Thoughts on the potato diet (opens in new tab)

There's actually some science behind this diet. Potatoes are the highest scoring food on the satiety index. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/15-incredibly-filling-f...

Basically they're the most filling food per calorie. So if you subscribe to the idea that losing weight is mainly about how many calories you consume, a potato heavy diet should be effective.

And an all potato diet, while monomaniacal, even more effective.

Eggs and fish are also very high on the satiety index. If you threw in pretty much any vegetables and spices of your choosing and just stuck to those along with potatoes, even with a cheat day or three you'd have a very healthy diet which I bet most people would lose weight on.

I spent a few weeks eating only potatoes and vegetable oil, several years ago. It wasn't for weight loss, it was because I was breastfeeding, and my baby had some kind of protein sensitivity we couldn't nail down. Potatoes turned out to be a safe food for him, so that's all I ate for a while. As it happens potatoes are my favorite food, and I had vegetable oil available so I could eat fries/chips/crisps, but even then I can't imagine doing it without a similarly serious motivation. When my choices were "listen to the baby cry in pain every time he eats" or "eat potatoes until the allergist appointment," it was an easy choice. Otherwise I wouldn't last long on the potato diet.

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!

A huge part of the potato diet which isn't mentioned in the article is resistant starch. Each time you cool and cook potatoes you increase the amount of starch your body cannot digest (basically turning into fiber). This makes them even more fulfilling and less caloric (studies show this around 17% each time but I'm sure this approaches a limit).

Also it's ridiculously cheap and way easier to cook potatoes in bulk than practically any other food. At least with the Yukon golds I just rinse them, stab them with a knife and drop them into an instant pot with about a cup of water and a trivet. When done I transfer them into a big bowl in the fridge to cool and when I want to reheat them I reheat the whole bowl to accumulate resistant starch.

It's not a silver bullet but it's a really useful tool if you haven't been successful with other diets.

This is really well written and easily digestible. It’s rare that content about diet is lighthearted and fun! No outlandish claims, very little misconstrued science, but tons of funny fads. Usually you’d have to dig deep to find the root of the authors point in articles like this, but the simplicity is baked in from the start.

If this is interesting I highly recommend "The Hungry Brain".

Some other thoughts:

Obesity is not a disease of over-eating, it is a disease of managing hunger.

"Losing weight" is a terrible goal. "Changing Body Composition" is a much better goal. Specifically change the proportion of fat to muscle.

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If your immediate answer is "Those are the same thing but with different words!!!" then here are some questions to get you thinking:

* Can you measure someone else's hunger and compare it to your own?

* What parts of hunger come from perceptions and what parts come from psychological conditioning?

* Can you survive being hungry? Can you survive starvation? How does your body know the difference?

* How does food energy relate to hunger? For CICO a Calorie is always a Calorie; is that also true for hunger?

* How do you measure progress towards a goal and how does it feel when you can't perceive progress?

* Excess body weight can put stress on your joints, but doesn't generally have any other negative effects. Excess body fat has many negative effects. A scale is cheap and consistent. Body fat monitors and measurement isn't always cheap or consistent (or accurate).

Intermittent fasting has been the easiest thing for fine tuning control over weight for me. My Dad always says it's too hard, he gets hangry etc, but once you commit to it for ~2 weeks you don't even get hungry in the fast window anymore.

The body gets very conditioned to eating patterns. Something to ease into.

I'm not sure the average person can succeed on a diet predicated on greatly limiting the variety of foods you eat. It's an interesting idea though!

My son is in treatment for Leukemia, and most patients lose large amounts of weight.

He's also autistic and has food texture issues.

Somehow he's good with potatoes (generally baked "fries") and milk with some infant formula mixed in. He's the only young (<5 YO) patient they've personally had that has gained weight during treatment, and the attribute it to his "milk and potato" diet. To be clear, he's continued growing, if not normally, something approximating normal, during his chemo. That's highly unusual.

Anecdotal, but it's my experience.

Learned about this diet from Penn Jillette. He has a book out on his weight loss called “Presto!: How I Made over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales”. I tried it for a week and the point that preparing that many potatoes for consumption is spot on. It was a bit of work! After a week I could not eat another potato. I think the point about trying a variety of potatoes might have helped. I think the biggest issue is this clearly is not a sustainable strategy.

I did plain chicken and sweet potatoes for a month. No spices, boiled or baked. Water or Green Tea.

Best I have ever felt. Ended six months of whole body agony.

I try and follow AIP these days. (Potatoes aren't allowed, but Sweet Potatoes are.)

