Eating a diet of nothing but potatoes (or almost nothing but potatoes) causes quick, effortless weight loss for many people. It’s not a matter of white-knuckling through a boring diet — people eat as much (potato) as they want, and at the end of a month of spuds they say things like, “I was quite surprised that I didn’t get tired of potatoes. I still love them, maybe even more so than usual?!” (Actual quote from a participant!) And some people lose a similar amount even when eating only 50% potato.

Why the hell does this happen? Well, there are many theories. To help get a sense of which theories are plausible, try to find some boundary conditions, or just more randomly explore the diet-space, we decided to run a Potato Diet Riff Trial. In this study, people volunteer to try different variations on the potato diet for at least one month and let us know how it goes. For example, they might eat nothing but potatoes and always cook their potatoes in olive oil. Or they might eat nothing but potatoes and leafy greens. Or they might eat nothing but potatoes and always eat their potatoes with ketchup. 

The hope is that this will help us figure out if there are other factors that slow, stop, or perhaps accelerate the rate of weight loss we saw on the full potato diet. This will get us closer to figuring out why potatoes cause weight loss in the first place, and might get us closer to curing obesity. We might also discover a new version of the diet that is easier to stick to or causes even more weight loss, or both. 

In the first two months after launching the riff trial, we heard back from ten riffs. Those results are described in the First Potato Riffs Report. Generally speaking, we learned that Potatoes + Dairy seems to work just fine, at least for some people, and we saw more evidence against the mono-diet and palatability hypotheses. 

Since then, we’ve heard back from seventeen new riffs. (Specifically, these are the riffs we heard back from between January 5th and March 18th, 2024.) We will describe these findings in a minute.

More people have their riffs underway or are planning to start soon, so there are more riff trial results in your future. And signups are still open if you want to get involved. But let’s see what we’ve learned so far. 

First we’ll review the overall results, and talk about our interpretation. Then, at the end we’ve included the actual riff proposals and reports from all seventeen participants in an appendix, if you want to read about them in more detail.

Unless otherwise indicated, weight loss numbers are over a period of about 28 days, comparable to the original Potato Diet Community Trial. 

Potatoes + Dairy

Potatoes + Dairy continues to be the most popular riff. Let’s get right to it.

82546219 ate Potatoes + Milk, specifically “because I wanted to prove whoever said ‘no dairy’ wrong”, and lost 19.8 lbs. 

(As before, all these plots have a span of 24 lbs on the y-axis so they can be compared directly.)

32223622 ate Potatoes + Dairy, always potatoes but “dairy … perhaps not every meal but when the mood strikes me!” Results: “Though I struggled to keep a long stretch without cheat days I do not attribute this to the diet itself, rather my work-life balance went to crap and I hardly had the wherewithal to prepare food. This is not typical and was just unfortunate timing for it to happen during this study. In any case, I am happy with the resulting ~5 lbs lost.” This person’s partner also tried the riff and while she did not feel comfortable recording her data, experienced a somewhat stronger effect (see the many interesting details in appendix).

84290728 ate Potato + Dairy, “mainly butter, soured cream, cream; some yoghurt, milk) + ocassional wine”. However, they felt very ill and had to stop after a couple of weeks, and they were not able to record any data. This is an important reminder that some people can’t stand eating this many potatoes, and naturally the potato diet does not work at all for them, even with dairy.

79886833 ate Potatoes + Yoghurt. The verdict? “I really enjoyed it.” See plot:  

37809513 ate Potatoes + “Butter (lots of it)”. A few interesting details here. This participant had previously tried an all-potato diet and wasn’t able to stick with it, but was able to make it through on this riff, though still found it a bit unpleasant. He mostly ate his potatoes steamed, which is notable. In the end he lost 5.3 lbs. 

Potatoes + Dairy + Others

Some people also tried versions of Potatoes + Dairy plus some other stuff, usually vegetables. 

90594710 said, “I’m planning to do the (understandably popular) potato+dairy diet for the first two weeks, and then add in leafy greens for the following two weeks, crossover study style.” This participant had previous success on the potato diet, and notes that while they did lose weight, there was “clearly lost less weight in this riff trial than in my original trial.”

81281674 ate Potatoes + Carrots + Dairy + some other foods, see the appendix for full detail. But safe to say, it was mostly potatoes. They lost 6 lbs in total.

10455414 was an interesting one: Potatoes + Dairy + “Three Sisters”. This participant explains, “I’d like to do the pure potato+dairy for two weeks to see what happens.  One cheat day per week.  Then add in corn.  If that seems to work, I’ll add in the other two of the three sisters: squash and beans.  I’m a member of the Cherokee Nation and think that ‘New World’ grains and veggies are better for you, and that the European additions like beef, chicken, wheat, etc. have screwed up our digestive systems.” He did lose some weight, but he had to deviate from his plan (“I never added the corn. I had some digestive issues so added broccoli, carrots, green beans, and cauliflower.”) and overall this protocol didn’t seem to cause much weight loss:

Potatoes + Protein(s)

Many people have been interested in getting more protein, or concerned about its absence, so we were happy to see several riffs testing the inclusion of various kinds of protein. 

12582676 ate Potatoes + Chicken + White Wine according to a defined protocol (see appendix). He experienced some swings in overall weight but no consistent weight loss, and had problems with energy. “As much as I tried to like this approach, I felt pretty low energy and this is probably not sustainable for me long-term … I need to have energy during the day, and somehow I didn’t end up feeling like I could sustain the required energy level.”

04194992 ate Potato + Red Meat + Dairy. Unfortunately they had to stop after only two weeks, from running out of willpower. This may not reflect on the riff, as this participant is unusually hungry. “I haven’t felt satiety since puberty, e.g. I always want to eat more (I had normal satiety reaction as a child, but this was suddenly lost). … To be honest, I don’t think I would’ve done better with just potato and dairy, I’m too hungry by nature. The amounts of potato and dairy I could consume if allowed to do so ad libitum, are large.”

37791108 ate Potato + Vegan Protein, “either a protein shake or a protein bar with each potato meal… My preferred protein powder is pea protein.” She reports: “I would consider the potato + plant protein a success. I lost 10 lbs/month on full tato but I suspect that I lost muscle during this as well. On potato riff I lost 6 lbs at day 24 but I did not feel like I lost muscle.” She says she might continue this riff so maybe we will hear from her again in a few months! :‎) 

41470698 ate Potatoes + Eggs, though he says, “in hindsight I believe it’s more fair to say I ate three things: Potatoes, Eggs and Olive Oil.” While there was some movement, he generally maintained his starting weight. 

Esoteric Riffs / Other

Finally, there were a few riffs that are hard to categorize or are on a theme all their own.

In the announcement post for this riff trial, we said:

If the whole food hypothesis is correct, eating these processed foods should make the potato diet much less effective. But if you lose weight on potatoes + gummy worms, that’s evidence against the whole foods hypothesis.

22293376 took us up on this with the Potatoes + Skittles riff. “I intend to follow this for a month and see what happens,” he said at the start. “My reasoning is that I believe adherence will be easier when allowing occasional treats, and because I don’t think that refined sugar has a moral valence.” He was right. In fact, “I was astonished at just how well it went.” The last few cheat days here were simply a poorly-timed vacation, but as you can see it didn’t really matter. Check it out:

32602136 went back to that standard potato diet, “plain potato diet, salt, black pepper, nothing else.” As you can see, there were some breaks, but there was also mostly steady weight loss while on the diet: 

75452454 tried a “Whole Foods” + Chocolate diet. This is not really a potato diet, though she did say about 10% of her diet each day was potatoes. In her report she says, “To be honest that was pretty bad, I couldn’t stick to the diet I’d planned for the life of me and definitely gained some weight. If it’s all good I’m going to try a different tact and see how that goes.”

She then did another riff, under the ID 75462073. This was a complex riff, “potatoes + other vegetables + fruit + limited proteins (soy, eggs, fish) + limited dairy (butter)”. She did lose some weight but overall describes the experience as “middling results!”

98821299 ate a diet of fried potatoes supplemented with other foods (e.g. breadrolls, pasta, rice, gingerbread, mayo, soy skyr, toast, etc.). This was more like a half-tato diet as far as we can tell. On this protocol they gained weight pretty consistently: 

Interpretation

Potatoes + Dairy continues to work for many people. However, it doesn’t work for everyone. Adding other ingredients, even fruits and vegetables, seems like it may be enough to interfere, though this is based on just a few cases. 

So far we don’t see a big winner on adding protein, though vegan protein does seem to do better. The egg riff and the meat riffs didn’t work, at least not for these people. This is pretty interesting given that meat and eggs are probably both high in lithium, though in such a small sample size there are many complicating factors. It would be good to see more protein riffs, especially riffs where someone starts off on the all-potato diet (to show that it works for them) and then adds a protein halfway through. We’d also like to see someone else try lentils, since they are high in protein and there was a big Potatoes + Lentils success in the first round of riffs.  

Potatoes + Skittles has a proof of concept. It works just fine, at least for this one participant. More evidence against “mono” and “palatability” as well as “potatoes are a whole food” explanations. We’d love to see more processed sweets riffs, maybe even a Potatoes + 1 Cup Sugar/Day riff!

We’re not entirely sure what to make of the other riffs.

So far it looks like dairy is compatible with the potato diet, or at least some forms of dairy. Vegan protein and sweets, or at least skittles, may be compatible as well. 

Going forward, we are most interested in the following kinds of riffs.

The first is a riff where you add just one thing to the potato diet, and show that you still lose weight. This shows that the new ingredient can be compatible with the potato diet, and if we get a couple of riffs like that, like we have with dairy, it suggests that the new ingredient is broadly compatible. We’d love to do a random walk towards the efficient frontier of fat loss, and maybe there is some super version of the potato diet that has yet to be discovered. (Perhaps Potatoes + 1 Cup Sugar/Day 👀)

The second is a riff that clearly shows that some ingredient stops the potato diet. To do this convincingly, you need to first show that you lose weight on the potato diet (since some people simply don’t), and that you stop losing weight when you add this new ingredient. The most interesting riffs going forward might start with 1 or 2 weeks of the classic potato diet as baseline, so it’s clear that the original version works for you. Then you can add one or two ingredients and see if they stop the effect. 

However, ruling foods in or out isn’t our main interest. What we really want is to make theoretical progress towards the question, why does the potato diet work (and sometimes not work)? Similarly, we would love to know why the half-tato diet works great for a few people but has a tiny effect on average. Maybe it has to do with what you’re eating in the other half?

