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Thoughts on the potato diet

dynomight.net

321–330 of 529 posts

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#321
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Eat 1 cup organic whole oats, half cup of milk, 4 diced strawberries, and 1 tablespoon of brown sugar. Should be good until 2-3 in the afternoon, at least in my experience.

1 cup oats, 1 cup skim 1% milk, strawberries, mix that in a container uncooked the night before/eat the next day.

Overnight oats are great.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#322

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…

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…

In some sense, pain is also a mental construct — just some electrons bouncing around in one's brain, yet it feels very much real.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#323
In regards to the first point. For the year of 2021 I did not eat any added sugar. If the label said any grams of added sugar I just didn’t eat it. Super easy diet and it worked really well for me.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#325

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…

Eggs are definitely my goto on a calorie controlled keto diet. Obviously potatoes are out of the question :) . They are simply awful for people who prediabetic or think they have metabolic syndrome; not as bad as white bread or sugar but bad.

My understanding of the current science is that many cycles of excess carbs (especially processed carbs) while you are not in a calorie deficit, alongside a sedentary lifestyle, are bad for metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance.

White flour pancakes ALWAYS give me a blood sugar crash, and often cause a mild to moderate hypoglycemic episode; but I can eat whole grain pancakes without too much trouble.

If you're not carrying a large amount of excess weight, it might be worth trying the potato diet for a short time period, with a LOT of caveats. The problem is, as always, what happens when you go off the diet.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How would you get through the initial pains? Hunger is absolutely intolerable for me. When I go out for breakfast I will often have two eggs...and a couple of big pieces of toast, mushrooms, hash browns, spinach etc. I have great difficulty believing that two eggs alone would be sufficient.

Not OP. That said, I would've believed you a few years ago, when my body and gut flora were out of whack. Totally impossible. Just two eggs? Never!

Fast forward to today and while I would agree that just two eggs would be boring, add in two slices of bacon to cook the eggs in as well as some nice cheese, scramble it all and there's the lunch I'll have after not having had any breakfast at all and having had that, I probably won't be hungry again until way past previous dinner times.

This is after getting my gut back in order, away from craving sugary meal after sugary meal after carb/sugary meal to not having more than 20g of carbs per day (i.e. what they call "Keto diet"). I totally eat carbs again nowadays but usually eat no breakfast and eat way less carbs than I used to. One thing I noticed is that having a "low fat meal" for breakfast (e.g. white toast w/ just jam) means I am usually hungry again before lunch already. What helped on Keto was basically just eating whenever I was "hungry" but just not eating anything with carbs. I used cheese for it. Whenever I "got an appetite", eat some slices of cheese. No counting of calories. Feel "hungry"? Eat cheese! Lost lots of weight after a short period of time on that. The cravings just went away. It's amazing how little calories you actually get from all that fat and protein but it fills you right up. Of course this only works well if you have some fat to burn (my totally non-scientific reasoning is that your body just figures out that it doesn't have to make you find food and can just use the stores. Which means you better have those fat stores on you and please do make sure to eat enough veggies and nuts for your vitamins and minerals - you get the 20g of carbs just incidentally from the veggies, so definitely nothing with flour will go in you) I don't do Keto any longer and I can now maintain weight instead of loosing it :)

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#327
post #168

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.

3 grams of protein per potato isn't much. If you're using this diet to lose weight you'll be eating say 1500 kcal per day of potatoes (leaving some allowance for oils), which will only give you ~39g of protein.

That's definitely below what most people need as a healthy minimum (RDA is 0.8g per kg of bodyweight), let alone if you want to build muscle while dieting which is a good idea for improving health. At the very least you want to maintain muscle mass, which requires protein if you're exercising.

If I was going to try this diet I would definitely supplement some protein shakes.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#328
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

iirc vitamin b12 is essentially non-existent in vegan diets. So it's important to either eat meats/seafood, eat a vegan food fortified in it, or take a supplement (the later two are equivalent, just different delivery mechanism)

iirc, that's not quite right. All dietary B12 originates in/on plant sources, you just have to avoid processing that removes it, and include plant sources with good sources. If you try and eat vegan from a typical north american grocery store though, you may have trouble and need to supplement it. On the other hand, selections are pretty good these days, and if you incorporate some nori or legume sprouts (from memory) you'll be fine.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#329
post #94
post #87

I spent a few weeks eating only potatoes and vegetable oil, several years ago. It wasn't for weight loss, it was because I was breastfeeding, and my baby had some kind of protein sensitivity we couldn't nail down. Potatoes turned out to be a safe food for him, so that's all I ate for a while. As it happens potatoes are my favorite food, and I had vegetable oil available so I could eat fries/chips/crisps, but even the…

Did you lose weight while on it? Any benefits you noticed?

Breastfeeding is the second most calorie intensive (prolonged) experience most people will have, right after pregnancy.

Obviously sprinting burns a lot of calories at once, but making milk happens all day, and you don't have to breathe those calories out.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How would you get through the initial pains? Hunger is absolutely intolerable for me. When I go out for breakfast I will often have two eggs...and a couple of big pieces of toast, mushrooms, hash browns, spinach etc. I have great difficulty believing that two eggs alone would be sufficient.

Try eating low calorie density foods. These let you eat more volume with fewer calories. I've lost ~80lbs over the last year largely through going low calorie density.

Largely: Salads and roasted veggies like sweet potatoes, broccoli, radishes, carrots, squash. Fruits like apples, grapes, blueberries, strawberries.

The low calorie density foods helped make it so I really wasn't hungry.

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