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Thoughts on the potato diet

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Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#191

Post by com2kid »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #162
com2kid wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peanut butter doesn't fill me up at all. I can consume 1k calories of it, nothing, still hungry after. Same with fish, I cannot get full eating fish in any quantity. Shrimp, sure, but not fish. Nuts, same deal. I'll eat 500+ calories of nuts, does nothing for me.

See a doctor.

Plenty of other foods fill me up just fine. A 4oz steak and some broccoli. Bacon and eggs. Meat + a veg does me fine.

> See a doctor.

Doctors know next to nothing about gut biome stuff.

"I don't get full eating an entire jar of peanut butter" is going to result in the doctor telling me to not eat a jar of peanut butter.

Heck plenty of people don't get full eating entire tubs of ice cream. The answer is to avoid downing tubs of ice cream.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#192

Post by strbean »

TrisMcC wrote: post #147
strbean wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potatoes are calorie dense. I think the focus on satiation rather than pure calorie counting is a more recent trend. Also, it sounds like water content is a significant contributor to their capacity to satiate, so things like potato chips probably fail miserably under this lense. Many processed foods made from potatoes have far less water in them than home cooked versions (french fries, hash browns).

> Potatoes are calorie dense. No. https://gurmeet.net/Images/food/calorie_density/CalorieDensi... Boiled potatoes are 870 kcal per kilogram. 1 kilogram of potatoes is a lot.

The term 'calorie dense' is used in reference to proportion of other nutrients. Water isn't typically included.

By your standards, Coca-Cola is actually less calorie dense than boiled potato, but I don't think anyone would recommend a Coca-Cola diet.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#193

Post by mrguyorama »

LesZedCB wrote: post #143
TrisMcC wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really believe that the obesity epidemic was caused by people eating 90% carbohydrate diets? The "high carb meals" at McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut... are all also (and more per calorie) high in fat. Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil to your mixed-green salad? That has turned into a high fat salad. Most people cannot avoid cheese or nuts on salad, either. Eating the potato diet with sour cream/butter/cheese:…

i thought fat was largely debunked as being the primary cause, though i'm not going to go searching for studies as i'm not a dietician (though my partner is). consider this: each of those meals at McD's, BK, or Pizza hut come with a 1-2 liter soda, loaded with calories and sugar. yes, the fats are there, but they are _always_ paired with loads of sugar.

Well.... Fats can be bad in that they are calorie dense foods, and thus it's easy to add more calories than you should to food with them.

It's significantly harder to be fat eating nothing but broccoli, but I could continuously gain weight eating only 250g of vegetable oil per day.

Sugar is bad for exactly the same reason IMO

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#194

Post by sph »

nvahalik wrote: post #101
sph wrote: post #53

Low protein and low fat, super carb heavy diet, what can go wrong?

In the short term? Probably not a lot. You’ll lose “weight” but what are you actually losing? What you eat is very important. Fat stores aren’t the first thing your body will turn to. After the carbs, your body will turn to breaking down muscle tissue which is not what you usually want.

That's what I meant with my comment. Of all the things you need the most to LIVE, it's protein and fats, not carbohydrates.

Energy is the least of one's problem on a super restrictive diet like this one, but having the building blocks for muscles and cells and hormones is the literally vital.

There are trace amounts of fats and proteins in potatoes, not enough to sustain life long term. Enjoy having boundless energy, unable to build mass thus wasting and no libido whatsoever.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#195

Post by bob1029 »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #60

The point about prep being time-consuming is no joke. I recently (maybe 4 months ago) started a fairly strict whole food diet, and the prep is insane. Whole vegetables take real time to wash, clean up, store, and prep for cooking. Then you need to cook it. But like the potato diet, it's extremely easy to stay full and lose weight. Unlike the potato diet, there's a ton of variety. It also seems to have completely reve…

Prep time is the biggest concern I am aware of on the nutritional side. My best answer to this category of excuses is to amortize the prep time by making more of whatever and then freezing the leftovers in meal-sized containers.

Buying an instant pot & a box of those 2-cup pyrex storage bowls was the best series of personal health choices I've ever made. Granted, not all food works out with a round trip through the freezer, but most things do.

