Thoughts on the potato diet | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on the potato diet

dynomight.net

348 pointsmediocregopher498 comments

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.

Also, if you’re having a lot of food intolerance or allergy or digestion issues, having potatoes to fall back on can feel like a lifesaver. It’s early in the elimination diet re-introduction schedule.

Potatoes may be pure carbs, but they're full of water.

When I eat a portion of mashed potatoes (I cook them with very little butter), it feels like I've eaten a very dense soup.

Fish is high on my personal satiety index, because I didn't eat much of it growing up so never developed a taste. Result is that when served fish I eat a little to be nice but don't enjoy it at all. That'd certainly help me eat less.

Oddly, I love calamari and sushi.

Of course, eating food you don't like so you end up eating less doesn't sound like the way to go through life!

IIRC a study made it on here once (a couple years ago, maybe?) that boiled down to "we're fat because modern, affordable, low-or-zero-prep food tastes too good and is too varied"

One of my not-well-backed suspicions is that this is closest to the truth of any of the various attempts to explain this.

It's fine if you substitute it with something that is equally or more pleasurable. There's no rule that you have to get part of your life satisfaction from food

Thanks for this, but I'll stick to the peanut butter diet :)

Peanut butter doesn't fill me up at all. I can consume 1k calories of it, nothing, still hungry after.

Same with fish, I cannot get full eating fish in any quantity. Shrimp, sure, but not fish.

Nuts, same deal. I'll eat 500+ calories of nuts, does nothing for me.

See a doctor.

Plenty of other foods fill me up just fine. A 4oz steak and some broccoli. Bacon and eggs. Meat + a veg does me fine.

> See a doctor.

Doctors know next to nothing about gut biome stuff.

"I don't get full eating an entire jar of peanut butter" is going to result in the doctor telling me to not eat a jar of peanut butter.

Heck plenty of people don't get full eating entire tubs of ice cream. The answer is to avoid downing tubs of ice cream.

You just listed a bunch of things that don't make sense? See a specialist rather than quibbling over the definition of doctor.

You ever tried eating fish with bones in it? It takes me forever. By the time I finished picking the bones out of 700 calories of fish it'd be time for my next meal. Meanwhile I have friends who eat fish just fine and get full.

FWIW Salmon drenched in butter and lemon does the trick, but that kind of feels like cheating.

Maybe fish sticks would fill me up? Heck if I know.

Peanut butter is another one, plenty of people can eat crap tons of peanut butter and not get full. Other people get full from peanut butter easily.

Same goes for nuts, and a ton of snacking foods. That is why they are called snacking foods

I once had a coworker who could honest to goodness get filled up from an ice cream cone. Calorically, that is correct, but the vast majority of people's bodies will completely ignore calorie math when consuming ice cream (see: Common jokes about a separate desert stomach).

> See a specialist rather than quibbling over the definition of doctor.

"Hi doctor, yeah, I have a normal BMI and I am in above average health and I work out multiple times per week but some guy online says I should see you because I don't get full eating peanut butter."

You do realize that there are literally not specialists for this stuff? If medical science understood why some people never get full eating certain foods, we wouldn't have so much obesity.

On the flip side, food scientists understand that fat + sugar = never satiated. That is why donuts are even a thing. Realistically a donut and a sweetened coffee are "enough calories" but they aren't satiating at all.

And then there is the nastiness of the human body mostly ignoring liquid calories all together[1], outside of mechanical fullness of the stomach. That is why starbucks can get away with selling drinks that have almost an entire day's worth of calories in them.

[1] Protein shakes are a notable exception to this.

> You ever tried eating fish with bones in it? It takes me forever. By the time I finished picking the bones out of 700 calories of fish it'd be time for my next meal.

I have a technique that works well 80% of the time: just pull the spine upwards and hope none of the smaller bones break off — and that's a nice, mostly deboned fish!

Eh, different people respond to food differently. This is not controversial. This whole discussion has a huge amount of bro science, and very little actual science. To the limited extent such a thing even exists in the nutritional space.

Not that differently. If you eat a thousand calories of peanut butter and don't feel anything there's something profoundly wrong.

A thousand calories of peanut butter is one cup, 8oz, of peanut butter.

Maybe 4 or 5 good spoonfuls.

I'm willing to bet that almost any healthy adult could down 4 spoons of peanut butter w/o issue, and that most people would end up being way over their calorie limit for the day as their body wouldn't go "yup that was lunch and half of dinner! All good now!"

The quantity given was in calories, about 1/2 of what you need in a day. Yes PB is heavy, yes that amount should register.

Drink a glug of olive oil. You'll probably be very regular on the toilet the next day, but your body will still ask for more calories, despite the 500+ you just consumed.

4 spoon fulls of peanut butter may or may not register. That many calories in a very short time frame often does not.

I take shots of OO regularly. Stops hunger but slowly, because it takes a while for body to convert to fat metabolism.

What do you imagine a doctor would do with this information?

Most likely, they'll say hmmm, that's strange and you probably should try to avoid eating so much peanut butter in one sitting. Maybe they'll give you an invasive test that's probably not conclusive or inexepensive.

Tell you 1) you have an issue... 2) everything is fine 3) perhaps you are imagining things.

I wonder where the misinformation that potatoes were unhealthy / fattening came from? Was it from french fries and fried starches?

Potatoes are calorie dense. I think the focus on satiation rather than pure calorie counting is a more recent trend.

Also, it sounds like water content is a significant contributor to their capacity to satiate, so things like potato chips probably fail miserably under this lense. Many processed foods made from potatoes have far less water in them than home cooked versions (french fries, hash browns).

> Potatoes are calorie dense.

No.

https://gurmeet.net/Images/food/calorie_density/CalorieDensi...

Boiled potatoes are 870 kcal per kilogram.

1 kilogram of potatoes is a lot.

Having done 28 days of the potato diet, this is true. It is difficult to get over 1kcal of potato. Eating two kilos of potato in a day is heroic. I would eat like 1 kilo per day, and be satisfied-full. It's wild.

I could definitely eat 2kg of potatoes a day. As french fries. Kind of ruins the whole point though

One can eat 2 kilograms of boiled potatoes, refrigerated, cut into very thin slices and then air-fried at 400F for 15-20 minutes with a drizzle of avocado or extra-virgin olive oil. Some rosemary too. An overall increase of about 150 calories per kilogram compared to boiled potatoes only.

The flavor is similar to that of French fries and they are an excellent substitute (I say this as someone who when asked what would be his last meal would answer: french fries).

The term 'calorie dense' is used in reference to proportion of other nutrients. Water isn't typically included.

By your standards, Coca-Cola is actually less calorie dense than boiled potato, but I don't think anyone would recommend a Coca-Cola diet.

Calorie density is not something made up. You are redefining a very well-known term. Many legumes, grains, and root vegetables are made up of copious amounts of water in their prepared form.

Calorie density is also not the only metric for recommendation. Everyone agrees that liquid calories are not "felt" by the body in the same way as solid foods.

That's "nutrient density"[0]. "calorie density" (also "energy density") is calories per unit of weight[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrient_density [1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/calorie-density

The Glycemic Index (GI) looks bad, even look at the chart in the article. However the GI for potatoes changes depending on how you eat them. Cold potatoes have a much lower GI than hot freshly served.

Wow, really? That is very interesting? Too bad hot potatoes are delicious. I think as long as I air fried mine and let them cool to room temp, I would enjoy them.

It's not really about the heat. They undergo a change as they cool down which changes the GI. Heating them back up does not reverse that, so you can still have hot potatoes with the lower GI effect as long as you cool them down first.

That's incredible. Thanks for sharing. Can you tell me what hte process is called?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrogradation_(starch)

And see the resistant starch link as well.

What temp should I cool them to? I'm making potatoes now. :P

I believe it might be based on misunderstanding the generic category "vegetables".

I.e. "I eat lots of vegetables! I had french fries on Tuesday, mashed potato on Wednesday, ..."

Reminds me of the classic regulatory decision (which I actually looked up to make sure that it wasn't an urban myth, that's how crazy it sounds) that the tomato paste on top of pizza is classified as a vegetable for school lunches [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable

what's the basis for thinking that ketchup or tomato paste or sauce are less nutritious than other cooked vegetables? It's tomatoes.

Also, potatoes (Russets especially) are an excellent source of potassium, which most people are grossly deficient in.

Potatoes tend to be unhealthy via the methods that most people use to cook them [1] because of the formation of acrylamide, a potent carcinogen [2]. In fact potatoes are the food that delivers the highest amount of acrylamide in the American diet through the consumption of chips and french fries. But other methods of cooking like baking, frying, or even microwaving are also prone to forming acrylamide.

If you want to avoid acrylamide when cooking potatoes, you must cook them below 250F (pressure cooking or steaming, I think)?

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18320571/

[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/chemical-contaminants-food/acrylami....

Eggs for breakfast and Marmitako for lunch and dinner, got it.

They're borderline at best for protein content, though. You'd probably want to at least supplement with a protein shake or two.

Or however many leads to 1g of protein per pound of lean body mass. No point losing weight if its lean body mass. (Protein has a muscle sparing effect during diets)

potatoes have like 3g of protein per potato. And to stay full you eat _a lot_ of potato. I tried it! It was easy, then not easy, then totally shitty, then fine, and then I was done (28 days). I ate a few sweet potatoes along the way for B vitamins.

iirc vitamin b12 is essentially non-existent in vegan diets. So it's important to either eat meats/seafood, eat a vegan food fortified in it, or take a supplement (the later two are equivalent, just different delivery mechanism)

iirc, that's not quite right. All dietary B12 originates in/on plant sources, you just have to avoid processing that removes it, and include plant sources with good sources. If you try and eat vegan from a typical north american grocery store though, you may have trouble and need to supplement it. On the other hand, selections are pretty good these days, and if you incorporate some nori or legume sprouts (from memory) you'll be fine.

Please check your sources. Such advice can be, and in fact is, dangerous to vegans.

Legumes or sprouts are not an adequate source of B12 and neither are other plant sources.

Your assertion that Nori has B12 is downright wrong. B12 is only synthesized by microorganisms.

There are plenty of vegetarian options, but if you are vegan, you have to rely on fortified products and supplements. This has nothing do to with where you happen to live.

You can check recommendations from physicians, researchers and most importantly Vegan associations all across the globe to the see this is true.

“The Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) suggests that vegans need to have reliable sources of vitamin B12 in their diets. (1) The Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group (VNDPG) of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics says that all vegetarians (including vegans) should include a reliable B12 source in their diets, such as fortified foods or supplements. (2) And The Vegan Society goes so far as to state, “What every vegan should know about B12: the only reliable sources of B12 are foods fortified with B12 and supplements.” (3)“

I have seen people get sick ignoring these issues in a vegan diet.

“According to vegan expert and co-author of Vegan for Life, Jack Norris, RD, there are no reliable sources of B12 in plants, contrary to many rumors about sources, such as tempeh, seaweeds, and organic produce. Plants have no B12 requirement, therefore they do not have any active mechanisms to make or store it. When you find B12 in plants, it is due to contamination, which is not a reliable source. Many seaweeds have B12 analogues, through their symbiotic relationship with cobalamin-producing bacteria, however the evidence is not clear that this form is active B12 in humans. And fermented foods, such as tempeh, are not fermented through B12-producing bacteria, thus they are not a source of B12. Rumors about bacteria on the surface of organic produce producing B12 have not been verified. “Chlorella may improve B12 status, but it’s by such a small amount that I wouldn’t rely on chlorella for B12,” adds Norris. Norris stresses that, unless a food obtained from multiple regions consistently improves B12 status, it should not be relied upon as a source of B12.“

A vegan diet can be a healthy and sensible choice for people living in a modern society with access to supplements and fortified foods as well as the care and knowledge to use them. Otherwise it is not an appropriate diet for humans, especially not outside of the modern Western organic supermarket and supplement infrastructure.

https://veganhealth.org/vitamin-b12/vitamin-b12-plant-foods/

Thank you for this, I wish I could upvote it 100x .

None of this is discussion is intended to dissuade a persons' choice to eat vegan, but to ensure they have the tools to do it safely :)

> you have to rely on fortified products and supplements.

I appreciate your input, but this level of categorical statement seems to fly in the face of historic and current diets which are vegan or vegan-like and have not relied on supplements, or at least not the type we are talking about here.

At any rate I'd review other dietitians/scientists as well; while it's been a long time since I read the literature on this (when a family member went vegan) your quote certainly wasn't consensus view at that time.

Absolutely agree if you were to eat such a restrictive diet, you have to pay attention to vitamin sources, or you can get sick. B12 particularly problematic because you don't need much at all and can go months/years in a deficit situation before showing any symptoms, which can make it hard to pin down.

(To be clear, when said family member did do this for a while, I suggested supplementing but the nutritional science types I was reading weren't nearly as categorical as your above quote)

The point I am trying to impress is rather that there is a clear scientific consensus, and you are giving potentially harmful advice contrary to that - based on things you have read a long time ago.

I provided a source that systemically goes through available evidence (including anecdotal points about vegan cultures).

I think that is fair and it does not imply any value statements about a vegan diet.

And I was pointing out that your source (and you, for that matter) are being implausibly categorical, and suggesting that people interested in this don't take anything in the thread as gospel but rather read a bit broadly. Which is fair, I think, also.

It's trivial to supplement. Just add a tablespoon of nutritional yeast to anything. It tastes cheesy.

> eat a vegan food fortified in it, or take a supplement (the later two are equivalent, just different delivery mechanism)

3 grams of protein per potato isn't much. If you're using this diet to lose weight you'll be eating say 1500 kcal per day of potatoes (leaving some allowance for oils), which will only give you ~39g of protein.

That's definitely below what most people need as a healthy minimum (RDA is 0.8g per kg of bodyweight), let alone if you want to build muscle while dieting which is a good idea for improving health. At the very least you want to maintain muscle mass, which requires protein if you're exercising.

If I was going to try this diet I would definitely supplement some protein shakes.

This. There really is something special about potatoes that just makes them far more filling than they "should be": https://nutritiondata.self.com/topics/fullness-factor

That list is ... suspect?

> Lowfat yogurt

I've never been satiated eating lowfat yogurt. I actually recently started buying high fat yogurt (10g+ of fat) and it is super satiating. Given I can eat 3x the amount of lowfat yogurt and still not be full, I'm not buying it.

> Watermelon

Maybe due to bloating from water?

> Bean sprouts

I challenge anyone to get full eating just bean sprouts. Again, they are more akin to drinking (crunchy) water than eating food. It is maybe a mechanical sense of fullness, it is not satiated as is normally thought of.

> Fish, broiled

I get bored eating fish long before I get full from eating fish.

> Sirloin steak, broiled

Yes, this works. Steak is super satiating.

> Popcorn

Has anyone in the history of humanity ever been satiated eating popcorn? To be fair I know a few people who go to the movies and eat only a small bit, but most people I know can easily down an entire large bag and it'll have no impact on their appetite soon after.

> Oranges

Eh, this also falls into the category of "hungry a little bit later."

Well that's satiety/calories. So water will be have an index of infinity even if it's effect is rather small.

