I have an engineer buddy that years past wanted to figure out every nutrient he needed in the smallest amount of variation possible. He had a spreadsheet of various foods, their nutrients, and the amounts needed to maintain his weight. His conclusion was that potatoes give you the most bang for your buck calorie to nutrient ratio. I have his old spreadsheets and just filtered out the other foods.<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/ka0FK18" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/ka0FK18</a><p>Pretty amazing what they give you as a monofood!<p>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.
Did the writer lose weight because they only ate potatoes? or because they only at 500 calories a day of potatoes - I suspect you could eat only 500 calories of almost anything and still lose weight.
If you're interested in trying This One Weird Trick, then the bloggers at Slime Mold Time Mold are recruiting for their "half-tato diet" study: [0]<p>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.<p>This is all based on a couple anecdotes, but I think SMTM would argue that an anecdote is a promising lead.<p>[0]: <a href="https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/03/13/half-tato-diet-community-trial-sign-up-now/" rel="nofollow">https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/03/13/half-tato-diet-comm...</a>
Due to being rather poor and slightly abandoned in high school, my major consistent food per day was a baked potato, no toppings aside salt and pepper. I hitched rides with a friend to school and back. I was on free lunch at school, I would try to steal an extra hamburger to sell for under a dollar, and that would allow me to buy a can of soup for dinner, heated over a wood burning stove. This was in Southern California around 20 years ago; time flies. Suffice it to say, I was not eating enough, malnutritioned, and it showed. Potatoes were my saving grace and I love them to this day. But they are not enough to stay healthy for months and/or years I think.
Theory: In some old "hunter/gatherer" parts of the human body, an all-potato diet scores: [X] plentiful; [X] nutritious; [X] highly non-perishable. So there is sure to be ample good food available for a long time, and no need for an extra-body-fat insurance policy.<p>It would be interesting to test whether other all-starchy-root-veggies diets had similar effects.
"Po-ta-toes! Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew!"<p>Fun experiment but for me crazy, specifically this part:<p>>some days we were losing almost a pound of bodyweight due to ingesting only ~500 calories<p>Can't even imagine only eating 500 calories in one day.
I’ve basically replaced rice with potatoes as my goto carb. They have way more taste, and there’s way more you can do with them. That said, I’m always a little worried that they’re unhealthy bc they’re so damn tasty if you boil them and then roast them with a little oil. Who knows<p>Carrots also taste incredible when cooked exactly like potatoes. Really any root veggie slaps when boiled and then roasted
It worked for me too until it didn't. I'm a world champion yo-yo dieter, having followed that jagged sinusoid from age 7 to 57, when I finally found one that keeps working. I've "succeeded" on more diets than anyone I've heard of. And then gained it back, often plus more.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Potatoes are most easily cooked in a microwave - just poke a few holes with a fork and nuke for 5 minutes on high, maybe another minute or two if the potatoes are very large. The best way to fry them is in an air fryer. We cut yesterdays cooked potatoes into 1/4 inch thick rounds and spray with a little olive oil. We always eat the skins and all - I read someplace there are lots of nutrients in or near the skin. Salsa is a good alternative to ketchup for more flavor and less calories. Sweet potatoes and butternut squash are good alternatives to avoid the monotony.
> I think there's something to this. I added ketchup a few days into the diet because plain boiled potatoes were so unpalatable that it was difficult to otherwise eat enough, even when I should've been hungry given my starvation level of food intake (~500 calories worth of potatoes per day).<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5470183/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5470183/</a><p>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?
I add a teaspoon of potato starch to my smoothies, and I find it makes it a bit more filling, and doesn't taste like anything.<p>Potato Starch is a Type II Resistant Starch, which is a nice pre-biotic to feed your gut microbiome<p><a href="https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/resistant-starch-101" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/resistant-starch-101</a>
Do take a look at the results from the citizen scientists doing a potato diet study, and now a "half-tato" diet: <a href="https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/03/13/half-tato-diet-community-trial-sign-up-now/" rel="nofollow">https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/03/13/half-tato-diet-comm...</a>
In the long run you'll want to eat them with butter, not just boiling them. Otherwise there are some nutrients that you'll miss. Even so, potatoes cover a huge swath of the nutritional profile that a person needs. It's one of the reasons that potato famines are so devastating. Switching to grain flour alone doesn't make up for the difference.
I love how the author calls this a study, when:<p>* Sample size of 2, no controls whatsoever<p>* 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<p>* 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<p>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.<p>They lost weight because they limited their caloric intake. That's part of what you need to do to lose weight.
Penn Jillette famously lost weight using an all-potato diet several years ago.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NelIXCuuSZ0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NelIXCuuSZ0</a>
Nice writeup. I'd love to hear from some others who've tried this route for weight loss, the author certainly feels it could be promising.<p>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. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory-specific_satiety" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory-specific_satiety</a>
I hate to defend this kind of dieting because I don't believe in it, but as many seem to have skimmed the article and now think it says he/they only ate 500 kcal per day I want to add this snippet from the article.<p>> "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)."
I don't manage to understand why the weight chart ist the first prominent piece of information. Eating only potatoes is barely good strategy for losing weight and only works because it is a too short duration to cause long-term damage (lack of other essential stuff).
Another "making oneself miserable to lose weight" diet, that will be followed by a rebound as soon as it stops (which it will)...<p>Also note that potatoes are mostly highly assimilable sugars and as such make sugar blood levels spike - leading to diabetes long-term.
I’ve done this for 2 days. It is was hard. Much harder than months that I ate only soylent analogue called Mana, which was not hard at all. But eating only potatoes is probably like 20 times cheaper.
Could there be a kind of Taylorism going on here where the effect just happens because it's such a dramatic change to normal, and the effect will go away if the study continued for longer?
I wish author share the metrics about fart frequency after having potatoes. I'm curious coz everytime I had oily food that contain potatoes, I used to fart more.
"I ate 500 calories of potatoes per day and lost weight. It must be because of the potatoes."<p>Considering even sedentary energy requirement is about 1800 calories per day, I have a shocking alternative theory.<p>Eating less makes you lose weight.<p>This concept of less-calories-in regardless of where they come from is repeatedly supported by science, read any fad diet article on Skeptoid: <a href="https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4664" rel="nofollow">https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4664</a>
> (some days we were losing almost a pound of bodyweight due to ingesting only ~500 calories).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.