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.

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-comm...

It would be interesting to test whether other all-starchy-root-veggies diets had similar effects.

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.

Carrots also taste incredible when cooked exactly like potatoes. Really any root veggie slaps when boiled and then roasted

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.

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/

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?

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

An average man ate up to 60 potatoes per day.

* 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NelIXCuuSZ0

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

> "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)."

Also note that potatoes are mostly highly assimilable sugars and as such make sugar blood levels spike - leading to diabetes long-term.

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

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.