I was more just linking it to highlight the 1995 study. Potatoes were by far the most satiating food found and far exceeding what NutritionData's modeling predicts it would be. (And FWIW, yoghurt was found to be much less satiating than the numbers would suggest.)

>Has anyone in the history of humanity ever been satiated eating popcorn? To be fair I know a few people who go to the movies and eat only a small bit, but most people I know can easily down an entire large bag and it'll have no impact on their appetite soon after.

I'll take this one. I actually 100% agree that list is useless, but an entire bag of microwave popcorn is extremely satiating to me. It's the perfect midnight snack IME because it is only 400ish Calories and yet takes up a large volume of space and takes a significant amount of time to eat.

That's not what satiated is really about though. Its like the other suggestions like watermelon. You feel full from all the water you just ate. And very soon after you will be hungry again and crave more sugar. Same with the popcorn. Soon after, maybe less soon than watermelon, sure, you will be hungry again. Meaning you definitely can go eat that burger and fries after the film. Not good ;) Eating that microwave bag slowly hopefully means you'll just go to bed before you're hungry but you definitely will be hungry again for breakfast. If instead you just had a huge steak in front of the TV (nothing else, just steak. If it's a good one, then no salt or pepper needed even, never mind a sauce) you will probably not want to eat again until lunch the next day. Unless your body is just always in sugar and carb craving mode of course. You'll have to get it out of that and get your system working properly again.

>Has anyone in the history of humanity ever been satiated eating popcorn?

All the time. I make it from kernels so I'm not sure on how much is in a bag. I will make between 4 and 6 cups worth and that will do me in. For a real challenge, eat it with chopsticks and hard to go through half as much

When I was doing intermittent fasting I would usually have roasted fish and potatoes for lunch, all prepared on the same baking dish[1]. It was very filling, agreeing with your post.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/18/dining/the-minimalist-tak...

Satiety is a mental construct. I've been underweight, normal weight, and overweight in my life. What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entirely divorced from nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving.

The only way to be exceptionally healthy and thin is to ignore the urge to overeat, and this urge is extremely dynamic on a per human basis. As a result, some people out there will eat a case of potatoes and still feel very hungry and unsatisfied.

I've never managed "underweight", but having been as high as 320+lbs and as low as 161lbs, I agree. The key to losing weight is to find ways to ignore what your brain tells you to eat and stick to a calorie intake limit that matches the base metabolic rate of your target weight.

>Satiety is a mental construct.

Are you implying that there aren't physical manifestations that cause hunger? In other words, I could inject you with a suprahuman amount of ghrelin and you wouldn't feel hungry?

There are physical situations that can nudge your brain's choice to make you feel hungry or not, IME. For example, I stopped eating breakfast and lunch for two years (because, I am a colossal idiot, and knew it was stupid when I did it) and it took very little time for my body to realize "feeling hungry" at noon was a fools errand, so it quickly stopped happening. I was absolutely physically hungry, seeing as I wasn't eating larger dinners, and having been about 18 hours since I last put food in my body, but habit has a large effect on your feelings of hunger if you aren't living in the wild Savannah. If my thoughts are correct, then a possible indicator would be people with wildly different "normal" times for dinner would get hungry at those different times, ie my grandparents who eat at 4 get hungry at 4 compared to someone who normally eats at 8pm getting hungry at 8pm.

I'm unsure if that "support" for my argument exists.

That fits with my current understanding. Your body's hunger response (driven in part by hormones) is complicated, and for lack of a better word it can be "habituated" to a routine. But I believe there are still very real mechanisms (like said hormones) rather than being a psychological construct. I would be willing to bet if you had blood samples, you would see very real distinctions in blood markers associated with hunger as your response changed.

This leads into the very real feedback loop between hormones and psychology. Addiction is a classic example. Both chemical and psychological addiction are real. It's basically impossible to break an addiction without tackling both

>Satiety is a mental construct.

Yeah, just not according to science.

E.g. there's ghrelin, cholecystokinin and other "satiety signals".

Except if you mean "satiefy is a mental construct" the same way pain is a mental construct. In which case, in a Kantian way, everything is, including space and time.

>What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entirely divorced from nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving.

(a) You'd be surprised.

(b) It only appears that way because we have diverged in a exteremely small span of time (evolutionary speaking) into completely different circumstances and food availability.

Otherwise, what the brain tells us is very much based on nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving.

It's just that in 2022 we have an endless supply of food we can just order or walk into a supermarket and buy, as opposed to food scarcity where we don't know if we will be able to find something to hunt tomorrow - like the last 100,000 of thousands of years before historical times (and millions of years considering our primate ancestors)...

>not according to THE SCIENCE

sorry, dont care

Science, like reality, is that that doesn't stop existing when you close your eyes (or when you don't care).

did the sciences of phrenology, plum pudding model, God doesn't play dice, et al stop existing? I hope?

You seem to conflate science with individual theories (which can be abandoned, expanded, improved, or kept as a special case approximation, like Newtonian physics, and so on), and advances in knowledge.

You also seem to think that the prevailig theory at some era is intechangable with arbitrary personal opinions about how things are.

Hormones are input signals to a neural network that produces a sensation of hunger as an output. The mapping of the network can obviate those inputs easily.

This is bro science. Sorry dude. Caloric intake matter because in the end it is CICO. However, there are foods that absolutely make you feel full quicker and for a longer period of time and that matters as much as calories because if you can't fight off the hunger because your diet is primarily white bread and doritos as opposed to healthy fats , greens, and proteins then calories won't matter because you will 100% fail because of cravings.

It could be much much more than CICO. If you want to read an epic saga on modern obesity and it's theories check out

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

It seems like everything in that article reinforces CICO. Is there something that diverges from the CICO model that I might be missing?

E.G. it’s examples of the Maasai and Inuit eating higher calories make a lot of sense when you consider their exposure to temp extremes and additional cal burn coming from thermoregulation (along with probably elevated levels of daily activity).

Most of the nuance I’ve seen around CICO that holds isn’t that CICO isn’t true, it’s that the intake and output are hard to calculate when you look at nutrient absorption and lifestyle

CICO may be scientifically valid but it's useless in practical terms. People who tend to be constipated absorb much more energy from their food and those with fast digestive tracts absorb much less. Everyone is somewhere on that spectrum, so, from person to person, you would never have a practical way to assess what the CI or the CO is in the CICO model.

Au contraire, it's very useful. If you want someone to lose weight, calculate their BMR + their rough activity based cal burn, and give 'em a 15% deficit. They'll lose weight. Not just water and glycogen. They will burn fat.

If you want someone to gain weight, do the same calc, tell 'em to eat 100 more calories. Not gaining? 200. Really not gaining? Wow, fast metabolism, shock 'em with 500 extra. Anecdata, but the only time I saw someone not slowly gain on 200 extra, there ended up being a lot of walking we weren't accounting for in our maintenance cal calculation. Our O in CICO was off. For reference, 200 cals is like a 16 oz of coke, or 2-3 apples. Decently precise.

The variance between a fast and slow metabolizer isn't 20% of daily calorie burn, maybe 10% on the high end. Guesstimation, probably more like 5%. Well within the tolerances that are used for weight modulation (up or down).

If it weren't the case, why are so many body builders (natty or enhanced) able to run repeated bulking and cutting cycles? Are they genetic outliers?

Can you calculate it 100%? Nope -- so many variables, probably tons we don't even know about yet. But it's accurate enough to be very effective, and very simple to implement.

Mark Pimentel's lab which studies disorders of the gut has hypothesized that people with extremely slow transit times can absorb 2-3x the amount of energy from food in comparison to people with regular transit times. I think there is a high amount of variability; and importantly in the context of losing weight, people who are overweight often have slow intestinal transit due to their dysregulated gut microflora.

I'm sort of with you, but it sounds more to me like: start eating less, and you'll lose weight; eat more, and you'll gain weight. There's just too many variables here that change how food is metabolized and digested; including the microbiome which CICO ignores.

You got a source for that study? A cursory google didn’t reveal anything and 2-3x is suspect. To your second point, wouldn’t the microbiome (and slow digestion) just be another input into CICO?

is it just caloric absorption, or are various essential nutrients also absorbed more and less? asking because coffee can speed up my transit time dramatically, and I'm always down for cutting calories!

AFAIK this has not been studied, but I would assume that nutrient absorption could feasibly vary with motility speed just like energy absorption. For example people with chronic diarrhea are usually deficient in several B vitamins especially B12, although their poor absorption may not be only due to rapid transit time and could stem from other gut issues. Rapid transit time is certainly a factor though.

you are ignoring what he said. I don't know if it's true, but he's saying CI is not simply a function of how much you put in your mouth, but how much of that your body absorbs.

the other answers here are more detailed, I just wanted to state it simply.

Not ignoring it - the in in calories in isn’t what you put in your mouth, it’s what you can absorb. Hence why you don’t count fiber towards your calories.

Again, the digestion point seems to reinforce CICO. If you gain weight because your digestion is slower (let’s grant the point), it’s not because your body some how treats calories differently, it’s that you’re getting more calories from your food. Your calories in are higher.

Not to mention that diet products have existed to game your digestive system to absorb less calories from your food. With the rationale being… less CI in CICO. See also: folks abusing laxatives for this purpose

I also say, to whatever readers may care, the reason I belabor this point so much is that obesity related health issues have a massive effect on QOL, public health and personal mental health. I say this having grown up in the southern US, having obese family, having my own fitness / weight loss problems, having seen gangrene diabetic foots with my own eyes. I know vividly what it looks like for someone you love to be heavy, miserable specifically because theyre heavy, and totally hopeless that “they just can’t lose the weight”.

Throwing information out like this (w/o source and at best poorly replicated), that CICO is useless because of digestion rate, is incredibly dangerous because it falsely legitimizes that hopelessness. It traps people. And it maybe only applies in <1% of cases, where you have not just obesity but also compounding, very specific digestive issues. The opposite is also true — you don’t just drink coffee to knock off enough cal absorption to make a diff — you take laxatives you don’t need and have extremely abnormal, frequent BMs.

Anyone and everyone can lose the weight. It’s just CICO. You gotta figure out your input and output to account for the minor individual variances, and lock in a lifestyle to do it. But it’s just CICO at the end of the day.

I don't count calories and I will never start counting calories. Hence it is useless.

>this is bro science

sorry, I don't care

CICO is axiomatically true, but the problem is CI is easy to measure and CO isn't.

Different people use different amounts of calories to do the same things (including sitting around), and different people extract different amount of calories from the input. Some people can extract calories from PF Chang or Buca di Beppo, but not me. Weight control by eating foods that go straight through sounds terrible though.

The problem is that the body and brain operate a complex control loop whose sole purpose is to regulate calories in and calories out.

You can run an additional control loop mentally but what purpose does that serve? Reducing caloric intake while your body screams increase caloric intake is very difficult. You should instead use the control loop you already have.

If you mean "mental" as in "not based on reality", then no, that's wrong.

However, it is true that your hunger urges are not solely based on thriving and surviving, but also significantly on the current state of your gut bacteria, which is highly influenced by diet and stress. They say the gut is a second brain for good reason.

In some sense, pain is also a mental construct — just some electrons bouncing around in one's brain, yet it feels very much real.

I had a buddy that created a spreadsheet of various foods and their micro/macro nutrients. He's an engineer and wanted to engineer his diet to cover every deficiency in the minimal amount of food possible. He told me that potatoes were almost the perfect food if you could magically reduce the amount of glucose you took from them.

Is there some form of fermented potato dish / treatment?

Apparently yes: https://drdavisinfinitehealth.com/2018/02/fermented-raw-pota...

(One of several results on search. I've no idea on merits / validity here.)

I eat pickled / fermented thin potato strips as a side-dish with Korean BBQ. They're really delicious!

I also drink highly fermented potatoes, that's called Vodka!

! do have some famliarity with the "little water".

https://www.etymonline.com/word/vodka

A nice anecdote about mathematicians trying to solve this problem:

> Again the diet seemed to be plausible except for calling for the consumption of 200 bullion cubes per day.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160411141356/https://dl.dropbo...

I learned this concept from Jeremey Either on youtube and highly recommend his content. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxktmQ3zJOA He does a good job of summarizing content and then the only hard part is putting it into action in your life.

This was my discovery as well. Keto, at its core, amounts to optimizing for satiety. Typically that takes the form of increasing fat intake, and progressively lowering carb intake. For most people, this results in fewer calories ingested, as fats + protein heavy diets make it hard to overeat. I burned through my excess weight rapidly: maybe 2-3lb a week IIRC?

After that, it changes to figuring out how many net carbs you need. I've found that this amount changes and is not a hard and fast rule. When I started keto, I aimed for 20g total (I don't recommend that low). Now, it is more like 50-100g. There's also the mental shift: carbs are not bad, they're just a tool.

The thing that feels most unfair is once your body gets to a lower weight, you're accustomed to eating less, and you've 'reset' things, I found I had a lot of leeway in what I could get away with, diet-wise.

This seems highly unlikely to me.

I have reactive hypoglycemia, and can say that potatoes spike my blood glucose levels more than table sugar - they have a really high glycemic index, and anyone with blood sugar issues should totally avoid them IMO.

And the thing about foods with a high glycemic index is that they cause you to feel hungry when your blood sugar rapidly drops back to baseline.

I find protein and fat way more satiating than, well, anything else. For example, eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.

> eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.

What a patently absurd claim. Your anecdata is not evidence.

While anecdotal, it entirely depends on habits and context.

If your usual breakfast is pretty big and you tried to switch then you'd definitely start to get pangs of hunger earlier than you usually would. But after a while, your body would adjust and you'd be fine for longer and longer (really until whenever you usually ate your next meal). It's the reason why intermittent fasting or "one-meal-a-day" sucks the first couple of weeks you try it.

I'm not recommending one way or the other. Personally, I wouldn't eat just 2 eggs for breakfast because it sounds like a boring breakfast (at least throw it on some toast with some hot sauce). But it's certainly plausible that 2 eggs for breakfast would satiate most folks after they got through the initial growing pains.

How would you get through the initial pains? Hunger is absolutely intolerable for me.

When I go out for breakfast I will often have two eggs...and a couple of big pieces of toast, mushrooms, hash browns, spinach etc. I have great difficulty believing that two eggs alone would be sufficient.

It’s so weird how different we can be.

I pretty much never get hungry.

I eat because I’d die and I can only enjoy food having consumed massive doses of thc.

I wish Soylent was more trustworthy or the jetsons pill was real.

It means I can lose weight very easily but combined with severe adhd before I was married I was often in trouble and hospitalized a couple times. Now my wife keeps an eye on me to make sure I eat at least dinner, and Apple Watch reminds me to eat and drink during the work day.

Have you looked at Huel as an alternative to Soylent? It mostly seems to live up to its claims.

I will sometimes eat that much when I go out for breakfast too, and yet I often skip breakfast entirely. The body is quite tolerant of different eating patterns.

Not OP. That said, I would've believed you a few years ago, when my body and gut flora were out of whack. Totally impossible. Just two eggs? Never!