The point about prep being time-consuming is no joke. I recently (maybe 4 months ago) started a fairly strict whole food diet, and the prep is insane. Whole vegetables take real time to wash, clean up, store, and prep for cooking. Then you need to cook it.

But like the potato diet, it's extremely easy to stay full and lose weight. Unlike the potato diet, there's a ton of variety. It also seems to have completely reversed a decline in health I'd been experiencing for over 5 years and I suspect the potato diet wouldn't have had the same effect, haha.

The moment you start thinking of a diet as something that deprives you of something, you are on the road to failure.

"Every diet restricts food choices."

This is incorrect. Good diets do not restrict food choices. They usually limit overall intake. You can eat whatever you want. You only have a certain number of calories you can eat per day without gaining some weight. I'm defining "good diets" as a diet that helps you maintain a healthy weight.

Basically, a diet is what you eat. If you eat junk food, your diet is junk food. When you go on a "diet" to lose weight, you generally change what you eat and how much. So, the most successful diets are ones that replace your old unhealthy diet. This means learning to eat a good diet as a habit.

It also means realizing a diet doesn't end just because you eat way more than you should one day. The mental strength needed to realize you didn't fail your diet, but simple changed your diet for one day, is quite high. You didn't fail. You didn't fall off the wagon. There is no wagon to fall off of. This is probably the biggest mental shift for me. Accept that I will eat unhealthy some times, and I don't need to feel guilty for it. I just go back to normal next time I eat.

And that all revolves around changing your normal diet, or what you eat normally. All of that also means I know I can eat anything, but only so much.

Note: This is mostly me rambling, so I apologize for any confusion. This is also my overall look and what's worked for me long-term. This isn't something that might apply to you, but it's how I see things, and helped me. Maybe it will help others.

Anyone who's obese or overweight with cholesterol/blood pressure issues should look in semaglutide.

It's expensive without insurance, but it helped me go from 25 lbs of weight loss to 55.

I just finished a two week potato diet. I did lose weight but I also reset my palate. Coming out of the diet I’m surprised to find my cravings non existent and food tastes different - neither good nor bad. I’m trying to retrain my palate with a much healthier mode of eating than I was doing before, and two weeks of flavorless bland food seems to have reset. Now I find it much easier to eat healthier foods without compulsions.

I don’t know I expected it to do anything other than drop a few pounds and reset my palate, and it seems to do that. I wasn’t hungry but it was hard to handle the lack of variety as I felt a lot of compulsions despite my lack of hunger.

My favourite part of the article, hailing from a part of the world _sans raton laveur_, was the explanation of "Raccoon trouble" for purchasing a lot of potatoes. What's with raccoons and potatoes?

Is weight loss the only reason behind "Dieting"? Isn't the "carnivore diet" around mental fitness? That's why I choose a low carb diet, mental and physical fitness(when I'm not actively exercising, I try to limit my carb/sugar intake to mornings before I run)

Potato, combined with milk, gives you all the nutrients required for the human body to function properly. I got a little sick of eating potatoes in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet Ukraine, but I learned much later that THE POTATO is a superfood. It can really get you through if you have nothing else.

The Colbert jokes are spot-on, though. We really did eat a buttload of potatoes. It was the primary survival vegetable.

Potato diet sounds like the much acclaimed "dutch cuisine".

I'm exaggerating, but not by much. I grew up on tasteless boiled potatoes, at least 6 times per week. Supplemented with veggies boiled to pulp. Very fatty meat. And lots of milk.

It's laughed at in relation to the highly creative and tasty mediterranean cuisine, but I respect our bland food for other reasons. It's creative for being a nutrition/cost hack born out of necessity.

Potatoes are a nutritional super food but also cheap and you can store them for months even without refrigeration. Even the skin isn't wasted, it has several uses.

The veggies are boiled to pulp because unlike potatoes, those do go bad when stored longer. In modern times a needless precaution but the paranoia to eat rotten veggies has stuck around for a while in people's habits.

Milk, not part of an adult's normal diet, but a cheap source for protein regardless, so let's use it.

Altogether, it's a physical worker's ultra cheap yet highly nutritional meal. In that sense it's very creative. It's creative where it counts, not just for optics.

Penn Jillette somewhat famously did this and lost 100+ pounds.

My guess as to why the potato diet works is the glycoalkoloids inside potatoes, since potatoes are nightshades. Potatoes contain some of the strongest glycoalkoloids out of the nightshades. By eating only potatoes, you give yourself non-standard amount of glycoalkoloid than most humans get. Glycoalkoloids take more than 24 hours to eliminate in the human body, so there is a build up effect.

