The Potato Diet Practicalities: Dropping Big Weight Fast With High Energy and Without Hunger

First things first. Here’s a search link to find all the potato diet posts and thousands of comments from a few years back. That’s for ‘potato hack,’ what we were usually calling it. Here’s one for ‘potato diet’ too. Lottsa stuff. This post is the 3rd in the series that began with Can Eating Mashed Potatoes With Your Meals Cause You To Eat 30–40% Fewer Calories? and my big tease of a couple of days ago: I’ve Dropped 13 Pounds In Four Days With No Hunger Or Cravings And I’m Going To Tell You Precisely How.

And I am. Right here.

The first post covers the science of why potatoes work…from big and rapid weight loss, to steady but sustained loss by eating less overall, to plain maintenance: from doing a potato only diet periodically, to just upping your overall potato consumption in your diet and generally eating less overall as a consequence. I encourage you to read that post, but here’s 1,000 words worth.

So, the takeaway is that boiled potatoes as a single food source are the most satiating food ever tested. That means that when eaten by themselves — compared with equivalent calories of anything else — test subjects waited longer to eat again and/or consumed less when they did eat, compared to any other single food. But that’s not all. When boiled potatoes are included as part of a meal (even mashed with sane amounts of butter & milk), test subjects consume far less calories overall in the meal, compared with any other starch…and I’d bet that would hold for any side dish. Your plate full of “leafy greens” that’s always all the rage in LC, where LCers eat more “leafy greens” than literally anyone else on the planet, including raw vegans? It’s a badge of honor; and plus, it allows them to up that steak from 6–8 oz., to 16 oz., thereby tripling the calories over a meal of mashed potatoes and a 4–6 oz. steak.

The Surprising 13-pound Weight Drop In Four Days

This wasn’t envisioned to be part of this post, but because of my utter mouth-gaping shock last Thursday, it has to be addressed preliminarily so that you clearly understand what it is, what it isn’t, and don’t feel hustled…because that’s what’s typically in play with those sorts of extraordinary claims.

Let’s get this out of the way, right away: It was way mostly water. I’d guess probably 11 pounds of water and 2 pounds of fat (performance at the gym was better than Sunday, so it ‘aint any lean that counts). I estimate 2 pounds because sustained weight loss from commenters in the past seemed to average 1/2 pound daily. The diet began last Sunday around noon, and Tuesday was the big whoosh! day, and without thirst. I knew I was dumping lots of water. Prior to going to the gym where I weighed in, I was expecting somewhere around a 5-pound loss. Nice surprise.

But what does it really mean?

In short, it means that even though 80%+ of my calories (I’ll get to what I actually ate, below) came from cellular carbohydrate in the form of plain boiled potatoes (salt, sometimes vinegar too), I was running significant enough of a daily caloric deficit that I was depleting glycogen, lowering generalized inflammation, etc. As you know from Low Carbohydrate Dietary Holy Grails, muscle and liver glycogen (the storage form of carbohydrate) is bound up with significant water and when you restrict carbohydrate enough, glycogen depletes, releasing that water. But here’s what they probably either didn’t tell you, or it was simply convenient if you weren’t clear about it. Glycogen depletion is fundamentally a function of significantly lower food intake than energy output, regardless of macronutrient mix. It can be done three ways:

1. Sustained exercising for long enough, with little to no carbohydrate intake. Long distance runners call it “hitting the wall.”
2. Eating significantly less than you expend in energy, chronically. That’s calorie counting diets, or starvation.
3. Eating less carbohydrate than required to store or sustain glycogen. In other words, you can be in an excess energy intake state and still deplete glycogen and “lose weight,” theoretically.

Compare the three and chew on them from a physiological, evolutionary standpoint. The first two make perfect sense. The third has overtones of gimmick, don’t you think? Now, it may be perfectly fine to have somewhat depleted glycogen and/or eat low carb, but isn’t it a bit convenient when a person could initially go on a low-carbohydrate diet, overeat — even put on some fat weight in the process — but if their glycogen is toped off enough at the start, the glycogen depletion and consequent water loss might outweigh the fat accumulation from the new high fat diet, eaten to excess? And they’re jumping for joy. Well, for 10 days or so, anyway (I’m still shedding water, incidentally, 7th day in).