Fast forward to today and while I would agree that just two eggs would be boring, add in two slices of bacon to cook the eggs in as well as some nice cheese, scramble it all and there's the lunch I'll have after not having had any breakfast at all and having had that, I probably won't be hungry again until way past previous dinner times.

This is after getting my gut back in order, away from craving sugary meal after sugary meal after carb/sugary meal to not having more than 20g of carbs per day (i.e. what they call "Keto diet"). I totally eat carbs again nowadays but usually eat no breakfast and eat way less carbs than I used to. One thing I noticed is that having a "low fat meal" for breakfast (e.g. white toast w/ just jam) means I am usually hungry again before lunch already. What helped on Keto was basically just eating whenever I was "hungry" but just not eating anything with carbs. I used cheese for it. Whenever I "got an appetite", eat some slices of cheese. No counting of calories. Feel "hungry"? Eat cheese! Lost lots of weight after a short period of time on that. The cravings just went away. It's amazing how little calories you actually get from all that fat and protein but it fills you right up. Of course this only works well if you have some fat to burn (my totally non-scientific reasoning is that your body just figures out that it doesn't have to make you find food and can just use the stores. Which means you better have those fat stores on you and please do make sure to eat enough veggies and nuts for your vitamins and minerals - you get the 20g of carbs just incidentally from the veggies, so definitely nothing with flour will go in you) I don't do Keto any longer and I can now maintain weight instead of loosing it :)

Try eating low calorie density foods. These let you eat more volume with fewer calories. I've lost ~80lbs over the last year largely through going low calorie density.

Largely: Salads and roasted veggies like sweet potatoes, broccoli, radishes, carrots, squash. Fruits like apples, grapes, blueberries, strawberries.

The low calorie density foods helped make it so I really wasn't hungry.

Like some other types of pain (exercise being the most obvious, marriage being another;) tolerance to it can be built up.

For example, I've done the fast mimicking diet twice in the past couple of months - a little bit ineptly at points (always plan properly!) - which left me feeling very hungry. Certainly, by the last day of each, I was planning what I'd eat the next day in great detail and anticipation.

The lasting feeling it left (aside from the obvious health benefits) was to be reminded of what real hunger is like, not the semi-boredom, semi-distracting-itch kind that makes me nip to the fridge for a snack. That is very tolerable to me now.

I think it also depends on what you do in a day if you're sitting in front of a computer you bet 150 calories can work, if you're actually doing physical work something like that would likely be brutal.

The big breakfast is called a farmers mreakfat for a reason.

I eat only two eggs plus three strips of bacon for breakfast, and I’m good for six hours. No toast or juice.

I also have reactive hypoglycemia and I tried the potato diet out and had zero crashes the entire time. It's just not possible (for me) to eat enough calories, quickly enough, to cause a crash. I was only on it for a few days (~5), precisely for the logistic issues that the article and the original diet post discuss - I couldn't cook and eat enough calories to not be absolutely starving after the first couple days.

But zero crashes, monitored by finger stick blood glucose. Crazy stuff, for someone who has them all the time.

Is a food coma / crash always the result of a blood sugar spike? I've never seen any literature supporting that the feeling of tiredness and fatigue after a meal is the direct result of blood sugar levels. Mostly what I've seen is just conjecture online, and correlational anecdotes about eating high glycemic index foods and feeling tired.

Not discounting people's experiences, but trying to suss out the science here. If you were, for example, to inject sugar directly into someone's blood stream would the result be fatigue every time?

It seems to me that there's more involved in this. In my experience (more anecdata!) I'm able to eat anything in the morning. Giant bolus of carbs and sugar, and I feel great. That same meal in the afternoon will give me such a fatigue that I need to lay down.

Clearly there's some other factor at play for me in the function whos result is fatigue.

FATIGUE_LEVEL = CARB_GRAMS * (HOUR_OF_DAY / 24)

Well, for me, I've been monitoring my blood sugar intensively for a while. I started when I worked for a nutrition and glucose monitoring company (as a test!), found out I had really anomalous blood sugar dips, and confirmed it with finger stick and another blood sugar monitor. So for me, the answer is, yes, the "sugar crash" postprandial is actually a dip in blood sugar - not to a hazardous level (e.g. passing out or seizure) but to a very uncomfortable level, with epinephrine and the shakes. (mine has gone down to 45mg/dl at worst)

For many people, it may not be, I can only speak for myself. There's another thing, called 'idiopathic postprandial syndrome' which is essentially the symptoms above, but without actual low blood sugar (<60mg/dl), which some people think is another form of insulin resistance, where your blood sugar is normal but your body "wants" more sugar in the blood.

Talking with endocrinologist, they say that the insulin sensitivity for most people is much higher in the AM and daytime than at night, so it makes sense that you might have more problems in the afternoon, but you should probably talk to a doctor rather than taking my word for it!

It's often difficult (in the US at least) to get primary care and endocrinologists to take you seriously if you are not actually dying of diabetes or passing out from low blood sugar - this is where dipping into the realm of concierge medicine can be helpful, or at least, it has been for me. They are often much more willing to investigate thoroughly.

> If you were, for example, to inject sugar directly into someone's blood stream would the result be fatigue every time?

Missed this the first time around. They do this, for research, it's called a glucose clamp test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose_clamp_technique

Unfortunately it's almost impossible to find someone willing to administer it to you. It's an outpatient hospital procedure lasting a number of hours, and almost no insurance would cover it, as far as I am aware.

https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg24332470-900-does-a-...

Responses are by readers, so take with a pinch of salt

>It seems to me that there's more involved in this. In my experience (more anecdata!) I'm able to eat anything in the morning. Giant bolus of carbs and sugar, and I feel great. That same meal in the afternoon will give me such a fatigue that I need to lay down.

What? That is quite a boring and obvious observation because your insulin sensitivity is much higher in the morning.

Strange, potatoes can spike and crash my blood sugar faster than anything else. I haven't eaten mashed potato in a decade or so, but IIRC it only took half an hour or so before I was trembling, sweating, feeling very anxious and fearful, and having a strong desire to eat sugar. Not long after I'd become progressively more confused, and sometimes aggressive.

I know 2 T1 diabetics, and both never touch potatoes because of the GI.

Can I ask how you deal with your reactive hypoglycemia? I switched to keto a long time ago, which took me from having hypos multiple times a day to never. But often in late afternoon I start feeling some mild hypo symptoms, even though my blood glucose is stable.

Honestly it's still up in the air right now. I have glucose snacks on hand, I try to monitor how often I eat and not let it go too long, but my Hb a1c is still low and I'm still bothered once or twice a day at least. It's only maybe once a week that it gets bad enough to be super bothersome like you say, basically a panic attack.

I tried keto but it was difficult to get the variety, especially (as you say) when you're intensely craving sugar. It obviously solved the problem but was really challenging to continue, so I only lasted a couple weeks.

How long did you yet keto for, and how strict were you? I did it for 5 years and found that if you're strict, the carb cravings completely go away after a couple of weeks.

I was in ketosis for 3 weeks, from a total of ~1 month eating a keto diet. I was super, super strict, which was probably part of the problem. I estimated <20g net carbs a day

Do you eat your potatos with either butter or olive oil? My understanding is that lipids flatten the glycemic curve.

Yes, but unless the ratio is heavily skewed towards fat and protein, in reality it makes little difference (as tested with a glucose meter).

Ah that makes sense. Out of sheer curiosity, can you quantify “heavily” from your experience? Are we talking about 3:1? 10:1? Also, is this by weight or by calorie?

Yes, something like 3:1 (by weight) at a minimum, for me personally. That would extend the time-to-hypo significantly for me, from 0.5h to 1-1.5h.

There's your answer: mashed potato.

Not only did you boil the potato, but you pre-chewed it too. Mashed potato is about as close as you can get to refined potato (potato flour). What you've created is easily digestable amylopectin - pre-chewed, already gelatinized and suspension with water. The amylase in your saliva can mix extremely well with mashed potatoes, and within minutes that amylopectin will be available as glucose. Maybe you mix in a little fat with butter or oil, but probably not much.

Vs. more or less any other potato cooking method. Even though the starch will have gelatinized with the water present in the potatoe, the potato's structure is more intact than boiling & mashing. Even after chewing the starch is not as well mixed with water, and this will take longer to digest.

We don't eat much mash in our house.

Mashed potatoes also contain milk and butter, which don't do well on the satiety index.

But really we are talking about two different things: GI and satiety. Yes potatoes are high GI. It would follow that they will spike your blood sugar. No claims have been made to the contrary.

Satiety is about how full you will feel per calorie eaten of that food. Multiple factors contribute to satiety. Specifically boiled potatoes score super high on the satiety index.

Not mashed potatoes. Not french fries, potatoes gratin, etc.

The topic is only tangentially related to GI.

Don't mean to be cranky here but I was hoping people would talk about the article, the underlying concept (satiety), and the research, instead of going off on lengthy discussions about quasi-related personal anecdotes.

Sure, but shouldn't satiety also factor in how long you feel full for?

And that's where GI comes in - high GI foods cause blood sugar spikes, and the crash will make you feel hungry again.

Pasta is a good example - it feels very satiating at the time, but the feeling doesn't last long.

Mashed potato is the worst, by a country mile, but potatoes in any form, hot or cold, will all result in a rapid hypo (just not as rapidly as with mash).

Yeah I was not eating mashed potatoes, those historically have been a nightmare for me, right up there with orange juice for guaranteed ruining a couple hours. I was eating roasted potatoes with olive oil and salt. there was a ton of chewing involved so I was eating 5-6 meals of 200-400 calories, which is, of course, what they say I should be doing with regular food also.

> eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.

I usually eat 3 scrambled eggs when I have them for breakfast. Lunch can't come soon enough afterwards. I think my record is 7 scrambled eggs. I'm sure I had normal lunch that day.

Eat 1 cup organic whole oats, half cup of milk, 4 diced strawberries, and 1 tablespoon of brown sugar.

Should be good until 2-3 in the afternoon, at least in my experience.

1 cup oats, 1 cup skim 1% milk, strawberries, mix that in a container uncooked the night before/eat the next day.

Overnight oats are great.

Oooo I'm going to do this! Saves time in the AM.

EDIT: Wait... uncooked!?

100%. overnight oats - google it. Equal volume of oats and mils, and the oats just absorb the milk overnight and soften. Very convenient for breakfast, minimal dishwashing, good for 2-3 days in the fridge.

substitute yogurt instead of milk for big increase in protein!

I feel like I've learned an excellent life hack. Thanks!

> I have reactive hypoglycemia

Makes sense that this diet wouldn't work for you - but I think using this argument is sort of like arguing that peanuts are unhealthy because some people are allergic to them.

Fun Fact: You can let your potatoes cool down, and then re-heat them, to significantly lower the glycemic impact.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761

Seems like the linked study only applies to pasta. Whether it applies to potato is unknown.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2016.03.120

> I find protein and fat way more satiating than, well, anything else. For example, eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.

That's not what satiety means (at least in this context), right?

I'm reading OP's definition as "you'll eat less [calories] per sitting because you'll feel satiated more quickly", rather than your "your feeling of non-hunger will last longer".

The two seem pretty orthogonal definitions to me.

One is "given the same calories, you'll be full longer." The other is "given fewer calories, you'll be full for as long." Surely those aren't orthogonal?

That seems like it'd be the definition of orthogonal; "length of fullness" and "caloric input" are separate variables, and each of those statements entails altering one of those variables independently from the other.

The definitions don't make reference to any particular food. And holding the food constant, presumably "length of fullness" and "caloric input" are strongly correlated, right? So if one of those statements is true, the other is very likely to be true. I would expect "orthogonal" to mean that there is no relationship between their truth values.

What am I missing?

I eat six eggs for breakfast, with vegetables and maybe a bowl of kefir with some mango and I'm hungry around 10 — breakfast being at 7-8.

I guess you're an outlier (or have a tapeworm :)

I physically can't eat any more than 3 eggs because I'd feel completely full.

Yea, my anecdata is that I feel crazy full from eggs. Maybe the choline in them? I dont know but more than any other food eggs trigger my brain to say "stop thats enough".

I'm the same [as the person who you are replying to]. Eggs are good as part of a meal, but they don't fill me up. I need a bit of carbs to go with them.

Or somewhere else on the bell-curve.

Maybe I'm twenty kilos heavier than you, exercise more than you, have a bigger appetite than you. Maybe a tape-worm ;) My post, along with many others that have replied to you seem to have done so to challenge your guarantee.

Egg Consumption Increases Risk for Diabetes

https://www.pcrm.org/news/health-nutrition/egg-consumption-i...

"The authors note results from a recent meta-analysis and data from the Physicians' Health Study and Women’s Health Study showed an increased risk for diabetes of up to 77% with seven or more eggs consumed per week."

Government propaganda to fight inflation https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/06/24/137400235/lbj-...

"When egg prices rose in the spring of 1966 and Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman told him that not much could be done, Johnson had the Surgeon General issue alerts as to the hazards of cholesterol in eggs."

There's actually no healthier food than eggs

These are much newer references than 1966. The first reference is for a Chinese study (China, not US) published in 2020.

"Compared with group 1 (30·7 %, low baseline intake and slight increase), both group 2 (62·2 %, medium baseline intake and increase) and group 3 (7·1 %, high baseline intake and decrease) were associated with an increased OR for diabetes. The results suggested that higher egg consumption was positively associated with the risk of diabetes in Chinese adults."

Here's the publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33028452/

> eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.

Tried that. Two eggs and a piece of toast will get me easily to lunch. Four eggs will get me an hour or so, despite having more calories.

What is reactive hypoglycemia?

[L]ow blood sugar that occurs after a meal — usually within four hours after eating. This is different from low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) that occurs while fasting. - https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/expe...

For me personally, it feels like you're having a panic attack, you get ravenously hungry and eat anything in sight, tremors and heart palpitations, confusion, irritability, dizziness. No fun at all. Thankfully not life threatening though, at least the "normal" kind.

It could be life threatening in the wrong circumstances. For example, one time years ago I was having a bad hypo, and had become very confused - and I was about to get in the car and drive, before my wife stopped me.

> eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.

I don't understand the motivation to make such a guarantee. It's as though you assume there are many people on HN who have never tried eating two eggs in the same meal. Do you maybe live in a place where eggs are rare (or not commonly eaten)?

(For what it's worth, my personal experience matches that of others here: two eggs would be a comically small breakfast.)

If "2 eggs for breakfast and you won't think about food again until hours later" were true, it would be the world's easiest and most effective diet: eat 2 eggs (2x75 calories), the next time you feel hungry (afternoon), eat another 2 eggs, then have a MASSIVE 1200 calorie dinner. Total = 1500 calories for the day - substantial weight loss would be guaranteed. In practice, this doesn't work because eggs are not hugely satiating.

I agree it's not true for most people -- though for someone who has trained themselves to eat a small breakfast, it surely can be. Plenty of people eat nothing for breakfast, and are satiated til lunchtime, but aren't losing weight from it.

More interesting to me is why someone would phrase it as a guarantee even if it were true. It suggests that the reader likely hasn't tried it, and would be surprised to discover the result.

>a MASSIVE 1200 calorie dinner

Yeah no one likes your humble brags about how little you eat and feel JUST GREAT. You're probably worse for it.

