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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

#41

Post by coffeefirst »

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.

And also, they're not eating out. This is a 100% vegetarian home cooked diet. At least for most Americans, even if there's literally no other mechanism in play, that's an absolutely massive change.

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

#42

Post by matthewdgreen »

seanwilson wrote: post #39

For people saying any diet works, I think the interest here is the rules of "eat as many potatoes as you want" are very easy to follow, it's unambiguous if you followed it properly, simple to buy the ingredients anywhere and when eating out, it's cheap, is meant to work fast, and you aren't going to feel hungry which helps a lot. Most fad diets don't tick as many boxes. Feels obvious to me that it works via “calories…

What’s interesting about the diet isn’t the mechanism for weight loss (you’re right, you don’t eat enough calories, that part is simple enough.) The interesting part is the intense appetite suppression that the diet produces. From my brief experience, it’s like after a couple of days you lose interest in eating - even when your body is sending you signals that indicate you’re likely starving. It’d be really interesting to figure out what causes this and then (preferably) reproduce it in a form that doesn’t require potatoes or injections.

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

#44

Post by ulizzle »

So people lost weight and these people have “no idea why?”

Well, ok, it’s calories, but why even bother to have any sort of study about this?

Of course people who don’t know about calories would think they invented a whole new idea and methodology on scientific research

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

#45

Post by matthewdgreen »

candiddevmike wrote: post #40
yungporko wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You'd think there would be some long term benefit to fad diets around the lines of hunger suppression or helping folks better recognize when they're "full". IMO, there's a psychosomatic angle for restrictive diets that is similar to a placebo.

Do you think Wegovy/Ozempic/Mounjaro also work due to placebo effect? It seems that over the past decade or two we’ve discovered (some elements of) the sophisticated physiological mechanism by which we regulate appetite, and it involves the production of various hormones within our lower intestinal tract. When some fad diet produces sharp appetite reduction, my general question is: what’s more reasonable? To assume placebo or disruption of this mechanism?

At very least I think it’s useful to reinterpret these extreme fad diet weight loss results in light of this knowledge, rather than defaulting to the (now obsolete) understanding that appetite is primarily determined by psychological effects.

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

#46

Post by nightski »

bensecure wrote: post #26
yungporko wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd argue it's a well established fact of any diet, regardless of how it is lost. Changing your body's natural weight long term is very difficult no matter what you eat.

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

#47

Post by seanwilson »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #42
seanwilson wrote: post #39

For people saying any diet works, I think the interest here is the rules of "eat as many potatoes as you want" are very easy to follow, it's unambiguous if you followed it properly, simple to buy the ingredients anywhere and when eating out, it's cheap, is meant to work fast, and you aren't going to feel hungry which helps a lot. Most fad diets don't tick as many boxes. Feels obvious to me that it works via “calories…

What’s interesting about the diet isn’t the mechanism for weight loss (you’re right, you don’t eat enough calories, that part is simple enough.) The interesting part is the intense appetite suppression that the diet produces. From my brief experience, it’s like after a couple of days you lose interest in eating - even when your body is sending you signals that indicate you’re likely starving. It’d be really interesti…

Is this not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value which has already been studied?

"Satiety value is the degree at which food gives a human the sense of food gratification, the exact contrast feeling of hunger ... Foods with the most satiation per calorie are often:high in certain proteinase inhibitors that suppress appetite - eg potatoes"

Potatoes are well known to be the most satiating food by a wide margin.

> you don’t eat enough calories, that part is simple enough.

The articles doesn't seem to agree though? They seem focused on things like how tomatoes might significantly block the weight loss of potatoes.

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

#48

Post by nightski »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #42
seanwilson wrote: post #39

For people saying any diet works, I think the interest here is the rules of "eat as many potatoes as you want" are very easy to follow, it's unambiguous if you followed it properly, simple to buy the ingredients anywhere and when eating out, it's cheap, is meant to work fast, and you aren't going to feel hungry which helps a lot. Most fad diets don't tick as many boxes. Feels obvious to me that it works via “calories…

What’s interesting about the diet isn’t the mechanism for weight loss (you’re right, you don’t eat enough calories, that part is simple enough.) The interesting part is the intense appetite suppression that the diet produces. From my brief experience, it’s like after a couple of days you lose interest in eating - even when your body is sending you signals that indicate you’re likely starving. It’d be really interesti…

Isn't that basically the premise behind Ozempic?

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

#49

Post by scottrogowski »

I think this is a more compelling idea than people in the comments are giving it credit for

> The problem is that you can easily come up with 100 different hypotheses for what’s going on. Ok, so you run 100 different studies to test each one. But studies take a long time to run — let’s say 6 months per study. Congratulations, you’ve just locked yourself into 50 years

This is a major problem with science whenever you have less of a theoretical foundation. Compared to physics or chemistry, we know very little about nutrition or sports science. Because of this, the search space is very large. One could argue that given the number of surprising results (and difficulty reproducing those results), medicine and psychology also fall into this category.

> A riff trial takes advantage of the power of parallel search. Some riffs will work better than others (or at least differently), and parallel search helps you find these differences faster, especially if the differences are big.

What if we did more to encourage people to track and report their personal experiments? If even 10% of everyone on a diet (any diet) just tracked what they ate, what exercise they did, and how much weight they lost, and reported it to a centralized database, scientists could then look for patterns in that data and do formal studies based on suspected patterns.

We could do similar things with longevity/happiness. Look at the "Harvard Study of Adult Development" but imagine it was spread out over 10s of thousands of diverse people instead of just 300 upper-class American men? The data quality wouldn't matter much if all you are doing is searching for patterns to do follow-up studies.

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

#50

Post by throw932490 »

> The diet worked — people lost 10.6 lbs on average over only four weeks — and we had basically no idea why

I do fasting a lot. Doing diet for weight loss is a huge red flag. Human body gains and loses water very easily. Change of 10 lbs (in any direction) is rounding error, after changing a diet.

Major reason to do potato diet are health benefits. It decreases inflammation, and gives your gut chance to heal. It may improve sugar digestion, liver and so on. Basically any junk and toxins you eat normally, go away on potato only diet.

AFTER you become healthy, you may try to lose weight.

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