We feel that the riffs so far have ruled out explanations like “the potato diet is a mono diet (and those work for some reason)”, “the potato diet is low-palatability, ignore the people who say how delicious it is”, and “on the potato diet you are eating nothing but whole foods.” However, if you disagree and feel that you can make a coherent case for why, we’d love to hear from you. Same if you have other explanations that might be tested by some new riff(s).

Sign Up Now

Signups for the potato riff trial are still open, and will probably stay open for all of 2024. You can read the original blog post here and sign up at the bottom. Feel free to replicate one of the riffs described above, try an extension, or invent your own riff. It’s up to you!

We’ll be back in a couple months when we have a new batch of riff trials big enough to report. For now, enjoy the full riff reports below.‎ ‎:‎) 

---

82546219 – Potatoes + Milk

Riff 

I plan to eat only potatoes and drink one cup of milk per day. CuoreDiVetro mixed dark chocolate with 250ml of milk in their trial. While it’s highly possible the dark chocolate is the active ingredient, I want to isolate the milk as a variable. Milk also contains Stearic Acid so it will be interesting to see whether it’s enough on its own. Europeans have been drinking milk far longer than they’ve been eating chocolate so I’m also curious about that component. Also by drinking milk I won’t have to supplement as much b12.

Report

Thanks for this! I’ve been following you from the very early days. I watched the original potato diet with much fascination and so it was great fun to be involved in this round. 

Here’s my report as such, it’s more just a rambling account on how I went rather than anything resembling scientific rigour. I’m quite interested in the science of it all but content to be a data point this time around.

I’m a pretty stubborn person. These kinds of extreme diets seem to suit me as I’m largely incapable of moderation or calorie restriction but very good and really firm rules. I’m also the designated waste disposal unit at any dinner table. A feature which is used by every friend group I’m in. I’m always the residual consumer who finishes all the food at the table. Partly because I hate to see anything go to waste, partly because I like it, and partly because that is the role I’ve come to assume in these friendship groups.

I chose potato and milk because I wanted to prove whoever said “no dairy” wrong. It just didn’t make sense to me why dairy would negate any effect the potatoes had. I liked the various theories about stearic acid and given milk is a good source of it thought that would put it to the test. I didn’t know that pretty much all your other participants were going to try something similar. I also very much thought the Riff trials were about isolating a single particular item. So when the first batch of Riff trials were released a few days into my experiment I was shocked to see others had done dairy as an entire category, what I would have done for a little cheese.

In saying that the first few weeks of the potato and milk diet were enjoyable. In a weird way there was a freedom in knowing I couldn’t eat anything else. I actually love both milk and potatoes and eating them exclusively almost wasn’t a challenge. At least not for the first few weeks. Experimenting with different ways of doing potatoes was fun and knowing I could eat as much as I wanted didn’t make it a chore. I’m a reasonably active person and my biggest worry was that this would effect my energy levels or performance in training, fears that were largely misguided. Towards the end I had one day where I felt incredibly faint after exercise but this may be more likely down to dehydration. I definitely had a bit of trouble with dehydration early in the diet, my urine was incredibly dark, I assume that’s from a drop in water content from what I was eating. I just doubled the amount of water I was drinking until I felt I was back to my baseline level of hydration.

I got many incredulous looks when telling people I was only eating potatoes. Most people were excited to see how it would pan out, many however didn’t believe it was “possible”. I deliberately kept it from my immediate family because they would think it was stupid. This was borne out when they did find out at the end of the 4th week and told me as much. Once I got known as the potato guy things also got easier because people stopped pushing me to eat other things or putting me through the Spanish Inquisition.

Probably the hardest part of the diet was prepping enough potatoes to take to work and for after work events. I play trivia several times a week, go to a weekly dinner at a friend’s place, and do a couple of group exercise things at night. Not having anything prepped meant it would be fries or packets of chips for dinner, both I grew quite sick of. In saying that I treated myself to some KFC chips on 3 different occasions. Something I normally reserve for when the State of Origin and NRL Grand Final are on.

The routine I came up with was to roast about 8kg of potatoes on the Sunday evening and box them up to be reheated through the week. I also boiled some potatoes on Sunday and boxed them, they could then be cut into discs and fried (my favourite format) or just eaten whole in a pinch. On top of this I tried hasselbacks, mash, baked, chips, and rosti’s. You’d think I would have eaten a lot of mash given my milk allowance but I actually wanted to drink the milk separately. Partly because it was often the highlight of my day, partly because I wanted to keep the variables as low as possible, and partly because I only actually felt like mash a couple of times. I originally planned to drink exactly 250ml of milk but that proved too difficult to measure when not in my own kitchen. So some days I was having about a litre and some days a small cup. All the milk I drank was full cream, I find skim too watery.

In terms of how many potatoes I ended up eating I wish I’d been able to count each one and weigh them all. I’d say my biggest day I had around 5kg of potatoes and my smallest around 200g. One thing I definitely think happened for me is I actually just ate less calories. As I could no longer provide clean-up service at dinners with other people, particularly my partner, that was a massive drop in consumption. I also have a big sweet tooth and the removal of refined sugars probably could have made me lose weight on its own. I definitely felt full more easily from straight potatoes. I guess I was also in diet mode and therefore was watching my consumption quite closely.

Towards the end of the diet I was quite keen for it to end. Mainly because I was really starting to crave fresh fruit and vegetables. I couldn’t stop thinking about fresh granny smith apples. I was also craving citrus. My partner started joking I had scurvy given how much I was talking about grapefruit, limes, and lemons. I did notice in the last two weeks I started to develop mouth ulcers, something that I don’t normally experience. By the end they were quite bad. I was taking a B multivitamin and as one of my friend’s loved to say the potato is nearly nutritionally complete so I’m not completely sure what the cause of that could have been. I wondered if it was a change in the bacteria in my mouth. I often thought about my gut biome and the starving little guys who feasted on my usually very diverse diet having only potatoes to eat.

Overall I lost 19.8 Pounds or 9kg. The first 10 pounds were easy and I knew I’d plateau for a bit and then I tend to have a few weeks lag before my body realises it’s a new regime and then it starts responding. So I wasn’t surprised when I lost the rest of the weight in that final week. I’m really happy with that and it’s a great start to the year. I should mention that going into this I’d had a huge Christmas. Every year I put on around 5kg over the Christmas holidays. That weight always seems to come off quite rapidly regardless of the approach because it’s just freshly put on and my sort of resting bitch weight seems to be 110kg. I also decided to do the potato diet about two weeks out and basically gave myself a hall pass to eat however poorly I wanted to in the lead-in. My main task was trying to chop through all the chocolate I got for Christmas so it wasn’t in the house come potato time. This meant I rolled up to the start line at 115kg and I lost that 5kg in the first week alone.

It was tempting on day 29 to keep going but I need at least a week to reset. It’s certainly nice to poop properly again. The social component of it was actually the hardest part, going out to dinner or to friend’s places and only being able to eat potatoes is not easy after the novelty wears off. It is however a good diet trick to have up my sleeve given I’m getting married at the end of the year and I’ve still got a bit to lose before I get to a weight I’d be comfortable waiting at the end of the aisle with.

Regards, 

82546219

32223622 – Potatoes + Dairy

Riff 

I will be having dairy with my potatoes. Perhaps not every meal but when the mood strikes me! I am open to suggestions however. I want to do potatoes for 28 days regardless, figure I could collect some data along the way :‎) 

I would like to start as soon as possible so please let me know!

Report

Hello,

I am writing to inform you that I have completed 28 days of the potato diet (and a final weigh-in on day 29). Overall, this diet was a great experience and while I don’t think I will be as strict going forward, I will definitely continue to eat more potatoes than I used to. Though I struggled to keep a long stretch without cheat days I do not attribute this to the diet itself, rather my work-life balance went to crap and I hardly had the wherewithal to prepare food. This is not typical and was just unfortunate timing for it to happen during this study. In any case, I am happy with the resulting ~5 lbs lost.

As for going “potato mode” like previous subjects have described, I do think I experienced it a little bit. Days where I was not hungry at all but had to remind myself to eat were common, especially in the beginning. As much as I love(d) cheese and sour cream, these honestly weren’t that enticing on this diet, so personally the added dairy component of this riff didn’t do much for me. Aside from butter, still love butter! And I am so happy living in Canada where I can get poutine just about anywhere. Feels more like a “meal” than just a large order of fries.

My partner, who decided to tag along for this diet (but absolutely hates data collection and diets so did not want to record anything for this study haha), definitely experienced more of the “potato mode” than I did. Any comfort foods she ate, she says the flavour was enhanced by a thousand. Despite that, she still had trouble finishing these cheat meals. Interestingly, she does not like her favourite chocolates that much anymore, as now the chocolate tastes off, and the fillings are too heavy (O’ Henry’s with reese’s peanut butter). I had the same thought, and I enjoyed these chocolates previously as well! Note that she didn’t know about this “effect” of the diet until she experienced it and I told her about it. She is 5’0″ and started at 156 lbs and ended at 149.

What’s most shocking to me in all this is how my perception of food has changed. I would actively avoid potatoes at most fast food places, instead opting to get, for example a chicken sandwich and nuggets. Because “common sense” was that potatoes have too many carbs and carbs = bad and protein = good.

84290728 – Potato + Dairy

Riff 

30 days, potato + diary (any – but mainly butter, soured cream, cream; some yoghurt, milk)+ocassional wine. 

Thinking: satiety effect due to proteinase inhibitors, v high in potatoes. I have previously noticed high satiety when eating significant amounts of whole wheat (also high in proteinase inhibitors) + soured cream. Expect normal protein levels to moderate the effect – hence low protein. High fat diary is in there to make the carbs palatable. Wine to maintain social life whilst doing it. 

Would like to run 30 days, whole wheat + diary and  30 days oats + diary, on same principle. 

Report

Just an update – I am afraid after trying various things over the past two weeks or so I have given up on eating potato + diary .

Reason is feeling ill on it – eating anywhere over half kg potato per day would make me nauseous, extremely thirsty, mildly dizzy, within 2/3 hrs of eating. My digestion also went from perfect to diarrhea every couple of days and cramps. Looks like potatoes do not agree with me if eaten every day in substantial amounts. I don’t have any explanations for this – maybe my ancestors did not evolve to eat potato? 

I have tried having salty water & eating pickles as I thought electrolite imbalance may be the problem – this resulted in a slight improvement, but not substantial enough to make  it manageable. Peeling the potatoes did not help much either.