I'm 5'11", ~170 lbs and rather lazy right now, running ~15 miles a week and a couple light lifting sessions because I'm busy. I eat 2500 calories a day and maintain just fine.

I just ate 1200 calories at dinner, no problem, so I'm going to try real hard not to feel judged by you!

I thought the same thing.

I just wonder do any of these people actually move? Apologies if you're less-than-abled but good lord, if you're not and you're surviving on so few calories, I just wonder if you're moving enough to actually be healthy?? Thin !== healthy, necessarily.

Lol, no, eggs are not rare - but eating eggs without also eating carbs at the same time seems to be.

Ah, I see: it wasn't "eat at least two eggs for breakfast", but "eat only two eggs for breakfast." The addition of carbs makes you hungry earlier, I suppose.

Ive had six egg scrambles for breakfast many times. I then can eat a lunch at a reasonable time very easily. Most of this food stuff is in everyone's head. I think everyone should try a 3 day fast once in their life to see what it all feels like and realize nothing bad will happen. If anything it quickly makes you realize why people stress eat. Being actually pretty hungry feels a lot like anxiety to me.

Agree on fasting, I did 5 days before and it was a good experience.

I agree that potatoes are high GI and that this idea is counterintuitive.

My observation was simply that research exists which substantiates this counterintuitive idea (quite a bit of it I believe, the satiety index has been around since 1995).

I'm sure it would spark an interesting discussion if someone had time to dive into the research and the studies.

http://www.mendosa.com/satiety.htm gives an overview and mentions a few of the studies.

As an aside, this potato diet supposedly allows salt and oil - which is all you need to make french fries. French fries did not score well on the satiety index.

Boiled potatoes did.

A couple years back I tried making colecanon due to a random suggestion from a friend. It's just mashed potatoes mixed with cabbage or kale or such, seasoned as you like. I do a version where I brown the cabbage in butter first.

I was surprised just how satisfying a plate of it as a meal, and thought exactly the same thing: I'm pretty sure you could live on that stuff indefinitely and be in great shape.

Same goes for Champ (mashed potatoes with diced spring onions throughout). Seems super basic but really filling.

I love colecanon. Mine has skin on boiled and mashed potatoes (any type or a mix), lots of butter, full fat whole milk greek yogurt and chopped cooked kale. My family loves it hot or cold. Add a few more spices and a little mustard, and I serve it as potato salad to my mayo hating in-laws.

I used to fry up a kielbasa and then add in sauerkraut and serve that with mashed potatoes. The Sauerkraut and potato combination was delicious, so I'd buy your cabbage and mash idea. Going to have to give that a try.

Oh for sure. I usually add just a dash of vinegar to the cabbage to balance it out with some acidity.

Colecannon is a staple in my house. Our variety is:

Peeled Russet potatoes boiled, then strained and let steam some moisture off for a bit.

Kale blanched in water for a few seconds (no more than 30). Then allow it to steam off some moisture. Chop to desired size, pat dry.

Add butter and kale to potatoes. Salt and pepper to taste.

We found that controlling the moisture has a huge impact on flavor and the kale maintaining some texture.

Eggs are definitely my goto on a calorie controlled keto diet. Obviously potatoes are out of the question :) . They are simply awful for people who prediabetic or think they have metabolic syndrome; not as bad as white bread or sugar but bad.

My understanding of the current science is that many cycles of excess carbs (especially processed carbs) while you are not in a calorie deficit, alongside a sedentary lifestyle, are bad for metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance.

White flour pancakes ALWAYS give me a blood sugar crash, and often cause a mild to moderate hypoglycemic episode; but I can eat whole grain pancakes without too much trouble.

If you're not carrying a large amount of excess weight, it might be worth trying the potato diet for a short time period, with a LOT of caveats. The problem is, as always, what happens when you go off the diet.

One of the main reasons I've switched from a Mediterranean type diet (lost about 20 lbs there) to low carb was sort of about this as well. When I eat bread and other flour based things my energy through the day is much more variable. Low carb seems to give me a much steadier supply of energy through the day after I got over that initial two week hump where your body adjusts to a new way of eating.

>There's actually some science behind this diet. Potatoes are the highest scoring food on the satiety index.

Never heard of this before, but I was surprised by the number of potatoes this person ate. I can eat like, 1.5 large potatoes max. Then I’m good. But this guy was quoting 18 med potatoes everyday!?!?

So that's 6 per meal? Maybe the equivalent of 3 large? Doesn't seem absurd, when you're eating nothing else.

boiled potatoes yes, but french fries and chips are more common and definitely crave worthy

>Potatoes are the highest scoring food on the satiety index. ... Eggs and fish are also very high on the satiety index.

So there was sound science behind my all-scrambled-eggs-and-hashbrowns diet in college.

Potatoes are more filling per calorie than broccoli? Spinach?

Also I wonder the comparison between potatoes and protein champions like hard-boiled eggs or fish. Maybe we could have a nice American eating competition to compare. Or just a detailed study where people eat short-term diets of each and measure their satiety and other vitals.

> Potatoes are more filling per calorie than broccoli? Spinach?

Way, way, way more filling. Regular vegetables have basically no fill value at all. Just a fancy form of water & vitamins. Potatoes are quite good at filling.

Filling here meaning over the medium term. You can stuff your stomach with vegetables and briefly feel "full", but you won't feel "satisfied" for very long, and might even feel a bit of nausea as your digestive system works on all these vegetables without much in the way of calories.

Exactly. I can eat enough vegetables to feel ill, and still not actually feel satiated. It's an uncomfortable feeling, still being hungry but also feeling full and a little nauseous even.

I'm pretty sure this is quite wrong [1]. While potatoes score as the most satiating "carb" it seem far from the most satiating food, vegetables have tons of fiber score a lot higher in satiety vs. nutrient density.[2]

> Just a fancy form of water & vitamins

No.

1. https://optimisingnutrition.com/calculating-satiety/

2. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/p_QyR5ImpQSJ_QODYl-tKxeKfj...

#1 is a really great link. I hope people click it and read it.

It specifically mentions the potato phenomenon:

> It’s worth noting here that the star performer in the satiety study was the plain boiled potato. People found it filling and hard to eat much at the buffet three hours later. This could be due to the low palatability of plain potatoes or the effects of resistant starch which forms when we cook and cool potatoes before eating.

> You may have heard of the Potato Hack Diet where people eat nothing but potatoes and lose weight. Unfortunately, while satiating, plain potato is not the most nutrient-dense and may not provide enough protein to maintain high levels of lean muscle mass during weight loss. You would also need to eat it without added fat (e.g. butter, oil, etc.). Otherwise, it’s extremely easy to overeat (e.g. chips).

That's why I speculated that a diet of potatoes, a lean protein source or two, and no added fats could make for a diet that's nutritious and promotes weight loss.

I'll probably break all of these rules and have fish and chips tonight!

I can't actually get satiated with vegetables. I can eat enough to feel ill, but I'll still be hungry, paradoxically.

Maybe you need something else specific due to your lifestyle.... more protein or carbs.

When I went to the Irish potato famine museum in Ireland they said the average person needed a basketful of potatoes per day.

That doesn’t seem like it’s high in the satiety index.

I can find claims that people were eating 14 pounds a day. That seems implausible. They'd have been really fat on nearly 5000 Calories per day.

If you're building a house or something 12 hours a day, you're going to burn that much.

I don't buy that. We've studied cultures where everyone works really hard all day. Their metabolism adjusts pretty well and functions at a level not too different from the rest of us.

https://www.lhsfna.org/burning-calories-on-the-job/

Burning 400 calories an hour for 12 hours would be about 5000 calories.

Anecdotally, I know a retired guy who's been constructing a gymnasium sized $150K play tube structure for the past month, and he's lost like 25lb.

What is a play tube because it makes me think of those structures that kids play in at McDonalds and something like that couldn’t possibly cost $150K.

Yes, it's something like that. I imagine the cost is proportional to the size and complexity of the particular setup? The company quoted $20k just to install it, which is why my acquaintance is volunteering to do it.

Athletes or active teens could eat that much easily

Very specific athletes can burn that much for a while. And teens can do it for a bit during growth spurts. But regular people? Nah. That's been studied pretty well. If you work hard all day, your metabolism compensates. It's also why exercise has quickly diminishing returns.

Satiety index is per calorie. Needing a large volume per day indicates it’s low calorie per volume, which would support that claim.

That seems… counter intuitive. I would say something has a high satiety index if something small can fill you up.

I think you may be confusing satiety with being "full".

You can eat 500 calories of butter and not feel even slightly full, but 500 calories of raw potato would have you full to bursting.

But satiety is defined as the state of being full. The satiety index should be based on volume not calories. Otherwise it’s not just unintuitive, it’s incorrect.

You don’t have to consume a certain number of calories to be full. You just need a large enough volume. Competitive eaters eat a huge amount of lettuce to feel “full” but it has almost no calories.

Satiety is defined as "the feeling or state of being sated"

Full != (Sated OR Satisfied)

Sate is defined as “satisfy to the full”

The biggest parts to losing weight are the things you didn't mention - portion size, snacks, alcohol, and sugary drinks. Most people would lose weight on any diet diet if they control those. I think I've lost about 20 pounds over the past 2 months just from reducing those things (not even eliminating).

Best comment on the post right here

You don't seem to factor in the glycemic index. If someone spreads such meals over the day, it keeps spiking blood sugar levels (potatoe meals have a high glycemic load) and realsing lots of insulin. That doesn't sound too efective for weightloss.

Eating nothing else but potatoes would easily fulfill all the energy needs of your body.

The problem with potatoes and with all similar starchy food, like cereals, bananas, sweet potatoes etc., is that their ratio between energy content and protein content is much too high.

If you eat enough potatoes to also eat enough proteins, you would also gain weight and it would be difficult to do that, because you will be very satiated long before eating enough proteins.

If you eat only enough potatoes to be satiated, you will not get enough proteins and a large part of the weight loss will be from muscular mass, not only from fat reserves.

After one month of potato diet, unless you had been a very muscular person previously it is likely that symptoms of protein deficiency will already be visible, e.g. swellings of the feet due to insufficient albumin in the blood.

A much more effective single-item diet would be to eat some high-protein legume, e.g. lentils with olive oil and iodized salt instead of potatoes with (unspecified) oil and (unspecified) salt, which would provide enough proteins.

Such a diet would be almost complete, except that it does not have enough of some substances required in very small quantities, i.e. sulfur amino-acids, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, choline, vitamin B12, vitamin D, calcium.

>Potatoes are the highest scoring food on the satiety index. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/15-incredibly-filling-f...

They certainly didn't calculate this index by weight, because per gram eggs are far more filling than potatoes

Satiety index is normalised by calories rather than weight [1]. If it were normalised by weight, calorie density would dominate any satiety effect.

[1] http://www.ernaehrungsdenkwerkstatt.de/fileadmin/user_upload...

Fish is high on satiety!? I can’t think of anything non-plant based that leaves me hungrier more quickly. Even something oily and tasty like a cod.

This satiety index can be very misleading. Maybe you eat a lot of potatoes, and then you feel full - but for how long?

In my experience nothing beats the feeling of fullness after eating food with high fat content. It may not be the quickest to kick in, eg. you eat salad with lots of olive oil and cheese, you might feel light in the following hour or so. But then the fat digestion really starts, and you won't even want to think about food for the next 6-8 hours.

This is why keto works so well, especially when combined with fasting / intermittent fasting. If you eat a lot of fat, IF is a breeze - it's not that you have to manage your hunger (and eat various snacks every 2-3 hours), but that you don't have hunger at all, in fact, you feel full all the time. If you hadn't tried it you cannot even imagine how good this feeling is...

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

I met someone on a Potatoes + Curd/Butter diet and he said something that stuck with me - "You need to eat the skins too".

So you can't just eat fries or mashed potatoes, but more like baked potatoes in skin with sour cream.

Seems a bit crazy, but it seemed to make him happy & felt like he was discovering something unique rather than being forced by someone else.

> even with a cheat day

Cheat days are under-explained, they're not for fun.

If you keep up a calorie deficit long-term, then your metabolism tanks and the easiest way to convince your body that it doesn't need to cut costs is to take a day of extra calories intermixed with the fasting.

If you don't do them, you will feel tired all the time when fasting.

> So you can't just eat fries or mashed potatoes,

You can keep the skin for both of these though, especially fries, it's delicious, for mashed potatoes it's a bit weird but if you're lazy it works

Also, for your standard potato, you should boil the potato whole the day before and put it in the fridge to cool.

This causes resistant starches to develop in the potato which is good for you in a handful of ways.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/resistant-starch-101

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.

Did you lose weight while on it? Any benefits you noticed?

Even if they did lose weight, it would be challenging to differentiate this from the insane calorie pull that happens to your body while breastfeeding.

Having recently given birth, and breast-feeding, is (Ahem) the mother of all confounding factors

I lost 60 pounds of pregnancy weight that year, so it's hard to tell, but I didn't notice any particular change in my weight loss rate during the potato diet.

Breastfeeding is the second most calorie intensive (prolonged) experience most people will have, right after pregnancy.

Obviously sprinting burns a lot of calories at once, but making milk happens all day, and you don't have to breathe those calories out.

It was all deep fried. It wasn’t just potatoes but a lot of fat.

It was certainly not all deep fried. Gross. I'd have been sick the whole time.

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!

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...

Thanks!

I'm not completely sold on the lithium hypothesis, either. But I find their arguments for some kind of environmental contaminant compelling, especially for the ways in which they refute some of the other major hypotheses for the increase in body weights (e.g. food variety, processed food, etc)

Note that the SMTM folks recently published an article responding to the TDS data referred to by "It's Probably Not Lithium": https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/05/total-diet-studies-...

This is... not promising.

Someone would write like this if they don't know anything about instrumental analysis and are just guessing as a result.

As an example, they don't seem to even understand that wet and dry weights are substantivel different measures, and speak as though Magalhães et al. (1990) is measuring wet weight; it is measuring dry weight.

I'm supportive of autodidactic study and outsider research, but this is, frankly, a mess. They should unweight their priors considerably and bring in some chemists.

We now have FDA-approved GLP-1 receptor agonists like Semaglutide that produce sustained weight loss of a magnitude similar to the weight gain discussed in that article. So the idea that something similar could be messing with this or a similar pathway hardly seems shocking to me, even if lithium perhaps isn’t the culprit.

(As an aside: we’ve also learned that proteins produced by certain gut bacteria have a similar effect on the same pathway, so it’s not crazy to imagine that gut dysbiosis could have an effect on weight gain. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00880-5)

I wonder if PCBs play a part in it. I was reading that thanks to Monsanto pushing PCBs like they are candy has resulted in basically the whole world being exposed to them.

They're hormone disruptors that cause a lot of side effects like decrease of intelligence, weight gain, early/late puberty and it is impossible to escape them completely since even though they're no longer manufactured (at least not in the USA legally) they take a long time to break down in the environment.

https://www.clearwater.org/news/pcbhealth.html

Note: I am the author of "It's Probably Not Lithium."

