Basically they're the most filling food per calorie. So if you subscribe to the idea that losing weight is mainly about how many calories you consume, a potato heavy diet should be effective.
And an all potato diet, while monomaniacal, even more effective.
Eggs and fish are also very high on the satiety index. If you threw in pretty much any vegetables and spices of your choosing and just stuck to those along with potatoes, even with a cheat day or three you'd have a very healthy diet which I bet most people would lose weight on.
I have reactive hypoglycemia, and can say that potatoes spike my blood glucose levels more than table sugar - they have a really high glycemic index, and anyone with blood sugar issues should totally avoid them IMO.
And the thing about foods with a high glycemic index is that they cause you to feel hungry when your blood sugar rapidly drops back to baseline.
I find protein and fat way more satiating than, well, anything else. For example, eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.
I also have reactive hypoglycemia and I tried the potato diet out and had zero crashes the entire time. It's just not possible (for me) to eat enough calories, quickly enough, to cause a crash. I was only on it for a few days (~5), precisely for the logistic issues that the article and the original diet post discuss - I couldn't cook and eat enough calories to not be absolutely starving after the first couple days.
But zero crashes, monitored by finger stick blood glucose. Crazy stuff, for someone who has them all the time.
> eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.
I don't understand the motivation to make such a guarantee. It's as though you assume there are many people on HN who have never tried eating two eggs in the same meal. Do you maybe live in a place where eggs are rare (or not commonly eaten)?
(For what it's worth, my personal experience matches that of others here: two eggs would be a comically small breakfast.)
> I find protein and fat way more satiating than, well, anything else. For example, eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.
That's not what satiety means (at least in this context), right?
I'm reading OP's definition as "you'll eat less [calories] per sitting because you'll feel satiated more quickly", rather than your "your feeling of non-hunger will last longer".
> eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.
I usually eat 3 scrambled eggs when I have them for breakfast. Lunch can't come soon enough afterwards. I think my record is 7 scrambled eggs. I'm sure I had normal lunch that day.
Makes sense that this diet wouldn't work for you - but I think using this argument is sort of like arguing that peanuts are unhealthy because some people are allergic to them.
Fun Fact: You can let your potatoes cool down, and then re-heat them, to significantly lower the glycemic impact.
I agree that potatoes are high GI and that this idea is counterintuitive.
My observation was simply that research exists which substantiates this counterintuitive idea (quite a bit of it I believe, the satiety index has been around since 1995).
I'm sure it would spark an interesting discussion if someone had time to dive into the research and the studies.
As an aside, this potato diet supposedly allows salt and oil - which is all you need to make french fries. French fries did not score well on the satiety index.
Ive had six egg scrambles for breakfast many times. I then can eat a lunch at a reasonable time very easily. Most of this food stuff is in everyone's head. I think everyone should try a 3 day fast once in their life to see what it all feels like and realize nothing bad will happen. If anything it quickly makes you realize why people stress eat. Being actually pretty hungry feels a lot like anxiety to me.
Eating nothing else but potatoes would easily fulfill all the energy needs of your body.
The problem with potatoes and with all similar starchy food, like cereals, bananas, sweet potatoes etc., is that their ratio between energy content and protein content is much too high.
If you eat enough potatoes to also eat enough proteins, you would also gain weight and it would be difficult to do that, because you will be very satiated long before eating enough proteins.
If you eat only enough potatoes to be satiated, you will not get enough proteins and a large part of the weight loss will be from muscular mass, not only from fat reserves.
After one month of potato diet, unless you had been a very muscular person previously it is likely that symptoms of protein deficiency will already be visible, e.g. swellings of the feet due to insufficient albumin in the blood.
A much more effective single-item diet would be to eat some high-protein legume, e.g. lentils with olive oil and iodized salt instead of potatoes with (unspecified) oil and (unspecified) salt, which would provide enough proteins.
Such a diet would be almost complete, except that it does not have enough of some substances required in very small quantities, i.e. sulfur amino-acids, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, choline, vitamin B12, vitamin D, calcium.
This was my discovery as well. Keto, at its core, amounts to optimizing for satiety. Typically that takes the form of increasing fat intake, and progressively lowering carb intake. For most people, this results in fewer calories ingested, as fats + protein heavy diets make it hard to overeat. I burned through my excess weight rapidly: maybe 2-3lb a week IIRC?
After that, it changes to figuring out how many net carbs you need. I've found that this amount changes and is not a hard and fast rule. When I started keto, I aimed for 20g total (I don't recommend that low). Now, it is more like 50-100g. There's also the mental shift: carbs are not bad, they're just a tool.
The thing that feels most unfair is once your body gets to a lower weight, you're accustomed to eating less, and you've 'reset' things, I found I had a lot of leeway in what I could get away with, diet-wise.
I had a buddy that created a spreadsheet of various foods and their micro/macro nutrients. He's an engineer and wanted to engineer his diet to cover every deficiency in the minimal amount of food possible. He told me that potatoes were almost the perfect food if you could magically reduce the amount of glucose you took from them.
A couple years back I tried making colecanon due to a random suggestion from a friend. It's just mashed potatoes mixed with cabbage or kale or such, seasoned as you like. I do a version where I brown the cabbage in butter first.
I was surprised just how satisfying a plate of it as a meal, and thought exactly the same thing: I'm pretty sure you could live on that stuff indefinitely and be in great shape.
I used to fry up a kielbasa and then add in sauerkraut and serve that with mashed potatoes. The Sauerkraut and potato combination was delicious, so I'd buy your cabbage and mash idea. Going to have to give that a try.
I love colecanon. Mine has skin on boiled and mashed potatoes (any type or a mix), lots of butter, full fat whole milk greek yogurt and chopped cooked kale. My family loves it hot or cold. Add a few more spices and a little mustard, and I serve it as potato salad to my mayo hating in-laws.
