The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
The Slime Mold guys are up to it again - this time asking people to drink large amounts of potassium chloride.. My OB thought it sounded harmless so I'm drinking about 1/8 tsp - 1/4 tsp of potassium chloride a day, though I'm not signing up for the trial as I'm pretty sure they don't want pregnant women in there. I do feel a little more energetic, we will see if that lasts or if it's just a placebo. The normal markers to assess health changes are lost to me, but I'm measuring my underbust to see if that changes over time. As a pregnant woman I am in a position where I am getting my blood pressure, heart rate, and blood samples taken regularly, so at least I'll know quickly if something isn't going well.
If potassium supplementation works, I don't know how they are going to work out their confirmation bias that it's obviously lithium causing obesity. My own assumptions regarding the obesity epidemic are that either 1) our soil is deficient in some nutrient and our body keeps telling us to eat food until we get enough or 2) it's seed oils. Potassium supplementation obviously addresses the first, for the second I wonder if potassium has an effect on ROS or oxidative stress.
On the potato diet - wouldn't that just work if there's 'something wrong with modern food that makes people want to eat more and be fat', independent of anything specific about potatoes? Or [not my guess but plausible] even if the issue is something else, maybe it's just that potatoes, when you're eating only them, are just less appealing and people eat less?
'feeling more energetic' is almost certainly just random fluctuations / placebo
Also, IIRC SMTM never replied to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium, pointing out many deep flaws in the lithium posts. (these aren't even the only flaws, it was an incredibly poor quality series of posts, and it was bizzare that e.g. it got a shoutout on dominic cummings' twitter)
Yes, the Potato diet thing was just to confirm that it even did anything. The Slime Mold guys seem pessimistic that anything has a long term effect on keeping weight off, so confirming that something does lose weight and keep it off would be one data point to them.
It absolutely doesn't tell them why the Potato Diet worked at all in the slightest. Hence this next step - is it a particular nutrient potatoes are high in? If this is a bust, they will undoubtedly turn to other possible causes.
It’s likely the blandness of potatoes that makes it work. It’s similar to the shangri la diet. Your effectively de coupling flavour from satiety, which means you can make better food choices far more easily with no negative cravings
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