Another infamous glycoalkoloid is nicotine from the tobacco nightshade. Nicotine is a stimulant that decreases hunger. Stimulants also increase body temperature, which is something that happens on this diet too. Nicotine is also a depressant, which is why your probably still able to sleep on this diet. It's also one reason why smokers tend to be skinnier than the normal population.

> But I felt something—I wanted to eat other foods, to jump onto a higher curve on the above graph. I don’t think this feeling has a good name, but it’s basically what you feel when you have trouble turning down that after-meal iced cream.

English doesn't have a specific names for this, but in Khmer there is a related word: "tralowahn". It means the feeling of being full of whatever you are currently eating. Usually used to describe the feeling after eating creamy/buttery western food. Cambodian people use it all the time, and being aware of that feeling seems to go a long way to prevent overeating.

I tried the potato diet. I consider myself a lean guy, but I wanted to try it for a month before recommending it to my overweight relatives.

I stopped after two weeks mostly because the stomach became rather bloated. There was no weight change.

Then I tried a similar rice diet. Basically one eats rice (both white and brown are OK) with few fruits or fruit juices. To my surprise I lost about 5 kg in 25 days and then the weight loss stopped during the last weak. There were no apparent strength loss judging by weigh lifting results or uphill jogging. There were no other side effects. Now I recommend this, not potato diet.

I love the cybernetic potato diet mentioned at the end: if weight is over target, then eat only potatoes for a week; else eat whatever you want. What could go wrong?

> Which of these would you rather have to sustain you for a day?

Definitely the 5 bacon cheeseburgers. That's one for breakfast, two for lunch, and two for dinner. I could definitely eat like that.

The picture OP shows looks like a typical fast food joint burger. And if we look at McDonald's own self-reporting of calorie content, they list a bacon cheeseburger as 330 calories. So the math of "5 bacon cheeseburgers = ~1750 calories" checks out.

The problem is, I think McDonald's is lying. 1800 calories is about my break-even rate. I don't lose or gain weight at 1800. But--though I'm a little ashamed to admit--I have eaten 5 such cheeseburgers a day (and really just the cheeseburgers, no fries and soda, I actually find them gross), and I gained weight rapidly.

That suggests to me that each of those cheeseburgers is much more than 330 calories. I'd not be surprised if--without bacon--they were actually 500 calories. 2500 calories a day, minus 1800 basal metabolic rate equals 4900 extra calories a week. If we go with the received wisdom of 3600 calories per pound of weight, that's gaining 5 pounds every 3 weeks.

And that tracks with my experience. My slovenly experience of eating nothing but McDonald's cheeseburgers for two months straight.

Seems to mention very little about nutritional value.. I mean, I don't imagine the potato contains every type of fatty acid, protein and vitamin we need..

This sounds like a great way to quickly deplete most of your vitamins and minerals.

Apart from the nutritional concerns, two other huge problems with the potato diet are:

1 - If you want your meal to be healthy you'll have to avoid many (most?) tasty toppings.

2 - The diet is incredibly monotonous and boring.

Hats off to people who can stomach it for an extended period of time, but I would be willing to wager that the vast majority of people who try it won't be able to stick with it for long.

I came to this exact conclusion a long time ago, except using intermittent fasting (i.e. “stop eating so much”):

    1. Use a fad diet (e.g. potato) to get down to 80 kg.

    2. Weigh yourself every morning

    3. If your average weight over a week ever exceeds 81 kg, spend the next week on the potato diet.

    4. Repeat forever.

One my friend once had to stay on a diet of only green tea and salo (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salo_(food)) with rye bread. According to him, after two weeks of this diet he experienced incedible lightness in the body.

> EVERYTHING WORKS. (at least in this short term) How to explain this? Well, what does everything have in common? Every diet restricts food choices.

Now I wonder what is the minimum N such that switching diets every N days ad libitum would work.

I think just making any significant change to one's diet can, in the short term anyway, have noticable positive effects, especially depending on what the previous diet looked like. But over time those effects tend to level off and eventually into net-negative consequences from whatever's being restricted out. I can definitely see that being the case for a prolonged potato only diet.

I also think the best long term strategy is to focus first on eating plenty of nutrient dense, minimally processed foods which will naturally tend to crowd out the junk. Junk being anything consisting mostly of the cheap subsidized ingredients like wheat, corn, and soy.

I don't know if this is the intention but of the five single food diets, I think I'd take literally any of the other 4 options ahead of the potato diet. But the context felt like the potato option was meant to be the most appealing?

