The Potato People | Hacker News Reader

The Potato People

kitchencounter.blog

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Hey, let’s organize a HN group and try to reproduce the good results of this potato diet. Being more tech-savvy we could create nice graphs and dashboards with our weight data, along other relevant anonymized info. Any other volunteers out there?

I did a version of the potato diet from mid-2022 to early-2023.

Lost around 27kg although I've put some back on since. Been meaning to restart it to get back down again.

I believe this can work for losing weight, albeit I'm not sure how good it is for muscle building, being fit and muscular - and not only not fat. Anecdotally, I need to eat my proteins and my creatine (and sleep well, and exercise and not be stressed) if I want some gains.

I had similar effects on a carnivore diet anyway, which makes sense given animals have too all the nutrients you need (and then some). Lost 10kg back to my ideal weight and then maintained. I'm 1.5 years in.

I did diet before but I had to calorie count and I was always hungry.

Eating meat is not as boring and I don't supplement B12. I do add sodium (salt) and potassium (no-salt) and rarely magnesium.

I remember trying this. It's a miserable diet that didn't give me the results advertised. I did drop some weight and then stalled out. The only thing I gained from the diet was a restrict in my perceived hunger which allowed me to lose significant weight after I left the diet and moved to intermittent fasting.

My friend had about the same results. I always wonder If this has a bias towards helping people who are very overweight and/or have an unbalanced diet. As far as I can tell, I've lost all the weight I can lose via a sustainable diet and I just need to find some time to do this whole exercise thing.

There's a saying in fitness circles: "You can't outrun your fork." Exercise is great, and you should do it, but reducing calories and changing their composition is far more impactful when the goal is losing weight. Even extremely vigorous and prolonged exercise burns only small amounts of calories.

That's a pithy saying and I think pretty accurate, but there is only so much I can manage my diet. The fact that I've maintained my weight for weeks and I'm extremely sedimentary says that the last 15 lbs is gonna involve a run. Good job diet in getting me back to my previous weight before I exercised. I think I'll get back to my goal weight by doing what I did before when I was at my goal wait: taking a 30mins run every day. That's just all that's left when you don't drink alcohol or soda or eat a lot of sweets or carbs.

How long did you and your friend stay on the diet? And was it 100% potato? (e.g. did you just boil a potato and eat it, or was it salted/buttered etc.)

I tend to read accounts of people trying a "potato hack" where they adhere to the diet for only a few days, or a week, then go back to regular food. They often lose a small amount of weight but don't move the needle much.

Then I read accounts of people who do it for months, very strictly, and they usually lose dozens (sometimes upwards of a hundred) pounds, and keep the weight off with little effort.

If the potato diet actually needs to be accompanied by a significant amount of exercise, it's probably mostly just another fad diet that is tricking people into losing weight themselves. But, Penn Jillette famously ate only potatoes for 4 months, never exercising at all, and lost over a hundred pounds. Those are the specific kind of claims that need to be verified (or falsified) here, if a large-scale study is ever done on this.

I did it for 2 weeks. I lost zero weight after 3 days. You might need to be on it for weeks, but I couldn't do it for a diet that miserable. I lost weight using intermittent fasting and I got to enjoy food in thr process

>potatoes have the uncommon, and under acknowledged, virtue of being very nearly nutritionally-complete.

I think peanuts give potatoes a lot of competition there -- although peanuts are more nutritionally dense, with more calories and other nutrients per gram.[0] Maybe for weight loss purposes, potatoes are therefore preferable, as they are more filling.

I was also looking for more information about what other ingredients were allowed on the potato diet - only one vague reference in TFA regarding olive oil and salt.

[0]https://foodstruct.com/compare/potato-vs-peanut

Raw Peanuts have a lot of fat, something like almost 50% by weight. A significant portion of which is omega-6 and with no omega-3’s. While something like 20-25% of the fat in raw peanuts won’t be absorbed (the absorption rate increases with processing), packing on omega-6 is not desirable due to the metabolism suppression effects of certain omega-6s like linoleic acid.

Probably not what people want.

> linoleic acid

Is there human health outcome research that shows that replacing, say, butter with a high linoleic acid oil leads to weight gain?

Here's a roundup of research that looks into this claim: https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-... (Adiposity & energy intake section)

It's just 350g of peanuts for 2000 calories compared to 3600g of potatoes. Nuts are so calorie dense that you need the same willpower as someone who is fasting all day since that's what you'll be doing after your bowl of peanuts while the potato people get to eat over 1kg of potato per meal.

Calorie density is your main enemy when trying to lose weight.