The big question for me is, how much glycogen/water is optimal or ok-fine? And, does a heavy-on-potato diet that keeps you satiated and generally not prone to overeat, result in a less than fully topped off glycogen stores and less water? I guess I’ll find out, because I’m on this bus for a long time. Boiled potatoes will now always form a mainstay of my diet, from here out.

But that’s not all. Let’s address another kinda gimmicky thing about low carbohydrate diets. Ketones, which are by-products of fat metabolism. Now, follow me closely, here. Your body produces significant ketones under what normal circumstances (i.e., excluding Type 1 diabetes)? Let’s review.

1. Energy restricted dieting.
2. Fasting beyond about 12 hours.
3. Starvation (a long-ass fast).
4. Prolonged intense exercise (glycogen is depleted first, then you move into fat stores) or very long moderate exercise, like a day of hiking with lots of ascent.
5. Carbohydrate restriction.

But again, look at those first four in the context of evolution, compared with carbohydrate restriction. Still kinda gimmicky, and I’ll tell you why. Ketosis is plain and simple a starvation adaptation (just like gluconeogenesis — making sugar for the brain from protein). All those items, 1–4, are simply lesser modes or corollaries of starvation. Acute starvation, if you like.

…As an aside and conversely, de novo lipogenesis (making fat from carbohydrate) is kinda the opposite. It’s a times-of-plenty adaptation to enable storage of fat when carbohydrate food sources are in abundance — and fat, like the salmon skin bears eat to pack it on fast, has dried up — like fruit in the summer and fall, prior to there being less food available in general during winter, especially in more extreme latitudes. Since the adaptation exists — but is meaningless unless 1) calories are in abundance, and 2) carbohydrate is a principle source of that abundance — it has been convenient to allow low-carbers to believe that almost any amount beyond trace in the diet will get pushed into fat storage, even in energy deficit! I address that in more depth here: A Mild Critique of the Low-Carb-Diet Encouragement to Add Fat.

Let’s go one gimmick further, though. Lots of people don’t show much in the way of ketones, even on a traditional Atkins Diet. That was me. I wanted to drop 10–15 pounds back in about 1991 (30 yo), so that was my first reading of Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution (it wasn’t “New,” yet). No matter what, I never, ever peed more than light pink. Except once. Years later, like 1996, I went on an all-day hike with plenty of ascent. I was low carbing and brought along some cheese & slices of pepperoni for the hike. Evidently, it wasn’t enough, because even into the afternoon of the next day, I was peeing dark purple. The only time ever. Ever.

See, it’s a survival adaptation under conditions of starvation or extended exertion under inadequate food to fuel the activity. Nothing magical about it. I did not hear angels in purple robes trumpeting from the heavens.

You can be in solid ketosis on a pure sugar diet if your intake is low enough for long enough. Say, 600 kcal deficit for a few days. Test ketones. You’ll have them. Now pay close attention:

You absolutely know that those ketones are a by-product of burning your own fat storage and not dietary fat, because you aren’t eating any fat.

Let’s compare that to low-carbohydrate, but especially, the most recent iteration of ketones-tell-the-whole-story ketogenic diet. Most simply, how do you know the ketones are from metabolizing the fat you’re eating, or the fat you have stored? Of what particular merit are the fingerprints of fat burning, if you don’t know whose hand to shake? A typical, conservative LC diet is going to come in at about 60%+ calories from fat (just beef alone, without adding fat, is about 50/50 fat/protein calories). Get the carbohydrate low enough and you might be lucky to see significant ketones (unlike me). But, another rub: what if the satisfaction of the LC diet induces you to eat less energy (which is partially to credit for lots of people with successful sustained weight loss on LC)? Are the ketones a solid product of carbohydrate restriction, or of the acute quasi-starvation I already addressed, or some of both? What fat is really being metabolized and throwing off ketones?