Potatoes are more filling per calorie than broccoli? Spinach?
Also I wonder the comparison between potatoes and protein champions like hard-boiled eggs or fish. Maybe we could have a nice American eating competition to compare. Or just a detailed study where people eat short-term diets of each and measure their satiety and other vitals.
> Potatoes are more filling per calorie than broccoli? Spinach?
Way, way, way more filling. Regular vegetables have basically no fill value at all. Just a fancy form of water & vitamins. Potatoes are quite good at filling.
>There's actually some science behind this diet. Potatoes are the highest scoring food on the satiety index.
Never heard of this before, but I was surprised by the number of potatoes this person ate. I can eat like, 1.5 large potatoes max. Then I’m good. But this guy was quoting 18 med potatoes everyday!?!?
When I was doing intermittent fasting I would usually have roasted fish and potatoes for lunch, all prepared on the same baking dish[1]. It was very filling, agreeing with your post.
Eggs are definitely my goto on a calorie controlled keto diet. Obviously potatoes are out of the question :) . They are simply awful for people who prediabetic or think they have metabolic syndrome; not as bad as white bread or sugar but bad.
My understanding of the current science is that many cycles of excess carbs (especially processed carbs) while you are not in a calorie deficit, alongside a sedentary lifestyle, are bad for metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance.
White flour pancakes ALWAYS give me a blood sugar crash, and often cause a mild to moderate hypoglycemic episode; but I can eat whole grain pancakes without too much trouble.
If you're not carrying a large amount of excess weight, it might be worth trying the potato diet for a short time period, with a LOT of caveats. The problem is, as always, what happens when you go off the diet.
The biggest parts to losing weight are the things you didn't mention - portion size, snacks, alcohol, and sugary drinks. Most people would lose weight on any diet diet if they control those. I think I've lost about 20 pounds over the past 2 months just from reducing those things (not even eliminating).
This satiety index can be very misleading. Maybe you eat a lot of potatoes, and then you feel full - but for how long?
In my experience nothing beats the feeling of fullness after eating food with high fat content. It may not be the quickest to kick in, eg. you eat salad with lots of olive oil and cheese, you might feel light in the following hour or so. But then the fat digestion really starts, and you won't even want to think about food for the next 6-8 hours.
This is why keto works so well, especially when combined with fasting / intermittent fasting. If you eat a lot of fat, IF is a breeze - it's not that you have to manage your hunger (and eat various snacks every 2-3 hours), but that you don't have hunger at all, in fact, you feel full all the time. If you hadn't tried it you cannot even imagine how good this feeling is...
I've never been satiated eating lowfat yogurt. I actually recently started buying high fat yogurt (10g+ of fat) and it is super satiating. Given I can eat 3x the amount of lowfat yogurt and still not be full, I'm not buying it.
> Watermelon
Maybe due to bloating from water?
> Bean sprouts
I challenge anyone to get full eating just bean sprouts. Again, they are more akin to drinking (crunchy) water than eating food. It is maybe a mechanical sense of fullness, it is not satiated as is normally thought of.
> Fish, broiled
I get bored eating fish long before I get full from eating fish.
> Sirloin steak, broiled
Yes, this works. Steak is super satiating.
> Popcorn
Has anyone in the history of humanity ever been satiated eating popcorn? To be fair I know a few people who go to the movies and eat only a small bit, but most people I know can easily down an entire large bag and it'll have no impact on their appetite soon after.
> Oranges
Eh, this also falls into the category of "hungry a little bit later."
Or however many leads to 1g of protein per pound of lean body mass. No point losing weight if its lean body mass. (Protein has a muscle sparing effect during diets)
> And an all potato diet, while monomaniacal, even more effective.
I met someone on a Potatoes + Curd/Butter diet and he said something that stuck with me - "You need to eat the skins too".
So you can't just eat fries or mashed potatoes, but more like baked potatoes in skin with sour cream.
Seems a bit crazy, but it seemed to make him happy & felt like he was discovering something unique rather than being forced by someone else.
> even with a cheat day
Cheat days are under-explained, they're not for fun.
If you keep up a calorie deficit long-term, then your metabolism tanks and the easiest way to convince your body that it doesn't need to cut costs is to take a day of extra calories intermixed with the fasting.
If you don't do them, you will feel tired all the time when fasting.
I learned this concept from Jeremey Either on youtube and highly recommend his content. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxktmQ3zJOA He does a good job of summarizing content and then the only hard part is putting it into action in your life.
Fish is high on my personal satiety index, because I didn't eat much of it growing up so never developed a taste. Result is that when served fish I eat a little to be nice but don't enjoy it at all. That'd certainly help me eat less.
You don't seem to factor in the glycemic index. If someone spreads such meals over the day, it keeps spiking blood sugar levels (potatoe meals have a high glycemic load) and realsing lots of insulin. That doesn't sound too efective for weightloss.
Also, if you’re having a lot of food intolerance or allergy or digestion issues, having potatoes to fall back on can feel like a lifesaver. It’s early in the elimination diet re-introduction schedule.
Potatoes tend to be unhealthy via the methods that most people use to cook them [1] because of the formation of acrylamide, a potent carcinogen [2]. In fact potatoes are the food that delivers the highest amount of acrylamide in the American diet through the consumption of chips and french fries. But other methods of cooking like baking, frying, or even microwaving are also prone to forming acrylamide.
If you want to avoid acrylamide when cooking potatoes, you must cook them below 250F (pressure cooking or steaming, I think)?
I believe it might be based on misunderstanding the generic category "vegetables".
I.e. "I eat lots of vegetables! I had french fries on Tuesday, mashed potato on Wednesday, ..."
