SlimeMoldTimeMold

That's a book review. Read the actual book.[1]

Notes:

- Prologue:

(Behaviorism) ended up being a terrible way to do psychology, but it was admirable for being an attempt at describing the whole business in terms of a few simple entities and rules. It was precise enough to be wrong, rather than vague to the point of being unassailable, which has been the rule in most of psychology.

- Thermostat:

An intro to control theory, but one which ignores stability. Maxwell's original paper, "On Governors", (1868) is still worth reading. He didn't just discover electromagnetics, he founded control theory. Has the usual problems with applying this to emotions, and the author realizes this.

OK, so living things have a lot of feedback control systems. This is not a new observation. The biological term is "homeostasis", a concept apparently first described in 1849 and named in 1926. (There are claims that this concept dates from Aristotle, who wrote about "habit", but Aristotle didn't really get feedback control. Too early.)

- Motivation:

Pick goals with highest need level, but have some hysteresis to avoid toggling between behaviors too fast.

- Conflict and oscillation:

Author discovers oscillation and stability in feedback systems.

- What is going on?

Author tries to derive control theory.

- Interlude

Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, which was peak fascination with feedback in the 1950s.

- Artificial intelligence

"But humans and all other biological intelligences are…

You're right and wrong. Many obese people have done this and lost weight... and then gained it right back again. Over, and over again.

There is a persistent myth that the obese person lacks some spiritual strength or willpower. I think your comment implies this.

And yet they do have the willpower to lose weight? And something happened in 1980 which turned 30% of adults into weak-willed moral degenerates, and more and more every year? Is that actually plausible in an era with unsurpassed interest in healthy eating, where people voluntarily exercise more than they ever have, with better quality food than we have ever had?

The original researchers who suggested a mass trial of the potato diet over social media aptly said "the study of obesity is the study of mysteries". They're investigating some high-risk hypotheses that chemical contaminants are the cause of skyrocketing obesity. Worth a read.

> People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. This seems closely related to observations like the French Paradox — the French eat a lot of fatty cheese and butter, so why aren’t they fatter and sicker?

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/

My opinion is the only reliable way to lose weight (other than ozempic) is to eat in such a way that regulates satiety such that you don't feel hungry when losing weight.

Intermittent fasting + lower carb + whole foods can do this. But the trick is satiety in any one person is regulated by multiple processes. I doubt there's a one size fits all and probably the problem gets harder the more satiety is dysregulated.

But I think any approach aimed at undereating in the sense of being hungry is not likely what people who lose weight successfully are doing. Or at least those who avoid rebounds. You'd instead want to find something that is highly satiating and satisfying and that also can't be overeaten.

Example: almonds may be high satiety by some technical definition. But is is very very possible to eat past hunger with them.

In my own experience it is very difficult to eat too much steak. I find it delicious but simply couldn't past a certain point. Others have reported similar results by adding lots of potatoes.

I don't guarantee success by targeting satiety but I think it's worth trying rather than calories or weight directly. At some level you need to roughly figure out macronutrients to know where you can err but anytime I've lost weight it's been by focussing on type of food rather than amount. But strictly so.

Re potatoes:…

The only reason the potato diet is interesting to me (and presumably the reason it's interesting to the https://slimemoldtimemold.com/ folks) is the likely relationship to their environmental contaminant hypothesis for the public health issue of increasing body weights since 1980, outlined in a series of posts here: http://achemicalhunger.com/

In short, while the variety and satiety explanations make a lot of sense subjectively for an individual on this diet, they don't match up with the empirical data on weight gain since 1980. Here are a few phenomena that are not explained by this hypothesis:

* The inflection point at right around 1980. There's no specific change that occurred in 1980 that anyone can point to that indicates a major change in variety of food in the average diet.

* The correllation of weight gain with location in watersheds: high altitude locales where surface water has not moved very far (e.g. Colorado) exhibit the weight gain phenomena much less than locales deeper down in the watershed (e.g. Mississippi and Louisiana)

I'm not interested in fad diets or disordered eating because they have a track record of bad long term outcomes, but I am interested in the potato diet as a blunt tool for taking action on this hypothesis, which looks pretty compelling to me. And if it doesn't work out, that's fine, too!

This is a great article but the best part is an off hand link to a book review of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression [1] which includes choice quotes like

> The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types: Swiss cheese, ham, sardine, liverwurst, egg, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue (yes). But by 1926, he “claimed that he had counted 946 different sandwich varieties stuffed with fillings such as watermelon and pimento, peanut butter, fried oyster, Bermuda onion and parsley, fruit salad, aspic of foie gras, spaghetti, red snapper roe, salmi of duck, bacon and fried egg, lettuce and tomato, spiced beef, chow-chow, pickled herring, asparagus tips, deep sea scallops, and so on ad infinitum.”

I ordered it off Amazon right away only to immediately realize, to my horror, that the hardcover version I had chosen would not arrive until Saturday, a full fortnite after my aspic of foie gras, salmi of duck, and the $5 esp32-wroom dev kits that were part of the same order.

What is this, the 1930s? Civilization is seriously going down the drain.

[1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/04/book-review-a-square-meal-part-i-foods-of-the-20s-and-30s/

This will likely be buried in all the answers, but I'll try anyway.

I've recently read this here: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/

It's a long article series, but IMHO very worth it.

In it, the authors posit that the body has a "lipostat", like a thermostat, but for regulating body fat and weight.

If you are breathing pure oxygen and burning more calories, you'll just feel hungrier and eat more to compensate; if you don't, you'll feel sluggish and tired.

The authors also claim that the most likely cause for the obesity crisis is that some environmental contaminant causes the lipostat to be mis-adjusted.

That makes it pretty hard to deal with obesity, so the author's advise is:

* move to a high altitude, since contamination follows watershed

* avoid jobs that correlate with high obesity rates

* avoid highly processed food, since each processing step has the option to add contamination

I am not sure if all of this is real or some of it is bunk, but I found some of the arguments quite convincing, so I'd encourage you to read it and form your own opinion. (Do NOT just rely on my summary, it doesn't do the article series justice).