Previous Philosophical Transactions:

• JP Callaghan on Lithium Pharmacokinetics
• Lithium in Scottish Drinking Water with Al Hatfield
• M’s Experience with Potatoes-by-Default
• Jon on One Year Post-Potato-Diet
• Neoncube on The Meat and Veggies Diet
• Adam Mastroianni says “please squirt lemon juice on my brain”

From deep within the metabolic mire, “Leo” sent us a transmission on a potato riff: SWAMP TATERS. Potatoes as high fat, high carbs, low protein. The exchange is reproduced below, lightly edited for clarity.

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First Exchange

Leo:

Hey y’all:

A friend of mine and I have been doing an unsanctioned potato-riff (didn’t get around to signing up, didn’t get a good initial weigh-in). Also I can’t remember what day we started but it was probably around January 8. 

I’m down 10+ pounds (from somewhere around 240 to 227; used different scales before I started going to a nearby pharmacy every day or so to use the big ‘health station’) and he’s down probably 20 to 375 (he doesn’t have a scale big enough, is also going to the pharmacy), but was 390+. 

The riff is potatoes + saturated fat (mostly butter, some coconut oil), with calories from the fat no more than maybe 40%. We’ve been strict even about cheat days — only having protein refeeds using bone broth powder for the BCAA restriction as in Brad Marshall’s emergence diet, with a tiny bit of cheese. (The refeed meal is potatoes au gratin boulangeres, with broth in the potatoes and pepper-jack on top). So far a success — we’re both visibly thinner and feeling good. 

A couple of notes:

• I seem to lose -more- weight after refeed meals. If this keeps up, I’ll experiment with adding bone broth every day. 
• I ate a bag of potato chips one day, and then fried up a bunch of potato chips in coconut oil the next day, then went up 4 pounds next weigh-in. Possibly just noise, but have religiously avoided both since.
• He hasn’t eliminated alcohol during this trial, and is still making progress. 

Oh and to make it explicit — we’ll be continuing with the potatoes until we reach our goal weights, and our data for the second month will be better than the first.

SMTM:

So good to hear from you! This is wonderful news.

We’re very interested in this observation about refeeds. We’ve wondered for a while if there might be some kind of second fuel that is the limiting factor, to whatever is causing the weight loss from potatoes. If there were, that would maybe explain why half-tato sometimes works, but often doesn’t, and why some people have so much more success with the potato diet than others.

We like the idea of adding bone broth every day for a week, but then maybe consider following up with a week off, followed by a week adding it back in or something, like an ABA model. If that shows support for bone broth making a difference, maybe folks can riff from there.

We can also imagine that bone broth might have an impact once per week but not the same if done daily. In this case, alternating weeks would also be helpful — you’d see a big weight drop on the first few days of a bone broth week and then less effect after that. 

Leo:

Good thoughts. let’s see:

• On the refeeds:
  1. The motivation behind adding the bone broth was diet adherence: I’m a lifelong lifter, and my (very large) co-experimenter is a now-crippled former athlete, so we both have a history eating a TON of protein. I implemented the refeed protocol in response to him reporting a tendency to cave late at night and eat cheese sometimes, which matched a certain interior discomfort I had been experiencing. Quite possibly just psychological, but we’ve been maintaining adherence better/easier since implementing them.
  2. My understanding of Brad Marshall’s bone broth (in his emergence diet) is to get enough protein without any of the obesogenic BCAAs. I helped a friend out yesterday in the kitchen but the timing was off — by the time my potatoes were done everyone else was eating burritos, and I ended up eating several spoonfuls of cooked hamburger. Weight went up a pound or so this morning and I don’t believe that’s an accident. 
• You’re right about A:B testing. I’ll buy some cream today (I tend not to keep it on hand because it’s too easy to overserve yourself adding it to beverages) and try making the au gratin for a week with no broth and no cheese (the cheese was a confounder, anyway). A recipe I’ve invented for the purposes of this diet is a low-protein au gratin dauphinoise that involves making the ‘crust’ on the top (gratin means crust) out of potato flakes mixed with cream. It works as well for the crustiness without the casein. What I expect is that this will have no effect on weight loss in either direction, assuming we control for cheating.
• Comments on palatability:
  1. Fries defeat the satiating nature of potatoes. Maybe the hot oil and the thin cut allows the heat to more easily destroy the protease inhibitors in potatoes, but i’d have to see the interior temp of potatoes cooked different ways accurately compared to even fully guess this is the case. What I do notice is that even oven-‘fried’ potatoes, if I do them just right, become a food I can eat a ton of without noticing whether or not I’m still actually hungry.
  2. The cheeseless au gratin + colcannon appear the best currently-demonstrated goldilocks option for palatability vs calories. If bone broth clears further trials I’d say that collagen-broth potato chowder and au gratin boulangeres (broth instead of cream) would be the best. Colcannon (mashed potatoes with minimal vegetables in it, traditionally cabbage) requires a lot of butter or cream for appropriate texture.