Have not put anything on spreadsheet as I basically ‘cheated’ every day due to potato ‘side effects’. On average I ate about 400-500g potato / day with some days of no potato due to feeling unwell. More than one meal of potato per day was not manageable for me.  When not eating potato, I have reverted to eating wholewheat. I have lost 2.6kg over 2 weeks, mostly within the first few days presumably water weight? My appetite was relatively low throughout, eating around 1600-1700kcal on average. 

What’s next? Probably doing this with wholewheat + diary instead of potato, as I know I can tolerate it?

79886833 – Potatoes + Yoghurt 

Riff

Potatos + cream/yoghurt / I think that’s a marvelous combination and I know I may not have enough of it thus it will help me to keep it up to the very end of the experiment.

Report

Hi!

I have finished my four weeks. My riff was only yoghurt eventually. I really enjoyed it. My sheet is ready for you.

I hope it will help you!

37809513 – Potatoes + Butter (lots of it)

Riff 

I’ll be doing potatoes + butter, for 4 weeks.

I’ve tried a potato diet before, and lasted about a week as I found pure potatoes too unpalatable, and too much work to peel all that everyday.

My rationale is that I’m pretty sold on the low PUFA + low BCAA idea, even though I didn’t lose weight on a rice-based high-carb low-fat low-protein supplemented with bone broth diet and all kind of pills before.

I wanted to do another trial, without supplement this time, just in case one of them sabotaged my weight loss, but I don’t feel comfortable doing that on mostly nutrient-devoid white rice. I also wanted to try high fat instead of low fat, as I experienced some increased inflammation during the low-fat diet, which I blame on the PUFA released from my body fat (the symptoms I experienced went away when I went PUFA-free, and made a come back on a low-fat diet).

Also, potatoes cooked in butter are delicious!

Report

Hi!

Just updating you about my potato riff trial! It went well! I lost 5.3 lbs, which isn’t as much as many others, but I’m still pretty happy with it given that I’ve tried and fail to lose weight with keto, the emergence diet and intermittent fasting this last year, without success.

So what did I do? My riff was potatoes + butter (lots of it).

My typical meal would be steamed potatoes, slathered with butter, seasoned with salt, pepper, and either dijon’s mustard or apple cider vinegar.

I tried other ways to cook potatoes for variety (over roasted, sauteed, …), but in the end the steamed ones were the ones that felt the most satisfying. I didn’t grow tired of them, and still found this meal delicious at the end of the trial. Mid-trial I started to add 15g of fire in a bottle’s stearic a day, melted in the butter, which I replaced with a couple squares of dark chocolate a day for the few last days. I also had some alcohol throughout the trial, mostly bailey’s and vodka mixers (technically, it’s dairyfat and potatoes, right?).

How did I feel? Honestly, not too great. I was a bit bloated at the beginning, but that faded quickly.  I tried eating baby potatoes with the skin once, which is a mistake I never did again as it gave me horrible bloating all night, and a bad aftertaste that’d come back anytime I thought about them. Mid-trial, I started to have some mild feeling of nausea and distaste for potatoes between meals, which weirdly disappeared completely once I started eating (potatoes…). I went from feeling like I was sick of potatoes while I had an empty stomach to loving them once the first bite was in my mouth. During the last week, I had a headache pretty much every day, and the thought of any protein-rich meal would be extremely appetizing, even things I don’t particularly like (like lentils). So when the 4 weeks were over, I broke the diet immediately.

In conclusion? There is definitely something magic about the potato diet, which isn’t impaired by butter. But based on my symptoms, and cravings on the last week, I think this version was too low in protein for me (after all, the butter is diluting the potatoes’ protein). Maybe in some other nutrients too. I might also be reactive to the solanine or other nightshade compound. I tried a full-potato diet before, and I lasted less than a week. The butter allowed me to do this one for the full 4 weeks.

I’m a bit tired of weird restrictive diets at this point, so I’m back on my usual one, but I’ll probably try other riffs in the future, this time focused on trying to reap the weight loss benefit while still feeling good.

Thanks a lot for organizing this, this was a lot of fun to do, and I love reading about people’s various attempts at solving the puzzle that is metabolic disease!

90594710 – Potato + Dairy, then Potato + Dairy + Greens

Riff 

I’m planning to do the (understandably popular) potato+dairy diet for the first two weeks, and then add in leafy greens for the following two weeks, crossover study style.

Report

My 4 weeks of data are in! Was, of course, fun as always. … I didn’t do any precise measurement for the leafy greens, but can weigh a sample of spinach and then back-estimate how much of that I ate during a given day with spinach indicated. I also have weight data for the 12 days before I started if that would be of any use. (Interesting note: I dropped more weight in this period, Jan 1st to Jan 13th, than I did during my actual trial, without doing anything special. Just holiday weight going away? Unsure.)  

For context, I did the original potato diet (though I allowed myself dairy during that time) and went from ~165lbs to ~158lbs–in other words, it worked pretty alright for me. (I’m on the taller side, so reminder, lower starting BMI -> lower expected % weight loss.) I’ve mostly fluctuated around the midpoint of that range since then. My starting weight for this riff trial was near the lower end of that, at ~159lbs.

Ok, with that out of the way, my riff was that dairy was once again fair game, but this time, I would also allow green leafy vegetables for the last two weeks. No particular reason for this, beyond that I had started craving them during my original trial–a bit of an odd craving, as I’m usually not as good about getting my greens as I should be, though I do also get that craving sometimes even when I’m not thinking about what I eat. Well, that and that leafy greens are “healthy”, so… something something, should make the diet work better, maybe? Turns out my answer to that is “Ehh, looks inconclusive to me.” I did lose weight overall during both the (potato+dairy) and the (potato+dairy+greens) periods: 1.1lbs and 0.4lbs, respectively. Losing less weight while eating greens doesn’t score a ton of points for that approach. However, those numbers can be a bit misleading, as they’re sensitive to local noise at the endpoints of the time periods. The slope of the trendline was more negative when I did have greens: -.0146 without greens vs -.0538 with them.

So I clearly lost less weight in this riff trial than in my original trial. Why? Well, it wasn’t the greens; even if I had lost 1.1lbs in the second half of my riff trial like I did in the first half, that still only gets me to about a third of what I lost in my original trial. One answer might lie in the types of potato preparation I did. In my original trial, my usual diet was hash browns for breakfast, and baked potatoes with a bit of cheese and/or sour cream for lunch and dinner. During my riff trial, I had way more of what people usually consider unhealthy potatoes: hash browns for breakfast, frozen -> oven-baked fries for lunch, and often milk-and-butter-heavy mashed potatoes for dinner; also, about one bowl (like, cereal bowl sized, not popcorn bowl sized) of potato chips a day. I also had way more dairy than in my original trial, snacking on cheese, putting cheese in my hash browns, putting whole milk in my coffee (which I always drank black during my original trial), and so forth. My deviations from these typical meals in the original diet were also fewer and less drastic; I’d occasionally have fries for dinner, but then be back to 2 meals a day of baked potato, whereas during my riff, the exceptions were more along the lines of “cook some potatoes and spinach in a boatload of heavy cream” and then that would be what I ate for the next couple days. Lastly, my vegetables when I had them were–while I did stick entirely to leafy greens–underwhelming from an “eating healthy veggies” perspective. I went through about a pound of spinach, a little over 4lbs of Brussels sprouts (some steamed, but mostly roasted with oil), and one 12oz bag of romaine lettuce. Not too terribly much healthy greenery for a 2-week span where greenery is one of the 3 types of food I can eat. I don’t think exercise was a factor; the only real exercise I did during either trial was go for the occasional walk, and I strongly suspect I got more walking in during my riff than my first trial.

Anyway, first and foremost, this was delicious and fun (and very easy). If you’re still thinking about doing a riff trial and don’t feel strongly about which one to do, I endorse this one as being enjoyable. (Probably less so than potatoes and chocolate, but hey.) If I were to do it again, the changes I would make are:

– Measure more stuff. In my original trial I tracked about a dozen variables and eventually found it a bit tedious. I overcorrected in my riff trial though, only really tracking my weight and a freeform notes field. I definitely wish I’d done more quantitative measurements, such as precise amounts of dairy and greens.

– Lean harder into the greens as a source of fresh, leafy joy rather than just yet another thing to be fried (I often threw spinach in the pan with my hash browns) or cooked with oil. I think I’d’ve had a more enjoyable time and gotten more interesting data if I’d cut out most of my roasted sprouts and instead gone through like 10 bags of romaine.

– Higher starting weight? Is that a thing I’m allowed to say I’d change? I don’t exactly have full control over it (I’ve never tried to gain weight and don’t know if I could intentionally do so–nor have I really tried to lose it outside of mad potato science) and it feels sort of dishonest to try to juice up your weight–either artificially or by waiting for a natural high point in your fluctuation–before starting a diet, even if you have a maybe-somewhat-valid reason to think it makes scientific sense to do so.

81281674 – Potatoes + Carrots + Dairy + Misc.

Riff 

Nearly all potatoes, carrots, some dairy. Allow ketchup, seasoning, and oil without restriction. However, I work somewhere that provides free lunch, so if they happen not to have potatoes, I’m going to just eat a light vegetarian+chicken lunch of whatever’s available. This time around my primary goal is to lose weight, so I’m going to be conservative and stick mostly to potatoes apart from the convenience of free lunches. After I reach my goal of -15 lbs, I may try adding bread to get more data into the hypothesis that bread halts weight loss from the potato diet.

Report

Hey, I finally got around to filling in the spreadsheet (I had been tracking in a weight app and personal notes until then) and noticed I’m already four weeks in, so here’s that email.

Things seem to be going well, and I’m going to continue until I get to my goal of 155 lb, then add bread and keep going, as planned.

Eyeballing my data, it looks like I was stagnant Feb 7-12, though I can’t think of a reason for that.

FYI I’ve been subtracting the weight of my poop every morning to reduce variance. Hope that doesn’t mess you up.

Let me know if you have any questions.

10455414 – Potatoes + Dairy + “Three Sisters”

Riff 

I’d like to do the pure potato+dairy for two weeks to see what happens.  One cheat day per week.  Then add in corn.  If that seems to work, I’ll add in the other two of the three sisters: squash and beans.  I’m a member of the Cherokee Nation and think that “New World” grains and veggies are better for you, and that the European additions like beef, chicken, wheat, etc. have screwed up our digestive systems.  

Report

I was initially planning on doing the potato diet for a few weeks, then adding corn, squash and beans.  This is a Native diet – it uses nothing from the “old world” but only what Native Americans ate before the Europeans arrived.