That SMTM post only addresses 5 of the ~17 studies about food lithium concentration that I mentioned in my post. It ignores several studies that did not use ICP-MS to measure lithium and found very low concentrations of it in food.

Moreover, as samatman mentioned, the post doesn't seem to understand that wet and dry weights are substantively different measures, and cites Magalhães et al. (1990) and Hullin, Kapel, and Drinkall (1969) as if they were reporting wet weight measurements of lithium, when they're reporting dry weight measurements. This makes a huge difference, because watercress (measured in Magalhães et al. (1990)) and lettuce (measured in Hullin, Kapel, and Drinkall (1969)) are both over 90% water by weight.

So that post is largely just based on cherry-picking and misrepresentation of studies.

Moreover, as far as I could tell, only *two* of their sources *actually attempt to estimate dietary lithium intake*, whereas almost all of my ~17 sources do. This is important because the SMTM post references a lot of studies that are not available on the internet, so we don't know whether they reported lithium concentration in dry or wet weight of food. Moreover, one of those sources based its estimation on hair lithium concentration rather than actual food measurements, using a regression model whose accuracy at low levels of dietary intake is unknown.

The vast majority of studies that actually attempt to estimate dietary lithium intake based on lithium concentration in food estimate it to be lower than 100 mcg/day, regardless of methodology. The only exceptions I am aware of are two studies from Manfred Anke.

I participated in the SMTM study, and am totally happy to share my data if anyone is at all curious.

Results for me:

  - it was not as easy as i thought it would be
  - i lost weight
  - my appetite and satiety feedback systems were reset.  After the diet was over I ate less and got full sooner. 
  - after the diet, I noticed that I wanted to eat more even after i was mechanically full.  This was weird, since it didn't happen on the potato diet (I did overeat potatoes a few times because I tried to fill a pizza shaped hole with potato). It feels like an addiction. I know I am full.  I feel full.  I am not hungry.  I want to eat more anyway.
  - So far the weight is staying off (~2 months).

I enjoyed reading them until I tried to get to the source of the 1980 data. The source appears to be from the National Center for Health Statistics, which ran surveys in 1971–1974, 1976–1980, 1988–1994, and 1999–2018.

I was disappointed that they then misunderstood this as an inflection point exactly in 1980 when that was merely the last point in a graph that inappropriately bashed several surveys together. They ask over and over "So what changed in 1980?" but the data doesn't support that year specifically. They seemed to start out from a fundamental misunderstanding and then used that to discount other data through the rest of their posts.

There should be places in the 'deep' watershed that are getting their water from somewhere else.

Or how about the Great Lakes? I doubt Lake Superior has the same stuff in it as Lake Erie, should be easy enough to poke with a stick.

There could certainly be some subtle underlying factor, but the food supply has grown continuously for like 80 years at this point, maybe it's just marketing and availability.

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.

Would've agreed if it wasn't for proteins as a macro which have been suddenly forgotten in its entirety.

Even if you're not working out, your body still craves proteins. Neglecting this is dangerous

potatoes have protein.

To chip in, I agree the author has a great eye. Other articles just mash the information together, but I found this to be very appealing.

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.

----

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).

Second this, Stephan Guyenet is a brilliant guy.

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

Indeed it is, and the solution to managing hunger (i.e. returning your whole insulin and leptin system to a more optimal baseline) is NOT going for a 90% carbohydrate diet.

That's exactly why we have a bloody obesity epidemic. It's a fun thought experiment, but reading the comments in here people actually think this is genius and sustainable.

CGMs should disillusion people of this pretty quickly. I really wish more people would try them for a month just to see how they respond to certain foods.

CGM ?

Continuous Glucose Monitor.

Related topic: Glycogen storage in the liver and muscles and glycogen depletion

I did and would recommend. It shows you the impact of foods in your blood glucose and made it easier to convince myself and change my behavior.

Some lessons I got from using it for 2 months (these are personal, some should apply to most people):

- Plantains cause a BIG glucose spike (I thought they didnt; in my case even more than pasta or rice)

- Walking ~10min after a meal removes the glucose spike of even pretty large meals

- Intense exercise before (duh) removes the glucose spike of any meal, even with big desert/ice cream

- Eating veggies (or taking fiber pills) before a meal removes the glucose spike of most meals

Some of these things I had read about online, but seeing the impact live on my own blood glucose made the lessons stick.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I feel that your comment is trying to connect a "big glucose spike" with the cause of diabetes. They are not connected. Millions of people are eating apples, grapes, plantains, strawberries, raspberries, etc every year without issue.

To tell people to avoid these healthy foods is not backed by the science. And so what if it raises your levels temporarily? Running raises my heart rate and blood pressure. Does that mean I'm about to die?

That's not what this person is saying. "Big glucose spike(s)" actually are the cause of diabetes. The more regular spikes a person has, the more resistant to insulin they become, which is where type 2 diabetes starts. The point of the comments I believe was just to say that certain foods cause different responses in different people. If plantains cause a large spike in a person, I would say that person should probably not eat them every day all the time.

> "Big glucose spike(s)" actually are the cause of diabetes. The more regular spikes a person has, the more resistant to insulin they become, which is where type 2 diabetes starts.

People who don't have diabetes or pre-diabetes spike. But I hardly see a body of work that suggests that everyone is at risk of diabetes.

> If plantains cause a large spike in a person, I would say that person should probably not eat them every day all the time.

People from South America eat them every day and they aren't linked to diabetes as far as I know.

> People who don't have diabetes or pre-diabetes spike. But I hardly see a body of work that suggests that everyone is at risk of diabetes.

The problem is consistently exceeding a certain level of blood sugar for extended periods of time. I think this is how you develop insulin resistance.

> People from South America eat them every day and they aren't linked to diabetes as far as I know.

I am from Panama, where we eat a lot of plantains. That's why I decided to test because it's a staple and I would have never put it in the same category as other carbs (bc I thought they had enough fiber to counter).

Why do you feel you need to change your food intake, and how do you interpret your CGM results? If you don't have a form of diabetes it doesn't really make a difference. Your glucose will go back down to 85 fairly soon.

Family history of developing type 2 diabetes. I take the CGM results as a sign of my pancreas having to pump out insulin to counter the blood sugar. From what I understand, consistently exceeding certain level (110/120? forgot) for prolonged periods (an hour was the warning given by the device) eventually leads to insulin resistance.

I see, sounds reasonable. I definitely learned a lot about how my body responds to different foods and other reasons glucose can rise (besides food, glucose also rises in response to metabolic activity).

Which CGM are you using? I have a Dexcom, which has configurable alarm thresholds. I have type 1 diabetes. Generally I try to avoid being over 140 for very long, and over 200 is considered dangerous. My Tandem insulin pump used a non-configurable setting of 110 as the level it tries to maintain by increasing or decreasing insulin dosages.

I used Levels, which integrates to Librelink from Abbot.

Levels just puts a nice UI on top of Librelink, like scoring meals and days, finding associations between meals and giving you tips.

I stopped using these because they are expensive (at least 100 per month if I only used Librelink, think it depends on country as my moms buys hers in Colombia not the US) and I was just looking to learn about certain meals/timing/etc.

I’ve put on weight and I find the cgm to be a way more objective and practical metric than calorie counting. It’s simply hard to consume enough low GI foods to put on weight.

There are certain foods that my body seems to process poorly. My blood glucose spikes as much from crackers and rice as it does from more traditional sweets. My heuristics for other foods that I assumed were sweet (often fatty foods with mild sweetener) were also wrong. And I’m not weighing everything, counting calories, etc. I just tap my phone onto the device a few times a day.

Other things have also been surprising. I smoke hookah fairly regularly and found that it raises my fasting blood glucose by almost ten points (80 -> 90).

I find it’s an easy North Star metric with a single exception being intense physical activity which releases glycogen stores.

There are other factions within the community that believe that blood glucose spikes are responsible for things like abdominal fat storage and you’ll see that they continually try to game the number with things like nut consumption and drinking vinegar. This seems less useful to me.

Have you tried taking a fiber supplement before meals? If you're still using the cgm I recommend you try and measure - I was impressed!

I noticed the effect with salads and figured the fiber could help in a similar way.

Fiber and protein do slow down carb absorption, but for me fat content makes the biggest difference.

I have type 1 diabetes (actually LADA) so I keep a very careful eye on my glucose.

Definitely the foods that make it rise the fastest are starchy vegetables like potatoes and grains. Fat plays a major role in absorption - a potato by itself causes a quick spike, while if I add cheese, it takes about twice as long to fully digest. Protein and fiber slow things down, too. Generally sugar causes a spike that goes down quickly compared to other carb sources.

Many people with t1 find that aerobic exercise like a brisk walk lowers glucose in the short term, and it even has an effect for a day or two. Often people report that intense anaerobic exercise like weightlifting raises glucose levels.

Insulin definitely plays a role in fat storage (that’s one of the major things it does as a hormone).

So I think this is an attempt to link a random result to a metabolic disease? This goes against the advice of pretty much every health doctor, nutritionist, and scientist.

I would be shocked if there aren’t more studies using CGMs to track diet adherence and health in the next few years.

If your doctor is telling you that prolonged periods of high blood sugar sustained over time are good for you, I would suggest that they review a bit of the literature.

If I asked my doctor about using a CGM as a runner that likes to eat fruits and vegetables he would look at me like I'm an idiot.

I imagine he would say, "So you aren't having any health issues and bought this $100 device anyway?"

People who get pre-diabetes or diabetes (type 2), well, it's usually because they are overweight or obese. There's just not a lot of people getting diabetes in a mysterious way.

Also, saturated fat is linked to diabetes. And cutting that out improves heart health anyway.

I'd do it if they had one that didn't involve needles.

I've used them before but I sweat too much and they fall off =(

Do you remember who made it? I didn't think they had one! It might be worth the trouble to keep it on just to get the data.

By this logic, the obesity epidemic should've happened in the 17th century when the potato was introduced to the rest of the world and became the staple crop of poor farmers everywhere.

They did not eat a potato only diet, however poor they were.

I actually have relatives in a third world country that however poor they were they'd have a diet of mostly starches but including decent protein, even if it's just fish, literal bugs, small rodents and other subpar meat.

They'd laugh you out the village if you'd tell them they can live on yams and tapioca alone.

Staple doesn't mean one food diet.

Do you really believe that the obesity epidemic was caused by people eating 90% carbohydrate diets?

The "high carb meals" at McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut... are all also (and more per calorie) high in fat.

Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil to your mixed-green salad? That has turned into a high fat salad. Most people cannot avoid cheese or nuts on salad, either.

Eating the potato diet with sour cream/butter/cheese: High fat.

I'm overweight because I eat too much. Eat caloric surplus, gain weight. That part isn't complicated. Why I eat too much is another question...

It's funny too, because I have perfectly logged data showing that the weeks I eat fewer than about 1800 calories reliably, (because I have an incredibly sedentary lifestyle) reliably and predictably lower my weight.

I've literally got a science experiment in my own body that shows reducing calories in, without reducing the actual design of my meals, reduces my body mass.

I'm willing to accept that there are some minor irregularities and difficulties that make "Calories in == Calories out" not 100% accurate, but I'm betting the effect size is closer to +-10%, and therefore easily discarded for approximations, even though they are scientifically significant and could create a more accurate model.

I agree that the CICO is a model that works, but it is at least somewhat complicated by the fact that CO is a function of CI. I.e., what you eat takes different amounts of energy to metabolize so it also contributes to what you burn. If I eat 1800 kcal of protein I may have higher CO than if I ate 1800 kcal of simple carbohydrates.

There's already a lot of uncertainty when most people measure their calories (very few people actually weigh their food) and this just adds another layer of uncertainty. I have a feeling those all combine to make it inaccurate enough in practice for some people to claim the CICO model doesn't work.

No. A healthy diet is a diet that provides you with the right amount of nutrients without leaving you hungry or unsatisfied.

By not being hungry and unsatisfied you'll then stop overeating (surprise!).

"My diet is OK, I just eat too much" is all wrong: there is a complex relation between caloric intake, which foods are eaten, hunger, satisfaction, energy, mood etc.

Many fad diets "work" even if they are not grounded in any scientific fact and are even unhealthy in the long term (low fat, low carb, keto, gluten-free, all-meat).

They artificially restrict the variety of food one person can eat and this indirectly encourages people to eat less. And when people stop overeating they feel better and believe the fad diet is sound.

There were even a diet where you can only eat foods in a given meal from the same group... by color. Same trick.

Bracing for all the downvotes...

Your body stores calories you eat, and it's really good at it. If you eat too much of anything (that contains more calories than the calories required to digest it), you will gain weight. Eat too much fried chicken, gain weight. Eat too many oranges, gain weight. Eat too many beans, gain weight. You can probably gain weight from eating too much broccoli, although I'd get sick of broccoli before that happened.

Did you just repeated the previous point without understanding anything of what I wrote?

Calories surplus equals weight gain. Are you saying you disagree with that? Because it sounds like you don't believe that.

Try reading what I wrote instead.

Talk about generalising. How is gluten-free unhealthy in the long term. Do you actually believe that wheat in particular is required for health?

Just above you said a diet needs to be nutritionally complete. Low carb, keto, gluten free, hell even low fat can be nutritionally complete and satisfying, though the latter one will not feel really good in the long term.

i thought fat was largely debunked as being the primary cause, though i'm not going to go searching for studies as i'm not a dietician (though my partner is).

consider this: each of those meals at McD's, BK, or Pizza hut come with a 1-2 liter soda, loaded with calories and sugar. yes, the fats are there, but they are _always_ paired with loads of sugar.

I agree with the debunking that fats are not bad for you, though, not all fats are equal. The rule of thumb is that fats that remain liquid at body temperature can be considered "dietary fat". The only problem with "dietary fat" is they have a load of energy on them and that can blow your calorie budget for the day quite easily if you overdo them.

Fats though that stay solid at body temperature arguably should be completely avoided. Hence the big-mac with a 1-2 liter soda, loads of unhealthy fat paired with loads of sugar, all with very minimal fiber..

I'd be curious to understand where you get that information from.

Fat that stays solid at room temperature is generally high in saturated fat (except for margarin, but let's keep it out). Fat that stays liquid is generally vegetable oil (e.g.: canola).

I don't think there is strong evidence that vegetable oil is good for you whereas saturated fat is not. If so, I'd really like to read about it.

For fat vs sugar (ie: carbs), this was a very informative reading: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co...

Overall, I don't know of a lot of good science regarding which fats are better for you and which are actually bad. After all it was not until recently that it was admitted that the relationship between cholesterol in the blood and cholesterol is uncorrelated and not at all understood. Similarly even for calories, just because a food has X calories, does not mean you actually absorb all of those calories, let alone how the body uses them.

For the rule of thumb, I have no specific references and it is general knowledge I've picked up reading on nutrition. It could very well be wrong. I believe there is something to it, for example, coconut oil is relatively good for a person and has a low melt point, where-as bacon grease and steak gristle are pretty certainly terrible for a person.

Trying to find some references, I was not able to find the original reading where I stumbled upon that idea. This was a decent read though that I just came across: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/healthy-vs-unhealthy-fa... (YMMV)

Well.... Fats can be bad in that they are calorie dense foods, and thus it's easy to add more calories than you should to food with them.