It gets worse. “The New Ketogenic Diet” appears to advocate something like 85% fat, 10% protein, and no more than 5% carbohydrate. And everyone jumps for joy because finally, objectively, unabashedly they detect lots and lots of ketones! No more of this trace stuff. They are indeed burning fat. Well, duh! When 85% of your diet consists of a single macronutrient — fat — then that’s what your body is going to burn, and the hierarchy of macronutrient metabolism is washed out by a flood of dietary fat. So duh! you’ve got lots of ketones. Smoke ’em if ya got ’em, but to what end, if it’s not burning stored fat and you need to burn stored fat? And if your energy needs are equivalent to 2,500 kcal daily but you’re eating 3,000+ because that’s part of the LC hustle with so many — and very easy to do with crazy-energy-dense fat — I can assure you that you are not burning an ounce of your own body fat and you’re probably gaining fat, lottsa ketones notwithstanding. Sound kinda dumb?

And to reiterate, on the potato diet or keeping-with-the-theme variations thereof, it’s very low fat, so to the extent you drop pounds beyond the water loss, you pretty much know it’s fat, since you aren’t eating much in the way of fat. Moreover, if you’re full, not hungry, and due to the extreme satiation of potatoes you find yourself in significant caloric deficit, you will produce ketones and for the same reason, you will know they are coming from your own fat. No gimmick, no hustle, no chance of failure for normal people by means of very fuzzy LC logic.

…I know it sounds as though I’m attacking LC and Keto diets, but I do make what I consider to be critical distinctions in this post: Why Am I “Attacking” The Low-Carb and Paleo Diets?

My Speculation About Why and How This Works

So what’s so magical about boiled potatoes? I’ve been asked this a lot, recently. I don’t think the satiation experiments lie and in my case, they’re understated. I’m easily running a 1,000+ kcal deficit with zero trouble at all. In fact, I’m having one helluva good time. Such liberation.

Yes, I know I could continue to believe and trust that my shoe heel is the best and most effective way to pound that nail, but it’s really very relieving to have at my disposal a tool — like a hammer — that actually works, and appears to be perfectly suited for the job. So what if I have Jimmy Moore’s Syndrome, uh, reactive hypoglycemia, uh, I get cramps in my hand when I use a hammer (I get confused about all my excuses over why I just can’t)? Hand cramps will subside once I get used to using a hammer, i.e., the right tool for the job. Or, I could just say “effectivenailpoundingwithshoeheel builstyle,” a lot. Keep repeating it in order to reinforce my solemn belief and trust.

Yes, potatoes appear to be substantially filling, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think there’s a neurological element. It could have something to do with the gut — especially for cooked and cooled, with higher resistant starch — but let’s just lump all possible elements into one, call them something like “palatability feedback.” It reminds my of the story of Goldilocks and The Three Bears. The first bowl of porridge was too hot, thus unpalatable unless you wait; the second was too cold, more seriously unpalatable because more work is needed to reheat it; and the third bowl was just right.

But think about it. Food temperature is a large element of palatability, and it’s individual and sometimes, cultural too. To my dad, soup is cold unless it causes burn scar tissue on the roof or your mouth. I’m like the French. I like my soup just above warm. Gazpacho uses herbs & spice for cold palatability, and there are a few other soups specifically designed to be consumed cold, but otherwise, people generally find cold soup unpalatable. But it’s all the same flavors, same composition, and this goes for all sorts of foods where we have a temperature range where they are the most palatable to us.

…I love cold pizza. Beatrice hates it, so she nukes it, making the crust all awfully spongy.

But perhaps if you were out somewhere remote and had made a pot of delicious, soul-feeding soup, but then your gas ran out, you’d end up eating it cold. The question is, would you eat it all over the same space of time as you would have if you could have reheated every bowl to just right?

Initially, back when I blogged about The Potato Diet in league with Tim Steele, I just could not get my mind around eating boiled potatoes plain, or maybe with only a sprinkle of salt. You look at those posts and what you see is me doing everything to make them palatable enough in my mind, by various ways of preparing them, adding various bits of things. I didn’t eat a single whole boiled russet potato plain, not dolled up with anything, even salt, until last Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t awful. It wasn’t fabulous. I don’t know if “just right” is the correct description, but I knew I could do it.

