionarily-guided goals they "want" to achieve.
If you change the length of the lever in physics, it will always have the same effect - it can't just decide to do something different. But in nutrition, if you provide less calories, the body may, in order to maintain enough stored energy to survive a famine, just burn less energy. It has a strategy it is pursuing, and it can measure things we do to it, and react accordingly, within its limited abilities.
Right. Three body problem? Cute! Our problems has 8 billion bodies, and they all have free will.
I will write back, it's been a busy couple of weeks. Sorry. The email itself might be borked, too.
Question: What is your higher priority: losing body fat (or weight, generally), or discovering what process is making your fat loss happen?
Ha, good question. I do kind of switch between the two. Being at 240lbs is already so much better quality of life than 290-300lbs that it's an amazing win and if I stayed here forever, I'd probably be pretty happy. But of course something in me wants to get back to <200lbs and maybe even hit "normal" weight at 188lbs :D
I did 185-ish once. That's my goal now. I figure water weight will take me back up to ~195 and that'd be great. Lower would be even better.
Keep doing what you're doing. I think you've got a good balance going, where the drive for fat loss and the drive to inquire are reinforcing each other in a virtuous cycle. Not only is it helping you, but it's helping us, too. I've already mentioned this, but you've inspired me to make some changes and I've dropped ~13 lbs in a little over a month.
Nice job :) Keep me updated on your progress (or plateau, too! can learn from both) please.
Will do.