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Thoughts on the potato diet

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Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#81

Post by csours »

ericb wrote: post #73
nostrebored wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CGMs should disillusion people of this pretty quickly. I really wish more people would try them for a month just to see how they respond to certain foods.

CGM ?

Continuous Glucose Monitor.

Related topic: Glycogen storage in the liver and muscles and glycogen depletion

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#82

Post by djmips »

friedman23 wrote: post #51
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…

I wonder where the misinformation that potatoes were unhealthy / fattening came from? Was it from french fries and fried starches?

The Glycemic Index (GI) looks bad, even look at the chart in the article. However the GI for potatoes changes depending on how you eat them. Cold potatoes have a much lower GI than hot freshly served.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#83

Post by corrral »

captaincrunch wrote: post #17
bejelentkezni wrote: post #12

This sounds like a great way to quickly deplete most of your vitamins and minerals.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that potatoes gave you every vitamin and mineral you needed (except b12 which you can get from butter).

You can pick one of the usual Native American crop patterns and get a solid set of vitamins. Potatoes + beans + squash or something like that, maybe with some corn. Cf. Mann's 1491. If you're going for a minimal veggie ingredient diet these new-world combos work well as a base, in part because potatoes are pretty much a superfood.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#84

Post by strbean »

adam_arthur wrote: post #7

Intermittent fasting has been the easiest thing for fine tuning control over weight for me. My Dad always says it's too hard, he gets hangry etc, but once you commit to it for ~2 weeks you don't even get hungry in the fast window anymore. The body gets very conditioned to eating patterns. Something to ease into. I'm not sure the average person can succeed on a diet predicated on greatly limiting the variety of foods…

What window do you eat during? I've seen lots of focus on eating only in the morning, but much of my life I naturally had low appetite in the mornings and mostly only ate dinner. That also coincided with being young and having an insane metabolism. I haven't actually intentionally implemented intermittent fasting, but I've considered it, and I'm strongly biased towards favoring a "dinner only" window from that experience.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#85

Post by kzrdude »

worker_person wrote: post #57
dangus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gotta ask: why no spices?

It was an elimination diet. See what things were bothering me. Severe migraines and autoimmune issues. I was very desperate at that point. Sweet potatoes didn't bother me at all, and kept me full. After a month I slowly started adding things back in to see how I reacted. Made it easy to tell what foods were an issue.

Great that it helped. I was also on AIP for some periods, long ago now though (maybe because it's so hard)

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#86

Post by bee_rider »

toolz wrote: post #22
bejelentkezni wrote: post #12

This sounds like a great way to quickly deplete most of your vitamins and minerals.

Agreed, it does sound that way, but it's amazing how many anecdotes there are of people who eat exclusively 1 type of food and thrive on it. I don't think modern intuition about nutrition is likely to stand the test of time.

The conclusion I have come to is that humans, when starting from an over-fed modern baseline, are robust enough to eat a totally shit diet for a couple months. This is also long enough to convince us it is worth blogging about.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#87

Post by ksenzee »

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 then I can't imagine doing it without a similarly serious motivation. When my choices were "listen to the baby cry in pain every time he eats" or "eat potatoes until the allergist appointment," it was an easy choice. Otherwise I wouldn't last long on the potato diet.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#88

Post by weberer »

toolz wrote: post #22
bejelentkezni wrote: post #12

This sounds like a great way to quickly deplete most of your vitamins and minerals.

Agreed, it does sound that way, but it's amazing how many anecdotes there are of people who eat exclusively 1 type of food and thrive on it. I don't think modern intuition about nutrition is likely to stand the test of time.

I've only heard that about carnivore diets, and it makes sense to me. Where can you find all the nutrients necessary for a mammal to survive? In the body of another mammal, of course.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#89

Post by Macha »

I don't know if this is the intention but of the five single food diets, I think I'd take literally any of the other 4 options ahead of the potato diet. But the context felt like the potato option was meant to be the most appealing?
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