My answers to "Prove You Are Worthy to Post About Diets"
Experimental Fat Loss
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My answers to "Prove You Are Worthy to Post About Diets"<br>Squarely putting myself in the Complex System Respecters category lol
Experimental Fat Loss<br>Aug 10, 2026
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complex system respecter<br>Slime Mold Time Mold recently posted a link to Prove You Are Worthy to Post About Diets. As someone who posts about diets all the time, and encounters lots of grifters & just genuinely stupid people in the space, I like the idea of a heuristic.<br>Of course I have my own subconscious/informal heuristic, but I thought I’d post my own answers to the questions posed in that blog post.<br>I think maybe the most important thing is admitting to “I don’t know.” There are a lot of dimensions in the diet & nutrition space, and a lot of the times you “just don’t know.” You need to admit when you don’t know or you’re just putting ego before truth and being dishonest.<br>For example, there are several questions in that post that I have zero clue about, about food allergies or SIBO. I know next to nothing about these because presumably I don’t really have any food allergies. Or I don’t know about them.
I’ve formatted these questions slightly differently to make them easier to read in a Q&A format.<br>Here goes:
How long does food take to pass through the alimentary canal? How long does it spend in different places/stages?<br>Honestly not very sure. Different foods seem to take a very different amount of time. I think most foods are digested in the stomach relatively quickly, from a few minutes to a few hours.<br>Fiber seems to stick around the longest in the colon or wherever that is, which is why high-fiber diets make you so bloated.<br>I don’t think there’s a specific “transit time” since the digestive tract isn’t just a passive tube. It has an active function, and it can be triggered by different things.<br>My understanding is that, for example, evacuating the bowels can be triggered by volume/stretching/distending, which is how it works on a high-fiber diet. Or by presence of fat, which is how it works on a low-fiber keto diet (this is why “how do you even poop without fiber” is such a dumb question for carnivores/ketards).
If digestion takes so long, why might one race to the toilet an hour or two after eating spicy ramen?<br>Clearly bowel movements can also be triggered in more of an emergency response by the presence of certain “intruders” like bacteria/viruses/certain toxins. E.g. diarrhea doesn’t “just happen” when you drink way more water one day, it’s the body flushing out everything.<br>In addition, various parts of the digestive tract can be in disrepair and not function well, which can also change transit time. I think spicy foods can cause inflammation in a (possibly unhealthy?) digestive tract, leading to this emergency evacuation.
How much do cooking, temperature, seasoning and flavoring, food processing, meal timing, etc. affect hunger and digestion?<br>Uh, a lot? Infinite dimensions to this.<br>Working backwards: I think of hunger as a biological signal to quench a certain need the body has. The big one is “carolies” or energy. For a metabolically healthy person, hunger should largely be a function of “energy required” and go away upon eating enough. In most modern people, this system seems broken somehow, which is why we “overeat.”<br>Beyond carolies, there are a few smaller/more niche ones, which are still very important. “Protein hunger” from the so-called Protein Leverage Hypothesis, which I experience when I go significantly below 40-45g of protein per day for a few days.<br>You can tell this is a different animal because 1. it feels very different and 2. it doesn’t go away no matter how much low/non-protein food I eat, but is fixed 15 minutes after eating a small portion of beef.<br>I also personally seem to experience “sodium hunger” at very low levels of intake, and there might be more types out there for other micronutrients.<br>In terms of how cooking/seasoning/flavoring/processing/etc affect hunger, it depends if these things are metabolically/biochemically active or inert. I believe that various food ingredients are able to “cause more hunger” by changing the biochemistry of how the body deals with food substrates. Infamous here are fructose, sodium, and linoleic acid from seed oils, but there are likely more.<br>I think that, in a metabolically healthy person eating metabolically healthy foods (whatever that means) the actual “hunger” should be relatively unchanged by cooking methods. You might eat a little more if the food is absolutely delicious, but then you should be a little less hungry later or the next day. You might put on a few pounds of fat over the holidays, but then you should instinctively eat less because you have more body fat stored.<br>This seems to be how it used to work for most people, and how it still works for the few metabolically healthy people today.<br>There are studies from I think the 1940s where they force-fed prisoners...