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So I only ate potatoes for 2 weeks
- astronads 3y agoHe admits in the article he was eating only ~500 calories per day. Of course he’s going to lose weight…
- causi 3y agoI'd like somebody to write a browser extension that, a la Sponsorblock, lets a group of likeminded individuals flag and filter out for each other HN submissions for a wider variety of reasons than are permitted under the official guidelines. Reasons like "bullshit headline" or "article is a total lie" or "wild conflict of interest".
- itsoktocry 3y ago>lets a group of likeminded individuals flag and filter out for each other HN submissions Yeah! You can call it MyEchoChamber or something.
- causi 3y agoAny discussion system that allows users to hide comments by downvoting them inherently trends toward being an echo chamber. I invite you to voice an unpopular opinion about one of HN's sacred cows and observe how fast it hits -4.
- tekla 3y agoIf you follow HN, calories don't matter and is a made up thing that is completely irrelevant to weight gain/loss.
- meindnoch 3y agoCoincidentally this opinion is usually held by Americans, who massively underestimate their caloric intake.
- sethammons 3y agoit is not that CI/CO is made up, it is that your metabolism is a dynamic system. You can't beat CI/CO, but the value of CO changes based on CI and other factors such as activity level. You can't keep CO steady if you adjust CI because your body adjusts. The one that blows people's minds is you _can_ increase CI and maintain your activities and _lose_ weight. The cause is increased metabolism based on the kinds and frequency of foods you eat. Body builders have been doing exactly that for years.
- axus 3y agoI think his argument was that with potato-only he only wanted to eat 500 calories per day. For any other -only diet, he'd want to eat more than that.
- tsgagnon 3y agoI think his argument was that with potato-only he only wanted to eat 500 calories per day. For two weeks. Which is effectively nothing when you are talking about long-term issues like nutrition, health, weight, etc.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>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.
- tsgagnon 3y agoFamously, lots of people have successfully lived healthy lives with long periods where they ate mostly or exclusively potato, including multiple cases where people voluntarily ate only potatoes for a year. The safety of this diet is difficult to dispute, and I highly recommend potatoes much more than any other mono diet that can really mess you up due to nutrient imbalances 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.
- mizzack 3y agoEven ad libitum, the low palatibility and high satiety of potatoes makes you reach a point where you simply do not want to eat any more. For most people that yields a significant caloric deficit. I did this experiment and it was boring more than anything. Plenty full/satisfied/not hungry, though.
- twelve40 3y agodid you feel like you maintained a decent energy level or spiral into a permanent malnourished slump? that's what i'm curious about, to me that's the biggest downside of calorie restrictions
- mizzack 3y agoFelt pretty normal, really. I reduced my activity level in that time, though. Deloaded lifting and no cardio just walking.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>He admits in the article he was eating only ~500 calories per day. If you can eat 500 calories of potatoes daily and feel satiated, why isn't that relevant?
- glanzwulf 3y ago"Po-ta-toes! Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew!" 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.
- kevviiinn 3y agoNot sustainable at all, the weight will more than likely come back super fast. A diet is something that you should be able to sustain over a long term
- JBorrow 3y agoIn TFA they state that the weight loss was an incidental part of the experiment and in fact they thought they would gain weight.
- tekla 3y agoAs it turns out, the body obeys thermodynamic laws and you will lose weight if you eat less than you burn even if its all starches and sugars.
- aredox 3y agoExcept that the body is not a passive black box and can adapt its burn rate - which is partially uncontrollable (meaning: not related to physical exercise, e.g. thermal regulation)
- kevviiinn 3y agoBurn rate for a sedentary 75kg human is 1600-2000 kcal/day iirc. It can't go down to 500 without dropping active tissue
- kevviiinn 3y agoIf they honestly thought that while eating 500 calories I would just write off everything else they claim as total nonsense
- joenot443 3y agoNice 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. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory-specific_satiety
- bell-cot 3y agoTheory: 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. It would be interesting to test whether other all-starchy-root-veggies diets had similar effects.
- rorytbyrne 3y agoPotato was the only food eaten by the majority of Irish people, up until 1848. An average man ate up to 60 potatoes per day.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoYeah, potatoes are like the only food I know of that a human can just about live off of successfully. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823275 Just sayin'.
- elchief 3y agoand after ~1590 of course, when the potato was introduced to the British Isles
- rorytbyrne 3y agoExcuse me, the what now?
- elchief 3y agoEurope didn't have potatoes until the Spanish started importing them from South America, which was in the 1500s
- reverius42 3y agoI think the parent was objecting to Ireland being called a British Isle.
- TMWNN 3y ago>By the 1800s, the potato had become the staple crop in the poorest regions. More than three million Irish peasants subsisted solely on the vegetable which is rich in protein, carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins such as riboflavin, niacin and Vitamin C. It is possible to stay healthy on a diet of potatoes alone. The Irish often drank a little buttermilk with their meal and sometimes used salt, cabbage, and fish as seasoning. Irish peasants were actually healthier than peasants in England or Europe where bread, far less nutritious, was the staple food. <https://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/introduction.htm https://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/introductio...>
- cglan 3y agoI’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 Carrots also taste incredible when cooked exactly like potatoes. Really any root veggie slaps when boiled and then roasted
- xeromal 3y agoThe 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.
- xeromal 3y agoI 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. https://imgur.com/a/ka0FK18 https://imgur.com/a/ka0FK18 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.