I never added the corn.  I had some digestive issues so added broccoli, carrots, green beans, and cauliflower.  I had a glass of wine most nights, and a cheat night every Friday.

Here’s what went wrong:  I REALLY like potatoes.  I wolfed down bag after bag of Cape Cod Kettle Cooked chips for two weeks, along with a few visits to Five Guys.  I was in heaven.  But I didn’t lose weight for the first two weeks.  What’s amazing is that I didn’t gain any!

When I cut back on the chips and fries, and substituted more baked potatoes, my weight started dropping.  I also started lifting weights, so my fat loss is probably greater than my weight loss.

The net is that I lost about 5 pounds in five weeks.  

Quitting now.  May go back on it later.

12582676 – Potatoes + Chicken + White Wine

Riff 

My riff (description I sent in the beginning): 

1. unlimited whole potato, maximum source of calories possible 
2. measured doses of chicken meat (probably 20-40g of extra protein/day) in addition to potatoes because i worry that potatoes don’t give me enough protein -> muscle loss (i need ~70g pure protein according to online calculators) – might substitute for ~30g of protein from canned sardines when out of chicken (easier) 
3. 3 bottles of white wine on the weekends (fri sat sun) 
4. likely to completely fast on Monday because it makes me feel better  

Cooking: 

• * simply pan-fried with a bit of olive oil, OR baked in oven, OR boiled in a chicken soup (for soup will eat all of it so no minerals/nutrients are wasted) 
• * when eating out with friends, may eat fries to keep company but nothing else. Also may eat frozen hash browns when in super-hurry at home, but still potatoes. 
• * regular dried spices (salt, pepper, dried dill weed, cumin, etc.) 
• * will do my best to take the potato skins off because you told me that lots of skins lead to indigestion, but that’s a lot of work, so sometimes just cut up whole 
• * no dairy, tomatoes, etc. – just maximum potatoes, supplemented with 20-40g of chicken protein, with measured wine on the weekends.

Report

just wanted to share some notes on my recently completed riff (12582676):

* I stuck to the rules as described in that doc pretty well, cheated only for two days or so during the holidays, as marked in there.

* There are pretty big day-to-day variations, at first because I weighed at different times, later not entirely sure why, but I diligently weighed multiple times each time and recorded everything as is.

* I can think of a few factors: some days I was too lazy to cook enough potatoes so didn’t get nearly enough calories, a few other days ate too much junk potatoes like frozen tater tots or french fries when eating out, maybe that contributed to ups/downs in the numbers

* Overall, as much as I tried to like this approach, I felt pretty low energy and this is probably not sustainable for me long-term. That’s probably the biggest problem for me, I can deal with routine and cooking, but I need to have energy during the day, and somehow I didn’t end up feeling like I could sustain the required energy level.

Fun experiment and I’m looking forward to more experiments in the future!

04194992 – Potato + Red Meat + Dairy

Riff 

Potato+fatty dairy+red meat. I have chronically lowish ferritin levels so I don’t want to skip meat; I like my coffee with milk/creme, so I won’t skip dairy. Therefore, this seems to be the only potato riff diet available to me.

I’ve kept myself at normal weight my whole life with great effort; I haven’t felt satiety since puberty, e.g. I always want to eat more (I had normal satiety reaction as a child, but this was suddenly lost). When eating moderately so that I keep stable normal weight my homeostasis mechanism figures there’s a famine and downregulates heat production and immune response etc, which is not healthy. A month ago I went through a 6-week “keto-diet” (in quotation marks because I ate so much keto-food that I never really reached ketosis) and slowly lost some weight without going into famine mode. However, keto diet is awfully expensive, especially when cooking for a family of four, and also I was badly craving for starchy foods. Yet the high amount of fat may have allowed me to lose weight without physiologically starving, for the first time in my life. So I’ll try potatoes (cheap) with fat (prevents starvation), maybe this works. 

I’ll try to eat meat regularly but not too much (in case high protein makes people fat*). I’ll use heavy cream in coffee, butter in food, and sometimes maybe eat peaces of pure butter from the fridge, in case I get too hungry. Potatoes either mushed, baked or fried. I’ll supplement iron, B12 (and some other Bs), C and D vitamin, that’s my usual.

Will start on 8th January, I’ll try to stay on the diet for 4 weeks, but there’s a high chance that I’ll stop earlier if it turns out to be unbearable. 

___

* It looks like the human diet science has made an almost full circle, starting with blaming fat intake, then sugar and starch, and now it has reached proteins at last. I’m waiting for the blame to fall on fats again, just to be sure it goes in circles. 

Report

Dear SMTM,

I’m reporting the results of my diet trial (number 04194992, potato+redmeat+dairy).

I quit my trial after two weeks, sorry. Mainly I just ran out of willpower and also I didn’t see any difference from a garden-variety calorie-counting diet. Which may be expected, as potatoes, red meat plus fatty dairy together are a diverse kind of diet, with all the usual macronutrients nicely present.

General information: I decided to keep meat consumption at around 100g a day, which is quite moderate, I thought. I also restricted dairy to reasonable amounts and ate potatoes by far the most. I started out counting calories every day just to know how much I eat and always stopped eating at around 2000 kcal. For context, online calculators tell me to consume 1800 kcal per day to stay at a constant weight. I wanted to eat much more, of course. So I never ate potatoes ad libitum. Should I eat potatoes ad libitum, I’d get very fat very soon. (I once tried to start the potato-only diet, but couldn’t last more than a week, cravings for other foods got too strong.)

This diet started with a nice clear water loss in 2-4 days, then a plateau, some more weight loss after I further reduced the intake of calories a week in (deliberately but against my will as usual). Then another plateau, an inevitable cheat day at my child’s birthday followed by weight gain, and soon after that I gave in. Started with BMI at 24.6 and ended up at 23.7.

I wasn’t horribly hungry or horribly cold, but I thought about food all the time and wanted to eat much more than I did. Also craved for fresh fruits.  

So I would call this diet not working. That supports the conclusions of previous trials by other people who combined potatoes with red meat. Maybe fatty dairy and any other fat would be okay but the protein in even a small amount of meat ruins everything? To be honest, I don’t think I would’ve done better with just potato and dairy, I’m too hungry by nature. The amounts of potato and dairy I could consume if allowed to do so ad libitum, are large.

I don’t know if this is any use but it’s still a non-zero amount of information.

Cheers,

T

37791108 – Potato + Vegan Protein

Riff 

I want to do potato with vegan protein. So either a protein shake or a protein bar with each potato meal. I estimate the breakdown would be 25% calories from protein, 5-10% oil or seasoning for potatoes and 65-70% potato. No restrictions on preparation of potato. My preferred protein powder is is pea protein. I also eat protein bars with peanut and soy and wheat gluten. My plan is to try it for January then re-assess.

Report

Hello Slime Molds,

I would consider the potato + plant protein a success. I lost 10 lbs/month on full tato but I suspect that I lost muscle during this as well. On potato riff I lost 6 lbs at day 24 but I did not feel like I lost muscle.

I actually screwed up the protocol on day 25 and 26 because I went on a vacation and ate like a pig. This was a really bad month for me to do this experiment. Earlier, I had 3 days where I was trapped at work and had to eat their non-potato catering. I had several social events where I ate things like birthday cake to be a part of the group. However, I did not find myself craving these “forbidden” foods so much as I wanted to participate in the gatherings.

Overall I am very happy and am going to continue the protocol, with breaks for social situations. I think even more than the weight loss, it is a huge quality of life boost to feel satiety. It sucks being hungry all the time. Even if I am not dieting, there is a constant gnawing hunger. 

With bread, pasta, rice, and even salad I can go from completely full to starving in 45-60 min. With potatoes I have a more lasting satiety that can go for 2-4 hours depending on various factors.

I seasoned my potatoes so boringness was not really a factor in my diet. Eating beans or tofu for protein did not really seem to effect my results vs a straight protein bar or shake. Ketchup did not seem to effect my results but I also use a no sugar added ketchup. I used some oils and margarine to cook with but tried to use them sparingly and keep it under 5% of my total daily caloric intake.

Also I found out that I have anemia and have probably had it for years. And that I have had shitty doctors who ignored my bloodwork that whole time. I started IV iron treatments for malabsorption in the middle of the potato riff diet. But the doctor said it would take 21-28 days for new blood cells to grow, so I wouldn’t see the results of the iron treatments yet.

41470698 – Potatoes + Eggs

Riff 

I want to try potato + eggs, both ad libitum. 

Reasoning: I’ve previously had great success with the slow carb diet from the book the “four hour body”. Eggs were a staple breakfast item there. Because I had success I believe potato plus eggs should also work. Furthermore eggs are super tasty and contain a ton of nutrients which seems good.

Report

Hello SMTM,

I have completed the potato riff trial 4 weeks. You can publish this text anonymously in any way you see fit.

I was planning to make a detailed description of my experience, but I’m unsure how to make coherent thoughts about this experience. So I have just written down some tidbits. Make of them what you will.

This was truly novel and weird. I have never done an experiment like this.

Beforehand I set myself to only eat Potatoes and Eggs. In hindsight I believe it’s more fair to say I ate three things: Potatoes, Eggs and Olive Oil. I’m a huge olive oil enjoyer and that’s also how I like my eggs. Adding to that the oven fried potatoes to that results in a good quantity of olive oil. So I think it would be fair to say I ate a lot of olive oil. I have stayed tot the protocol almost every day of the 4 weeks.

I think I marked 3 cheat days. Probably it’s like 4, as one evening I just wanted something different.

I probably ate more eggs than my bodies was telling me to eat. At certain points during the 4 weeks I didn’t really want to eat eggs, but I also didn’t want to peel & prepare potatoes. Sometimes I then did indeed make potatoes, but sometimes I still ate some eggs instead. I should probably have eaten potatoes instead, but I didn’t have the willpower. 

That was one thing that I was surprised by. The sheer amount of potatoes I had to peel. Finding the time in my schedule to do that was interesting. After a while I just started peeling 3 kilos of potatoes in one sitting. I feel like meal prep is very important for following any of these experiments. 

I started trying to mark different things on the sheet, but the effort of even doing the experiment won in the end.

Recipe discovery: Spanish omelets, It’s basically eggs, potato and olive oil, perfect! Hard to make well though, I had mixed results keeping the kitchen and the floor clean.

