Follow-up to: Boring Advice Repository
Many practical problems in instrumental rationality appear to be wide open. Two I've been annoyed by recently are "what should I eat?" and "how should I exercise?" However, some appear to be more or less solved. For example, various mnemonic techniques like memory palaces, along with spaced repetition, seem to more or less solve the problem of memorization.
I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of solved problems in instrumental rationality. I'm pretty sure you all collectively know good examples; there's a comment I can't find from a user who said something like "taking a flattering photograph of yourself is a solved problem," and it's likely that there are other useful examples like this that aren't common knowledge. Err on the side of posting solutions which may not be universal but are still likely to be helpful to many people.
(This thread is allowed to not be boring! Go wild!)
Well, there's your problem right there -- it sounds like you didn't really especially "do" a ketogenic diet, if you never once reached ketosis (as I understand, you typically need to deplete glycogen stores before entering ketosis, and so you might have 3,000~6,000+ kcal to burn through first, and then there's an interim period of glycogen depletion before it actually begins. Which is where the magnitude of your caloric deficit becomes relevant; was it large enough to get through your stored glycogen in the 1-2 weeks you ate no-carb? I think recently consumed food is generally metabolized first, before dipping into glycogen stores, though that's likely a huge oversimplification), any more than someone eating an egg for breakfast can be said to have "tried" keto.
And even with weight as your metric you should have seen some noticeable reduction after a month and a half of "dieting" on a >300 kcal deficit if you were consistent in your measurement conditions (eg, every day after waking/bathroom and before breakfast). Maybe you just overestimated how many calories you needed for maintenance each day? Which is quite common among "dieters". Like I mentioned, the usual advice for muscle preservation is to eat 300-500 kcal below maintenance each day, and if after a month you fail to note any weight loss or note weight gain to reduce your consumption by an additional 300 kcal, rinse and repeat. It might take several months to note any reduction in weight if you had a shoddy initial estimate (or if your metabolism is exceptionally sensitive to intake, though that can only account for so much. Eventually as you progressively reduce consumption [or increase activity!] you will lose weight).
Haha, and many people report a "mental fog" when first trying ketogenic diets. Maybe that's why you can't remember :D
disclaimer: this isn't my field of study and it's been several years since I tried keto and my research then was cursory, at best, which is why I used less-than-confident language in the above. In the three months that I ran a cyclic ketogenic diet I think it took 2-3 weeks to make the ketostik turn purple (or whatever) the first time, then a weekish after that, ulitmately down to 2-4 days after each weekly recarb.
edit: also, I've heard it might be useful to think of diets less in the "dieting" sense (a temporary change in eating behavior that will end once you reach a predefined goal) and more in a "biological" sense (the typical assortment of food that an organism habitually consumes). Less temporary, more permanent or semi-permanent lifestyle change.
After numerous previous failures, if it's that complicated I'm not going to bother. Complicated things seem even less likely to work than simple things, and simple things almost never work in the first place.
In my experience, no matter what you try, there's always an excuse when it doesn't work. Then when it still doesn't work there's something else you're not doing exactly right that they forgot to mention earlier. Oddly enough, when something does work for someone, nobody bothers to check to see if they were doing everything exactly right by way of co... (read more)