I'm so cynical at this point I just assume this is propaganda from the potato lobbyists.

I think I accidentally did something like that with lentils during the pandemic. I stocked up before and I limited my shoping, for safety and to consume the things I already had. Which was mostly lentils with butter and rice with a bit of dried simple vegetables.

I noticed I was loosing weight without the intention to do so and without being hungry. I was even a bit concerned because I dropped to a number on the scale I haven't seen in a decade. Once I started shopping again and bought more interesting and varied foods (including some sweets) the weight quickly came back up.

Thought this was going to be about the Irish. Am disappointed now.

> What happened in 1976, they ask

> there’s evidence that the lower atmospheric pressure at higher altitudes drives down obesity.

Could it be related to CO2 concenrtrations?

Good question!

How much change in CO2 concentration was there in the last 50 years? How many parts per million?

how about exercise?

It is extremely difficult to lose appreciable amounts of weight from exercise — our bodies are very efficient with calories.

Exercise can also make you feel hungry, which defeats weight loss goals.

Calorie restriction is the easiest route to go. Learning to live with smaller portions is the most difficult part of such a diet.

This entirely depends on the amount and duration of the exercise. If you're just going to the gym for 30 minutes a day, sure your body (and your diet) are going to adapt to that pretty quickly. If you're doing 4-6 hours of sustained low intensity effort then you will lose weight unless you significantly increase your calorie intake. The "problem" with exercise and weight loss isn't that exercise doesn't work, it's that most people can't fit enough exercise into their schedule (or won't sacrifice their average amount of screentime for it).

Of course, now we're talking about real transformation rather than something you can just sprinkle on top of your current life.

I think the only way to see it is that your lifestyle up until now is responsible for the body you have, so you need to transform into a person you currently aren't to have the body that you don't. There really doesn't exist (Current lifestyle) + (Small lever you can pull) = (Body you want).

That said, large transformation doesn't mean it's hard or needs to be approached in baby steps. You really can wake up tomorrow and become 6:00am-runner guy, no-eating-out guy, treadmill-at-standing-desk guy, 2000-calorie guy.

> 2000-calorie guy.

800 works pretty well.

I can't find anything that agrees with your statement. I can find counters:

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/3/16845438/exercise-weight-loss-m...

> "You work hard on that machine for an hour, and that work can be erased with five minutes of eating afterward," Hall says. A single slice of pizza, for example, could undo the benefit of an hour's workout. So could a cafe mocha or an ice cream cone.

https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-...

Note that I do not discount the other health benefits exercise brings, and everyone should get in as much as humanly possible with the schedule they're working with.

Our bodies are so incredibly efficient with calories that exercise is simply not an effective way to lose weight.

Calories in, calories out are all that matters. Don't expect to lose weight with a 2000 calorie diet. It took me 15 miles with a 3000' elevation gain to burn 2500 calories -- a nearly 7-hour hike. A single day's worth of calories burned in a largely unreasonable amount of time for nearly all adults.

Whatever, agree to disagree because I've lost weight this way without changing my diet. Obviously adding 6 pizza slices per day to counter balance your energy expenditure is going to prevent you from losing weight, I'm pretty sure I said "without changing your diet" though.

They're not talking six slices, they're talking one slice to undo a workout. Not sure where you invented six from.

You're free to debate scientific evidence, but it stands stronger than an anecdotal statement.

one slice is roughly equal to one hour of walking in calories. I said you need 4 - 6 hours per day of walking equivalent workout so 4 to 6 slices of pizza to counterbalance that. Of course, it's hard to eat pizza while you're exercising so it'd be a challenge to keep the weight on.

I hate these articles that make it sound like weight loss/gain is some kind of mystery magic.

That being said, if it's mentally easier to just eat potatoes go for it...but it sounds like a hell of a boring way to live.

The mystery magic is exactly in the "mentally easier" part. The amount of calories one is comfortable eating largely dictates their weight over long enough timescales. Most people on restrictive diets fail, because over the long term discipline is really hard. On the other hand, most thin people aren't that way out of some conscious commitment to being so, they just don't choose to eat as much as heavier people do. So the mystery of weight management isn't in managing caloric intake, that's simple, but difficult. The mystery is in managing hunger, which is complicated, but easy.

For an example of this, addictive appetite suppressants are really effective at weight loss. This is... less than ideal, so people aren't typically encouraged to pick up an methamphetamine or nicotine or cocaine habit for weight loss. But they work, and compared to discipline diets easy to follow.

Ideally, we find appetite suppressants that don't have substantially worse side effects.

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