Reminds me of the classic regulatory decision (which I actually looked up to make sure that it wasn't an urban myth, that's how crazy it sounds) that the tomato paste on top of pizza is classified as a vegetable for school lunches [0].
The Glycemic Index (GI) looks bad, even look at the chart in the article. However the GI for potatoes changes depending on how you eat them. Cold potatoes have a much lower GI than hot freshly served.
Potatoes are calorie dense. I think the focus on satiation rather than pure calorie counting is a more recent trend.
Also, it sounds like water content is a significant contributor to their capacity to satiate, so things like potato chips probably fail miserably under this lense. Many processed foods made from potatoes have far less water in them than home cooked versions (french fries, hash browns).
Satiety is a mental construct. I've been underweight, normal weight, and overweight in my life. What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entirely divorced from nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving.
The only way to be exceptionally healthy and thin is to ignore the urge to overeat, and this urge is extremely dynamic on a per human basis. As a result, some people out there will eat a case of potatoes and still feel very hungry and unsatisfied.
E.g. there's ghrelin, cholecystokinin and other "satiety signals".
Except if you mean "satiefy is a mental construct" the same way pain is a mental construct. In which case, in a Kantian way, everything is, including space and time.
>What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entirely divorced from nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving.
(a) You'd be surprised.
(b) It only appears that way because we have diverged in a exteremely small span of time (evolutionary speaking) into completely different circumstances and food availability.
Otherwise, what the brain tells us is very much based on nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving.
It's just that in 2022 we have an endless supply of food we can just order or walk into a supermarket and buy, as opposed to food scarcity where we don't know if we will be able to find something to hunt tomorrow - like the last 100,000 of thousands of years before historical times (and millions of years considering our primate ancestors)...
This is bro science. Sorry dude. Caloric intake matter because in the end it is CICO. However, there are foods that absolutely make you feel full quicker and for a longer period of time and that matters as much as calories because if you can't fight off the hunger because your diet is primarily white bread and doritos as opposed to healthy fats , greens, and proteins then calories won't matter because you will 100% fail because of cravings.
Are you implying that there aren't physical manifestations that cause hunger? In other words, I could inject you with a suprahuman amount of ghrelin and you wouldn't feel hungry?
I've never managed "underweight", but having been as high as 320+lbs and as low as 161lbs, I agree. The key to losing weight is to find ways to ignore what your brain tells you to eat and stick to a calorie intake limit that matches the base metabolic rate of your target weight.
If you mean "mental" as in "not based on reality", then no, that's wrong.
However, it is true that your hunger urges are not solely based on thriving and surviving, but also significantly on the current state of your gut bacteria, which is highly influenced by diet and stress. They say the gut is a second brain for good reason.
I spent a few weeks eating only potatoes and vegetable oil, several years ago. It wasn't for weight loss, it was because I was breastfeeding, and my baby had some kind of protein sensitivity we couldn't nail down. Potatoes turned out to be a safe food for him, so that's all I ate for a while. As it happens potatoes are my favorite food, and I had vegetable oil available so I could eat fries/chips/crisps, but even then I can't imagine doing it without a similarly serious motivation. When my choices were "listen to the baby cry in pain every time he eats" or "eat potatoes until the allergist appointment," it was an easy choice. Otherwise I wouldn't last long on the potato diet.
I lost 60 pounds of pregnancy weight that year, so it's hard to tell, but I didn't notice any particular change in my weight loss rate during the potato diet.
Even if they did lose weight, it would be challenging to differentiate this from the insane calorie pull that happens to your body while breastfeeding.
The only reason the potato diet is interesting to me (and presumably the reason it's interesting to the https://slimemoldtimemold.com/ folks) is the likely relationship to their environmental contaminant hypothesis for the public health issue of increasing body weights since 1980, outlined in a series of posts here: http://achemicalhunger.com/
In short, while the variety and satiety explanations make a lot of sense subjectively for an individual on this diet, they don't match up with the empirical data on weight gain since 1980. Here are a few phenomena that are not explained by this hypothesis:
* The inflection point at right around 1980. There's no specific change that occurred in 1980 that anyone can point to that indicates a major change in variety of food in the average diet.
* The correllation of weight gain with location in watersheds: high altitude locales where surface water has not moved very far (e.g. Colorado) exhibit the weight gain phenomena much less than locales deeper down in the watershed (e.g. Mississippi and Louisiana)
I'm not interested in fad diets or disordered eating because they have a track record of bad long term outcomes, but I am interested in the potato diet as a blunt tool for taking action on this hypothesis, which looks pretty compelling to me. And if it doesn't work out, that's fine, too!
I enjoyed reading them until I tried to get to the source of the 1980 data. The source appears to be from the National Center for Health Statistics, which ran surveys in 1971–1974, 1976–1980, 1988–1994, and 1999–2018.
I was disappointed that they then misunderstood this as an inflection point exactly in 1980 when that was merely the last point in a graph that inappropriately bashed several surveys together. They ask over and over "So what changed in 1980?" but the data doesn't support that year specifically. They seemed to start out from a fundamental misunderstanding and then used that to discount other data through the rest of their posts.
I participated in the SMTM study, and am totally happy to share my data if anyone is at all curious.
Results for me:
- it was not as easy as i thought it would be
- i lost weight
- my appetite and satiety feedback systems were reset. After the diet was over I ate less and got full sooner.
- after the diet, I noticed that I wanted to eat more even after i was mechanically full. This was weird, since it didn't happen on the potato diet (I did overeat potatoes a few times because I tried to fill a pizza shaped hole with potato). It feels like an addiction. I know I am full. I feel full. I am not hungry. I want to eat more anyway.
- So far the weight is staying off (~2 months).