It's significantly harder to be fat eating nothing but broccoli, but I could continuously gain weight eating only 250g of vegetable oil per day.

Sugar is bad for exactly the same reason IMO

> Indeed it is, and the solution to managing hunger (i.e. returning your whole insulin and leptin system to a more optimal baseline) is NOT going for a 90% carbohydrate diet.

Leptin system returns to a more optimal baseline with weight loss.

Insulin returns to a more optimal baseline by increasing insulin sensitivity. Exercise does this most effectively, loosing weight also does this. Low carb diets don't do this directly, only through weight loss.

Managing hunger is managing your dopamine response. Eating nothing but one food, will make you very bored of your food. You won't be looking for food as entertainment, stress relief, or a cure for boredom(dopamine). You will only eat for true hunger(lack of dopamine can feel similar).

>Exercise does this most effectively

Curious, does it depend on the type of exercise and, if so, do we know what mechanisms cause some types to have a disproportionate impact?

I believe that the more glycolytic the type of exercise is the greater the impact. Thus, higher intensity exercise is preferable if the goal is to improve insulin sensitivity which I reckon is a transient improvement and that a lot of it is thanks to GLUT4-translocation within the muscles in response to the exercise. This translocation means that less insulin needs to be secreted to deal with carbohydrates after training.

https://scholar.google.se/scholar_url?url=https://www.resear...

Sorry but your comment is complete nonsense. Insulin reacts faster than weight loss. In fact it is so fast, every time you wake up, your insulin resistance recovers a little bit every morning after you sleep. It is entirely possible to be obese without insulin resistance and to be skinny with insulin resistance. It is completely orthogonal to weight but insulin resistance makes it much easier to gain even more weight.

> It is completely orthogonal to weight but insulin resistance makes it much easier to gain even more weight.

Insulin sensitive women on the high carb diet lost nearly double the weight as insulin sensitive women on the low-carb diet.

Similarly, insulin resistant women lost twice the weight on the low-carb diet as on the high carb diet.

https://bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/insulin-sensitivity-a...

> It is entirely possible to be obese without insulin resistance and to be skinny with insulin resistance.

This is what I said

>> Exercise does this most effectively, loosing weight also does this. Low carb diets don't do this directly, only through weight loss.

A more precise way: A caloric deficit can also increase insulin sensitivity.

My unsupported personal belief is that the human body processes different carbohydrates in very different ways. Carbs that come from starch are not equivalent to carbs from cane sugar, and yet again not equivalent to honey, and again not equivalent to high fructose corn sryup, and again different from breads & pasta.

Ratio of fiber to carbohydrate and how that carbohydrate is processed by the body is also important as well.

Hence, french fries are not good, they have added sugar, the skin is removed, and they have a lot of added fats from the fried oils. That strikes me as a world of difference compared to a whole baked potato consumed with a sauteed broccolli with a side salad (plenty of fiber).

Unrelated, and unsolicited 2 cents, IMO it's all about eating as many fibrous and leafy greens as possible. At that point, a moderate side of lean meat, potato, carb, practially whatever - does not matter so long as the fibrous and leafy greens are the majority source of calories.

> personal belief is that the human body processes different carbohydrates in very different ways

This is nutritional science 101.

Slow-digesting carbohydrates like big-flake oats are really good.

Fast-digesting things like sugars, processed foods, fast food and meat products are bad as they create spikes in the glycemic index.

> Slow-digesting carbohydrates like big-flake oats are really good.

if only they tasted that way!

With enough brown sugar and butter they sure do. But I suppose that defeats the point...

I agree. I do wonder and was speaking a bit to other factors that I do not know but suspect, notably: - Do a high glycemic index food have a higher propensity to be stored on the body vs actually used? - Is the caloric absorption rate of high fructose corn sryup higher than say honey?

Speaking to this, the body makes different choices on whether a food passes through you, is absorbed and used, or whether it is stored. It makes different choices in where and how to store that energy, all in all which makes me think that not all carbohydrates (or calories, or foods) are equal when actually consumed. That is not even getting started with on gut fauna and the effects of different foods on the microbial environments in our guts.

> meat products

Are you saying meat products cause spikes in glycaemic index? Seriously?

> Unrelated, and unsolicited 2 cents, IMO it's all about eating as many fibrous and leafy greens as possible. At that point, a moderate side of lean meat, potato, carb, practially whatever - does not matter so long as the fibrous and leafy greens are the majority source of calories.

If you eat a meal with a small steak and a baked potato, how many pounds of salad would you need to consume to get the majority of your calories from eating those leaves?

Don't forget those broccoli stalks! But I think you make the point though, it's a lot of veg if you are going to be getting half of your calories or more from veg alone. Which also means you are going to feel pretty satiated and full from eating all that low calorie density food.

I was a bit curious about the actual answer here. 1 oz steak has about 70 calories, 1 cup broccoli has about 30 calories. Seemingly you then need about a 3:1 ratio of servings veg to steak to hit that majority threshold.

A whole potato has about 110 calories (about 150g), and broccoli by the same weight has about 50 calories, so about 2:1.

Lettuce is known for having almost no calories in it, similar to tomatoes and cucumbers... There are lots of veg's out there, so don't just compare lettuce calories to the steak calories. "fibrous" greens include asparagus, brussel sprouts, bok choy, peppers, etc.. etc..

So.. to get that majority calories, two servings asparagus, one serving broccoli, a large salad, a small potato, and a tiny steak every third day or so or even less often would do it. There are also beans, lentils, whole-grains, plenty of sources so it's not just meat-potatos and leaves alone.

On another front, that majority calories from veg means you are getting a ton of nutrients and are actually eating quite a lot.

The idea of 'low calorie density' comes from this video by "Dylan Thomas" a professional cyclist and coach that produces a lot of data-based videos (and in the video, he goes into the studies and the science): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPVHGt3Nf9U (minute 9:00 is where he talks about having a majority veg diet)

That is impossible, you're supposed to throw in some calories e.g. at least some sunflower seeds or nuts.

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

400lb of muscles or fat is probably not healthy either way...

I don't think this is a good faith comment. It is very difficult and rare to add that much muscle.

I just don't know how much muscles steroid junkies can add, but either way it's not healthy... but yeah you are probably right that it isn't that much.

Also, that parent comment was saying that you should trade fat for muscles, so my comment still stands.

> Also, that parent comment was saying that you should trade fat for muscles, so my comment still stands.

Great -- you win by technicality! For the vast majority of people, the parent made a very reasonable statement, so comments like this are not helpful.

> so comments like this are not helpful.

Maybe you think my comment was not helpful, but his comment was ignoring many variables.

Eat less if you are fat and do cardio no matter what.

No, obesity is a metabolic problem. And barring personal medical issues, diets of starch and sugar are the cause.

[EDIT], Folks, obesity is a result of metabolic disease. Obesity is an epidemic, and the science is abundant on this. This isn't a grammatic nuance, it's the essence of the global obesity epidemic that results from diet and eating habits. It's literally the foundation of the growing understanding amongst medical professionals of why low-carb diets and fasting work dramatically on this.

I feel it would be accurate to say that obesity is also a metabolic problem.

The difficulty with disentangling "what is obesity" is that the body is full of feedback and feed-forward mechanisms. You can look at any part of the machinery and say "here is the problem". There are a significant number of systems that deal with adiposity, hunger, and energy management and allocation.

Once we find something to blame for a problem we often stop looking. Processed carbs are not compatible with a sedentary lifestyle, that is true. But our ancestors ate carbs for generations. Many modern cultures eat carbs and don't have a big problem with obesity.

> It's literally the foundation of the growing understanding amongst medical professionals of why low-carb diets and fasting work dramatically on this.

Do you have a good source to support the idea that there is a "growing understanding" that "low-card diets and fasting work"?

I'm fairly well-read on this subject (though a complete layman), but my general understanding of today's scientific consensus is that there is nothing, or almost nothing special about low-card diets or fasting. Most of the people who are purporting that these diets are somehow better (for various meanings of better) are stating heteredox views.

They might still be right! (Though I doubt it.) But I'm specifically pushing back on the narrative that this is a growing consensus.

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

If that is so, why is obesity so much worse in some countries than in others? Are Italians really so much better at managing hunger than Americans?

It seems far more plausible to me that the differences in obesity between countries are caused by simple cultural habits than by some complex psychological task called managing hunger, which seems less likely to be cultural.

> It seems far more plausible to me that the differences in obesity between countries are caused by simple cultural habits than by some complex psychological task called managing hunger, which seems less likely to be cultural.

I don't see a clear point here. Culture has a HUGE impact on psychology.

Also, managing hunger is Psychological AND Physiological.

>Culture has a HUGE impact on psychology.

I would agree with that in general, but hunger seems like such an incredibly old issue to deal with from evolutionary perspective. Managing hunger is something "we" have been doing for millions of years and it has always been at the very center of our survival as a species.

The idea that a cultural group could lose its ability to deal with such a key psychological and biological necessity in a short period of time just seems far less likely to me than a change in habits brought about by far more recent industrial and socioeconomic circumstances.

Take that from yet another pseudonymous internet autodidact ;-)

> The idea that a cultural group could lose its ability to deal with such a key psychological and biological necessity in a short period of time just seems far less likely to me than a change in habits brought about by industrial and socio-economic circumstances.

But those industrial and socio-economic circumstances also had a huge impact on culture! It's super complicated!

I am not strongly anti-capitalist, but consider the impact of capitalism on food:

Take low cost ingredients. Put them together in an appealing way. Sell the product at a relatively low price (higher than the ingredients, but not much). Advertise the product widely in such a way to condition people to desire your product.

I am describing junk food of course. Walk into a convenience store or look at the checkout lines of a grocery store. Look at all the food you are conditioned to desire.

edit: I am not blaming capitalism as the single cause of obesity. There is much more to it than that.

Well, exactly, but would you really describe these cultural changes as a disease of managing hunger on an individual psychological level (which is how I understood the term)?

If something like what you're describing is going on then our psychological ability to manage hunger hasn't changed at all. Other things have changed, which is my whole point.

Yes, the conditions we live under have changed; the big question is "Why are some individuals so much more affected by the new environmental effects than others and what should we do about it"

When we gain weight, we understand we need to eat less to lose weight. But that obviously does not work for many many people.

I'm carrying excess fat right now. Abolishing capitalism or taxing soda (or whatever other social, political, or cultural changes you would make) won't get rid of that fat. It is commendable to work on the social causes of obesity. I frame it as an individual psychological issue because it is an individual experience. If it was a matter of finding "the right foods to eat and avoid" or any particular set of facts that could convey how to actually lose weight, then the problem would be solved.

In other words, you can't tell someone to be hungry. Or at least, that doesn't sell any books or diet plans.

I think you're absolutely right that as an individual you have to find solutions that work for yourself, not wait for some vague set of social conditions to change.

I'm not even sure what those conditions are. Capitalism is easy to blame for everything because it creates choices, both good and bad ones. But some capitalist countries have an obesity problem and others far less so. Socialist Cuba is a lot more obese than most European countries.

So I don't know what causes it on an epidemiological level and I have no solutions to offer. I'm merely questioning a particlar diagnosis. Framing the problem in a way that helps you personally is fine of course, but it's not the same thing as finding the truth about what causes the obesity epidemic.

When I was a teenager, I couldn't understand why there could possibly be any people who are both smart and obese. There is an obvious answer to weight gain - control your diet and add exercise. Everyone knows this. But it doesn't work.

There are 1000's of things that can cause weight gain, but there is an obvious solution - CICO. But that obvious solution doesn't work for many people.

----

I think the scientific study of obesity is full of meta-scientific problems that affect our reasoning on the subject.

- BMI is easy to measure, and predictive at a population level; but it is not as strongly predictive at an individual level when you control for things like activity level and body fat percentage.

- It is very hard for individuals to measure calories consumed and expended. It is also difficult to do this in scientific studies - it can be done, and it has been done well, but it took many years to take this problem seriously.

- Hunger is not one thing. Hunger is hard to measure. Hunger is hard to break into components. Hunger is hard to communicate about.

- - Hunger has multiple physical and psychological components - how would you even teach this in school? With physical sensations like smell and taste, or with emotional sensations like anger?

- - Hunger is a sensation generated deep within the body and the brain. There are no scientific units associated with hunger. You can't get a "hunger level" lab done at your endocrinologist.

----

Occam's Razor is a powerful tool. It feels good to find a "simple" answer. People want to find "the" cause of the obesity epidemic, but there is not one single cause. I will repeat my recommendation for "The Hungry Brain" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LXT28ZE/ and add a recommendation for "Burn" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08D8JYQD6/ .

There are many factors in the obesity epidemic and they all work on different people in different ways. Some of them tend to increase the calories in and some of them tend to decrease the calories out.

CI factors - affluence, advertisement, psychological conditioning, "You can have it all" attitude, more junk food (list not exhaustive)

CO factors - less walking in daily life, more people living in areas where it is hard to go outside in the daytime, more sedentary lifestyle overall (list not exhaustive)

----

Your body does have a voice that says "you have enough fat", but it is a little voice, and modern foods are highly desirable and calorie dense. There is some evidence that processed sugar has a strong effect on your hunger setpoint as well. There is strong evidence that having access to a wide variety of highly desirable foods leads to overeating (The Cafeteria Diet)

> Excess body weight can put stress on your joints, but doesn't generally have any other negative effects.

That seems to contradict the Harvard School of Public Health's article[0] that says:

> The results showed that participants with BMI of 22.5-<25 kg/m2 (considered a healthy weight range) had the lowest mortality risk during the time they were followed. The risk of mortality increased significantly throughout the overweight range: a BMI of 25-<27.5 kg/m2 was associated with a 7% higher risk of mortality; a BMI of 27.5-<30 kg/m2 was associated with a 20% higher risk; a BMI of 30.0-<35.0 kg/m2 was associated with a 45% higher risk; a BMI of 35.0-<40.0 kg/m2 was associated with a 94% higher risk; and a BMI of 40.0-<60.0 kg/m2 was associated with a nearly three-fold risk. Every 5 units higher BMI above 25 kg/m2 was associated with about 31% higher risk of premature death. Participants who were underweight also had a higher mortality risk.

These findings don't seem to discriminate on the source of the BMI, only on its existence.

[0] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/overweight-...

If they didn't control for the ratio of lean body mass to fat, then it doesn't actually contradict my point.

If the findings don't discriminate on the source of the BMI, then you just don't know. It's not evidence.

> "They looked at participants’ body mass index (BMI)—an indicator of body fat calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared (kg/m2)."

BMI is the WORST indicator of body fat precisely because it does not account for muscle mass. BMI is only suitable for population level studies, it is not suitable for individual health decisions.

Put another way - if I go to the gym religiously, I could gain a few pounds but also lose a few percent of body fat. What will my medical tests show in general? Will my clothes fit better? Will I be able to climb stairs more easily? BMI shows none of that.

> BMI is the WORST indicator of body fat precisely because it does not account for muscle mass. BMI is only suitable for population level studies, it is not suitable for individual health decisions.