Tidbit about eggs: In “4 Hour Body” Tim Ferriss recommends eating eggs without yolks or organic eggs. Not sure if this matters, but perhaps there is some substantial difference between organic and non-organic eggs. I stuck to organic eggs for the whole experiment. For the Netherlands, this article lists the different between our “Scharreleieren”, “Vrije uitloopeieren” and “Biologische eieren”: https://www.bnnvara.nl/kassa/artikelen/scharrel-biologisch-of-vrije-uitloopei-wat-is-nou-het-verschil. I only ate “Biologische eieren”.

Bowel movements were truly weird for the first 4-5 days. I had some weird diarrhea, that’s different from the diarrhea I regularly get with heavily processed food. I usually have it the day after when I ordered a pizza for example. With this experiment it was weird though. After eating the sweet potatoes it seems like they just passed through me with no ‘processing’ by my body. It seems that my body adjusted afterward though, because I had no issues the rest of the time. Even though I also tried sweet potatoes again later, those were completely fine.

I felt fine other than the diarrhea. I find these things hard to compare over time, because my remembering self seems so different from my experiencing self. But it seems that I wasn’t feeling much better or worse during the trial.

As for conclusions, the only one I am drawing from this experience is: When I eat only potatoes and eggs ad libitum, I will generally maintain my current weight.

Which is a little disappointing because I was hoping to lose a little. But also it’s different from the status quo, because before the trial I was eating anything a libitum and was gaining weight. So it’s a change from the mean.

22293376 – Potatoes + Skittles

Riff 

Potatoes (fat and salt allowed) + skittles candies. I intend to follow this for a month and see what happens. My reasoning is that I believe adherence will be easier when allowing occasional treats, and because I don’t think that refined sugar has a moral valence. 

Report

Hi there,

My riff is now complete. I was astonished at just how well it went, thanks for doing all this work!

32602136 – Standard Potato Diet

Riff

Plain potato diet, salt, black pepper, nothing else. I have already prepared an assload of potatoes for the fridge (russet, salad, baby, baking)

Report

Hi, I have some weeks of data complete, but took a break over Christmas period and taking another break now. I hope it is useful.

UPDATE

Hi, I think I will take a semi-break and cease recording data for now – overall I’ve been really pleased with the results. Added some thoughts below:

I read about Penn Jillette’s potato diet and then found SMTM and thought it sounded too good to be true, so I figured it would be worth a shot to lose some excess weight. My potato riff was to include some pepperoni, salami, chorizo and other cured meats to see if they would help with any anticipated cravings for other food and to break up the monotony of only eating potatoes. This turned out to be unnecessary, to my surprise at no point did I become bored of or frustrated with potatoes. They were delicious to start with and remained satisfying the entire time.

I chose a mix of baking, baby, sweet, and red potatoes, always with the skin left on, mostly boiled or baked. I did not use oil or butter, and usually only salt and pepper as seasonings.

I enjoyed knowing that once I had prepared the next batch of potatoes there was no meal prep left to do and nothing to fuss about. The cost of preparing weekly meals was incredibly cheap. If I wanted a snack, the potatoes were ready, if I wanted a larger meal, I would just take more potatoes. I experienced no cravings for any other type of food the entire time and would’ve been just as content with solely potatoes.

The main downside I experienced throughout the last few weeks was taking the time to prepare all the potatoes – baking especially. It often felt like a chore. Storing the cooked potatoes in suitable containers meant that I only had around 2 days worth ready to eat at any time, and I felt a slight resentment that I had to prepare more when they were running low.

I chose to pause the diet over the Christmas period as it wouldn’t be feasible with family meals and such, though after it had ended my weight had not shot back up which was a pleasant surprise.

I saw an immediate drop in weight that leveled off but has stayed off (around 6 lbs) and seemed to fluctuate at random. My lowest weight was reached on the 19th of January despite not doing anything differently, not noticeably eating less or exercising more, and taking several breaks from the diet. Going forward I think I will incorporate far more potatoes into my daily diet, knowing that I can snack on something filling and pleasant that doesn’t seem to have any negative effect on my weight is great. I think if I had solely stuck to potatoes and had no breaks I would’ve lost maybe double the amount of weight, but even though it isn’t a huge amount I am still really impressed with the whole idea. I’ve recommended it to one of my friends and he has begun his own potato diet after reading the blog, so it is pretty convincing.

75452454 – “Whole Foods” + Chocolate

Riff

I’m gonna stick to whole foods and chocolate. I originally lost a lot of weight years ago eating basically cabbage and brussels sprouts every day but during covid I gained some of that back due to stress. I want to commit to a diet of primarily roasted or raw vegetables. I’ll allow mustard, hot sauce, almost no dairy, and only chocolate when necessary.

I should’ve tracked [potatoes] independently but looking back [they] worked out to about 10% of my diet each day.

Report 

Technically completed back in December but then the holidays happened and I forgot to finish the last days of the diary.

To be honest that was pretty bad, I couldn’t stick to the diet I’d planned for the life of me and definitely gained some weight. If it’s all good I’m going to try a different tact and see how that goes.

75462073 – Potatoes + Other Vegetables + Fruit + Limited Proteins (Soy, Eggs, Fish) + Limited Dairy (Butter)

Riff 

I had done one before focusing on “whole foods and chocolate” but I want to narrow that down. I’m doing potatoes + other vegetables + fruit + limited proteins (soy, eggs, fish) + limited dairy (butter). I’m also going to focus on incorporating exercise since I think that helps not with hitting specific caloric goals but creating a widen margin of error for hitting caloric goals. I also think exercise’s affect on mood helps with making better food choices and sticking to a stricter diet. I’m really angling to recreate previous success I’d had losing weight with a more varied diet than just potatoes and that had involved a lot of cole crops, tofu, and avoiding grains and sweets. I intend to submit results at 4 weeks and then continue if I’m having success.

Report

Hey besties,

I just wrapped week 4 of my potato riff to some, spoiler alert, middling results!

I’ll probably keep tracking for a week or two longer but we’ll see! I don’t think at any point did I feel like I was in the potato zone. I did make a little progress, I’m 7 lbs down from when I initially filled out the form but that’s still less than the 2/week industry standard and came with a lot of ups and downs.

98821299 – Fried Potatoes

Riff

I want to try a Fried potato riff. I think fries and such are delicious. As I’ve been eating rice and pasta for the last few weeks, it’s time for a change. 

I would also like to know if the amount of PUFA is more important than the amount of BCAA. 

This time last year I had lost about 10kg using a table that calculates real calorie consumption based on intake and weight loss. I’ve since gained it back again, but it was stable for quite a long time. It was only when I doubled my BCAA intake from around 10g to 20g that I became heavier. However, this could also be due to strength training or an increase in my vegan butter consumption. I wasn’t aware of the concept of BCAA restriction at the time and I didn’t have much success with PUFA avoidance before. 

I took part in the potassium experiment back then but didn’t stick with it. This stuff is pretty disgusting and after 1-2 weeks I lost all motivation. 

I hope I can hold out this time! 

• I want to know i the amount of PUFA or BCAA has a bigger impact on bodyweight. 
• There will be some Potatoes, but also other low BCAA foods like Rice.  
• “However, for now it wont limit the amount of PUFA. I will use a reasonabel amount of it to cook my food.  Not drink oil straigt from the jug.” 
• Calories aren´t counted to keep the data somewhat unbiased. 
• If there is something, it should work ad lib.  
• If BCAA´s are such important signal molecules it will be refelctet in the data. 
• If its neither BCAA or PUFA it shoud also show. 
• A multivitamin suplement is taken every day. 
• I´m Vegan, so if i write things like “Butter” or “Cheese” its always a Vegan version of it

Report

Hey There, i fucked around and found (something, maybe) out!

My goal with this messy riff was to find data on the relationship between BCAA, PUFA and body weight.

I recorded protein, BCAAs, fat, PUFAs, carbohydrates and fiber in addition to food eaten for 30 days. Unfortunately, it only occurred to me in the last few days that carbohydrates might also be important. I have therefore only been able to collect 2 data points from them so far. So I will continue my riff for another 30 days to get meaningful data.

I have started to analyze all the data. I may have damaged your summary. I am sorry.

Let’s start with calculated correlations of the individual macros and body data for my weight.

Protein – 0.009195770085

The amount of protein does not seem to be particularly important in my quantities. The trend line is also almost horizontal.

BCAA – 0.0171401008

The amount of BCAA per kg body weight seems to be a bit more important. In the diagram, however, the trend line is completely horizontal.

Fat – -0.5219424632

More fat made me quite reliably heavier the next day.

PUFA – -0.3515048417

The same goes for PUFA. Interestingly, the less fat and the higher the PUFA content, the less weight gain.

Steps – 0.4659220545

More weight = more energy = more exercise.

Calories – 0.3381898136

I’m not surprised either. I have to get rid of the energy somehow.

In the next step I compared the macros I ate the day before with the change in weight overnight.

As already mentioned, the amount of protein seems to have little or no relevance. Both trend lines are almost horizontal. Fats on the other hand seem to make me heavier. However, data on carbohydrates is missing for the comparison.

So what happens next?

I will also record carbohydrates and keep the amount of fat down. I may increase the amount of protein when I see results. I have put on 4 kg for science and I don’t like that.

Eating a diet of nothing but potatoes (or almost nothing but potatoes) causes quick, effortless weight loss for many people. It’s not a matter of white-knuckling through a boring diet — people eat as much (potato) as they want, and at the end of a month of spuds they say things like, “I was quite surprised that I didn’t get tired of potatoes. I still love them, maybe even more so than usual?!” And some people lose a similar amount even when eating only 50% potato.

Why the hell does this happen? Well, there are many theories. To help get a sense of which theories are plausible, try to find some boundary conditions, or just more randomly explore the diet-space, we decided to run a Potato Diet Riff Trial. In this study, people volunteer to try different variations on the potato diet for at least one month and let us know how it goes. For example, they might eat nothing but potatoes and always cook their potatoes in olive oil. Or they might eat nothing but potatoes and leafy greens. Or they might eat nothing but potatoes and always eat their potatoes with ketchup. 

The hope is that this will help us figure out if there are other factors that slow, stop, or perhaps accelerate the rate of weight loss we saw on the full potato diet. This will get us closer to figuring out why potatoes cause weight loss in the first place, and might get us closer to curing obesity. We might also discover a new version of the diet that is easier to stick to or causes even more weight loss, or both. 

In the two months since launching the riff trial we’ve heard back from ten riffs. More people have their riffs underway or are planning to start soon, so there are more riff trial results in your future. But let’s see what we’ve learned so far. 