SMTM:

Great, the ABA designs should tell us a lot! Testing the bone broth is a good starting point. You might also at some point test some of the hypotheses about causes. For example, your results so far are consistent with the BCAA restriction hypothesis, but not very specific evidence for it.

That hypothesis suggests that you should be able to add anything that doesn’t contain BCAAs to this diet without any negative effect, so you could try adding in non-BCAA foods one at a time or something. You could also do an ABA design where you add BCAA powder to your meals directly, to (hopefully) avoid confounders. Hamburger contains BCAAs but it contains a lot of other things too (including lithium, as far as we can tell), it’s suggestive but not a clean test of the hypothesis. 

The most interesting test from a scientific standpoint will be the one where we think there’s a chance one of the conditions might stop the weight loss — see our post about biting the bullet if you haven’t already. From a practical standpoint it’s annoying to interrupt your weight loss, but will be the best sign that we’re getting close to finding the “switch” (or one of the switches at least).

Looking forward to hearing how it goes! 🙂 

Leo:

Ah, yes! I hadn’t read your N=1 series but I agree entirely. 

I’d from the beginning been planning on running this in an ABBB[…]BBBA form, in the sense that I started out making food that was at least 50% potato by calorie, with the rest being saturated fat and cabbage/onions/garlic (sometimes in the form of sauerkraut that I make), with the intention of increasing the tater until I started losing weight. That’s the B. When I reach my goal weight (which barring some miracle will be far sooner than my friend will, given he’s got 150 pounds and negative-6 inches on me, though he’s built like a bull) I’d just add back beef to my own portions (but not his) until I stopped losing weight. 

I’d been thinking of beef as the most obvious source of isoleucine, but you make a good point about the lithium. I have in the past bought bulk BCAA powder and empty capsules and filled them myself (eight years ago on a stint of strictly lifting in the morning despite intermittent fasting on a 20:4 pattern — in retrospect the whole thing was laughable but that’s what I get for not biting the bullet), so I might just buy a big bottle of BCAA tablets and see if I can stop the weight loss with them instead of beef. 

I can already say that adding cabbage (cooked or fermented) appears to have no effects on weight loss, nor does eating massive amounts of capsaicin.

Another thing: I’m experiencing something approaching normal satiety for perhaps the first time in my life. I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for a long time just because once I start eating I don’t stop, and once I eat I crash. So usually I go all day on decaf coffee with butter in it, then eat 4500 kcal of e.g. greasy beef tacos on corn tortillas fried in butter, then become dead to the world. I was never able to lift, barely able to hike after eating. 

That’s all changed. I can eat a bunch of potatoes and lift, or even wait a couple of hours and do sprints or burpees. My IBS is much better, my testosterone levels seem more consistent over the whole day (judging by steady libido and no maudlin period in the evening), and have been sleeping through the night better (less ‘maintenance’ insomnia). I’m a convert already — potato is life.

Second Exchange

Leo: 

Brethren:

Apologies for the long delay, and for this not being as robust a run as I’d intended. I’ve had a lot going on. Only got 3.5 weeks of good weigh-ins. Started a week earlier at probably 240-2, but not on a good scale.

First, the dates with the (good scale) weights:

1/25 – 238
1/26 – 238
1/27 – 236
1/28 – 232
1/29 – 233
1/30 – 233
1/31 – 231
2/1 – 233
2/2 – 231
2/3 – 227
2/4 – 227
2/5 – 226
2/6 – 227
2/7 – 225
2/8 – 225
2/9 – 224
2/10 – 225
2/11- 224
2/12- 223
2/13 – 223
2/14 – 224
2/15 – 224
2/16 – 224
2/17 – 221

My ‘riff’ was adding saturated fat. I wanted to test the metabolic ‘swamp’: high fat, high carbs, low protein. Other potato riffs had reported some dairy, some french fries, etc., but I wanted to control and report the fat intake. 

