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Thoughts on the potato diet

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Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#201

Post by bumby »

mrguyorama wrote: post #190
devoutsalsa wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm overweight because I eat too much. Eat caloric surplus, gain weight. That part isn't complicated. Why I eat too much is another question...

It's funny too, because I have perfectly logged data showing that the weeks I eat fewer than about 1800 calories reliably, (because I have an incredibly sedentary lifestyle) reliably and predictably lower my weight. I've literally got a science experiment in my own body that shows reducing calories in, without reducing the actual design of my meals, reduces my body mass. I'm willing to accept that there are some mino…

I agree that the CICO is a model that works, but it is at least somewhat complicated by the fact that CO is a function of CI. I.e., what you eat takes different amounts of energy to metabolize so it also contributes to what you burn. If I eat 1800 kcal of protein I may have higher CO than if I ate 1800 kcal of simple carbohydrates.

There's already a lot of uncertainty when most people measure their calories (very few people actually weigh their food) and this just adds another layer of uncertainty. I have a feeling those all combine to make it inaccurate enough in practice for some people to claim the CICO model doesn't work.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#202

Post by rolisz »

GordonS wrote: post #125
safety1st wrote: post #30

There's actually some science behind this diet. Potatoes are the highest scoring food on the satiety index. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/15-incredibly-filling-f... Basically they're the most filling food per calorie. So if you subscribe to the idea that losing weight is mainly about how many calories you consume, a potato heavy diet should be effective. And an all potato diet, while monomaniacal, even more ef…

This seems highly unlikely to me. I have reactive hypoglycemia, and can say that potatoes spike my blood glucose levels more than table sugar - they have a really high glycemic index, and anyone with blood sugar issues should totally avoid them IMO. And the thing about foods with a high glycemic index is that they cause you to feel hungry when your blood sugar rapidly drops back to baseline. I find protein and fat wa…

> eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.

I usually eat 3 scrambled eggs when I have them for breakfast. Lunch can't come soon enough afterwards. I think my record is 7 scrambled eggs. I'm sure I had normal lunch that day.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#203

Post by rockostrich »

ghostly_s wrote: post #159
GordonS wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems highly unlikely to me. I have reactive hypoglycemia, and can say that potatoes spike my blood glucose levels more than table sugar - they have a really high glycemic index, and anyone with blood sugar issues should totally avoid them IMO. And the thing about foods with a high glycemic index is that they cause you to feel hungry when your blood sugar rapidly drops back to baseline. I find protein and fat wa…

> eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time. What a patently absurd claim. Your anecdata is not evidence.

While anecdotal, it entirely depends on habits and context.

If your usual breakfast is pretty big and you tried to switch then you'd definitely start to get pangs of hunger earlier than you usually would. But after a while, your body would adjust and you'd be fine for longer and longer (really until whenever you usually ate your next meal). It's the reason why intermittent fasting or "one-meal-a-day" sucks the first couple of weeks you try it.

I'm not recommending one way or the other. Personally, I wouldn't eat just 2 eggs for breakfast because it sounds like a boring breakfast (at least throw it on some toast with some hot sauce). But it's certainly plausible that 2 eggs for breakfast would satiate most folks after they got through the initial growing pains.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#204

Post by fnordpiglet »

I just finished a two week potato diet. I did lose weight but I also reset my palate. Coming out of the diet I’m surprised to find my cravings non existent and food tastes different - neither good nor bad. I’m trying to retrain my palate with a much healthier mode of eating than I was doing before, and two weeks of flavorless bland food seems to have reset. Now I find it much easier to eat healthier foods without compulsions.

I don’t know I expected it to do anything other than drop a few pounds and reset my palate, and it seems to do that. I wasn’t hungry but it was hard to handle the lack of variety as I felt a lot of compulsions despite my lack of hunger.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#205

Post by [deleted] »

zhynn wrote: post #168
maerF0x0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or however many leads to 1g of protein per pound of lean body mass. No point losing weight if its lean body mass. (Protein has a muscle sparing effect during diets)

potatoes have like 3g of protein per potato. And to stay full you eat _a lot_ of potato. I tried it! It was easy, then not easy, then totally shitty, then fine, and then I was done (28 days). I ate a few sweet potatoes along the way for B vitamins.