I'm not completely sold on the lithium hypothesis, either. But I find their arguments for some kind of environmental contaminant compelling, especially for the ways in which they refute some of the other major hypotheses for the increase in body weights (e.g. food variety, processed food, etc)
There should be places in the 'deep' watershed that are getting their water from somewhere else.
Or how about the Great Lakes? I doubt Lake Superior has the same stuff in it as Lake Erie, should be easy enough to poke with a stick.
There could certainly be some subtle underlying factor, but the food supply has grown continuously for like 80 years at this point, maybe it's just marketing and availability.
A huge part of the potato diet which isn't mentioned in the article is resistant starch. Each time you cool and cook potatoes you increase the amount of starch your body cannot digest (basically turning into fiber). This makes them even more fulfilling and less caloric (studies show this around 17% each time but I'm sure this approaches a limit).
Also it's ridiculously cheap and way easier to cook potatoes in bulk than practically any other food. At least with the Yukon golds I just rinse them, stab them with a knife and drop them into an instant pot with about a cup of water and a trivet. When done I transfer them into a big bowl in the fridge to cool and when I want to reheat them I reheat the whole bowl to accumulate resistant starch.
It's not a silver bullet but it's a really useful tool if you haven't been successful with other diets.
This is really well written and easily digestible. It’s rare that content about diet is lighthearted and fun! No outlandish claims, very little misconstrued science, but tons of funny fads. Usually you’d have to dig deep to find the root of the authors point in articles like this, but the simplicity is baked in from the start.
If this is interesting I highly recommend "The Hungry Brain".
Some other thoughts:
Obesity is not a disease of over-eating, it is a disease of managing hunger.
"Losing weight" is a terrible goal. "Changing Body Composition" is a much better goal. Specifically change the proportion of fat to muscle.
----
If your immediate answer is "Those are the same thing but with different words!!!" then here are some questions to get you thinking:
* Can you measure someone else's hunger and compare it to your own?
* What parts of hunger come from perceptions and what parts come from psychological conditioning?
* Can you survive being hungry? Can you survive starvation? How does your body know the difference?
* How does food energy relate to hunger? For CICO a Calorie is always a Calorie; is that also true for hunger?
* How do you measure progress towards a goal and how does it feel when you can't perceive progress?
* Excess body weight can put stress on your joints, but doesn't generally have any other negative effects. Excess body fat has many negative effects. A scale is cheap and consistent. Body fat monitors and measurement isn't always cheap or consistent (or accurate).
> Obesity is not a disease of over-eating, it is a disease of managing hunger.
Indeed it is, and the solution to managing hunger (i.e. returning your whole insulin and leptin system to a more optimal baseline) is NOT going for a 90% carbohydrate diet.
That's exactly why we have a bloody obesity epidemic. It's a fun thought experiment, but reading the comments in here people actually think this is genius and sustainable.
My unsupported personal belief is that the human body processes different carbohydrates in very different ways. Carbs that come from starch are not equivalent to carbs from cane sugar, and yet again not equivalent to honey, and again not equivalent to high fructose corn sryup, and again different from breads & pasta.
Ratio of fiber to carbohydrate and how that carbohydrate is processed by the body is also important as well.
Hence, french fries are not good, they have added sugar, the skin is removed, and they have a lot of added fats from the fried oils. That strikes me as a world of difference compared to a whole baked potato consumed with a sauteed broccolli with a side salad (plenty of fiber).
Unrelated, and unsolicited 2 cents, IMO it's all about eating as many fibrous and leafy greens as possible. At that point, a moderate side of lean meat, potato, carb, practially whatever - does not matter so long as the fibrous and leafy greens are the majority source of calories.
> Indeed it is, and the solution to managing hunger (i.e. returning your whole insulin and leptin system to a more optimal baseline) is NOT going for a 90% carbohydrate diet.
Leptin system returns to a more optimal baseline with weight loss.
Insulin returns to a more optimal baseline by increasing insulin sensitivity. Exercise does this most effectively, loosing weight also does this. Low carb diets don't do this directly, only through weight loss.
Managing hunger is managing your dopamine response. Eating nothing but one food, will make you very bored of your food. You won't be looking for food as entertainment, stress relief, or a cure for boredom(dopamine). You will only eat for true hunger(lack of dopamine can feel similar).
Do you really believe that the obesity epidemic was caused by people eating 90% carbohydrate diets?
The "high carb meals" at McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut... are all also (and more per calorie) high in fat.
Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil to your mixed-green salad? That has turned into a high fat salad. Most people cannot avoid cheese or nuts on salad, either.
Eating the potato diet with sour cream/butter/cheese: High fat.
By this logic, the obesity epidemic should've happened in the 17th century when the potato was introduced to the rest of the world and became the staple crop of poor farmers everywhere.
CGMs should disillusion people of this pretty quickly. I really wish more people would try them for a month just to see how they respond to certain foods.
> Excess body weight can put stress on your joints, but doesn't generally have any other negative effects.
That seems to contradict the Harvard School of Public Health's article[0] that says:
> The results showed that participants with BMI of 22.5-<25 kg/m2 (considered a healthy weight range) had the lowest mortality risk during the time they were followed. The risk of mortality increased significantly throughout the overweight range: a BMI of 25-<27.5 kg/m2 was associated with a 7% higher risk of mortality; a BMI of 27.5-<30 kg/m2 was associated with a 20% higher risk; a BMI of 30.0-<35.0 kg/m2 was associated with a 45% higher risk; a BMI of 35.0-<40.0 kg/m2 was associated with a 94% higher risk; and a BMI of 40.0-<60.0 kg/m2 was associated with a nearly three-fold risk. Every 5 units higher BMI above 25 kg/m2 was associated with about 31% higher risk of premature death. Participants who were underweight also had a higher mortality risk.
These findings don't seem to discriminate on the source of the BMI, only on its existence.