First we’ll review the overall results, and talk about our interpretation. Then, at the end we’ve included the actual riff proposals and reports from all ten participants, if you want to read about them in more detail.

Unless otherwise indicated, weight loss numbers are over a period of about 28 days, comparable to the original Potato Diet Community Trial. 

Potatoes + Dairy

The most common riff to date has been one version or another of Potatoes + Dairy, five out of the ten reports so far. Let’s take a look!

72682326 ate Potatoes + Dairy Fat (butter, heavy cream, sour cream), plus a little chocolate, and lost 11.8 lbs. “This is a new low weight for me,” she adds, “I’d say going back 15 years.”

(All these plots have a span of 24 lbs on the y-axis so they can be compared directly.)

05035476 ate Potatoes + Dairy and lost 12.9 lbs. 

69159819 ate Potatoes + Dairy, mostly as mashed potatoes (prepared as “5 pounds of potatoes with 1-2 sticks of butter, plenty of milk and cream mixed in, and cheese on top”) or potatoes roasted in butter, and had coffee with lots of cream. He lost 9.7 lbs, and described the experience as “truly decadent”. This report is interesting because this participant had the lowest starting BMI (just 26.6) of all the reports so far, and because previous attempts at the full-potato diet didn’t work for him. 

38440610 ate Potatoes + Cheese. “My reasoning is that I thought it would be very funny if cheesy potato would work,” he explained in the signup form, “so I wanted to try.” He ate a wide variety of cheeses (feta, cheddar, parmesan, emmental, maasdamer, etc.) and lost 5.2 lbs. 

67475178 ate Potatoes + Dairy + Milk Chocolate, and lost no weight. Despite this, she reports being amazed that the scale didn’t move, given how much potatoes, butter, cheese, and chocolate she was eating. “I have lost an inch of my waist (maybe less bloated?),” she says, “despite eating copious amounts of milk chocolate daily.”

Obviously this is a small sample size, but so far it looks like Potatoes + Dairy works about as well as the original potato diet, where people lost an average of 10.6 lbs over a similar span of time. So tell your friends, “I need to eat more gratin de pommes à la dauphinoise, I’m trying to lose weight!”

Given this, it’s pretty ironic that our one strict rule in the original potato diet was “no dairy”. Oops!

Sustained Weight Loss

78175908 ate Potatoes + Ketchup + Protein Powder (“derived from milk”) and lost 9 kg (about 19.8 lbs) in the process. He does mention that he doesn’t like potatoes, but says that satiety and energy levels were good overall. 

87411834 ate Potatoes + Lentils in a “stew/soup” with butter, along with a few other minor interventions, like “two Gatorade Zeros each with an additional 1 teaspoon of Potassium Chloride per day” as inspired by Krinn. He lost 17.2 lbs over 29 days.

(PSA: Be careful adding more potassium when doing a potato diet because you are already getting a ton of potassium from the potatoes. At some point you will be getting too much, which is dangerous. How much is too much? It’s hard to tell! Again, be careful.)

In addition, here are two plots he provided of the same data: 

40711007 did a riff that can only be quoted: “Potato + Carrot (for vitamin A) + Fish (for B12 & protein) + Marmite (for B12) + salt (I hear it can be lacking if you just eat potato) + olive oil (…honestly it’s the fat source that I had lying around when I decided to commit to the bit) + various seasonings (it’s how I make soup taste of things) + Apples (I’m only about 90% that I’d be getting enough C from potatoes) + sugar-free fizzy drinks.” Despite this list of modifications, he lost 8.5 lbs, “and that was with four explicit cheat days, as well as at least two days with an unwise amount of deep frying even by the measure of ‘amounts of deep frying’.”

None of these riffs seemed to stop the potato effect. In fact, the first two might have accelerated it. Both of them outperformed the average weight loss in the original Potato Diet Community Trial (though they didn’t outperform the extremes; the greatest amount lost in the original study was 24.0 lbs). 

It’s irresponsible to speculate too much from just two examples, but both of them do include more protein. It’s possible that more protein improves the potato diet. It’s also possible that this is just noise. 

Flopped

13910399 ate Potatoes + Toast with Margarine, the toast being for breakfast and an afternoon snack. He lost only 2.4 lbs. It may be that this riff doesn’t work, but there are complicating factors — he had a cold at one point during the study, took a lot of cheat days, and all the potatoes he had were boiled. 

27482609 ate Potatoes + Beef, mostly grass-fed, and using butter as cooking oil. He lost only 2.0 lbs. 

Both of these participants lost weight, but neither of them lost very much. Again, we should be careful about speculating from just two examples, but this definitely makes us curious whether toast, margarine, or beef blocks the potato effect in general.

If you are interested in trying a potato riff (instructions to sign up are below), we’d be very interested to see riffs of Potato + Bread/Toast, Potato + Margarine, or Potato + Beef. 

Even better would be for someone to try 100% potato for 2-4 weeks, to confirm that they lose weight on the normal potato diet. Then they would add toast, margarine, or beef for another 2-4 weeks and see if they stop losing weight. If they do, they can do another 2-4 weeks of just potato and see if they start losing weight again. This could provide strong evidence that the added food somehow stops the potato diet from causing weight loss as normal. 

Interpretation

We’re interested in potatoes because we want to try to figure out the cause and cure for obesity. But you may be reading this because you’re looking for a way to lose weight. In a practical sense, if you’re trying to lose weight, you might want to start by trying Potatoes + Dairy. It seems to work about as well as the normal potato diet, and it’s probably easier to stick to. If it doesn’t work for you, you can always switch to original potato diet. 

Some people think the potato diet causes weight loss because it is a mono diet, a diet where you eat mostly or entirely one food. We already found this interpretation unlikely, and the riff trials provide even more data against it. Potatoes + Cheese isn’t a mono diet. Neither are Potatoes + Dairy, Potatoes + Lentils, Potatoes + Ketchup + Protein Powder, or Potatoes + Carrots + Fish + … + Sugar-Free Fizzy Drinks. Yet all of these diets caused weight loss, for at least one person who has tried them. If you still think another mono diet would work just as well, then please do a riff of your own and send us the results.

Some people think the potato diet causes weight loss because it is boring. This is often linked to Stephan Guyenet’s perspective that very palatable (read: delicious) foods lead to overeating and weight gain. From this perspective, the potato causes weight loss because it is high-satiety and low-palatability, i.e. filling yet bland. If this were true, adding delicious foods like butter and cheese to potatoes should stop or at least slow their weight-loss powers. Right? Fuckin’ wrong! 

Participant 72682326 ate potatoes, various dairy fats, and sometimes chocolate. She described the experience as “I feel like I’m stuffing myself with delicious carby potatoes”, and lost 11.8 lbs over 28 days. Participant 69159819 ate potatoes and dairy, lost 9.7 lbs, and described the experience as “truly decadent”. Participant 78175908 specifically added ketchup “for enhanced palatability” and still lost 19.8 lbs. Read the rest of the reports below to see similar details. Any kind of blandness/deliciousness/palatability hypothesis predicts the opposite: adding tasty foods to the potato diet should make it much less effective, and anyone who is having a decadent time shouldn’t lose weight. Busted.

Given this evidence, we find it hard to take the mono diet or palatability explanations very seriously. If there’s anyone out there who still defends either of these interpretations, we’d love to hear what you’re thinking.

Sign Up Now

Signups for the potato riff trial are still open! And they will probably stay open all year. If you want to help out, or just try it for yourself, you can read the original blog post here and sign up at the bottom. Feel free to replicate one of the riffs described above, try an extension, or invent your own riff. It’s up to you.

We’ll be back in a couple months when we have a new batch of riff trials big enough to report. For now, chill out and enjoy the full riff reports below.‎ ‎:) 

---

72682326 – Potato + Dairy Fat

Riff

Potato + dairy fat 

Report

Hi there – 

I almost can’t believe that 4 weeks have gone by already but here we are. I started at 216 and today I’m at 204.2… I had 6 substantial deviation days, 2 of which were in the past week (family funerals are rough on diet experiments!)

Before I comment on the last for week, I’ll offer a little history about me. I’ve been obese pretty much my whole adult life. I’m 48F, 5’5”, hourglass-ish (ie low-ish WHR), and with one exception when I was in my early 30s, never was able to get my weight reliably below 250. By early 2022, I was up to 270 and had been in that vicinity for at least a couple of years. Before the pandemic I had gotten down just below 250 but the pandemic showed up and I gained back everything I’d lost and maybe a little more. On Feb 22, 2022 (2/22/22, I’m a fan of palindromes) I decided to get serious and lose weight, no matter what. Over the course of 2022, I lost about 50 pounds using what I refer to as my change-up diet(when I get bored, I change it up, so I cycled through CICO, low fat, high fiber, keto, vegetarian, a very brief carni stint, etc etc.) Early in 2023, I came across r/SaturatedFat and r/StopEatingSeedOils on reddit and then was kind of off to the races on that whole thing.  I was having a hard time losing (and even maintaining) at that point and had some luck maintaining the weight loss on TCD. But I wanted to lose more. It was in April/May 2023 that I came across Exfatloss’s stuff and his ex150 experiment so I did that in May/June 2023, starting at 220 and ending at 206. I then had a ton of work travel and various other life events (aka summer in Wisconsin) that made it difficult to keep losing. I stayed under 210 for the most part until some work and personal stress in September/October when things started trending up again, leading to a bit of a freak out and my plan to do a potato spin off (saw someone comment somewhere on Reddit that potatoes + fat was working for them, so I figured what the heck, because I love potatoes and it’s one of the foods I’ve missed the most while doing a fair amount of low carb eating.) About a week in I told Exfatloss what I was up to and he told me about your potato riff and that’s when I messaged you. 

Sorry that was a lot but I just wanted to kind of lay that all out. Here are my thoughts on the last 4 weeks. 

My starting weight. The scale said 216, yes, but average wise my weight going in to this was more like 214, and it was a recent 214 from a previously lower average weight of 210ish. But I was definitely in a gaining trend that I wanted desperately to reverse. 

My ending weight. This is a new low weight for me, I’d say going back 15 years. Back then the low weight that I hit was a brief victory, I got there via keto and I probably stayed that weight for a couple of weeks, if that, then lost the keto battle and put the weight back on and then some. 

The food I ate: basically, I’d have coffee with heavy cream for breakfast and then potatoes and dairy fat (butter, heavy cream, sour cream) for lunch and dinner. I’d usually target eating about 200-250g of potatoes per meal depending on how hungry I was. I’d add enough fat to make it taste good. I’d also be liberal with salt and other seasonings. I would eat slowly so that if I started to feel full, I’d stop before I felt sick (I had a day where I was in a rush and ate too fast/too much and felt terrible the rest of the day.) If I felt like I needed something sweet, I’d have a square of dark chocolate or a Lindt 70% cacao truffle.  