[deleted]

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#206

Post by wtetzner »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #93

As I'm reading others' comments on here I'm shocked at the seemingly uneducated state of comments, I blame "influencers" and the fitness industry for spreading so much FUD + absolute nonsense. Most of them patterned like "I lost x lbs on Y diet, and you should too". I'm shocked at how few people realize that diets equated for protein + fiber are essentially identical. I highly recommend Layne Norton's book Fat loss f…

> They all only work if there is a caloric deficit

I don't believe this is true. On keto for example, I lost weight when eating an excess of calories.

> Calories in - calories out ("CICO") is absolutely backed by science when the researchers are smart enough to actually account for known things like caloric cost of digestion (changes the "CO" part)

Not exactly. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you'll obviously lose weight. But the reverse is not necessarily true. For that to be the case, your body would have to always store all excess calories. This is probably pretty close to what happens on a high-carb diet, though, because insulin is a fat storage hormone.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#207

Post by mrguyorama »

bumby wrote: post #180
jsiaajdsdaa wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satiety is a mental construct. I've been underweight, normal weight, and overweight in my life. What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entirely divorced from nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving. The only way to be exceptionally healthy and thin is to ignore the urge to overeat, and this urge is extremely dynamic on a per human basis. As a result, some people out there will eat a ca…

> Satiety is a mental construct. Are you implying that there aren't physical manifestations that cause hunger? In other words, I could inject you with a suprahuman amount of ghrelin and you wouldn't feel hungry?

There are physical situations that can nudge your brain's choice to make you feel hungry or not, IME. For example, I stopped eating breakfast and lunch for two years (because, I am a colossal idiot, and knew it was stupid when I did it) and it took very little time for my body to realize "feeling hungry" at noon was a fools errand, so it quickly stopped happening. I was absolutely physically hungry, seeing as I wasn't eating larger dinners, and having been about 18 hours since I last put food in my body, but habit has a large effect on your feelings of hunger if you aren't living in the wild Savannah. If my thoughts are correct, then a possible indicator would be people with wildly different "normal" times for dinner would get hungry at those different times, ie my grandparents who eat at 4 get hungry at 4 compared to someone who normally eats at 8pm getting hungry at 8pm.

I'm unsure if that "support" for my argument exists.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#208

Post by TrisMcC »

strbean wrote: post #192
TrisMcC wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Calorie density is not something made up. You are redefining a very well-known term. Many legumes, grains, and root vegetables are made up of copious amounts of water in their prepared form.

Calorie density is also not the only metric for recommendation. Everyone agrees that liquid calories are not "felt" by the body in the same way as solid foods.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#209

Post by csours »

stakkur wrote: post #183
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…

No, obesity is a metabolic problem. And barring personal medical issues, diets of starch and sugar are the cause. [EDIT], Folks, obesity is a result of metabolic disease. Obesity is an epidemic, and the science is abundant on this. This isn't a grammatic nuance, it's the essence of the global obesity epidemic that results from diet and eating habits. It's literally the foundation of the growing understanding amongst…

I feel it would be accurate to say that obesity is also a metabolic problem.

The difficulty with disentangling "what is obesity" is that the body is full of feedback and feed-forward mechanisms. You can look at any part of the machinery and say "here is the problem". There are a significant number of systems that deal with adiposity, hunger, and energy management and allocation.

Once we find something to blame for a problem we often stop looking. Processed carbs are not compatible with a sedentary lifestyle, that is true. But our ancestors ate carbs for generations. Many modern cultures eat carbs and don't have a big problem with obesity.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#210

Post by appletrotter »

GordonS wrote: post #125
safety1st wrote: post #30

There's actually some science behind this diet. Potatoes are the highest scoring food on the satiety index. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/15-incredibly-filling-f... Basically they're the most filling food per calorie. So if you subscribe to the idea that losing weight is mainly about how many calories you consume, a potato heavy diet should be effective. And an all potato diet, while monomaniacal, even more ef…

This seems highly unlikely to me. I have reactive hypoglycemia, and can say that potatoes spike my blood glucose levels more than table sugar - they have a really high glycemic index, and anyone with blood sugar issues should totally avoid them IMO. And the thing about foods with a high glycemic index is that they cause you to feel hungry when your blood sugar rapidly drops back to baseline. I find protein and fat wa…

> I have reactive hypoglycemia

Makes sense that this diet wouldn't work for you - but I think using this argument is sort of like arguing that peanuts are unhealthy because some people are allergic to them.

Fun Fact: You can let your potatoes cool down, and then re-heat them, to significantly lower the glycemic impact.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761

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