When I stocked up for covid I restricted myself from ordering meals or any shopping an I ate only what I had. Which was mostly green lentils with butter and salt. Plus some rice and dried vegetables, peas and buckwheet for a bit of variety. In few weeks of eating that I started unintentionally loosing weight. I didn't feel hungry. The food was tasty just a little bit boring. I was taking some vitamins just in case.

Weightloss stopped when I decided to start doing shopping again and bought higher variety if food including sweets.

Just take a GLP-1 agonist long term and be done with the dieting and bankrupt will power.

Wegovy (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide) have set a new bar in weight loss drugs.

15-20% body weight loss over the course of a year.

While I love the idea of only eating one food for money and practical reasons... Potatoes are so utterly boring.

Diets only work if you can stay on them without being miserable, and I know if all I could eat was potatoes I would be pretty miserable about that.

Also, any diet that requires supplements(Vitamin B12, probably some other vitamins that are fairly low in potatoes, and whatever essential amino acids are missing from potato protein. That's just off the top of my head) to be complete is a bad diet in my book.

I totally feel the amount of work comment, though I tried something totally different. I tried juicing - it was a ton of fun (I “cheated” by having more fruit juices than vegetables). I had more energy, thought clearly, slept better etc. Same with eating raw solid food (only fruits and veggies).

The thing that sucked, was the amount of work. Buying, cleaning, juicing, cleaning again… crap ton of work. Ah, it is also expensive.

If only fruits and veggies were as cheap as milk, eggs, chicken… life would be much better

I can't speak generally, but when he asked if I'd prefer five bacon hamburgers or like twenty potatoes to get through the day, I would definitely choose the burgers.

I remember a joke that is something like this. The local pastor is talking to young poor child Timmy asking about his life. P: So Timmy what do you have for breakfast? T: Potatoes. P: How about Lunch? T: Potatoes. The Pastor is getting concerned and asks how about dinner? T: Potatoes as well. P: So all you have to eat is potatoes? T: Oh no Pastor: P: Oh, that is good, what else do you have. T: Well I've also got my spoon.

Patotoes have a very round nutrients profile and relatively high complete proteins. Not the worst pick.

But to eat 2500kcals of potatoes a day is so hard. No wonder they loose weight. That's so much potatoes!

With 70-80 kcals per 100 grams an adult would need between 3-4 kilos. Every day

That's a mountain of potatoes twice the size of your stomach.

Some bake it with fat or oils I've read which makes it somewhat more manageable volume wise.

Short-term weightloss is a very low bar. Losing weight long-term is much more worthwhile and might not go well with “all (restrictive) diets”.

> EVERYTHING WORKS (at least in this short term).

> How to explain this? Well, what does everything have in common? Every diet restricts food choices.

Or some variant of the Hawthorne effect, and the change has nothing to do with the specific change and everything to do with your conciseness about there being a change and it being for the purpose of weight loss.

i've done it three times for 2 weeks. potatoes only, that's it. it works very well in the short term. towards the end of the last 2 attempts I was able to fast for 2-3 days due to sheer boredom of the food. i'm a compulsive eater, and this was kind of eye opening.

that being said, this approach didn't work long term for me (hence multiple times doing it). I'd transition back to the way I was eating before and put the weight back on.

currently I'm working with a nutritionist and trying to eat towards specific macros, and counting everything in my fitness pal. the weight loss is more subtle (1-2 lbs per week tops), and I'm lifting weights which distorts the actual loss on the scale. not seeing the scale go down dramatically is hard, but eating the way I am now is totally sustainable and I've been doing it for almost 3 months now.

"You can’t eat potatoes forever."

Actually I heard from the local potato lobby organisation in my country, that the potato is the only food in existance which you can eat exclusive forever and you can't get any bad sideeffects, because a potato contains all nutritions needed...

Is this not true? :D Is there any real science on that?

There's something interesting about this. I ate a Halo Top and Water diet for 3 weeks and it got me a quick crash diet outcome of 6 kgs or somewhat down (long time ago) but at the cost of my mental health. So maybe this dude's "restrict foods" thing works.

Potentially related: the Twinkie diet

https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor...

remember vaguely reading in some book (Jared Diamond?) that at one time the poor in Ireland lived almost entirely on potatoes and milk - and that they were much healthier in general than the richer elites. Apparently those two items + some green veggies are enough.

Potato diet given milk/butter seems quite doable, Ireland lived off milk and oats for a very long time and potatoes, especially older varieties are incredibly nutritious given the skin so mixed with dairy JT seems like a relatively manageable diet.

Do yams and sweet potatoes count even though they're not "technically" potatoes?

Also checkout the original twitter thread results: https://twitter.com/mold_time/status/1521237143515013120

Aren't potatoes high starch which is generally avoided with keto-type diets?

