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Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

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Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#21

Post by sedivy94 »

soared wrote: post #8

I imagine anyone who is researching diets this heavily and is willing to sign up for a weird one may have lost weight regardless of if they used the potato diet or not - they committed to serious lifestyle changes that caused them to lose weight. Maybe it’s potatoes, maybes it’s everything the person changed in their and potatoes didn’t offset those.

I agree, restriction-based diets (restricting food choice, amount, or timing) virtually always yield positive results initially. If that phenomenon is a given, then digging deeper into the variations could help us understand why that is the case.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#22

Post by corry »

Does anyone remember a meta study that showed ANY even slightly reasonable restrictive diet works because they almost by definition dramatically reduced sugar and HFCS in the diet, and if you just controlled for that, the individual types of restriction didn't matter?

I can't find it on PubMed or in my bookmarks.

If memory serves - high/low fat, high/low carb, high/low protein, etc - didn't matter as long as the restriction is stopping sugar/HFCS.

And it also explained the rebound effect - e.g. after the extreme restriction, the participants start re-introducing sugar and HFCS back into the diet, and since that's the real culprit, weight goes back up.

No taking away from this super cool citizen science - deep kudos on testing things like this out! I'm tempted to participate in something like this. Self-experimentation is a lost art.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#24

Post by merpnderp »

Taikonerd wrote: post #15

I really enjoyed SMTM's "A Chemical Hunger" series[1]. But recently they've gone into weird fad-diet territory with their potato obsession. Like, they crow that the potato mono-diet "works," in that the people who successfully followed it lost weight. Well, sure -- all of those 70s fad diets "worked" in that sense! Grapefruit and popcorn? Sure, you can lose weight on that! But their own numbers show that people regai…

Once you find a diet that is healthy and works, I don't think you're supposed to ever get off of it. It's kind of a tautology that the people getting off their diets gained back their original weight.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#25

Post by tekla »

corry wrote: post #22

Does anyone remember a meta study that showed ANY even slightly reasonable restrictive diet works because they almost by definition dramatically reduced sugar and HFCS in the diet, and if you just controlled for that, the individual types of restriction didn't matter? I can't find it on PubMed or in my bookmarks. If memory serves - high/low fat, high/low carb, high/low protein, etc - didn't matter as long as the rest…

They work by definition because you eat less calories

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#26

Post by bensecure »

yungporko wrote: post #18
Taikonerd wrote: post #15

I really enjoyed SMTM's "A Chemical Hunger" series[1]. But recently they've gone into weird fad-diet territory with their potato obsession. Like, they crow that the potato mono-diet "works," in that the people who successfully followed it lost weight. Well, sure -- all of those 70s fad diets "worked" in that sense! Grapefruit and popcorn? Sure, you can lose weight on that! But their own numbers show that people regai…

i don't understand what you're trying to say here, of course anybody who loses weight by changing their diet will gain the weight back if they go back to eating the way they were before, isn't that just common sense?

He's saying that this is a well established fact regarding every fad diet. Usually in the sciences, a new method measures itself against a "control", which might be a placebo or non-treatment, but might be another well established treatment, such as a drug for the same disease. For a fad diet, a sensible "control", or "null hypothesis" would be another fad diet, not involving potatoes. One would only have grounds to say that this fad diet worked if it worked better than the best alternative fad diet.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#27

Post by merpnderp »

rabbits_2002 wrote: post #20

I feel like the only reason people are losing weight is because eating 20 potatoes in a day is insane and no one on this diet is hitting their BMR. Of course they will lose weight and they will with any variation that keeps them under their BMR.

Ever since food inflation has gotten so crazy, I've been buying bags of potatoes and nuking 3 at a time for a meal/snack. Like 3 potatoes leaves me feeling stuffed, but is only maybe 300 calories. So not only am I healthier, but I feel full longer, and am almost back to my college wrestling weight.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#28

Post by elil17 »

I'm so disappointed by SMTM's trajectory. One of their key initial insights was that you don't need control groups for diet trials because essentially no one loses more than 10-20 lbs on a diet. You can just run the treatment group and, if you get lots of people losing more than that, you know you've got something.

The flip side, of course, is that losing 10-20 lbs from a diet shouldn't be taken as proof that the diet does anything special. People can do that with almost any diet.

SMTM's potato diet study found exactly that - 10 to 20 lbs of weight loss for most participants. This should be strong evidence that it's not a silver bullet. SMTM is pretending otherwise.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#29

Post by Taikonerd »

yungporko wrote: post #18
Taikonerd wrote: post #15

I really enjoyed SMTM's "A Chemical Hunger" series[1]. But recently they've gone into weird fad-diet territory with their potato obsession. Like, they crow that the potato mono-diet "works," in that the people who successfully followed it lost weight. Well, sure -- all of those 70s fad diets "worked" in that sense! Grapefruit and popcorn? Sure, you can lose weight on that! But their own numbers show that people regai…

i don't understand what you're trying to say here, of course anybody who loses weight by changing their diet will gain the weight back if they go back to eating the way they were before, isn't that just common sense?

Well, I guess I'm saying a "good" diet is one that can be sustained indefinitely. The fact that an extreme diet produces good results in the short term isn't surprising or interesting, because virtually nobody can (or should) follow an extreme diet for the rest of their life.
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