But guess what? By the force of will of just doing it, they have become increasingly palatable by the day, and only with a sprinkle of salt, sometimes some malt vinegar too. But I eat more and more of them just plain, pushing out other options.

So, my conclusion is that boiled potatoes occupy some outlier niche where they’re mensch enough to give your stomach something substantial to feel, palatable enough to eat without choking them down (I drink plain, room temp water with them), but not palatable enough to gorge on. In other words, when your stomach feels as though there’s enough of them in it, the palatability feedback shuts off and you push it away.

And this suggests a potential cure for those few people who, in spite of eating lots of boiled potatoes, nonetheless feel ravenously hungry an hour later. What to do? Then you eat another potato, plain, no salt. Still a problem an hour later? Then eat another one, stone cold out of the fridge. In other words, every time you get that deep hunger, eat the most unpalatable cold boiled potato possible until you’ve whipped your dumb dog brain into submission.

And verbalize it. “Ha, you stupid dog brain! You thought you were getting chocolate cake and ice cream, didn’t you? Ha, you dumb dog!” See, it’s rather like training your dog not to beg at the dinner table immediately after you fed him first. Sure, you can try to shame and submit him, order him around, etc. But what if you give him something off the table he doesn’t like at all?

See?

But Aren’t You Flirting With Malnutrition?

Back in 2007 or 2008 when I first got into this whole food thing, you may recall that Art De Vany was my introduction into it (via a blog commenter; kudos). Art called potatoes “a bag of glucose,” and I just took his word for it (not technically, of course, since it’s a starch, but I “knew” what he meant). It wasn’t until a few years later, when Stephan Guyenet was blogging about potatoes that I learned that they’re a complete source of protein and a host of other nutrients, such that people can live on them exclusively for very long periods of time. Hell, my own dad did, in post WWII Germany.

I was 5 years old in 1943, living with my grandparents in Wriezen, Germany. Potatoes where a big part of the daily diet. My grandparents had a rather large piece of property where they grew all of our vegetables and fruit: apples, cherries, grapes (which were mostly used for making wine), and berries. The main crop: potatoes. We also had laying hens for some animal protein & fat.

The thing that most profoundly sticks in my mind in terms of food is…potatoes, a lot of potatoes, at least during most of WWII. Later, toward the end of the war and after, food was so scarce that even potatoes weren’t very available. By then, I was 7 years old and was able to forage the fields and woods for anything that was edible. My grandmother — who lived to the ripe old age of 96 — taught me what was good and what to avoid. I ate a lot of weeds made into sort of a spinach soup, flavored with bones and other stuff my grandmother scavenged from trash cans.

So let’s take a look at the nutrition. The other day, I decided to weigh my potato-only meals for the day, which was 2 pounds, 780 calories. For shits & giggles, I decided to run the nutrition on an equivalent caloric portion of beef steak. 785 calories is an 11 oz. steak. Before I show you the nutrition comparison, which one of those, 2 pounds of boiled potatoes, or an 11 oz. steak, is more likely to have you eating less of anything else that day?

So here again, we have absolute falsehoods being peddled out there. Why must people always substitute a nice-sounding, just-so narrative in place of actual facts or, more nefariously, to assure you that there’s no need to look. It’s just a bag of glucose. But let’s set that aside and look at the bigger picture. What does that big picture up there suggest to you? How about meat & potatoes, for a nice, well-rounded nutritional distribution?

Plugs a few gaps, wouldn’t you say? It’s almost like we were meant to eat in more balanced ways. Incidentally, those two foods roughly split the calories. And hey, how about go to a 4 oz meat portion and take those fat and protein calories from that ounce of meat and put them in the potatoes as a little butter and whole milk. Mash ’em up?

Now who would’ve ever thought of that!?

