Previous Philosophical Transactions:
- JP Callaghan on Lithium Pharmacokinetics
- Lithium in Scottish Drinking Water with Al Hatfield
- M’s Experience with Potatoes-by-Default
- Jon on One Year Post-Potato-Diet
- Neoncube on The Meat and Veggies Diet
- Adam Mastroianni says “please squirt lemon juice on my brain”
- Leo on Swamp Taters
- JV on Explorations of Isotonic Brine Space
This account has been lightly edited for clarity, but what appears below is otherwise the original report as we received it.
From April 21 of this year until today (August 5), I’ve been on a potatoes-by-default diet. This was inspired by the email by M (Philosophical Transactions: M’s Experience with Potatoes-by-Default). In that time, I went from a weight of 173.0 pounds to a weight of 155.4. I’m giving myself a slight handicap, because I actually started the diet about two weeks earlier and my weight was ~180, but I didn’t track my meals or get a digital scale until the 21st and my analog scale was unreliable. Depending on how robust you want to be about it, I’ve lost 17 or 24 pounds in 107 or 121 days. About half of that weight loss was concentrated in the first few weeks, but I kept it off and continued losing over the rest of the diet period.
The most interesting thing I have to say about this is that I have nothing interesting to say. My experience matches what I expected from reading this blog and other sources. I’ve lost weight, and noticed no adverse health effects. That made me almost not want to share here, but it’s important to share replications!
The Details
Here are the eccentricities of my particular case:
1. The diet variation I chose.
I chose “potatoes by default” because I was interested in testing it, and because my social life puts me in group meal settings regularly. And then I added sauce because I had some sauce in the fridge I was hoping to use up. Initially I was going to discontinue the sauce after finishing it up, but I realized it wasn’t adding very many calories and I was curious whether it would affect the diet. My usual meal was a bowl of potatoes with roughly 2 tablespoons of sauce for dipping.
My favorite sauces after four months include the Zesty Secret Sauce by Marie’s, the Creamy Buffalo Sauce by Sweet Baby Ray’s, and the Gold BBQ Sauce by Kinder’s. Sometimes I would add some everything bagel seasoning and melted butter to the buffalo sauce – absolutely amazing!
One question discussed on the blog has been whether some ingredient serves as a blocker, and these sauces contained a whole lot of supposed blockers, which I think is interesting data. The percent of my meals with/without potatoes was inconsistent over the course of the diet, but sauce with potatoes was a constant, so if there’s a complete potato-diet-effect blocker, it wasn’t in the sauces.
I cooked the potatoes by cutting off the skin, cutting them in half or thirds depending on the size, and baking them in the oven on parchment paper at 425 for around 70 minutes. Potato varieties used were mostly russet and gold, sometimes red, and “baby” varieties if they were on sale.
The rest of my diet was very standard – all the normal-American-diet ingredients that might be blockers were involved, and there was no particular portion control beyond not eating when I was full.
2. Exercise.
I don’t believe exercise played a substantial role in the weight loss, but I had two exercise habits going on during this experiment and I did lose weight, so it’s worth reporting on them.
First, I walked a minimum of 10,000 steps each day, although that actually undersells the average (15,313).
Second, roughly 10 times during the experiment period, I played dance video games (DDR or Just Dance) for a minimum of 2 hours at a relatively intense difficulty mode. These mostly happened in the first two months, and were discontinued for personal reasons and not for diet or health-related reasons.
“I Could Never Do That,” Said The Person Who Never Tried
Some friends I discussed this diet with said they were interested, but could never do it, because they get cravings for specific foods when they’re hungry. I find this absolutely unpersuasive. The rules I followed let me have snacks when I got cravings; I still lost weight, and the cravings were less common than before the potato diet.
Some people in previous experiments writing on this blog noted that their desire to have junk food largely subsided while in “potato mode”. It was pretty easy for me to control what I ate at home. But sometimes I would be outside the house, and I would be a little bit hungry and get a small meal at a restaurant, and then I was in trouble! Because if I ate something small, I suddenly found myself hungry for dessert too. But if I didn’t eat out, and I went about my day, I would be perfectly happy not following that impulse.
At any rate, if you’re going to follow any diet, potato dieting is about as close as a diet can be to Pareto optimal: (e.g. it’s better in every possible way than any diet you compare it to)
- It’s easy to do. The rules are simpler than any other diet; the shopping is simpler; the meal prep is simpler.
- It’s easy to stick to; it’s the only diet I’ve ever kept for more than a week. My experience with other diets is that you are constantly thinking about the food and fighting cravings for other food. For some reason, a potato diet doesn’t create that for me, especially with the leniency of “-by-default.”
- It’s less expensive than any other diet. I spent roughly $500 a month less on groceries over the period, despite eating the same proportion of my meals at home.
No Grand Conclusion
Ultimately, this is an N=1 replication. There were times when I ate better and times when I ate worse. I didn’t always lose weight when I was having non-potato meals, but if I gained weight (e.g. on travel) I would quickly lose it again when going back to potatoes. This feels like the “lipostat” hypothesis to me; eating a lot of potatoes did something to make my set point weight lower than it otherwise would be.
I’m happy to have lost weight and even happier to be able to provide a tiny bit more data in support of the potato diet.
