So I only ate potatoes for 2 weeks
petercai.com
petercai.com
Pretty amazing what they give you as a monofood!
The biggest negative to potatoes is their glucose bump they give you. A solid way to reduce that is to cook them once then cool to room temperature. When you reheat them in any way you want, they will cause less of a glucose spike.
Someone can definitely chime in and correct me though.
https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bmb.2...
Insulin gets released after every meal
If you want to know why it's bad, eat a bunch of sweets and tell me how do you feel after!
You could have said something like "eating foods that continuously spike glucose could possibly cause an eventual desensitization to insulin by causing down regulation of insulin receptors"
But you don't get to type 2 diabetes by eating potatoes
Potatoes are not sweets.
There is another method that involves focusing on food volumes rather than other restrictions.
The average stomach can hold 8 cups of solid food but intestines can comfortably only process 2-3 cups of food at a time (every 4-6 hours).
The method works for stomachs with faulty fill guages. Fast food meal portion sizes, processed foods, and some medications are really good at breaking the reliability of these guages which is part of the reason for weight issues in western populations, atleast that's the theory behind this approach.
this is really interesting, do you have any additional references on this?
He only ate 2-3 cups of food per meal and was symptom free shortly after.
https://alittlebityummy.com/blog/changes-in-fodmap-ratings-f...
https://www.karlijnskitchen.com/en/monash-university-update-...
Like plug it into a nutrition calculator and see for yourself.
When dieting, satiety is key and potatoes have that in spades.
Not sure this particular counter example is accurate. The volume of 500 calories of lettuce would be enormous and lead to satiety for other reasons (stretching of stomach).
Just eat bad-tasting foods for weeks and you'll lose the appetite! And you'll lose weight!
Try eating 1.5 kilos of potatoes that will fill you up, still only about 1500 kilos (unless you go wild with the butter)
Though, there's no question you'll feel like shit doing it.
"Susanna Holt of the University of Sydney Australia did a research experiment in 1995 to compare the effects of different foods on short-term satiety and appetite levels. She prepared 240 cals portions of 38 different foods...The satiety index score she assigned to the potato was 323. No other food was even close. The second closest food was “ling fish” which scored 225." https://scottabelfitness.com/potato-and-the-satiety-index/
But separately from that, there has been frequent speculation that the outlier potato results in this study were at least partly because of their unappetizing preparation method -- boiled, cooled overnight and then microwaved before serving - which, coincidentally, would've raised their resistant starch levels, which we already suspect increases satiety.https://www.al.com/entertainment/2015/08/meet_the_science_te...
Caveat: Losing weight is not necessarily the same as being healthier in this case
As for potatoes – I love using them as the carb in lunch. High volume, low calories, great combo. Makes you feel full but isn’t actually that much food. As a small person it’s easy to overeat in America so gotta be careful.
He’s quite clear that it was the calorie limitation, aided by the satiety effects of potatoes, and possibly the resistant starch factor. He considers other weird non-caloric theories (potassium, etc.) and finds them unlikely.
The "half-tato diet" is one where you either get half your calories from potatoes, or half of your meals are entirely potato. (They allow either variant.) Their hypothesis is that half-tato is much more sustainable for the dieter than full-potato like the article above, and still quite effective for weight loss.
This is all based on a couple anecdotes, but I think SMTM would argue that an anecdote is a promising lead.
[0]: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/03/13/half-tato-diet-comm...
Yeah! You can call it MyEchoChamber or something.
For two weeks. Which is effectively nothing when you are talking about long-term issues like nutrition, health, weight, etc.
Yes, for two weeks, that's what the author is talking about. You are talking about something different. Can you point to the part of the article where this person recommends eating 500 calories of potatoes, as you say, "long-term"?
I find it hilarious that some innocuous article like this appears and people want long-term, double blind studies or it's trash. Meanwhile, any time air quality articles come up, half the same audience claims they can detect 100ppm changes in room CO2, it makes them sick, etc etc.
While this doesn't specifically say to only eat 500 calories, this is an explicit recommendation for eating only potatoes as a diet in an article proclaiming that eating 500 calories a day of only potatoes was an effective way to lose weight.
But at the end of day, I just don't see value in "I did some diet thing for 2 weeks!". Just like someone writing an article about trying out a new programming language for a couple weeks and labeling it amazing or terrible wouldn't be super interesting to me either.
I did this experiment and it was boring more than anything. Plenty full/satisfied/not hungry, though.
If you can eat 500 calories of potatoes daily and feel satiated, why isn't that relevant?
It would be interesting to test whether other all-starchy-root-veggies diets had similar effects.
Fun experiment but for me crazy, specifically this part:
>some days we were losing almost a pound of bodyweight due to ingesting only ~500 calories
Can't even imagine only eating 500 calories in one day.