If they didn't control for the ratio of lean body mass to fat, then it doesn't actually contradict my point.
If the findings don't discriminate on the source of the BMI, then you just don't know. It's not evidence.
> "They looked at participants’ body mass index (BMI)—an indicator of body fat calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared (kg/m2)."
BMI is the WORST indicator of body fat precisely because it does not account for muscle mass. BMI is only suitable for population level studies, it is not suitable for individual health decisions.
Put another way - if I go to the gym religiously, I could gain a few pounds but also lose a few percent of body fat. What will my medical tests show in general? Will my clothes fit better? Will I be able to climb stairs more easily? BMI shows none of that.
>Obesity is not a disease of over-eating, it is a disease of managing hunger.
If that is so, why is obesity so much worse in some countries than in others? Are Italians really so much better at managing hunger than Americans?
It seems far more plausible to me that the differences in obesity between countries are caused by simple cultural habits than by some complex psychological task called managing hunger, which seems less likely to be cultural.
> It seems far more plausible to me that the differences in obesity between countries are caused by simple cultural habits than by some complex psychological task called managing hunger, which seems less likely to be cultural.
I don't see a clear point here. Culture has a HUGE impact on psychology.
Also, managing hunger is Psychological AND Physiological.
No, obesity is a metabolic problem. And barring personal medical issues, diets of starch and sugar are the cause.
[EDIT], Folks, obesity is a result of metabolic disease. Obesity is an epidemic, and the science is abundant on this. This isn't a grammatic nuance, it's the essence of the global obesity epidemic that results from diet and eating habits. It's literally the foundation of the growing understanding amongst medical professionals of why low-carb diets and fasting work dramatically on this.
> It's literally the foundation of the growing understanding amongst medical professionals of why low-carb diets and fasting work dramatically on this.
Do you have a good source to support the idea that there is a "growing understanding" that "low-card diets and fasting work"?
I'm fairly well-read on this subject (though a complete layman), but my general understanding of today's scientific consensus is that there is nothing, or almost nothing special about low-card diets or fasting. Most of the people who are purporting that these diets are somehow better (for various meanings of better) are stating heteredox views.
They might still be right! (Though I doubt it.) But I'm specifically pushing back on the narrative that this is a growing consensus.
I feel it would be accurate to say that obesity is also a metabolic problem.
The difficulty with disentangling "what is obesity" is that the body is full of feedback and feed-forward mechanisms. You can look at any part of the machinery and say "here is the problem". There are a significant number of systems that deal with adiposity, hunger, and energy management and allocation.
Once we find something to blame for a problem we often stop looking. Processed carbs are not compatible with a sedentary lifestyle, that is true. But our ancestors ate carbs for generations. Many modern cultures eat carbs and don't have a big problem with obesity.
Intermittent fasting has been the easiest thing for fine tuning control over weight for me. My Dad always says it's too hard, he gets hangry etc, but once you commit to it for ~2 weeks you don't even get hungry in the fast window anymore.
The body gets very conditioned to eating patterns. Something to ease into.
I'm not sure the average person can succeed on a diet predicated on greatly limiting the variety of foods you eat. It's an interesting idea though!
Having done both time-based and food-based restrictions, I would say that both can work for some people but won't work for others. And I think the details matter a ton. E.g., I've happily done months of fasting where my eating window is circa 7a-1p. But I spent a month trying a switch to a 12p-6p so I could eat dinner with people and it was hell. I got mean in the 10a-12p range and that did not improve over the month.
You sound like me. I can't do a morning fast. It kinda sucks, as you notice, because it screws around with your ability to have a social dinner. But if I don't have breakfast, I'm not someone to be around before lunch.
What window do you eat during? I've seen lots of focus on eating only in the morning, but much of my life I naturally had low appetite in the mornings and mostly only ate dinner. That also coincided with being young and having an insane metabolism. I haven't actually intentionally implemented intermittent fasting, but I've considered it, and I'm strongly biased towards favoring a "dinner only" window from that experience.
I typically do a Noon to 8 PM eating window, which works for me. I agree with you, much easier to skip breakfast than to skip dinner. Also, I do more social eating for lunch/dinner.
Intermittent fasting works well for some, but could be a danger for others. Like you, I used it to fine tune my weight until I wanted to lose and then decided to lose more via IF.
I'm not going into my life story, but I've had fast that have lasted for more than 2 weeks and have had loved ones ask me to stop. Fasting is not an eating disorder, but it can be a path to one if you are not careful. Sounds like you are. I hope others, who may not be, know this.
Totally agree with what you say OrangeMonkey however I think I understood GP's comment differently. I thought GP was saying once you stick to an IF schedule for 2 weeks (for example only eating 12pm to 8pm), after 2 weeks it becomes easy to only eat within those windows. I don't think they were suggesting prolonged fasting >24 hours.
My son is in treatment for Leukemia, and most patients lose large amounts of weight.
He's also autistic and has food texture issues.
Somehow he's good with potatoes (generally baked "fries") and milk with some infant formula mixed in. He's the only young (<5 YO) patient they've personally had that has gained weight during treatment, and the attribute it to his "milk and potato" diet. To be clear, he's continued growing, if not normally, something approximating normal, during his chemo. That's highly unusual.
Readit News
Basically they're the most filling food per calorie. So if you subscribe to the idea that losing weight is mainly about how many calories you consume, a potato heavy diet should be effective.
And an all potato diet, while monomaniacal, even more effective.
Eggs and fish are also very high on the satiety index. If you threw in pretty much any vegetables and spices of your choosing and just stuck to those along with potatoes, even with a cheat day or three you'd have a very healthy diet which I bet most people would lose weight on.
