My weight loss experiments so far

My second attempt at writing a blog about my weight loss experiments.

Hugely inspired by A Chemical Hunger and the experiments ExFatLoss has been doing.

Since the start of this year I have been doing food experiments. Here I share all I have learned, which in truth has raised more questions than answers, I fear.

First, how do I conduct these experiments. The idea is to eat a restrictive diet for 4 weeks and measure my weight. That's all I do. I decided that it must be as frictionless as possible, otherwise I won't do it.

I bough a small notebook for the bathroom, as my smartphone is not next to my bed, and I want to weight myself just after waking up. For consistency always first go to the toilet, as I have found that otherwise the amount of fluids I drank yesterday evening changes my weight.

I vibe-coded an app to make it effortless to put in my weight and graph it out.

The graphs

Let's start with the entire 6-month window. All experiments are marked with a light green background.

And with the daily values, which make it a whole lot more noisy:

And with cheat days:

The emotional journey

I have found all this interesting from an experience perspective. There are two opposing forces in me: The scientist and the fat guy. In any of the experiments that don't clearly lose weight, after 3 weeks I'm really starting to feel I want to stop. But the scientist in me wants to continue, to get clear results.

So far, the scientist has always won. I find the process too important. Also, there is a ton of shame around being obese and I'm trying to love that side of me more. The nice part of these experiments is that it feels like playing, so I am actually enjoying being a 'mad scientist'.

Individual results

Unless otherwise qualified, all experiments allowed oil. We only use olive oil at home, but when buying fries you're obviously exposed to other kinds.

#1 Potatoes and Eggs

First experiment, potatoes and eggs. Not shown in the graph for this year. This was part of the SMTM rifftrial . I basically maintained my weight, which is interesting on it's own standpoint.

#2 Potatoes

Then after some correspondence with the SMTM people, I decided to do potatoes only. Which worked. Effortless weight loss, without feeling unnecessary hunger. When I was hungry I would just eat a potato, or fries, or go to McDonalds. More on that last part later. So oil was also ok.

I omit the first 3 days to get to my result, because in most experiments I lose a ton of water weight in those days. With those excluded I lost 3.5k's in 4 weeks. Not too bad.

#3 Potatoes and Legumes

I had a hunch that legumes were as awesome as potatoes are. So I wanted to test that. They're also incredibly convenient, because you can buy them in a can, ready to eat. So that was my first experiment for this new experiment-heavy chapter in my life.

-4.4kg, great success. I got concerned halfway, because there was a plateau. But it seems that if eat this much fiber, shedding the weight seems to have a lot of variance.

#4 Potatoes and Dairy

I was curious about this, because in the riff trial many people had success with this combo . I however, did not:

I wonder whether it has to do with my definition of dairy. Which included a ton of cheese. But my neighbourhood's LLM tells me that dairy includes cheese.

I made a ton of mashed potatoes with milk and butter, which is delicious by the way. +2.2kg though, If you include the first three days, it is more neutral. But still, seems that it doesn't work for me. At least in this experimental form.

#5 Potatoes, Legumes and Vegetables

My goal is to at some point arrive at a 'healthy', 'sustainable' diet. So I though to expand the potatoes and legumes with vegetables, because we tend to think these are healthy. So it goes:

I did have 3 massive cheat days on the 10th, 11th and 12th of April. That seems to have had a massive effect. Now that I think of it, I should probably retry this experiment. -1kg.

#6 Rice and Legumes

To start trying to disprove some theories I want to have experiments without potatoes. This was my first try, and oh boy did it not go as planned. I lasted 3 days and had extreme acid reflex constantly. I can tell you, the acid reflex I have generally by being overweight is nothing compared to this. I decided that having this much acid reflux is likely not health, so I should stop. So no graph. The amount of water weight I lost was impressive though, about two kilos.

#7 Mix

I was a little bit done with the extreme restrictions, so I wanted too loosen up a little, to see if that would work too. The protocol was:

Ad libitum: Potatoes, Legumes, Vegetables, Rice, Coconut milk, Diced tomatoes from a can.

Extra: All cheese, oils and eggs.

Explicitly didn't: Bread, paste, nuts & seeds, sugar, fruit.

With that you can cook curries and chilis, which makes it much more tolerable in terms of eating together and deliciousness. Don't get me wrong, potatoes are extremely delicious, but even for me it get's a little bit boring.

This graph feels like the shrug emoji.

#8 Back to Basics (potatoes)

I find the results of this experiment fascinating. I ate only potatoes. But I went the super lazy route: Almost only frozen potatoes with 3-8% sunflower oil. This seems to have damped the 'potato effect'.

The reason I even started this experiment was because of the fat side that 'just wanted to lose some weight this time'. Well it seems that plan didn't work. Anecdotally, the two times I manually peeled potatoes and had them boiled and panfried the next day I immediately lost weight the days after. It's a bit of a wash, but this is super interesting contract with the first potatoes only I did.

I'm starting to wonder whether oil is actually the problem. I'm agnostic whether it's PUFA's or a contaminant in that case. This experiment has a few days left, but I'm ready to call that this much oil is doing something to reduce the weight loss.

Future

I have no idea what to do next. Suggestions are welcome.

Conclusion

As I said in the beginning, more questions than answers. The only thing I'm sure of is that I love Potatoes and Legumes.