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Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

I'm so disappointed by SMTM's trajectory. One of their key initial insights was that you don't need control groups for diet trials because essentially no one loses more than 10-20 lbs on a diet. You can just run the treatment group and, if you get lots of people losing more than that, you know you've got something.

The flip side, of course, is that losing 10-20 lbs from a diet shouldn't be taken as proof that the diet does anything special. People can do that with almost any diet.

SMTM's potato diet study found exactly that - 10 to 20 lbs of weight loss for most participants. This should be strong evidence that it's not a silver bullet. SMTM is pretending otherwise.

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The difference is that people report that the potato diet is /easy/. No cravings, no endless hunger & having to force yourself to calorie count and stop eating when you hit your target. Eat as much as you like, when you like.

That’s radically different from other diets.

I guess it's easy on the hunger/cravings side of things but it eliminates your ability to enjoy food and enjoy the social aspect of dining. I achieved similar by swapping out white bread for whole wheat and mostly eliminating dessert from my diet. I also have no hunger/cravings/calorie counting but I still enjoy all my meals. I don't mean to say that any one diet is the answer, just that if your goals are modest you have many options that will work, and most will be more pleasant than the potato diet.

Eliminating deserts doesn't make cravings go away for me. I feel hungry (or a weird similar feeling) until I eat something sweet, no matter how much I eat of a main course.

But I tried the potato diet and my cravings were gone. For two weeks it was trivial to keep, but then social aspects intervened and I gave it up.

That sounds really challenging. I guess people vary a lot in their experiences of hunger, which is probably why different diets work/don't work for different people

The problem is SMTM seems obsessed with finding some explanation for why the diet works other than it being an easy method to reduce calories and generally appears convinced theres a non-CICO explanation for obesity and weight loss/gain that these potato diet experiments will be able to discover.

“An easy method to reduce calories” is fairly revolutionary in the academic diet world. Consistently losing weight is something that people find hard to stick to. A diet that is safe & makes it easy is in and of itself something very interesting.

HN types tend to take the “just eat less, lol” attitude, but in the real world that just doesn’t work very well for the majority of people. There’s no point arguing that people “should” be better at it: they aren’t, for sound biological reasons. Forcing them to behave otherwise & then blaming them when it doesn’t work is simply cruel. Hence the idea that a diet that lets obese people steadily lose weight without any other interventions is a bigger deal than you’d otherwise expect.

The attrition rate was very high. The claim that it's easy was based on a few anecdotes, which aren't representative of the trial participants.

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