I have reactive hypoglycemia, and can say that potatoes spike my blood glucose levels more than table sugar - they have a really high glycemic index, and anyone with blood sugar issues should totally avoid them IMO.
And the thing about foods with a high glycemic index is that they cause you to feel hungry when your blood sugar rapidly drops back to baseline.
I find protein and fat way more satiating than, well, anything else. For example, eat 2 eggs for breakfast and I guarantee you won't even think a out food again until lunch time, if not dinner time.
But zero crashes, monitored by finger stick blood glucose. Crazy stuff, for someone who has them all the time.
I don't understand the motivation to make such a guarantee. It's as though you assume there are many people on HN who have never tried eating two eggs in the same meal. Do you maybe live in a place where eggs are rare (or not commonly eaten)?
(For what it's worth, my personal experience matches that of others here: two eggs would be a comically small breakfast.)
What a patently absurd claim. Your anecdata is not evidence.
That's not what satiety means (at least in this context), right?
I'm reading OP's definition as "you'll eat less [calories] per sitting because you'll feel satiated more quickly", rather than your "your feeling of non-hunger will last longer".
The two seem pretty orthogonal definitions to me.
I usually eat 3 scrambled eggs when I have them for breakfast. Lunch can't come soon enough afterwards. I think my record is 7 scrambled eggs. I'm sure I had normal lunch that day.
Makes sense that this diet wouldn't work for you - but I think using this argument is sort of like arguing that peanuts are unhealthy because some people are allergic to them.
Fun Fact: You can let your potatoes cool down, and then re-heat them, to significantly lower the glycemic impact.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761
Tried that. Two eggs and a piece of toast will get me easily to lunch. Four eggs will get me an hour or so, despite having more calories.
My observation was simply that research exists which substantiates this counterintuitive idea (quite a bit of it I believe, the satiety index has been around since 1995).
I'm sure it would spark an interesting discussion if someone had time to dive into the research and the studies.
http://www.mendosa.com/satiety.htm gives an overview and mentions a few of the studies.
As an aside, this potato diet supposedly allows salt and oil - which is all you need to make french fries. French fries did not score well on the satiety index.
Boiled potatoes did.
The problem with potatoes and with all similar starchy food, like cereals, bananas, sweet potatoes etc., is that their ratio between energy content and protein content is much too high.
If you eat enough potatoes to also eat enough proteins, you would also gain weight and it would be difficult to do that, because you will be very satiated long before eating enough proteins.
If you eat only enough potatoes to be satiated, you will not get enough proteins and a large part of the weight loss will be from muscular mass, not only from fat reserves.
After one month of potato diet, unless you had been a very muscular person previously it is likely that symptoms of protein deficiency will already be visible, e.g. swellings of the feet due to insufficient albumin in the blood.
A much more effective single-item diet would be to eat some high-protein legume, e.g. lentils with olive oil and iodized salt instead of potatoes with (unspecified) oil and (unspecified) salt, which would provide enough proteins.
Such a diet would be almost complete, except that it does not have enough of some substances required in very small quantities, i.e. sulfur amino-acids, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, choline, vitamin B12, vitamin D, calcium.
After that, it changes to figuring out how many net carbs you need. I've found that this amount changes and is not a hard and fast rule. When I started keto, I aimed for 20g total (I don't recommend that low). Now, it is more like 50-100g. There's also the mental shift: carbs are not bad, they're just a tool.
The thing that feels most unfair is once your body gets to a lower weight, you're accustomed to eating less, and you've 'reset' things, I found I had a lot of leeway in what I could get away with, diet-wise.
Apparently yes: https://drdavisinfinitehealth.com/2018/02/fermented-raw-pota...
(One of several results on search. I've no idea on merits / validity here.)
> Again the diet seemed to be plausible except for calling for the consumption of 200 bullion cubes per day.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160411141356/https://dl.dropbo...
I was surprised just how satisfying a plate of it as a meal, and thought exactly the same thing: I'm pretty sure you could live on that stuff indefinitely and be in great shape.
Peeled Russet potatoes boiled, then strained and let steam some moisture off for a bit.
Kale blanched in water for a few seconds (no more than 30). Then allow it to steam off some moisture. Chop to desired size, pat dry.
Add butter and kale to potatoes. Salt and pepper to taste.
We found that controlling the moisture has a huge impact on flavor and the kale maintaining some texture.
Also I wonder the comparison between potatoes and protein champions like hard-boiled eggs or fish. Maybe we could have a nice American eating competition to compare. Or just a detailed study where people eat short-term diets of each and measure their satiety and other vitals.
Way, way, way more filling. Regular vegetables have basically no fill value at all. Just a fancy form of water & vitamins. Potatoes are quite good at filling.
Never heard of this before, but I was surprised by the number of potatoes this person ate. I can eat like, 1.5 large potatoes max. Then I’m good. But this guy was quoting 18 med potatoes everyday!?!?
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/18/dining/the-minimalist-tak...
White flour pancakes ALWAYS give me a blood sugar crash, and often cause a mild to moderate hypoglycemic episode; but I can eat whole grain pancakes without too much trouble.
If you're not carrying a large amount of excess weight, it might be worth trying the potato diet for a short time period, with a LOT of caveats. The problem is, as always, what happens when you go off the diet.
In my experience nothing beats the feeling of fullness after eating food with high fat content. It may not be the quickest to kick in, eg. you eat salad with lots of olive oil and cheese, you might feel light in the following hour or so. But then the fat digestion really starts, and you won't even want to think about food for the next 6-8 hours.
This is why keto works so well, especially when combined with fasting / intermittent fasting. If you eat a lot of fat, IF is a breeze - it's not that you have to manage your hunger (and eat various snacks every 2-3 hours), but that you don't have hunger at all, in fact, you feel full all the time. If you hadn't tried it you cannot even imagine how good this feeling is...