May we dispense with the fallacy that potatoes are just empty sugar calories? You better, or I’m going to compare them to your 80% fat ketogenic diet where nutritionally, there’s just no fixing it. In that sense, you are talking about nearly empty fat calories, and your “leafy greens” aren’t going to be of much help unless you eat them by the pounds every day. What fun.

What I Ate Over Four Days That Caused Me To Drop 13 Pounds

I’ll preface this by saying this is what I did and what is very surprisingly working better than wild dreams, for me. You may be different. Or, you may be like the commenter who lost 26 pounds in a month. But keep in mind that once you at very least begin to include plain boiled potatoes as at least something you eat sometimes and often, you’ll likely lose your fear and loathing over them, and then the epiphany happens: I can eat a couple or more boiled potatoes in place of any meal in the world, at any time, no problem. This is so liberating and that’s what’s important. Keep the boiled potatoes in your fridge, and you have a complete meal in seconds, at any time.

Something else that’s important. If you have trouble losing weight you need to lose, or have uncontrollable hunger, then double down and keep doubling down. Read the section about your dumb dog brain above, again. Also, let me remind you that Tim Steele is The Potato Diet master, literally writing the book on it, which you will all buy and read, no exceptions. Then you’ll buy copies for all your friends and family. You will not disappoint me in this matter. But whether you approach it like Tim, bottom-up style, or like me, top-down, just always remember that you can eat a boiled potato in place of anything, anytime.

So first of all, let me tell you what I didn’t eat or drink.

1. No alcohol. In fact, my last drop of the stuff was the prior Wednesday, so I was 4 days dry before even starting this shenanigans. And you know what? I just might make a habit of dependency out of this — perhaps just a nice cold pint of Stella on tap, or a decent Old Vine Zin with a steak, now and then. Just the improvement in sleep is enough to just dump regular drinking entirely. Also, not even a whiff of heartburn, ever. Last time I went a whole week with zero alcohol was my Movenat experience, back in 2010.
2. No drinks with calories at all. Water and black coffee — which is my standard way anyhow.
3. No snaks.
4. No added fat.

What I did eat mostly was my boiled potatoes. Plain, or with salt and/or malt vinegar. On average, 8–10 of those per day, and let me tell you how I ended up eating them. I boil them whole, in the skin. After I drain them, I let them cool a bit and I’ll eat a couple nice & warm. I peel only the very outer layer of the skin with a pairing knife and I eat them whole, like one eats a hard-bouled egg. There’s something about biting off rather than slicing off what you eat.

The rest go into the fridge. Just toss ’em on a shelf. The skin is a great barrier to they stay moist. I take out about 8–10 in the morning so they can attain ambient temperature and typically, I eat 2 at a sitting, sometimes three, and the first dose is sometime around 10–11:00, 14–16 hours since the evening meal.

…What’s this about high carbohydrate sending you trolling the cupboards and fridge over nagging hunger all the time?

I ate two big sweet oranges over the four days.

I ate one 14 oz. tub of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, split between 2 of the 4 nights (along with the two complete, 700–800-ish kcal balanced dinners I’ll show below).

And I ate my potato soup. Funny about that. In the first post, I had made a pot that I precisely calculated to 1,900 calories for the whole shebang. It was immediately apparent to me that I could not near eat that whole thing in a day, much less every day — even though doing so would put me at a 600 calorie deficit on average. I eat it two ways.

OK, here’s the recipe. Now let me tell you, this is very close to the recipe I grew up with and I think my mom got it from my German grandmother, “Oma.” At any rate, in its original way, it was an inexpensive dish; peasant food, or perhaps war-torn Germany food…and if you could scrounge a little bacon, a little goes one hell of a long way for flavor. Now, unfortunately, it’s morphed into three times the calories per serving by using a pound of cubed polish sausage instead of a few slices of bacon drained of fat (to use in other cooking), heavy cream instead of milk, and to top it off, literally, a half handful of grated cheddar cheese.

What’s even worse is that either of those above bowls satisfy me for hours. Two, sometimes three ladles, but most often jut two. In the current morphology? It’s so damn insanely palatable that you’ll go back for a second huge bowl. So, in one step, you’ve taken what would be satisfying a X calories, and ended up eating 6X calories. And you know what? I prefer it this way anyway. It takes me back, and perhaps that two is an element of palatability. I get just the right balance between soupy and creamy, I think.

