Potassium Maxxing - the results

​Every year, around March my exercise regimen gets a serious boost of structure and focus as I start to plan out my run for The Triple Bypass, a Colorado based bike race.

Starting at 8000 feet of elevation the course runs over 3 mountain passes ending in Avon resulting in 10,000 feet of climb and 120 miles of cycling.

It is freaking tough, but so so so worth it.

​This year my excitement started early, I was 155lbs when I registered in November, sure that being 10lb lighter would make a noticeable difference in my performance.

By March though I was 164lbs heavy which does seem to be my current “set point” if you believe in such a thing. Through ravenous endless hunger and clear metabolism suppression, my body fought me in the in between months to get back here having fought freaking hard in 2023 through 7 weeks of PSMFs to get down to 155.

Anyway, having tried years of different diets to try and get to what I believe is a leanness I deserve (sub 15% bf) as a completely non professional hybrid athlete I found myself in March thinking - How does this work and how can I get lean for the triple.

It was not a top priority, in fact 164 is perfectly fine to ride at. I have also put on lbs of muscle including on my legs since my last ride so one might hope I would produce more sustained power up hill. But I was concerned with not gaining further weight as documented as the “rebound” effect where you body learned that you starved and wants to doubly protect against it in future (more on this is later posts).

I was however, open to mixxing it up. By March I had been some form of keto for about 8 years and decided that maybe I could run a different protocol. Maybe I should slam sugar. Maybe I would instantly become obese, any time I had touched a carb for years, this is what it felt like happened.

Jump forward a few months and I found myself re-reading “A chemical hunger” by the anonymous research group Slime Mold Time Mold (In a previous post I wrote a response to their case against the seed oil hypothesis - see my blog), and came across the story of Krinn who via a heavy supplementation of potassium, seemingly miraculously lost a tonne of weight

“**An Ad-Hoc, Informally-Specified, Bug-Ridden, Single-Subject Study Of Weight Loss Via Potassium Supplementation And Exercise Without Dieting”**

The protocol was simple, every day try and supplement up to 10g of potassium in the diet, ideally in a sugary drink (she prefers gatorade), do some exercise but nothing out of the ordinary and watch what happens.

As someone who was already doing a enormous amount of exercise, that part was easy. I weigh myself every day as soon as I wake up and so any meaningful result is not a fluke. The control is effectively the time before I started.

The 20,000 steps, 100miles of cycling and 4 weight lifting sessions a week have not been producing any weight loss for months. (Pontzer 2012 explains this)

We did differ though - Krinns diet was this “I ate as I had been doing: I ate the food I felt like eating and ate as much of it as I felt like eating. If I felt like eating more or less, I did that.”

Whereas I did actually start tracking my food, trying to keep it at around 2200kcal, hitting 120g protein a day and on big training days only eating back 50% of calories burned.

Week 1 was so successful I thought I had unlocked the secret to life. I couldn’t explain it. One week, with such results required me to try two weeks to make up for some anomalies, and well, that’s where things got weird.

​So weird, that I extended by a 3rd week to see what would happen.

Week 1 I seemingly lost a pound of body weight based on average, but by Sunday. I weighed in 3lbs lighter. Can you imagine if that was effortlessly reproduceable

Some context - I ate an entire pack of mints on the Wednesday which nuked my stomach and confounds these weight results.

Sunday of week 1 I did a 4 hour bike ride up a mountain. So my food intake was huge.

Week 2 seemed to make up for it again, but I did start to find that walking up stairs was tiring or I couldn’t finish the last few sets of my workouts.

Week 3 was much like week 2.

Looking at those week 1 numbers. Man the joy I felt on the Sunday morning was unbelievable.

I’m now stuck on whether I should continue. I am feeling tired. Maybe my NA to K ratio is way off. Drinking that much potassium tastes like crap.

If it works - why?

I don’t know enough about Krinn. She started at 30 bmi. It could be very likely that her NA to K ratio was so skewed, her results are based on slowly restoring her potassium ratio. Maybe my ratio had no where to go. Her results did stall and there’s been no update from her since.

She also mentioned she’s on HRT. Hormones are complex. In fact they likely rule most things in hunger and metabolism.

Here are my theories on why this might work

1 - Potassium plays a key roll in energy mobilization - by maxxing, my body can take energy from stores rather than down regulate metabolism

2 - Potassium plays a key roll in detoxification - as I'm slightly out of energy balance, Potassium helps transport released toxins (inc pufa) out of my system (and kidneys) thus reducing my body fighting back.

3 - Potassium something something microbiome.

I am currently working on another protocol but it isn’t ready for testing yet, and the triple is now less than a month away.

So here’s what I’m going to do. Try this again but also ramp up my sodium intake. My gut tells me this might fix the lethargy.

Also funny side note - Gatorade is gross. The refined sugar, the blue, red and white coloring. I’ve been experimenting with much failure on a more natural drink. I’ve been trying variations of maple syrup, honey, date sugar, fig sugar and I’m not getting close.

Onwards.