Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

slimemoldtimemold.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 118 posts

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

#51

Post by matthewdgreen »

seanwilson wrote: post #47
matthewdgreen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. >…

The only way to explain the effect of the diet to someone is for them to try it. The effect is not like “I just ate potatoes and they quickly made me feel full.” It’s more like “I am taking a drug that disrupts the GLP-1 cycle in my body and makes me lose interest in eating food at all, even when I haven’t recently eaten many potatoes.” Obviously N=1 and no, I don’t think it’s very healthy to do this for long.

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

#52

Post by Taikonerd »

alecst wrote: post #31
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…

The way I see it, the point of the very article you're replying to is to find a friendlier version of the potato diet that might be more fun or sustainable. Maybe they'll find that people who replace one of their daily meals with french fries end up losing weight over time. Who knows. I think it's good to be positive.

Oh, totally -- I was interested in their "half-tato" idea, because it seemed more sustainable than the all-potato version. But the results were "underwhelming," in their own words. Ditto their potassium-salt idea.

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

#53

Post by bumby »

throw932490 wrote: post #50

> 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…

>It decreases inflammation, and gives your gut chance to heal. It may improve sugar digestion, liver and so on.

Are there clinical trials that show these outcomes in patients? (To clarify, I don't mean studies that show potatoes have potential chemicals/mechanisms related to those outcomes, but actual trials with patients that saw a scientifically meaningful difference in those outcomes after a potato diet.

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

#54

Post by seanwilson »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #51
seanwilson wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. >…

The only way to explain the effect of the diet to someone is for them to try it. The effect is not like “I just ate potatoes and they quickly made me feel full.” It’s more like “I am taking a drug that disrupts the GLP-1 cycle in my body and makes me lose interest in eating food at all, even when I haven’t recently eaten many potatoes.” Obviously N=1 and no, I don’t think it’s very healthy to do this for long.

> It’s more like “I am taking a drug that disrupts the GLP-1 cycle in my body and makes me lose interest in eating food at all, even when I haven’t recently eaten many potatoes."

Are there any results that say most participants experienced that and to what degree? I spoke to a few people that followed similar diets and they didn't report (obviously anecdotal too) anything about really strange levels of appetite suppression, just that they were happy they could eat as much as they wanted when they felt like it. It likely depends a lot on what you're used to eating as well.

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

#55

Post by bee_rider »

tech-historian wrote: post #32
Taikonerd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A diet that you can follow forever is called a lifestyle. For many diets and many people, it's really hard to convert into a lifestyle, because the of the restrictions and predictable cravings. Side note, there's a thing called the Potato Hack [0] that proposes 3-5 day potato-only diets for short term fixes. A "potato fast" if you will. [0] https://potatohack.com/

A lifestyle involves all sorts of non-diet things.

It is a bit odd, though, that we use “going on a diet” to describe a short term change.

But I think the most accurate phrase would be that you’ve “changed your diet,” (implicitly, permanently).

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

#56

Post by Taikonerd »

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.

At least for the 70s fad diets, there wasn't any sort of long-term benefit like that. When they stopped, people would return to their original weight, or maybe even a little more. Then they would freak out and go back to the diet again -- the infamous "yo-yo dieting."

But I do think it's true that there are two different sensations: hunger, versus wanting food because it's yummy. Maybe some future diet will pair a restrictive diet with some sort of guided meditation helping you discern the different signals your stomach can send you.

Or maybe Mounjaro and friends will make the whole point moot ;-)

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

#57

Post by ajmurmann »

Taikonerd wrote: post #29
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?

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.

I don't think SMTM is proposing the potato diet as a permanent weight loss dilution, but think that there is something weird going on here that might result in a permanent dietary recommendation if understood. For example, we might find that the potassium is causing the weight loss and supplementing high doses of potassium could be something you do permanently.

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

#58

Post by lm28469 »

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…

> But their own numbers show that people regain the weight after they start eating other foods again: "On average, people gained back most of the weight they lost."[2]

Every single diet suffers from that, because you don't need a diet, you need a life style and as the name implies it, it has to be sustained for your whole life

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

#59

Post by throw932490 »

bumby wrote: post #53
throw932490 wrote: post #50

> 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…

> It decreases inflammation, and gives your gut chance to heal. It may improve sugar digestion, liver and so on. Are there clinical trials that show these outcomes in patients? (To clarify, I don't mean studies that show potatoes have potential chemicals/mechanisms related to those outcomes, but actual trials with patients that saw a scientifically meaningful difference in those outcomes after a potato diet.

I do not read studies, but this pops from google [1]

Potato diet is a baseline in fasting community. Before you do long water fast, you need to go on detox. Doing potato diet for couple of weeks is strongly recommended.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6928682/

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

#60

Post by dalbasal »

Diets seriously need to be considered through the lens of Occam's razor.

First, radical dietary changes cause rapid fluctuations in weight regularly. Not fat, weight.

Second, if you eat only one thing or are generally restrictive... You will probably lose a lot of appetite.

It's no good going off on some theory about pottasium. Occam's razor suggests that this also works for the been soup diet, fruit diet, etc.

It is, potentially, useful to do these kinds of things as an isolation diet (gradually add back foods and pay attention to effects). It's also useful to just break bad habits by doing weird stuff sometimes.

I'm Irish. I love potatoes. They do not have magic dietary powers. The potato doesn't explain anything. You can get similar results with toast, bacon or bananas. The results do not mean anything specific for longer term fat loss, health, etc.

It just proves that bodyweight fluctuates in response to radical diet change. That is known.

Same for a lot of the "water tricks" that thankfully have started to die down. They use bodybuilder tricks to eventually dehydrate themselves for a perfect look on stage day. It's sold as a weight loss trick.

Post reply on HN