Ingredients for one 1,900 total calorie pot

• 3 pounds of potatoes, peeled and quatered
• 2 medium yellow onions, roughly chopped, or halved and sliced in onion-rings width
• 3 slices of thick-cut, smoked bacon; diced, fried, & drained (save the fat to cook something else)
• 2 cloves of fresh, peeled and crushed garlic (crushing with the heal of your hand is sufficient)
• 2 tablespoons of dried parsley (triple that for fresh)
• Salt & ground pepper to taste
• 1 quart chicken stock (I use Kitchen Basics; the best tasting on the supermarket shelf, and with 4g protein per cup — 5g for the beef stock)
• 1 cup whole milk

Preparation (~45 minutes)

Put potato, onion, bacon, garlic, and and parsley in a large pot. Add chicken stock. For thicker soup, add just enough water to just cover the ingredients by 1/3 inch. For soupier soup, cover by about an inch (you can always add water later…or reduce if you have to). I like it soupy to creamy, never thick, so I’m at an inch to start with and go from there.

Bring to a boil covered, reduce heat and go for about 30 minutes. Turn the heat to low and mash. If you dare use a stick blender and make a damn purée out of it, then we can’t be friends. Use a standard potato masher please. Mash to about 3/4 creamy, leaving plenty of bits and chunks.

Add the milk, stir, salt & pepper to taste. This is a dish that soaks up salt nicely. Best to add 1/4 tsp at a time until you get it just right.

So I did some nutritional comparisons. Here’s the nutrition breakdown of the pot of potato soup.

I know it’s slightly “unfair,” because of course, one can also add other nutrients to to the LCHF and Keto spreads, but this is just for a general comparative idea. That said, what do you have to work with? Proteins are super high in a few nutrients, as you can see, but also deficient in a not insignificant number, and fat is pretty nutrient vapid (“empty calories”), which is why, when you go from just standard LCHF to ketogenic — where you have to get protein way down — along with carbohydrate being near nil already, you’re compromising nutrition big time. Better get in some liver, I guess.

Does it matter? Who knows? I prefer to go with the evolutionary record of man as omnivorous dietary generalist who can migrate to almost anywhere and thrive. But more to the point, we actually do have excellent, modern day examples of the most long-lived, healthy people we’ve ever had any idea of. Blue Zones. I remember dismissing it when I first heard about it, 2008-ish. Nobody in Paleo talked about it, kinda pretended it didn’t exist, wasn’t relevant, wasn’t convenient, too counter-narrative…whatever. Instead, people talked about tooth scrapings on fossils and discarded bones next to the latrine. Make sense? Not to me. Not any more.

…Alright, to wrap this up, I mentioned above that I had two regular, nice dinners. Some weeks back, we got a subscription to Plated.com, which I blogged about here. Each Monday, a guy drives up and hands me a box with three complete meals for 2 people. It’s beyond fabulous for us, given our off-grid living at a construction site in an RV with its micro-kitchen. So there’s that, and also a compromise with Bea, so she’s not overly burdened with my dietary peccadillos. In return, she eats some of the potato soup and has even joined in a time or two for an all-plain-potato meal.

So yea, three times per week I’m doing regular, nicely balanced, 700–800-ish calorie meals. Here was Monday and Wednesday nights.

Well, since this post is way late in getting to first draft, here’s tonight’s Friday meal, a parting consolation to the low-carbers I’ve beat up on in this post.

Now, either I got lucky with those two meals over four days, still dumping all that weight, or it doesn’t matter, or it will matter. But at this point, making adjustments is zero problem. Should that, and even the potato soup, hamper anything where I’m not netting 2–3 pounds weight off weekly on the magic carpet ride to one-sixty-five, then one, two, or all three of those meals will be the first to go, pushed out by boiled potatoes.

Alright. Are we done, here? Yea, I think we’re done here.

This post originally appeared at FreeTheAnimal.com.