I still do eat things that cannot be frozen (well), such as eggs+bacon+toast, but the core of my nutritional needs are available in my freezer at all times (with approximately 1-2 weeks of buffer). Having a small buffer keeps me absolutely calm regarding my next meal source. I do not wait until all my frozen food is gone before I prepare the next batch. If I didn't have the buffer, my cycle would probably break and I'd start eating Burger King and other related trash for lunch again.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#196

Post by silicon2401 »

strbean wrote: post #84
adam_arthur wrote: post #7

Intermittent fasting has been the easiest thing for fine tuning control over weight for me. My Dad always says it's too hard, he gets hangry etc, but once you commit to it for ~2 weeks you don't even get hungry in the fast window anymore. The body gets very conditioned to eating patterns. Something to ease into. I'm not sure the average person can succeed on a diet predicated on greatly limiting the variety of foods…

What window do you eat during? I've seen lots of focus on eating only in the morning, but much of my life I naturally had low appetite in the mornings and mostly only ate dinner. That also coincided with being young and having an insane metabolism. I haven't actually intentionally implemented intermittent fasting, but I've considered it, and I'm strongly biased towards favoring a "dinner only" window from that experi…

> being young and having an insane metabolism

curious, how young do you mean? Human metabolism doesn't really change during adulthood until old age:

> Fat-free mass–adjusted expenditure [...] remains stable in adulthood (20 to 60 years), even during pregnancy; then declines in older adults.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5017

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#197

Post by mminer237 »

com2kid wrote: post #152
mminer237 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. There really is something special about potatoes that just makes them far more filling than they "should be": https://nutritiondata.self.com/topics/fullness-factor

That list is ... suspect? > Lowfat yogurt I've never been satiated eating lowfat yogurt. I actually recently started buying high fat yogurt (10g+ of fat) and it is super satiating. Given I can eat 3x the amount of lowfat yogurt and still not be full, I'm not buying it. > Watermelon Maybe due to bloating from water? > Bean sprouts I challenge anyone to get full eating just bean sprouts. Again, they are more akin to dr…

Well that's satiety/calories. So water will be have an index of infinity even if it's effect is rather small.

I was more just linking it to highlight the 1995 study. Potatoes were by far the most satiating food found and far exceeding what NutritionData's modeling predicts it would be. (And FWIW, yoghurt was found to be much less satiating than the numbers would suggest.)

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#198

Post by silicon2401 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #43
dangus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gotta ask: why no spices?

Exactly, that's the genius of Indian cuisine: making otherwise bland ingredients (chickpeas, lentils, potatoes, spinach, etc.) taste amazing. I just polished off a simple rice, spinach and tuna dinner. Very tasty thanks to some sprinkling of misc. spices. I could swap out the rice for potatoes and it would probably even healthier.

> the genius of Indian cuisine: making otherwise bland ingredients (chickpeas, lentils, potatoes, spinach, etc.) taste amazing.

How is that different from any other cuisine? Rice, noodles, potatoes, beans, cabbage, fish, meat, chicken all get mixed with spices in almost every cuisine

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#199

Post by sph »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #119
sph wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obesity is not a disease of over-eating, it is a disease of managing hunger. Indeed it is, and the solution to managing hunger (i.e. returning your whole insulin and leptin system to a more optimal baseline) is NOT going for a 90% carbohydrate diet. That's exactly why we have a bloody obesity epidemic. It's a fun thought experiment, but reading the comments in here people actually think this is genius and sustainab…

By this logic, the obesity epidemic should've happened in the 17th century when the potato was introduced to the rest of the world and became the staple crop of poor farmers everywhere.

They did not eat a potato only diet, however poor they were.

I actually have relatives in a third world country that however poor they were they'd have a diet of mostly starches but including decent protein, even if it's just fish, literal bugs, small rodents and other subpar meat.

They'd laugh you out the village if you'd tell them they can live on yams and tapioca alone.

Staple doesn't mean one food diet.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#200

Post by csours »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #189
csours wrote: post #35

If this is interesting I highly recommend "The Hungry Brain". Some other thoughts: Obesity is not a disease of over-eating, it is a disease of managing hunger. "Losing weight" is a terrible goal. "Changing Body Composition" is a much better goal. Specifically change the proportion of fat to muscle. ---- If your immediate answer is "Those are the same thing but with different words!!!" then here are some questions to…

>Obesity is not a disease of over-eating, it is a disease of managing hunger. If that is so, why is obesity so much worse in some countries than in others? Are Italians really so much better at managing hunger than Americans? It seems far more plausible to me that the differences in obesity between countries are caused by simple cultural habits than by some complex psychological task called managing hunger, which see…

> It seems far more plausible to me that the differences in obesity between countries are caused by simple cultural habits than by some complex psychological task called managing hunger, which seems less likely to be cultural.

I don't see a clear point here. Culture has a HUGE impact on psychology.

Also, managing hunger is Psychological AND Physiological.

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