- kevviiinn 3y agoWhy is a glucose spike bad for non diabetics
- xeromal 3y agoI'm not a doctor, but I believe the best way to treat your body is not to have big swings in values in glucose. If your glucose is 70 and you spike it up to 150 every day, I believe it's just a lot of stress on your body's endocrine system. Someone can definitely chime in and correct me though.
- meindnoch 3y agoHaving big swings in your heart rate daily is healthy.
- qbrass 3y agoYou not only get the downside of high glucose levels from the spike, but you get the downside of the insulin your body produced in response (or you injected because you're diabetic) kicking in as the spike falls on it's own, making it crash even further.
- mizzack 3y agoSpiking and recovering is probably better than consistently elevated for insulin sensitivity reasons.
- Taikonerd 3y agoIf 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] 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-community-trial-sign-up-now/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/03/13/half-tato-diet-comm...
- stevespang 3y ago[dead]
- 3pt14159 3y agoIn 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.
- mahathu 3y agoSerious question because I am also interested in this, what about micronutrients in fruits/vegetables, fish etc.?
- 3pt14159 3y agoI don't know why I was downvoted, but the answers you are looking for are available on a now offline website called WHFoods (World's Healthiest Foods) which you should be able to find on Archive.org or similar.
- qwertox 3y agoI 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).
- ejb999 3y agoDid 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.
- matwood 3y agoEnter the Twinkie diet: https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor...
- thewataccount 3y agoYeah even assuming you're burning anywhere near 2000 calories a day, there's no way you aren't going to lose weight at a 1:4 calorie deficit. Even burning 1000 calories you're still at two times deficit...
- rorytbyrne 3y agoI think the idea is that it's easy to eat only 500 calories, if the only food available is potatoes. Which should surprise absolutely no one.
- xeromal 3y agoThey make that point in the article. Potatoes are very filling. That's part of the allure. Try doing a diet of 500 calories of lettuce and you'll regret it. When dieting, satiety is key and potatoes have that in spades.
- voisin 3y ago> Try doing a diet of 500 calories of lettuce and you'll regret it. 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).
- xeromal 3y agoI don't think you could pay anyone to eat that much lettuce but it would be easy to pull off with potatoes is more my point.
- daenney 3y agoI love how the author calls this a study, when: * 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.
- kevviiinn 3y agoNot to mention they thought they would gain weight while eating 500kcal/day
- tsgagnon 3y agoMy favorite part is where they eat 500 calories of food each day but still state "Neither of us were looking 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."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fullstop 3y agoThis reminds me of The Martian
- BigCryo 3y agoPotatoes and other tubers have a low energy density and are conducive to weight loss
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoAdd a daily multivitamin to it, and you have the diet from "The Martian".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- doodpants 3y agoPenn Jillette famously lost weight using an all-potato diet several years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NelIXCuuSZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NelIXCuuSZ0
- armagon 3y agoDo take a look at the results from the citizen scientists doing a potato diet study, and now a "half-tato" diet: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/03/13/half-tato-diet-community-trial-sign-up-now/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/03/13/half-tato-diet-comm...
- dave333 3y agoThe Irish have subsisted on a mostly only potato diet for centuries which was fine until the blight took the entire crop.
- aredox 3y agoYou forget the beer.
- aredox 3y agoAnother "making oneself miserable to lose weight" diet, that will be followed by a rebound as soon as it stops (which it will)... Also note that potatoes are mostly highly assimilable sugars and as such make sugar blood levels spike - leading to diabetes long-term.
- rwmj 3y agoCould 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?
- skocznymroczny 3y ago> (some days we were losing almost a pound of bodyweight due to ingesting only ~500 calories). 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.
- aredox 3y agoShort-term it is true, but long-term not: your body is adaptable and will adapt to lower caloric intake to maintain weight. This is why "you just have to reduce calorie intake" advice is shortsighted if not just plain dumb: if I eat less calories, is my weight going to fall down to zero? Of course not! (Save for real starvation, where one reduces intake below the body's ability to adapt) It follows that one can lose weight without reducing calorie intake - and studies prove it: https://mobile.twitter.com/T_Fiolet/status/1643528828696817665 https://mobile.twitter.com/T_Fiolet/status/16435288286968176...
- meindnoch 3y agoHuh? 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.
- sethammons 3y agoDue 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.
- Zobat 3y agoI 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. > "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)."
- hirundo 3y agoIt 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. 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.
- elchief 3y agoI 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. Potato Starch is a Type II Resistant Starch, which is a nice pre-biotic to feed your gut microbiome https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/resistant-starch-101 https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/resistant-starch-101
- dave333 3y agoPotatoes 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.
- zeeshanmh215 3y agoI 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.
- pcai 3y agoAuthor here. I will admit to having severe…let’s call it “gastrointestinal distress” the first 24 hours or so, until my body acclimated to the new diet. I would recommend easing into it over a few days, instead of the hard cutover I did.
- Euphorbium 3y agoI’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.
- suprjami 3y ago"I ate 500 calories of potatoes per day and lost weight. It must be because of the potatoes." 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 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4664
- pcai 3y agoAuthor here: I actually discuss theories for why ~500 calories ad libitum is satiating thus leading to weight loss. Your “shocking alternative theory” is already an embedded assumption and requires no discussion.
- suprjami 3y agoSatiation vs hunger is a willpower issue, but I get your point.
- 876978095789789 3y ago> 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). 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/ 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?