Also lifting while in a fasted state is a thing, to prevent this exact scenario.
Especially since they weren't looking to lose weight, since they were not obese. It's likely the weight loss was due to muscle loss, and not fat loss.
You think your muscle is deteriorating within days of a caloric deficit?
One thing I've come to learn from doing this for years is our bodies really accept fasting well...which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. We really are "built" to fast.
Carrots also taste incredible when cooked exactly like potatoes. Really any root veggie slaps when boiled and then roasted
I have notebooks and long spreadsheets full of detailed food logs that cover decades. They mostly show the same thing. Every diet works for me for weeks to months. The better ones work for six months or more. For me those included both raw vegan and low carb paleo.
I went hardcore potato as an accolite of Dr. John McDougall, a once quite popular high carb guru. I lost about 130 pounds on that program, and felt very wonderful. But without changing the kind of foods I ate, my appetite gradually recovered, and I gained all of the weight back and more over around a year. This was a mixed high-carb diet. I only went all potato for a month. I fell off of that just by getting very hungry for something else.
Bottom line, the study of satiety from any particular diet needs to be many months long to understand the full effect, and that can be very different than the short term effect.
500 calories (a starvation diet) of potatoes, which provides about 13 grams of protein a day. I would love to see what before/after DEXA scans look like.
Why do "smart," scientifically-minded people do stuff like this? There's abundant evidence in the form of papers published by the most prominent researchers in the exercise physiology space (e.g., Aragon, Schoenfeld) about the importance of high protein intakes, even over 1g/lb, for the preservation of LBM during a prolonged deficit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5470183/
Yet even people who meet these higher protein intake targets and do resistance training during their cut still lose muscle if they lose too much weight too fast. Why would you go on a diet that is both a starvation diet, and low in protein, and then blog about it proudly?
Potato Starch is a Type II Resistant Starch, which is a nice pre-biotic to feed your gut microbiome
An average man ate up to 60 potatoes per day.
If we were serious about going to Mars, there would be more research into growing potatoes on Mars:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823275
Just sayin'.
<https://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/introductio...>
* Sample size of 2, no controls whatsoever
* No actual scientific analysis or understanding of anything that's going on here, just a bunch of potato-adjacent studies and a few personal hypotheses
* Nothing got measured beyond weight, so who knows what this does to your health during those 2 weeks or what would happen longer-term if you'd stick to it
Please don't follow any kind of advice like this. The conclusion in the implications section that they've collected enough data to confirm the main hypothesis is equally nonsense.
They lost weight because they limited their caloric intake. That's part of what you need to do to lose weight.
Or the comment on "So the fact that we ate exclusively one type of food most likely contributed to weight loss, but it's unlikely to be the whole story."
It also led me to read a bit about "Sensory Specific Satiety" which is something I'd anecdotally observed, but now realize is well studied and understood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory-specific_satiety
> "The addition of ketchup (and pan frying in oil) was for practicality, as we otherwise found it difficult to eat enough calories and lost weight too quickly (some days we were losing almost a pound of bodyweight due to ingesting only ~500 calories)."
Also note that potatoes are mostly highly assimilable sugars and as such make sugar blood levels spike - leading to diabetes long-term.
Considering even sedentary energy requirement is about 1800 calories per day, I have a shocking alternative theory.
Eating less makes you lose weight.
This concept of less-calories-in regardless of where they come from is repeatedly supported by science, read any fad diet article on Skeptoid: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4664
This is the key. There is no magic to lose weight. There are no magical ingredients and secret diet foods. Outside of some specific medical conditions, if you consume fewer calories than your body burns, over time you will lose weight.
Personally I am a fan of low-carb/keto/intermittent fasting diets, but there isn't much magic to them either, they are in the end a way to eat fewer calories. What food you eat makes a difference in terms of nutrients and satiation however.
It's possible to lose weight even eating only chocolate bars. Assuming 600kcal per chocolate bar, you can eat two chocolate bars a day and you should be losing weight. But chocolate bar is almost pure carbs, so it will play tricks on your sugar levels, make you experience mood shifts and you'll deprive your body of nutrients. And it won't take long until you start cheating when you keep getting hungry all the time.
Personally I wouldn't go for a potato only diet, because potatoes are carbohydrate heavy as well. I don't like the idea of eating only a single food. Eating the same meal every time might work better though. Something like fried chicken breast and broccoli or cauliflower is relatively low in calories and can keep you satiated for a long time, while also being a relatively healthy meal.
It follows that one can lose weight without reducing calorie intake - and studies prove it: https://mobile.twitter.com/T_Fiolet/status/16435288286968176...
Of course the answer is yes: if you keep eating 500 calories a day, like in the article, eventually you will die of starvation.
Starvation is less than 600kcal/day for the average person.