It works for the people who need it most.

Sure you might just be some 5% body-fat tren cycling bodybuilder with an "obese" BMI... but in reality for most people the higher up you go, the more urgent of an indicator it is that someone should lose weight for their health.

Then why does my source use it as a measurement? Why wouldn’t they be more specific, if being more specific were very important?

I’m very familiar with the “BMI is not good!” argument, but if it’s good enough for Harvard’s School of Public Health, it’s good enough for me.

My conjecture is that "Changing Body Composition" is a better goal than "Lose Weight" for individuals who are trying to become healthier. As a long term aim or as a population measure, "Lose Weight" or "Lower BMI" fine; however, as a personal goal "Lose Weight" can be demotivating and flat out counterproductive, especially in the short term. It just doesn't work for many many people.

If you had a magic wand and changed all of an obese person's fat mass into muscle mass, that would not produce a healthy person. But that doesn't happen in the real world.

Here's what happens in the real world - when you start a workout program you gain a little weight. That small weight gain is not bad, but it can be demotivating if your goal is "lose weight". It can stop people from exercising, which is good for long term health.

Weight fluctuations are also confounding to the goal of "Lose Weight". I've often heard that a good goal is to lose 2 pounds a week. I have several problems with that. I can lose up to 4 pounds on a long walk. I can gain up to 5 pounds overnight. Neither of those reflect body fat loss (the walk may represent a few ounces). You may say "That's just water weight!" - Ok. How does my scale know that?

Being specific is very important in the personal experience of weight loss ahem change of body composition.

When the choices are, “anonymous person on HN” and “one of the most respected institutions for public health education on the planet”, I’m going to tend towards the latter, thanks.

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!

Having done both time-based and food-based restrictions, I would say that both can work for some people but won't work for others. And I think the details matter a ton. E.g., I've happily done months of fasting where my eating window is circa 7a-1p. But I spent a month trying a switch to a 12p-6p so I could eat dinner with people and it was hell. I got mean in the 10a-12p range and that did not improve over the month.

You sound like me. I can't do a morning fast. It kinda sucks, as you notice, because it screws around with your ability to have a social dinner. But if I don't have breakfast, I'm not someone to be around before lunch.

Intermittent fasting works well for some, but could be a danger for others. Like you, I used it to fine tune my weight until I wanted to lose and then decided to lose more via IF.

I'm not going into my life story, but I've had fast that have lasted for more than 2 weeks and have had loved ones ask me to stop. Fasting is not an eating disorder, but it can be a path to one if you are not careful. Sounds like you are. I hope others, who may not be, know this.

Cheers.

Totally agree with what you say OrangeMonkey however I think I understood GP's comment differently. I thought GP was saying once you stick to an IF schedule for 2 weeks (for example only eating 12pm to 8pm), after 2 weeks it becomes easy to only eat within those windows. I don't think they were suggesting prolonged fasting >24 hours.

I agree - it wasn't what they were saying.

I was just stating my own experience without exposing too much personal history. For me, mild intermittent fasting led to deep intermittent fasting, multi day fasting, then week, then half a month. At that point it was anorexia not fasting.

I meant no disrespect to him at all nor the implication he was suggesting it - just wanted to throw a caution out. For some, it could lead to unhealthy excess.

That totally makes sense. I didn't think you were disrespectful or anything and I appreciate you sharing your experience.

What window do you eat during? I've seen lots of focus on eating only in the morning, but much of my life I naturally had low appetite in the mornings and mostly only ate dinner. That also coincided with being young and having an insane metabolism. I haven't actually intentionally implemented intermittent fasting, but I've considered it, and I'm strongly biased towards favoring a "dinner only" window from that experience.

An afternoon window is ok. I’ve done IF eating on a 12pm-8pm or 2pm-8pm schedule and it worked just fine.

I read a study some years ago where they compared two groups of people either skipping breakfast or skipping dinner and found that the group skipping the breakfast had higher inflammation levels. The actual cause was unknown. I also read that when skipping breakfast your metabolism kind of stays in sleep mode (burning less calories) until the first meal.

So not skipping breakfast might be the healthier, more effective protocol.

Unfortunately I cannot provide the sources right now, but I guess a web search will help the interested.

A web search suggests that the "skipping breakfast slows metabolism" idea is actually a myth.

I typically do a Noon to 8 PM eating window, which works for me. I agree with you, much easier to skip breakfast than to skip dinner. Also, I do more social eating for lunch/dinner.

> being young and having an insane metabolism

curious, how young do you mean? Human metabolism doesn't really change during adulthood until old age:

> Fat-free mass–adjusted expenditure [...] remains stable in adulthood (20 to 60 years), even during pregnancy; then declines in older adults.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5017

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.

Hope your son makes a full recovery.

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.)

I gotta ask: why no spices?

It’s a diet for autoimmune disorders.

Genuinely I’m not quite sure I get the connection. Would spices in general cause issues with autoimmune diseases? Specific spices?

From. https://thrivingonpaleo.com/aip-spices-and-herbs/

What spices are NOT allowed on AIP? Allspice Anise Seed Annatto Seed Black Caraway Black Cumin Black Pepper Caraway Cardamom Capsicums Cayenne Celery Seed Chili Pepper Flakes Chili Powder Chinese Five-Spice Chipotle Chili Powder Coriander Seed Cumin Seed Curry Powder (typically contains nightshades) Dill Seed Fennel Seed Fenugreek Seed Garam Masala Juniper Mustard Nutmeg Paprika Pepper (from black, green, pink, or white peppercorns) Poppy Seed Poultry Seasoning Red Pepper Russian Caraway Star Anise Steak Seasoning Sumac Taco Seasonin

The idea is that the disorders may not actually be autoimmune, but reactions to certain foods.

I have heard Paprika and chili powder, along with peppers in general, doing something with opening the tight junctions in the gut from Paul Saladino but I can’t recall the what the specific issue or mechanism was.

Herbs have all sorts of compounds, many of which are known to interact with the body's immune system.

Loads of studies about tumeric and inflammation, arthritis. Also capsaicin, piperine, etc. The list is extensive.

Remember: Herbs and spices are where medicinal remedies originated.

Deep down, AIP is one of those fad diets that prohibit more things than there's evidence for. It's justified based on some pseudoscientific ideas about certain foods causing autoimmune issues. People might say things about intestinal permeability, but the scientific connection can be a bit sketchy.

Exactly, that's the genius of Indian cuisine: making otherwise bland ingredients (chickpeas, lentils, potatoes, spinach, etc.) taste amazing. I just polished off a simple rice, spinach and tuna dinner. Very tasty thanks to some sprinkling of misc. spices. I could swap out the rice for potatoes and it would probably even healthier.

> the genius of Indian cuisine: making otherwise bland ingredients (chickpeas, lentils, potatoes, spinach, etc.) taste amazing.

How is that different from any other cuisine? Rice, noodles, potatoes, beans, cabbage, fish, meat, chicken all get mixed with spices in almost every cuisine

More than one cuisine can successfully use spices at a time. “Indian food is good” is not the same as “food other than Indian food is bad.”

Of course there are other styles of cooking. Indian cuisine excels at just the complexity of the spice blends they use. Completely the opposite of Italian cuisine which tends to be minimalist in terms of numbers of ingredients. Just a handful of ingredients typically.

As a Dutch person where salt & pepper are considered excessive in some places, quite a contrast. Let's just say I know what unseasoned vegetables and potatoes taste like after they've been boiled to death. Not great.

The comment I responded to didn't mention complexity, only the spicing up bland food.

Also sorry to hear that - boiled vegetables taste amazing to me. Cabbage, onions, broccoli, etc have amazing flavors when you learn to appreciate them. I can enjoy food drowned in spices and sauces, but in my experience "blandness" is often an indication of desensitization rather than an actual lack of flavor, like how people who excessively consume sugar may have trouble appreciating the sweetness in fruits.

It was an elimination diet. See what things were bothering me. Severe migraines and autoimmune issues. I was very desperate at that point.

Sweet potatoes didn't bother me at all, and kept me full.

After a month I slowly started adding things back in to see how I reacted. Made it easy to tell what foods were an issue.

Great that it helped. I was also on AIP for some periods, long ago now though (maybe because it's so hard)

Basil, oregano, thyme, ginger and some other spices are allowed according to AIP though?

They are herbs and not necessarily called spices

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.

Where I live there’s lots of pre-washed, frozen vegetables at supermarkets. We have an automated pressure cooker where we can just throw the vegs in and let them steam for 7-8 minutes. We have a huge freezer and can quickly prepare brokkoli, spinach, carrots, peas, mushrooms, etc. You can also pressure cook potatoes with the peel on, takes ca 20m including warmup time.

> We have a huge freezer

Ah, yeah – I have a very small one. I've been thinking about upgrading for years to a chest freezer. It's probably time to just do it.

Can recommend. We went for a vertical one (Bosch GSN33VWEP) because we didn’t have enough room for a chest, plus we thought that the UX is better - and I still think it is.

Wow, thanks for the tip! I had no idea that's even a thing, and I have the perfect spot to put one. I can't believe I didn't think to even look these up. Part of my hesitation with a chest freezer was where I'd put it, because I'd almost certainly need to keep it outside (which means building an enclosure, getting power to it, etc).

Thanks!

Glad to help! If you‘ll take another tip, I‘d recommend to get a „no frost“ one (if they are available in your area). We had „low frost“ ones before and had to defrost them every couple months, which can be a real hassle when it’s currently full. The „no frost“ usually really means you never have to defrost.

Prep time is the biggest concern I am aware of on the nutritional side. My best answer to this category of excuses is to amortize the prep time by making more of whatever and then freezing the leftovers in meal-sized containers.

Buying an instant pot & a box of those 2-cup pyrex storage bowls was the best series of personal health choices I've ever made. Granted, not all food works out with a round trip through the freezer, but most things do.

I still do eat things that cannot be frozen (well), such as eggs+bacon+toast, but the core of my nutritional needs are available in my freezer at all times (with approximately 1-2 weeks of buffer). Having a small buffer keeps me absolutely calm regarding my next meal source. I do not wait until all my frozen food is gone before I prepare the next batch. If I didn't have the buffer, my cycle would probably break and I'd start eating Burger King and other related trash for lunch again.

YMMV, but I got great returns on investing in a proper chef’s knife, and learning how to use and maintain it properly. There’s a real pleasure in dicing an onion or whatever in seconds. Knowing I can do that helps lower the ‘activation energy’ of cooking versus takeout, as does just generally loosening up about cooking.

My favorite meals are often thrown together in 20 minutes with zero planning, and certainly no recipe. Knowing a few fundamentals (see Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) gets you a long way.

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.

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. [...] 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.

There is another way to think about it that has helped me. It's not necessarily a good way, but.. I got to thinking, what can you do if you struggle to adjust the diet domain? Adjust the time domain!

So eat the same food, but just space it out more. I've found this a great way to start and while I am more gradually improving the food, it has been less psychologically jarring to adjust the timing of my existing food as a way to get going.

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.

For those with no money to spend on expensive medication, just go on a low(er) carb diet.

or the elimination diet that they can best adhere to. Adherence is the biggest issue in diets, not efficacy (whilst adhered to).

Is there good evidence a low carb diet is close to as effective?

I was pretty into the idea of this drug until I saw the patently ridiculous cost. $1,300? Literally no drug that must be taken long term should cost anything close to this price.

Mounjaro (tirzepatide) has also now been approved.

And it works slightly better than semaglutide.

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?

Nothing. It's meant to be an absurdist joke meant to leave the person wondering exactly what you were wondering.

I think the (humorous) implication is that you would use them as bait for traps. I don't think potatoes would be that effective as raccoon bait (maybe?), but I do know that bear trappers use all sorts of weird stuff, usually food waste of some kind, and it wouldn't surprise me if potatoes would work. I've heard of people using everything from rotten corn to frosted donuts, usually in ridiculous quantities (like an entire 10-gallon drum full). Put it in the middle of the woods, wait for the smell to permeate the entire forest, and then watch the bears come in. Of course the goal is to get the bear to come back the next week, where you'll be waiting in a treestand with a bow or a rifle.

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)

Endurance training on an empty stomach is a great ketone pathways excercise, the first few times are hard but get easier afterwards!

I can confirm. I was preparing from marathon some years ago and the fastest improvements I have seen were when I started going for runs on empty stomach in the morning.

But, I would make sure to give all my body needs immediately after the exercise.

I do this, but usually more by accident than anything else— I lane swim (1hr) or do a bike ride (1.5-2hrs) first thing in the morning before I've had much of a chance to eat anything, and then afterwards have a big protein shake or some bacon and eggs.

I feel like I'd be prone to cramps if I tried push myself after having eaten much.

Runs are better as well, some Sundays I don't eat, go for a 30k run on 14:00 and have a meal after. Feels great. Never do breakfast either, sometimes lunch if I feel like it otherwise just a big meal in the evening.

i will agree with the person above/below about exercising while fasting; it feels like a light pleasure and it is healthy!

now regarding about high carb intake, people go overboard on their minds when thinking about diet based on blogs and news websites... eating fruits and vegetables all day is completely different than eating refined flour stuff and regarding getting into a fast (ketogenesis) state, you can get into, easily by eating a low-PROTEIN diet too (but this one i do not remember the keywords of the papers i read but if you are interested in nutrition, worth taking a look)

here is a sample of human population which have the lowest index of mental disease, diet consisted of 64% carbs, 21% protein, and 15% fat | https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/108/6/1183/5153293

Ironically I eat a high carb diet for the same reasons. I think that is illustrative of the current state of dietary science haha :)

I highly suspect proper diet is quite variable based on genes/environment/etc. I wonder how mature (or not) dietary science is. We have this firm idea of allergies and vague idea of sensitivities, but I imagine there is a lot more nuance to how different people react to different foods.

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.

Kevin Smith also did a form of this diet after his heart attack and lost a lot of weight

Quickly googling it shows articles of him claiming to lose 75 pounds over 3 months, without exercising. Even starting at 300 lbs, running a daily 2822 calorie deficit for 3 months seems insane.

There has to be some embellishing of the numbers. It's highly improbable that at 322 pounds someone could eat 1000 calories per day (his claim) and be at a 2800 calorie deficit with zero exercise.

I'm not saying it's not true, but I'm skeptical of the numbers.

If you lose 75 pounds in 3 months, it's certainly not all fat. He lost water weight, muscle, even skin. This drops the calories required. His "no exercise" also wasn't the same as sedentary. He does shows in Vegas six days a week.

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.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that potatoes gave you every vitamin and mineral you needed (except b12 which you can get from butter).

B12 is a pretty important one if you want to avoid the title of section 1 of this article though.

And while butter contains b12, you'd probably have to be eating a few bars of it a day to get enough long-term.

That's my understanding.

The spudfit guy did only potatoes and a B12 supplement for a year. His claim was that he was getting everything else he needed from the potatoes.

You can pick one of the usual Native American crop patterns and get a solid set of vitamins. Potatoes + beans + squash or something like that, maybe with some corn. Cf. Mann's 1491. If you're going for a minimal veggie ingredient diet these new-world combos work well as a base, in part because potatoes are pretty much a superfood.