Protocol was ~7+ pounds of potatoes and at least one stick of butter (often 1.5). After initial weight loss demonstrated that this was working, I wanted to see if additional non-BCAA aminos (i.e. bone broth) would halt it. It didn’t, and I intended to flip that and add just BCAAs, but it’s a good thing I didn’t — I hit a plateau that lasted a week, and would surely have attributed the stoppage to the BCAAs if I’d been taking any. 

17 pounds down in four weeks is a good proof-of-concept of swamping, though. Note that I’m a big guy, and fairly metabolically healthy (I’m barely overweight at 221 and have a fair bit of lean body mass). I was doing this with a friend who was eating roughly equivalent food (slightly less fat) but not weighing in daily. He estimates he lost 15-20 pounds, but he has more LBM than I do. I’d love to see a chart of potato-diet weight loss by LBM rather than by total weight. 

Other consistent elements of the diet were the use of seasonings including MSG and KCl, copious hot sauce, and homemade sauerkraut. Both of us engaged in some kind of intermittent fasting daily as well — my fat intake daily was higher due to blending butter in my coffee in the morning, he just wasn’t eating before noon.

Other notes: a couple of women who ate the same swamp-tater diet a few days reported a reduction in weight of a few pounds, but this isn’t much of a sample. 

Towards the end of the plateau, I was wondering if my metabolism was slowing down (I felt tired and cold more often — this may have been illusory). A couple of days I experimented with stimulating FGF21 in the mornings by eating ~500 calories of table sugar in the am (and no butter). I felt amped while fasting all afternoon, but then ate just as much for supper as I would have eaten between dinner and supper. Probably gained a couple pounds but wasn’t weighing those days. 

I’ll start being more strict with the swamp tater protocol again soon. Overtrained a bit the last few days and hurt all over. Just trying not to psych myself into eating protein as recovery fuel. I should mix up some collagen right now.

Oh, here are my three most successful ‘swamp tater’ recipes. 

Colcannon: (peeled) red potatoes boiled barely enough, then whipped with butter or cream (roughly half stick per five pound bag). while potatoes are boiling, sautee a small head of cabbage, two or three onions, five cloves of garlic pressed (or granulated), and maybe a sliced jalapeno or two. (for sliced, use a mandolin, i’ll link below)

Au gratin: mandolined (peeled) russet potatoes, (optional) cream, hot water, and low-protein bullion (and garlic powder). liquid goes up slightly more than halfway in the taters. then a TINY bit of cheese on top, just barely enough to seal in moisture

Sheet-baked wedges: quartered (peeled) gold potatoes. heat them up by pouring boiling water over them in a bowl, stir until separated and warm, then drain. toss them in a wok with the following: heat a third of a stick of butter, whisk in some frank’s red-hot, a little bullion powder, and granulated garlic. toss them until they’re coated, then put onto baking sheets and cook at 400 until crispy. (do not make these smaller than quarters or they will become ‘fries’ and derange your satiety signaling).

Leo:

I’ve had a lot going on since shortly after I emailed you last, and have found it more or less impossible to stay on any diet. I’ve been largely eating potatoes, sometimes eating a little bread, often eating sugar. 

It feels a bit as I have after weight loss in the past, like what could imagine the experience of an embattled person with an outraged lipostat and part-empty WAT cells might be. Hard to say, beyond 1) fructose sure doesn’t work for me, next time I experiment with using sugar to upregulate my metabolism it’ll be pure glucose; 2) haven’t seemed to suffer as a result of not having more protein; 3) I can now cliff-young-shuffle in zone two (i.e. not even noticing my breathing) as long as I’m not going uphill. This hasn’t been the case for a while, might just be that I’ve been doing a lot of cardio and am 20 pounds lighter; 4) potatoes still taste fine. 

I’m interested in helping map brinespace and will be acquiring a big bucket of confectioner’s glucose as well as bulk supplement bags of magnesium and potassium (maybe in citrate form — KCl makes my teeth hurt). 

I’ll spare you any further reflections I have, as I’ve become a fanatic on linoleic acid (falling short of the colloquial definition of a fanatic: someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject). 

Thanks again for all your good work.