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“Potatoes, milk, butter and the occasional piece of meat” is apparently a nutritionally complete diet, but you need to be able to eat something like 10-lb of cooked potatoes a day, which is hard work and also not that inexpensive either.

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More like 7lbs for an average man, but that's probably the point. You realistically can only eat something like 4lbs a day (I guess - I haven't tried), and thus you lose weight. If that amount is enough to make you feel full, that would plausibly explain why these people have success with this weight loss strategy.

Note that the article recommends refraining from consuming dairy products, albeit without any reasoning.

Dairy products are usually high in fat and cholesterol, and are generally considered to be unhealthy. They are high in calcium, but the absorption rate (how much calcium you actually get from consuming it) is very low, and according to some research it's even negative (as in, it costs your body more calcium to consume dairy than what you get from it).

Dairy is also a relatively new addition to our diet, and was exclusively for babies for most of our history. A lot of people hate on vegans for being "unnatural", but at least when it comes to eating dairy that's just silly.

Potatoes are cheap af what do you mean?

Quick back of the envelope numbers.

At Tesco's you can get potatoes for £0.36/kg. 1kg = ~2.2lb, so ~£0.165/lb. Even at the higher daily consumption in this thread, 10lb/day, that's £1.65 daily cost of food.

I imagine the only way to go cheaper is by dumpster diving.

A loaf of bread is pretty conveniently 2000 calories, and costs £0.40 if you buy a cheap one. Less nutritious than a potato though!

A 40p loaf of bread is punishment, not nourishment.

Potatoes[0]: £0.36/770kcal[1]

Rice[2]: £0.45/3650kcal[3]

Pasta[4]: £0.46/3710kcal[5]

Normalized to rice:

Potatoes: 3.79 rice_cost_units/kcal

Rice: 1.00 rice_cost_units/kcal

Pasta: 1.01 rice_cost_units/kcal

Tesco does not list calories for potatoes, and for the dry foods only provides calories for the cooked result, so I used values from the USDA nutrient database. The value for potatoes is optimistic, because the cheap potatoes are "imperfect", which suggests there will be significant loss from trimming inedible parts. Assuming efficient technique (pre-soaking dry foods, chopping potatoes small, reducing heat input to minimum once at temperature, covering cooking pots, using insulated pots if possible), cooking cost will probably be similar for all three, although pasta can be eaten "al dente" (undercooked), which might let it beat rice for total cost.

[0] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/292332517

[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/170026/n...

[2] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/300843799

[3] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/169756/n...

[4] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/297844134

[5] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/168927/n...

Rice has a satiety index of 138 while potatoes have a satiety index of 323, almost 3 times as much. So you need to eat way less potatoes compared to rice, I don't know if it's a linear scale though but still probably brings potatoes pretty close to rice.

Satiety index affects how much you want to eat, not how much you need to eat.

But the point of this diet is that potatoes have a very high satiety so that even if you eat as much you possibly want to you won't eat enough to put on weight. Rice, with its lower satiety, is much easier to overeat (or eat enough to maintain a higher weight).

mrob explains it well - potatoes aren’t the cheapest carb, but there’s also the cost of milk and butter in the quantities needed. I worked it out at over £4 a day, and you can eat the regular and varied protein, carbs and veg diet on that.

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