I did the SMTM study and they prohibited dairy. So I got my B12 from sweet potato.

Sweet potato doesn't contain B12 - you're probably thinking of Vitamin A.

Dairy doesn't contain enough B12 to supplement you on it's own, which is why the study recommends against and instead suggests taking an actual B12 supplement (Puritan's Pride lozenges)

4 weeks shouldn't be enough time to develop a serious B12 deficiency but doing this for longer could impair you cognitively.

Is there an easy way to test your B12 when on this diet?

It's typically via blood test, I'm not aware of any easier methods

fwiw, I wouldn't personally be a massive advocate of supplements - dietary sources are usually better if possible - so not sure whether the study's supplement recommendation here is a good one. Just quoting the instructions given to participants

Agreed, it does sound that way, but it's amazing how many anecdotes there are of people who eat exclusively 1 type of food and thrive on it. I don't think modern intuition about nutrition is likely to stand the test of time.

The conclusion I have come to is that humans, when starting from an over-fed modern baseline, are robust enough to eat a totally shit diet for a couple months. This is also long enough to convince us it is worth blogging about.

The subculture of long-distance hikers who optimize by going fast and light (maybe 1-3 lbs food per day plus 10-20lbs of gear). They'll go for months on extremely weird diets that optimize for calories per gram while doing more exercise than they've ever done and generally be fine.

I've only heard that about carnivore diets, and it makes sense to me. Where can you find all the nutrients necessary for a mammal to survive? In the body of another mammal, of course.

Potatoes have nearly everything you need to survive. You won't have any deficiencies until you eat only straight potatoes for a full year or more.

I wouldn't quite say "most" as potatoes are surprisingly nutritious, but yes, it is notable that the article doesn't contain the words "nutrient(s)", "nutritious", "vitamin(s)" or anything similar I could think of.

I've always been curious whether many of these diets lacking appropriate B vitamin requirements might have a compounding effect w.r.t. people's interest & willingness to continue trying such diets...

There was a British teen who went blind eating only fries and chips.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/british-teenager-went-blind-fro...

Potatoes are a good source of vitamin C, B6, potassium, magnesium… Butter has vitamin A, D, E, B12, K2, etc. This diet doesn’t seem TOO crazy. Perhaps pairing it with a multivitamin supplement wouldn't hurt though.

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 never understood why people think unhealthy food has all the flavor. Most unhealthy food is just sugar, salt, fat, and a tiny pinch of flavor. Just get the flavor without the other crap and it's much more intense.

Most vegetables, fruit, beans, legumes, and grains have lots of great flavor and are low in calories. Fermented foods have tons of flavor and extra health benefits. There's a gigantic range of herbs, spices, extracts. It would take a million years before you exhaust all the possible combinations.

Imagine any non-animal flavor and it's probably not unhealthy. If all you can think of is meat or oil, you just need to expose yourself to new cuisines.

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.

> Potatoes are so utterly boring.

That is exactly the point. Dieting should be boring: Figure out what your nutrition your body needs and move on with your life to spend time thinking about other things.

I completely disagree. Boring diets only increase the chance of relapse.

It's perfectly possible to diet on enjoyable food if you do some research. And it will be much easier to stick to it.

I think it very much depends on the purpose of the diet.

For me, two weeks of plain potatoes, a little oil, and one piccolo per day was to reset my unhealthy relationship with food. I avoided common toppings (sour cream, bacon, cheese) and anything to flavour them up (salt, rosemary, thyme).

After a couple of weeks, I found I was no longer desperately craving the flavours I previously did. I attribute this solely to the blandness of the food - potatoes being the delivery method is just incidental.

> only eating one food for money and practical reasons

"One food" is a little silly, but "one meal" is something I've always been trying to achieve on a low carb / keto diet.

My latest thing: chicken wings. They're something I can buy in small quantities for fairly cheap, and they taste great completely unseasoned, which makes limiting my sodium intake far easier.

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.

The third week suuuuucks. I did 4 weeks. The third week was the worst. I was sick of potato and my weight loss plateaued in the third week. It started going back down again in the fourth, which offsets some of the boredom.

I don't think 2 weeks would work though. It has worked for me, I kept the weight off and it reset my appetite/satiety feedback (I get full sooner). That said, the "I want to keep eating even though I am not hungry" has come roaring back after being totally eliminated by the fourth week of potato.

"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?

I felt fine after a month of nothing but potato and a few cheat days. But... it's not just potato. I ate oil too. And spices and vinegar. And a sweet potato every few days for variety and B-vitamins. But as far as I can tell you can get almost everything you need nutritionally from potatoes (if you eat the peel).

It was boring and awful 3 weeks in, but it totally worked. Happy to share my data if you are curious.

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?

Yes, but this isn't keto.

So it's basically going to spike insulin and do much for weight loss... besides not eating the other bad stuff they planned to eat.

So it doesnt really matter they are eating potatoes. Unless they want to do it cheap then it makes sense. Which is good but there's so much more variety in the keto approach then boring potatoes.

Yes, there's not a lot of variety in just eating potatoes. Maybe some people don't need variety.

People lose a lot of weight this way. Insulin sensitivity increases. Insulin-lowering medicines can be reduced or stopped. Bad cholesterol drops to the floor.

If you go beyond monomeals of potatoes and add in tasty vegetables (like you do in keto) and limit the fat you add to the meal, you will have all the benefits of the potato diet without the mind-numbing boredom.

Variety in the keto approach? There are only so many ways to dress up chicken/beef/pork and cheese.

In the last few days I've had blueberry greek yogurt overnight oats, almond/peanut butter shake, horseradish deviled eggs, cowboy chili, cauliflower mac & cheese, keto-friendly Jello, and a BBQ steak dinner with a monk fruit/allulose simple-syrup Gimlet cocktail.

Doesn't get much more varied than that for a 'diet'.

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.

"Taters? What's taters, precious?"

"You don't know what taters are? Po-tat-oes? Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew?"

Nice crispy taters.

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.

> They all only work if there is a caloric deficit

I don't believe this is true. On keto for example, I lost weight when eating an excess of calories.

> 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)

Not exactly. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you'll obviously lose weight. But the reverse is not necessarily true. For that to be the case, your body would have to always store all excess calories. This is probably pretty close to what happens on a high-carb diet, though, because insulin is a fat storage hormone.

> I lost weight when eating an excess of calories.

You're just misunderstanding your TDEE then. It's basic thermodynamics that is very accurate in human digestion too, save for extremes like bulemia, gastric distress (you shit out undigested food), or pills that simulate it w/ carb/fat blockers.

The most pedantic detail is CICO is actually on digested calories, not swallowed calories.

Your anecdata is likely accounted by:

1. Protein takes more calories to digest (many people unintentionally eat more protein on keto, though keto is actually about fat intake and protein can break ketosis through gluconeogensis)

2. Up regulation in things like thermogenesis (ie you lose more calories to the ambient air)

3. Inaccuracy in food tracking

4. Higher NEAT

5. Loss of water weight due to lower food mass in digestive tract, and lower glycogen(+bound water) weight.

> 1. Protein takes more calories to digest (many people unintentionally eat more protein on keto, though keto is actually about fat intake and protein can break ketosis through gluconeogensis)

I'm pretty sure this is a myth, unless you're eating such a small amount of fat that you can't get energy anywhere but though gluconeogensis. Your body uses gluconeogensis to create glucose for the cells that need it. It's not an efficient way to produce energy for cells that can just use ketones.

> Your anecdata is likely accounted by:

I suspect it's mostly that I didn't store all of the excess calories I ate. E.g. I've seen excess fat in my stool.

When people say CICO doesn't work, they don't mean thermodynamics doesn't work. They mean that not all calories consumed (i.e. eaten) get burned or stored. If you limit "Calories In" only the calories that get burned or stored, then sure, tautologically, CICO is correct.

Crazy that I had to scroll this far to read this. This diet is crazy good at losing muscle mass. Atleast you can lose kg at doubled speed.

best comment here. losing half your muscle is not healthy.

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.

What's your reasoning behind this thought?

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

Maybe today, but potatoes are a new world food. So I think the award for originality goes to someone in South America.

I though Dutch people eat more of them annually

This is actually great if your goal is to lose muscle

Right, potatoes and vegetable oil is basically a very-low-protein diet.

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

I wouldn't judge quickly. For several decades, fat was considered bad in all forms. Now views are changing..

it sounded to me like the OP was critiquing it for being low fat + high carb

Are you saying that views on carbs might change like it did for fat? Keto is pretty much the best supported thing we've got, plus diabetes being so prevalent, so the argument against carbs is pretty solid.

In the short term? Probably not a lot. You’ll lose “weight” but what are you actually losing?

What you eat is very important.

Fat stores aren’t the first thing your body will turn to. After the carbs, your body will turn to breaking down muscle tissue which is not what you usually want.

That's what I meant with my comment. Of all the things you need the most to LIVE, it's protein and fats, not carbohydrates.

Energy is the least of one's problem on a super restrictive diet like this one, but having the building blocks for muscles and cells and hormones is the literally vital.

There are trace amounts of fats and proteins in potatoes, not enough to sustain life long term. Enjoy having boundless energy, unable to build mass thus wasting and no libido whatsoever.

Potatoes have protein and fats. Enough protein and fats for fat-soluble vitamins and preventing dying of protein malnutrition. Potatoes are not just carbs.

No libido? I'd like to see the source of that claim.

The western world has become "addicted" to protein and the claims on how much is necessary and recommended are extremely exaggerated.

They have about 9x more carbs than fat.

If you are eating Yukon gold potatoes, and you ate 5 pounds of them, and according to my calculations you are looking at approximately 2100 kcal of which a little less than 1900 of those calories comes from carbohydrates.

We advise people not to go below 50 g of fat per day and according to the macros for Yukon Gold you wouldn’t even be getting a 10th of that amount.

Additionally, you’re only getting about 50 g of protein. We normally coach people to eat 1 g of protein per pound of lean muscle mass. So for 150 pound person that would be 150 g of protein per day or approximately 600 cal from protein.

> We normally coach people to eat 1 g of protein per pound of lean muscle mass. So for 150 pound person that would be 150 g of protein per day or approximately 600 cal from protein.

"Lean muscle mass" excludes the fat on the body, right? A 150lb person should have less than 150lb of lean muscle mass.

USDA recommends 54g using their calculator. Don't forget the 38 grams of fiber! :)

Sorry, I misspoke. 1 gram per pound of body weight. I was multitasking.

Literally no science behind saying the body turns to muscle before fat.

Do the science yourself!

All you need is an InBody machine. Many gyms and trainers have them.

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?

Except that's not what this is, and the diet has existed longer than economic downturn in whatever country you're in.

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

What comes to mind is that (A) there's value to ultra-simple single-food diets when it comes to adherence and (B) potatoes are something people are actually willing to eat compared to other veg, especially as their only option.

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.

Simple is not always easy. I think it's important that we find easier ways to help alleviate this obesity epidemic.

Sure there’s more to it unless you’re a chronic bonehead.

It's not always as simple as this.

You're right and wrong. Many obese people have done this and lost weight... and then gained it right back again. Over, and over again.

There is a persistent myth that the obese person lacks some spiritual strength or willpower. I think your comment implies this.

And yet they do have the willpower to lose weight? And something happened in 1980 which turned 30% of adults into weak-willed moral degenerates, and more and more every year? Is that actually plausible in an era with unsurpassed interest in healthy eating, where people voluntarily exercise more than they ever have, with better quality food than we have ever had?

The original researchers who suggested a mass trial of the potato diet over social media aptly said "the study of obesity is the study of mysteries". They're investigating some high-risk hypotheses that chemical contaminants are the cause of skyrocketing obesity. Worth a read.

> People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. This seems closely related to observations like the French Paradox — the French eat a lot of fatty cheese and butter, so why aren’t they fatter and sicker?

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

My favorite hypothesis is that it is big refrigerators at home and perhaps widespread use of preservatives that made people fat as it provided uninterrupted access to high calorie food like meat, cookies etc.

Your favorite theory is “people eat more” in more words.

> And something happened in 1980 which turned 30% of adults into weak-willed moral degenerates, and more and more every year?

...actually when you put it like that it sounds pretty plausible. Ronald Regan was elected in 1980, officially beginning the Reign of the Boomers.

>Ronald Regan was elected in 1980, officially beginning the Reign of the Boomers.

...With the election of a GI president? Boomers didn't take over until Clinton.

Well yeah,

* You can't sell a book with just 6 words in it

* People will pay you a lot of money if you can convince them they don't have to do that

I'd pay a lot of money if someone can find a way to make that easier. Actually I know the way, it's called Phentermine, but doctor's don't give out prescriptions for it lightly.

The food industry on the other hand is innocent and doesn’t want to sell you junk like soda pop that makes you even more thirsty. Get real.

You seem a bit annoyed with an argument I haven't made. FWIW, I agree that the junk food industry is bad.

This is obviously not a solution - everyone says this, everyone already knows this, and yet there's still an obesity epidemic.

Unless you have a way of motivating most people to follow this advice, day in and day out, it will not be a solution.

Even if those are the fundamentals, it's still worth looking at the thought patterns that some people get trapped in which prevent them doing what is considered "easy" by others, and especially understanding if those traps are subject to certain tricks or shortcuts.

For example, I put on about 20lbs early in the pandemic just from being around the house and being able to snack all the time, plus having ice cream a lot in the evenings before bed (I don't think I was particularly "stress eating", but maybe more like... boredom eating?). And yes, if a dietician or trainer had had me keep a food log, this would have clearly shown up and it would have been obvious what needed to change.

What actually worked for me, though, was not just cutting out the snacking but also shifting my mindset back to a place where I'm okay with being slightly hungry some of the time. Like, it's okay to feel peckish in the afternoon— it's not a problem that needs to be solved by having a snack, it's just a sign that I'm going to be good and hungry come dinner time. Same in the evening: I don't need to go to bed stuffed, I can just make sure to eat a solid dinner, and then plan on eating well at breakfast in the morning. That plus some protein shakes and getting more cardio (swimming, cycling), and I've been steadily shedding about a pound a week; I'm now below my pre-pandemic weight.

enforcing individual responsibilities as a solution to systemic problems rarely works in the absence of changes to the system

This take does nothing for people who are addicted to food. It's not easy and many people don't have the willpower to make it happen without doing a gimmick like this. Your comment seems a bit holier-than-thou. If they lose weight doign the potato diet instead of stoic-ing it away like you, are they less successful?

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.

They're all elimination diets, and lifetime adherence is the reality (albeit slightly more calories during maintenance than fat loss phases). Carnivore is one such elimination diet, with the mild advantage that it provides a lot of protein and thus has a muscle sparing effect, and increases the TDEE due to the digestion process.

It has been 20 months on carnivore. I never made it past a year on the others, and it was a strain to go that far. Doing this is no strain. If protein alone has this effect it is more than a mild advantage for me.

I did not start from a standard american diet this time, but from a clean keto diet, so yes carnivore was an elimination diet for me, but what I eliminated was vegetables, fruits, cheese, etc. For me those eliminations seem to be providing an advantage.

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