The weight I lost. As I mentioned above, I previously got down to 206 on ex150 back in May/June. My weight loss efforts always take a couple of times to stick so I’m super excited about this weight loss, it makes me think that I can keep losing. I loved the food on ex150 but that way of eating was pretty difficult to incorporate into my life. I’d say that I love this way of eating about as much and it’s easier to make work for me. Easier to make work -> easier to stick with it. 

Speaking of keto. I mentioned it in my notes on the spreadsheet but there were days that I was in ketosis (my wife has a finely tuned nose for keto breath, for better and for worse.) I was really surprised by this. I know I’m not in major keto because I haven’t dropped all the water weight like I did on ex150. I feel like I’m stuffing myself with delicious carby potatoes, so how is that happening? I have a couple of thoughts on that. 

1) the lion’s share of the potatoes I’m eating are yellow or red potatoes that have been cooked/cooled/reheated, so are the carbs lower than I think because of resistant starch, and/or does resistant starch have some magical quality that we haven’t quite sussed out yet

2) is the high quantity of saturated fat and/or low quantity of protein making it easier to get in to ketosis. 

3) something else I’m not thinking of 

Couple of last thoughts: I’m so excited about these results and my plan is to continue to eat like this for the foreseeable future (holidays might be tricky, crossing that bridge when I get there, one meal at a time). A goal I had for this year was to get to onederland, but it was not happening and I decided not to make myself crazy over the holidays by trying to lose weight. I was just going to ride it out in that average 210-215 weight zone and then attack it again in 2024. Now I’m feeling like I could maybe get to that point yet this year. I’m elated at this prospect. 

That was a lot, hopefully not TMI. Is there anything else you’d like to know?

Thanks for doing this! I’m looking forward to seeing other people’s riffs.

05035476 – Potatoes + Dairy

Riff

potato plus dairy b/c i like those things and I read the ice cream hypothesis…would be very interesting if the combo helped wait loss b/c of all the negative pub on dairy in diets

Report

Hi There!

Finished my potato diet! Very happy with the results, some cheat days at the end that kept my weight a little bit up.  Think I have Stockholm Syndrome now and am keeping up with the taters. Best diet ever.

Hope my data can help.  Kept to potatoes plus dairy, didn’t go hard on the dairy, just supplemented my potato intake.  Tried to keep it low in BCAA, but some seed oil hash browns and fries included in there.

Mood and digestion was all great during the diet.  Only cranky one was my wife having to cook for herself ‎:)

69159819 – Potatoes + Dairy

Riff

My intent is to try potatoes + dairy. This riff is particularly interesting for a few reasons. From a lifestyle perspective, this seems like a relatively accessible way to do the potato diet. I love mashed potatoes (the most delicious way to eat potatoes), most of the toppings I put on baked potatoes are dairy foods, and I don’t see any reason I couldn’t roast potatoes with butter instead of oil. Additionally, the last time I tried the potato diet (as an unregistered personal experiment), I think the olive oil I relied on to roast my potatoes upset my stomach, so I’m interested if this approach eliminates that issue.

Potatoes + dairy is also interesting to me from an ancestral health perspective. My family comes almost exclusively from the British Isles, and I recently read a book (“Highland Folk Ways”) that provided a detailed description of the diet the Highland side of my family would have followed. The historic Highland diet was ridiculously high in both dairy and potatoes! If anyone is able to thrive on just potatoes and dairy, it should be me. If I don’t lose weight/feel good (especially if a future riff without dairy does work for me), that would be particularly valuable information for my personal health.

Beyond those more personal factors, dairy seems pretty controversial in health/fitness/nutrition circles, which makes it interesting. More than I decade ago, when I was first learning about nutrition, I remember reading the strength coach Mark Rippetoe talk about putting scrawny high school boys on the Gallon of Milk a Day (GOMAD) diet, and he proposed that milk was uniquely anabolic. (I seem to recall that the proposed mechanism was Insulin-Like Growth Factor (IGF-1), but further details elude me now.) When you’re trying to put muscles on a high school kid, anabolism is good, but not so much if you’re trying to lose weight. At the same time, dairy is a staple of plenty of non-obese cultures (most of Northern Europe, for example, which is where I am genetically from). Anyway, I’ve noticed that I’m confused about dairy, and that makes it exciting.

I intend to start the day after American Thanksgiving (November 24). Thanksgiving is a big potato holiday in my family, so I’ll have plenty of leftovers to get started with. I will continue up to December 24, the next major date that has food traditions associated with it. I intend to use a mixture of russet, gold, and red potatoes. My major foods will be mashed potatoes (made with lots of milk and butter), potatoes roasted in butter, and baked potatoes with dairy toppings (butter, sour cream, cheese, etc.). I will not restrict incidental dairy in my coffee (I often put a small amount of cream or milk, or have the occasional latte), but I do not intend to eat tons of supplementary dairy (e.g., no ExFatLoss-style whipped cream desserts).

Report

I just took my 4 week weight measurement for the potatoes + dairy riff.

Overall results were surprisingly good – almost 10 pounds of weight loss despite eating massive amounts of both potatoes and dairy. Even assuming that some of the initial weight loss was water, it was impressive. I’ve included some implementation details below to add some context, or in case others want to try to replicate the riff.

Mashed potatoes were the MVP meal – 5 pounds of potatoes with 1-2 sticks of butter, plenty of milk and cream mixed in, and cheese on top, generally lasting 4-5 meals. It was truly decadent. I suspect that I ate that for something like 35-40 total meals, with potatoes roasted in butter making up another 10-15 meals. I generally did coffee with lots of cream (2-4 mugs/day) for breakfast, then had potatoes for lunch and dinner at normal times (roughly 12 and 6, but I made no effort to manipulate the times I ate, I just ate when I was hungry). Rarely (something like 5 meals, each indicated on the sheet) I would eat french fries from a restaurant, mostly for social reasons.

Compared to my previous personal experiment with the potato diet, the dairy makes this so much more accessible for me. First of all, it means fewer overall potatoes, since I was getting quite a bit of satisfaction from the hefty amounts of dairy. While I’m very excited to eat non-potato food (my wife commented last night that I have begun to stare longingly at other people’s food), I’m actually not tired of potatoes. (I actually ate leftover potatoes for lunch, despite technically ending my diet yesterday.) Second, having the dairy also pushed me to prepare almost all of my potatoes from an unprocessed state, rather than trying to justify frozen potatoes, potato chips, and various forms of fried potatoes.

The original potato diet did not seem to work for me. Besides the presence of dairy, the other major confounding factor is the preparation method – in my previous attempt, I mostly ate roasted potatoes (probably 50% peeled, 50% unpeeled, roasted with olive oil). In the dairy riff, a majority of my meals were mashed potatoes, which started with peeling and boiling. During this iteration, I noticed that when I ate roasted potatoes, my weight plateaued or went up the next day (I actually started recording that in my notes part way through). I assumed that was just water retention (maybe I just salt roasted potatoes more heavily?), but it was a very consistent pattern. I’ll also note that this argues against the “boiling potatoes removes the potassium, so boiled potatoes won’t work as well” theory from the original riff intro post!

Let me know if you have any other questions, and thanks for organizing this whole thing! I’m excited to see the results of other riffs.

38440610 – Potatoes + Cheese

Riff

My riff is potatoes and cheese. My reasoning is that I thought it would be very funny if cheesy potato would work, so I wanted to try. My plan is to do the 4 weeks, I have no idea how I will feel afterwards so it’s hard for me to say if I will continue. I know from the past two years, in which I recorded my weight to track weight-loss, that I have a much harder time loosing weight in spring time (or even just holding my weight). If this works now, I will repeat it in the spring to see if it still works then. 

Side note: I just did a quick google search if it’s common to gain weight in spring and a quick search suggest the polar opposite. Might just be because I am lazy and not very social, while others are especially active during spring.

Anyhow there is one caveat for me in this: My goal is to loose weight so if this riff turns out horribly (I feel like a good cut-off point is if I gain 10 lbs total at any point relative to my starting weight) my plan is to abort this riff and transition to the traditional potato (pure-tato?) diet. I plan to document everything so hopefully it will still be useful fore someone. If the pure-tato diet also does not work for me, at least I will have suffered for science T^T

Report

thanks for organizing this riff trial. It was a great experience and a lot of fun.

I think generally potatoes + cheese works. I wasn’t very strict to begin with and when I cheated it reset my progress quite a bit.

After week two I started to get fed up with potatoes and also was pretty stressed in general. I think for me the resulting mental state was the biggest hurdle.

Even though I tended to get satiated more easily on the potato + cheese diet in general, in that time I ate more than ever and still felt hungry.

I’m stopping for now because it will be a pain during the holidays and I’m also planning to move flats in January which would make it increasingly difficult to adhere to the diet.

But I like the idea of continuing N=1 experiments after things settled down a bit.

Yours,
participant 38440610

67475178 – Potatoes + Dairy + Milk Chocolate

Riff

Potatoes + dairy + milk chocolate for at least four weeks. I have chosen dairy as I would enjoy the potatoes more with butter and cheese and I’m curious as to the weight loss effects if any. Chocolate because I’m curious about that as well. 

Report

Hi I have completed the four weeks off my riff! I have lost no weight, but I have lost an inch of my waist ( maybe less bloated?). Despite eating copious amounts of milk chocolate daily. My blood pressure has also gone down a bit from 138/95 to 137/87 I’m not sure if that’s of any significance. 

I was amazed I didn’t put any weight on! I ate a variation of potatoes for every meal with either butter and cheese or both. Followed by some milk chocolate or a yogurt mixed with cream. Usually the potatoes were microwaved in the skin. 

78175908 – Potatoes + Ketchup + Protein Powder

Riff 

+Ketchup +100g protein per day (150g powder, made from milk)

Personal Experience with the Potato Diet Riff (November 1st to 28th)

Introduction

• Diet Overview: Engaged in a modified version of the Potato Diet from November 1st to 28th, adding ketchup and protein powder.
• Purpose: To explore the effectiveness and adaptability of the Potato Diet while maintaining muscle mass and energy levels.