In regards to the first point. For the year of 2021 I did not eat any added sugar. If the label said any grams of added sugar I just didn’t eat it. Super easy diet and it worked really well for me.

This sounds as sensible as living on hardtack, salt pork, and rum (the pirate diet) -- a great way to get scurvy and other fun diseases caused by nutritional deficiencies.

Samwise Gamgee approves.

All crazy elimination diets work short term. The true measure of a diet is the one you can live on for years and be healthy.

This reminds me of a SSC article reviewing of a book by Guyenet[1], which describes the “buffet diet” vs what I’ll summarize as the “Soylent diet” (nutrient sludge).

The finding was that giving people unlimited boring nutrient sludge on tap, they consumed way fewer calories while still reporting satiety (not feeling hungry).

The basic idea being if you restrict yourself to boring food, then your appetite is lower. And the inverse; if you eat at a buffet and can have any number of diverse flavors, then your appetite (and “fullness threshold”) is higher.

Any diet where you just eat one thing is therefore going to equilibrate at a lower caloric intake than a diet where you are allowed to eat multiple flavors.

I’m a bit skeptical about glycemic load (I had potatoes down as by far the worst vegetable of them all) but perhaps that isn’t the current understanding of things. Any diet of one-thing is going to have strong appetite suppressing effects. I suspect there are more nutritious options, like “only eat salad with no dressing” which might be boring enough to suppress appetite, while also being nutritious enough to sustain longer-term. You don’t want to be the first case of scurvy in your town this century.

1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry...

As I'm reading others' comments on here I'm shocked at the seemingly uneducated state of comments, I blame "influencers" and the fitness industry for spreading so much FUD + absolute nonsense. Most of them patterned like "I lost x lbs on Y diet, and you should too". I'm shocked at how few people realize that diets equated for protein + fiber are essentially identical.

I highly recommend Layne Norton's book Fat loss forever, and his free content on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3ePbeZJzYA .

Important tldr from his content:

* protein and resistance training are key if you want to lose fat (and not muscle), not just "weight"

* All restriction diets work when adhered to, the key is to find the one you will actually adhere to. This includes low carb, keto, intermittent fasting of various protocols (OMAD, 16:8, others), low fat, eat only soup, etc etc. They all work by causing a restriction on eating time or foods eaten. They all only work if there is a caloric deficit (net of cost of digestion for protein + fiber, or equal if equated for protein+fiber) .

* Calories in - calories out ("CICO") is absolutely backed by science when the researchers are smart enough to actually account for known things like caloric cost of digestion (changes the "CO" part)

Go DYOR on his content if you want the sources.

The problem is that no one food, including potatoes, has all the vitamins our bodies need. If you do this diet, make sure you're taking a multivitamins and supplements for the vitamins and minerals not present in potatoes

I prefer to go jogging honestly and do exercise. Every fat-thin cycle makes you lose muscular mass so you should combine diets with exercise instead of getting unhealthy eating habits.

Seems more like an experiment than a diet.

Belarusian people are the original inventors of Potato Diet - highest consumption in the world.

This is actually great if your goal is to lose muscle

Low protein and low fat, super carb heavy diet, what can go wrong?

potato diet?!?!

what is this. Can we just come out and say, the recent increase in price of food is too damn high instead of hiding it behind a veneer of clever diets that choose lesser costing food?

Excluding all other fruits and vegetables in favor of potatoes seems obviously misguided.

Eat less food and move more. There's literally nothing to losing weight beyond that. It's incredible to me the amount of mental gymnastics that people will perform to avoid facing this.

I lost over 100 pounds on a potato diet. And then gained it all back, plus some. Same goes for a raw vegan diet and a less strict McDougall vegitarian diet, and then a paleo/keto diet. When it comes to yo yo dieting I'm an overachiever. Yes, 100+ pounds on each. I do not recommend that.

So out of desperation and pain I did something I thought I never would or could resort to. Carnivore. It hasn't fixed all of my problems, but it has done more to stabilize my weight at a much lower level than anything else. It has controlled my cravings, making it uniquely sustainable.

My new theory is that obesity is about appetite control is about ... malnutrition. The secret for me was simply to find the fuel mixture that my body demands. Appetite responds immediately. No fancy behavioral techniques need be applied. I'm pretty sure carnivory isn't the right fuel mixture for everyone. But I think finding what is, is a lot more important than other weight control strategies.

Specifically I think The Hungry Brain gets it backwards. I spent decades trying to "outsmart the instincts that make us overeat" and failed horribly. I succeeded by following those instincts.