> Lowfat yogurt
I've never been satiated eating lowfat yogurt. I actually recently started buying high fat yogurt (10g+ of fat) and it is super satiating. Given I can eat 3x the amount of lowfat yogurt and still not be full, I'm not buying it.
> Watermelon
Maybe due to bloating from water?
> Bean sprouts
I challenge anyone to get full eating just bean sprouts. Again, they are more akin to drinking (crunchy) water than eating food. It is maybe a mechanical sense of fullness, it is not satiated as is normally thought of.
> Fish, broiled
I get bored eating fish long before I get full from eating fish.
> Sirloin steak, broiled
Yes, this works. Steak is super satiating.
> Popcorn
Has anyone in the history of humanity ever been satiated eating popcorn? To be fair I know a few people who go to the movies and eat only a small bit, but most people I know can easily down an entire large bag and it'll have no impact on their appetite soon after.
> Oranges
Eh, this also falls into the category of "hungry a little bit later."
I met someone on a Potatoes + Curd/Butter diet and he said something that stuck with me - "You need to eat the skins too".
So you can't just eat fries or mashed potatoes, but more like baked potatoes in skin with sour cream.
Seems a bit crazy, but it seemed to make him happy & felt like he was discovering something unique rather than being forced by someone else.
> even with a cheat day
Cheat days are under-explained, they're not for fun.
If you keep up a calorie deficit long-term, then your metabolism tanks and the easiest way to convince your body that it doesn't need to cut costs is to take a day of extra calories intermixed with the fasting.
If you don't do them, you will feel tired all the time when fasting.
This causes resistant starches to develop in the potato which is good for you in a handful of ways.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/resistant-starch-101
You can keep the skin for both of these though, especially fries, it's delicious, for mashed potatoes it's a bit weird but if you're lazy it works
That doesn’t seem like it’s high in the satiety index.
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When I eat a portion of mashed potatoes (I cook them with very little butter), it feels like I've eaten a very dense soup.
They certainly didn't calculate this index by weight, because per gram eggs are far more filling than potatoes
[1] http://www.ernaehrungsdenkwerkstatt.de/fileadmin/user_upload...
Oddly, I love calamari and sushi.
So there was sound science behind my all-scrambled-eggs-and-hashbrowns diet in college.
If you want to avoid acrylamide when cooking potatoes, you must cook them below 250F (pressure cooking or steaming, I think)?
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18320571/
[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/chemical-contaminants-food/acrylami....
I.e. "I eat lots of vegetables! I had french fries on Tuesday, mashed potato on Wednesday, ..."
Reminds me of the classic regulatory decision (which I actually looked up to make sure that it wasn't an urban myth, that's how crazy it sounds) that the tomato paste on top of pizza is classified as a vegetable for school lunches [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable
Also, it sounds like water content is a significant contributor to their capacity to satiate, so things like potato chips probably fail miserably under this lense. Many processed foods made from potatoes have far less water in them than home cooked versions (french fries, hash browns).
Same with fish, I cannot get full eating fish in any quantity. Shrimp, sure, but not fish.
Nuts, same deal. I'll eat 500+ calories of nuts, does nothing for me.
The only way to be exceptionally healthy and thin is to ignore the urge to overeat, and this urge is extremely dynamic on a per human basis. As a result, some people out there will eat a case of potatoes and still feel very hungry and unsatisfied.
Yeah, just not according to science.
E.g. there's ghrelin, cholecystokinin and other "satiety signals".
Except if you mean "satiefy is a mental construct" the same way pain is a mental construct. In which case, in a Kantian way, everything is, including space and time.
>What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entirely divorced from nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving.
(a) You'd be surprised.
(b) It only appears that way because we have diverged in a exteremely small span of time (evolutionary speaking) into completely different circumstances and food availability.
Otherwise, what the brain tells us is very much based on nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving.
It's just that in 2022 we have an endless supply of food we can just order or walk into a supermarket and buy, as opposed to food scarcity where we don't know if we will be able to find something to hunt tomorrow - like the last 100,000 of thousands of years before historical times (and millions of years considering our primate ancestors)...
Are you implying that there aren't physical manifestations that cause hunger? In other words, I could inject you with a suprahuman amount of ghrelin and you wouldn't feel hungry?
However, it is true that your hunger urges are not solely based on thriving and surviving, but also significantly on the current state of your gut bacteria, which is highly influenced by diet and stress. They say the gut is a second brain for good reason.
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Obviously sprinting burns a lot of calories at once, but making milk happens all day, and you don't have to breathe those calories out.
In short, while the variety and satiety explanations make a lot of sense subjectively for an individual on this diet, they don't match up with the empirical data on weight gain since 1980. Here are a few phenomena that are not explained by this hypothesis:
* The inflection point at right around 1980. There's no specific change that occurred in 1980 that anyone can point to that indicates a major change in variety of food in the average diet.
* The correllation of weight gain with location in watersheds: high altitude locales where surface water has not moved very far (e.g. Colorado) exhibit the weight gain phenomena much less than locales deeper down in the watershed (e.g. Mississippi and Louisiana)
I'm not interested in fad diets or disordered eating because they have a track record of bad long term outcomes, but I am interested in the potato diet as a blunt tool for taking action on this hypothesis, which looks pretty compelling to me. And if it doesn't work out, that's fine, too!
I was disappointed that they then misunderstood this as an inflection point exactly in 1980 when that was merely the last point in a graph that inappropriately bashed several surveys together. They ask over and over "So what changed in 1980?" but the data doesn't support that year specifically. They seemed to start out from a fundamental misunderstanding and then used that to discount other data through the rest of their posts.