Riff Details

• Ketchup Addition: Included ketchup for enhanced palatability.
• Protein Supplementation: Consumed 150 grams of protein powder daily, providing an additional 100 grams of protein from 563 kcal. This was to prevent muscle loss, given the low protein content in potatoes. 
• 

Results

• Weight Loss: Achieved a significant reduction in weight, from 87 kg to 78 kg over 28 days, with a more rapid loss observed initially.
• Hunger and Convenience: Generally, hunger was not an issue; however, the diet’s convenience was sometimes challenging, particularly during busy periods.
• Potato Preparation: Utilized jarred potatoes (425 grams per jar), rinsed and microwaved for a minute, served with ketchup.
• Energy Levels: Maintained stable energy throughout the diet, contrasting previous diet experiences that involved reduced eating.

Observations

• Non-Palatability as a Factor: Personal dislike for potatoes and the unpleasant taste of the protein powder negatively impacted the diet experience.
• Beverage Consumption: Primarily drank water, with occasional sugar-free pop.

Conclusions

• Efficacy: The diet was effective for weight loss, even with the modifications.
• Muscle Maintenance: The high protein intake likely contributed to preserving muscle mass during the diet. No measurements were made.
• Satiety and Energy: Satiety was generally good, and energy levels remained stable.
• Private factor: For privacy reasons, I’ve omitted a factor that may be important. Please don’t update too strongly on my results.
• Palatability Challenges: The diet’s success might be hindered by the non-enjoyable nature of the foods consumed, suggesting a potential trade-off between effectiveness and enjoyment. 

87411834 – Potatoes + Lentils

Riff

“Potato Stoop” – basically a stew/soup of potatoes, onions, celery, red lentils and butter cooked in an Instant Pot (so I’m retaining the broth and hopefully the potassium). I’ll likely add in some supplementing with potassium chloride later when I receive it from Amazon. I’m hoping to stick with it for several weeks.

Rationale: lentils will add some protein and fiber (maybe a good thing?), and the rest is to help make it tasty and “not just potatoes”. I’ll also add salt, pepper, and various hot sauces to keep it from becoming too same-y and bland.

Report

Hey,

I’ve reached the four week mark and wanted to give an update on how things have been going and why I’ll continue with this for a while longer! It doesn’t feel like it’s been four weeks…

Background

I’m a 47 year old cishet white male with a sedentary lifestyle (IT consultant) living in Canada. Over the last few years I’ve gained “The Covid 19” and then some, so this was a good opportunity to try and lose weight for myself and For Science!

Protocol

First up, some details on what I’ve been eating. My eventual-standard recipe has been:

• Approx. 5 lbs yellow potatoes (i.e., eyeball half a 10 lb bag from the supermarket)
• 3 cups water
• 1 cup dry lentils – more on this shortly
• 1/4 cup butter

I cut the potatoes into pieces with a maximum dimension of around an inch; half go into an instant pot, then the water, then the lentils sprinkled on top, the other half of the potatoes (so now we have a half-submerged raw potato sandwich with dry lentil filling) and the butter on top. This cooks in the Instant Pot at high pressure for 11 minutes, preferably with natural release. I then “finish” things by using a wooden spoon to roughly mash the potatoes and combine in the lentils. Serve with hot sauce of choice. Do it all over again in a couple of days.

Aside Number One: Laziness aka “recipe optimization”

Originally I was also sauteing a finely diced onion and chopped celery first before doing the above steps – this added significantly to the prep time and didn’t add enough value to the experience, so I dropped it. I’ve also tried adding some herbs to the recipe but they didn’t do much for it either. Sometimes simpler truly is better. This recipe’s prep time is about five minutes.

Aside Number Two: Lentil options

At first I was using red lentils – they are a better aesthetic option as they dissolve into the cooking water and have little effect on the colour of the end product, maybe even brightening it a little. When I ran out of those I switched to green lentils – they also taste good but the colour of the result is not as inviting. Opinions will likely differ though, and it’s something I’ve adjusted to.

Aside Number Three: Potassium

I read Krinn’s experiences with Potassium supplements with great interest and decided to include this in my protocol. Starting in the middle of week two, I’ve been drinking two Gatorade Zeros each with an additional 1 teaspoon of Potassium Chloride per day. Sadly, the Costco multipack here in Canada doesn’t include “blue”.

Adherence

There have been two days when I’ve been “off” the diet. The first was an all-day industry conference, so I was eating the delicious catered food at the event. The second was after a very long day, I had an alcoholic beverage and then pigged out on the leftovers from my youngest (bagel, chicken fingers, etc…).

I’m allowing myself a “small” quantity of potato chips as part of the diet, as the meals don’t have any crunch to them and I miss that texture. I also will have things like fresh berries. All that said, I’m staying conscious of what I’m eating and staying away from what I would consider my “typical” diet.

In terms of mealtimes, I’ve sort of fallen into a 16-hour fasting period with an 8-hour feeding window. I typically have my first meal at around 11:30 in the morning, and the food day is over by 7:30PM. My potassium supplementation is generally aligned to these times as well.

This hasn’t been a hardship to adhere to because I’m giving myself some grace from being completely strict. Does that make this “riff-ish”? Perhaps, but I also feel that, outside a medical context, people are typically going to be mostly-good at sticking to a strict eating program. I would say I’m achieving the main goal, that the majority of my calories are coming from my riff. Maybe I’d have a different perspective if I was doing a more fun riff like “potatoes and Snickers bars” ‎:)

Results

I’ve been extremely pleased with how this has gone. This first graph shows progress so far (in kilograms, the native measure of my scales) – on the first day I lost almost 3kg, which I assume is water weight. The three bars are the daily weigh-in (blue), a three-day average (orange) and a seven-day average (gray). The smoothed curves show a pretty consistent weight reduction over time after the first day’s outlier reading.

I find the sawtooth peak/drop pattern intriguing in the raw data, but prefer the smoothed data for looking at overall progress.

I also found it useful / inspirational to pull a seven-day rate of change graph for these readings:

It’s a bit of a mess because the lines all overlap, but you can see from the smoothed curves that I’m typically down between 1 and 1.5 kg (i.e. two to three pounds) compared to the reading from a week before. There hasn’t yet been a sign of a decline in the rate of change.

Next Steps

As the graphs indicate, I plan on continuing this for a couple more weeks – at that point it’ll be the holiday season and I will be fully participating in seasonally appropriate food consumption! After that I will resume the diet; it’s working, I feel good doing it, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out.

Thanks for inspiring me to give this a shot!

40711007 – Misc.

Riff

Potato + Carrot (for vitamin A) + Fish (for B12 & protein) + Marmite (for B12) + salt (I hear it can be lacking if you just eat potato) + olive oil (…honestly it’s the fat source that I had lying around when I decided to commit to the bit) + various seasonings (it’s how I make soup taste of things) + Apples (I’m only about 90% that I’d be getting enough C from potatoes) + sugar-free fizzy drinks (realistically if I try to fully abstain from Treats(TM) I might indulge further than planned on other days).

Report

Hello Slime Mold Time Mold,

This morning was the 28th measurement. As I believe you can see from the data (I suppose I’m assuming you have at least read-access to the spreadsheet that you made and then gave me a copy of), in that time I shed a net total of about 8.5lb from my body mass, and that was with four explicit cheat days, as well as at least two days with an unwise amount of deep frying even by the measure of “amounts of deep frying”.

Among other things this is enough evidence for me that on the order of 2 litres a day of aspartame juice sugar free fizzy drinks is not enough on its own to thwart the potato diet. While I would by no means recommend that anyone, ever, rely on crisps (known as “chips” in America) as a main source of any nutrient, even salt – they were close to a logistical necessity during office days, and even with far more packs a day than I’d normally have used, they weren’t a consistent factor in weight gain days.

Going forwards, obviously I’m not going to be able to stick to the exact riff rigorously over Christmas, however “getting most of the calories from taters” seems to have worked pretty well as a medium to long term stratagem – at least until the trend line stops going down. Of course, I’m most certainly adding onions and swede to the list of explicitly allowed foods (can’t really make soup without onions; can’t make tatties and neeps without the neeps), and probably chicken too as it’s a cheaper protein source compared to even the cheapest tinned fish (certainly if you measure by just grams of protein per unit legal tender). Which is to say, I’ll still be taking data, but “had chicken” is no longer going to get a tick of “majorly broke diet”.

Looking forward to analysis of the data – here’s hoping something more useful was got at this stage, beyond “you can add dietary sources of A and B12 with different macro profiles to the potatoes without totally wrecking the diet” and “in a shock not seen since the Pope was confirmed to be Catholic, excessive consumption of deep fried food is correlated with weight gain”.

Kind regards
Mr Cavern

13910399 – Potatoes + Margarined Toast

Riff

My plan is to follow the potato diet but have toast with margarine for breakfast and afternoon snack. When I tried the potato diet for the first time, I had a lot of bread cravings, so it would be great if I could have it and still lose weight. I’m trying out the margarine to see if consuming seed oils hinders weight loss.

Additionally, I’ll also have mandarins and soy milk in small quantities, which are not part of the main plan, but I had them during my first attempt at the potato diet and still lost weight without any issues.

I will follow the diet for 4 weeks (unless I feel unwell or start gaining weight rapidly), and if I see that it works well, I will continue it for a longer period.

Report

I was very motivated at the start, but at the end I was cheating a lot. Also, I got a cold or something last week and I lost some weight due to that. The days I was sick have a note on the “Observations” row. And maybe relevant, all the potatoes I ate were boiled.

27482609 – Potatoes + Beef

Riff

Potato + Beef. My plan is to make potatoes the majority of my food intake, since my normal diet is very high in meat. It wouldn’t be much of a trial for me if I allowed no potato and unlimited beef. I’m not exactly sure how exactly what the restriction will be; perhaps a pound of steak and then as much potato as I want.

I will be using butter as a cooking oil, writing down how much I use per day, and I may also have beef liver on occasion.

I’d like to get back into my gym routine during the trial, and I’m not very much in the mood to experiment with a low protein diet. I also have a freezer full of grass-fed beef and I’d like to actually eat it.

Report

I’ve put my four weeks in, so I’m done. I’m sorry to say this will not be the most insightful or interesting trial you receive, but here it is. I’ve left my few thoughts and comments in the spreadsheet itself.

General notes from the spreadsheet:

I had intended to record mass of potato and steak, but I ended up messing that up enough that it wasn’t worth recording. As you can see, I was not perfect at measuring myself in the morning, either. Sorry about that.

I generally ended up eating equal parts beef and potato, sometimes large majority potato, very rarely large majority beef.

Common recipes include diced potatoes with beef, mashed potatoes with beef, sliced and fried potatoes with steak.