Results for me:
I'm not completely sold on the lithium hypothesis, either. But I find their arguments for some kind of environmental contaminant compelling, especially for the ways in which they refute some of the other major hypotheses for the increase in body weights (e.g. food variety, processed food, etc)
Note that the SMTM folks recently published an article responding to the TDS data referred to by "It's Probably Not Lithium": https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/05/total-diet-studies-...
Or how about the Great Lakes? I doubt Lake Superior has the same stuff in it as Lake Erie, should be easy enough to poke with a stick.
There could certainly be some subtle underlying factor, but the food supply has grown continuously for like 80 years at this point, maybe it's just marketing and availability.
Also it's ridiculously cheap and way easier to cook potatoes in bulk than practically any other food. At least with the Yukon golds I just rinse them, stab them with a knife and drop them into an instant pot with about a cup of water and a trivet. When done I transfer them into a big bowl in the fridge to cool and when I want to reheat them I reheat the whole bowl to accumulate resistant starch.
It's not a silver bullet but it's a really useful tool if you haven't been successful with other diets.
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Even if you're not working out, your body still craves proteins. Neglecting this is dangerous
Some other thoughts:
Obesity is not a disease of over-eating, it is a disease of managing hunger.
"Losing weight" is a terrible goal. "Changing Body Composition" is a much better goal. Specifically change the proportion of fat to muscle.
----
If your immediate answer is "Those are the same thing but with different words!!!" then here are some questions to get you thinking:
* Can you measure someone else's hunger and compare it to your own?
* What parts of hunger come from perceptions and what parts come from psychological conditioning?
* Can you survive being hungry? Can you survive starvation? How does your body know the difference?
* How does food energy relate to hunger? For CICO a Calorie is always a Calorie; is that also true for hunger?
* How do you measure progress towards a goal and how does it feel when you can't perceive progress?
* Excess body weight can put stress on your joints, but doesn't generally have any other negative effects. Excess body fat has many negative effects. A scale is cheap and consistent. Body fat monitors and measurement isn't always cheap or consistent (or accurate).
Indeed it is, and the solution to managing hunger (i.e. returning your whole insulin and leptin system to a more optimal baseline) is NOT going for a 90% carbohydrate diet.
That's exactly why we have a bloody obesity epidemic. It's a fun thought experiment, but reading the comments in here people actually think this is genius and sustainable.
Ratio of fiber to carbohydrate and how that carbohydrate is processed by the body is also important as well.
Hence, french fries are not good, they have added sugar, the skin is removed, and they have a lot of added fats from the fried oils. That strikes me as a world of difference compared to a whole baked potato consumed with a sauteed broccolli with a side salad (plenty of fiber).
Unrelated, and unsolicited 2 cents, IMO it's all about eating as many fibrous and leafy greens as possible. At that point, a moderate side of lean meat, potato, carb, practially whatever - does not matter so long as the fibrous and leafy greens are the majority source of calories.
Leptin system returns to a more optimal baseline with weight loss.
Insulin returns to a more optimal baseline by increasing insulin sensitivity. Exercise does this most effectively, loosing weight also does this. Low carb diets don't do this directly, only through weight loss.
Managing hunger is managing your dopamine response. Eating nothing but one food, will make you very bored of your food. You won't be looking for food as entertainment, stress relief, or a cure for boredom(dopamine). You will only eat for true hunger(lack of dopamine can feel similar).
The "high carb meals" at McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut... are all also (and more per calorie) high in fat.
Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil to your mixed-green salad? That has turned into a high fat salad. Most people cannot avoid cheese or nuts on salad, either.
Eating the potato diet with sour cream/butter/cheese: High fat.
That seems to contradict the Harvard School of Public Health's article[0] that says:
> The results showed that participants with BMI of 22.5-<25 kg/m2 (considered a healthy weight range) had the lowest mortality risk during the time they were followed. The risk of mortality increased significantly throughout the overweight range: a BMI of 25-<27.5 kg/m2 was associated with a 7% higher risk of mortality; a BMI of 27.5-<30 kg/m2 was associated with a 20% higher risk; a BMI of 30.0-<35.0 kg/m2 was associated with a 45% higher risk; a BMI of 35.0-<40.0 kg/m2 was associated with a 94% higher risk; and a BMI of 40.0-<60.0 kg/m2 was associated with a nearly three-fold risk. Every 5 units higher BMI above 25 kg/m2 was associated with about 31% higher risk of premature death. Participants who were underweight also had a higher mortality risk.
These findings don't seem to discriminate on the source of the BMI, only on its existence.
[0] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/overweight-...
If the findings don't discriminate on the source of the BMI, then you just don't know. It's not evidence.
> "They looked at participants’ body mass index (BMI)—an indicator of body fat calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared (kg/m2)."
BMI is the WORST indicator of body fat precisely because it does not account for muscle mass. BMI is only suitable for population level studies, it is not suitable for individual health decisions.
Put another way - if I go to the gym religiously, I could gain a few pounds but also lose a few percent of body fat. What will my medical tests show in general? Will my clothes fit better? Will I be able to climb stairs more easily? BMI shows none of that.
If that is so, why is obesity so much worse in some countries than in others? Are Italians really so much better at managing hunger than Americans?
It seems far more plausible to me that the differences in obesity between countries are caused by simple cultural habits than by some complex psychological task called managing hunger, which seems less likely to be cultural.
I don't see a clear point here. Culture has a HUGE impact on psychology.
Also, managing hunger is Psychological AND Physiological.
400lb of muscles or fat is probably not healthy either way...
[EDIT], Folks, obesity is a result of metabolic disease. Obesity is an epidemic, and the science is abundant on this. This isn't a grammatic nuance, it's the essence of the global obesity epidemic that results from diet and eating habits. It's literally the foundation of the growing understanding amongst medical professionals of why low-carb diets and fasting work dramatically on this.
Do you have a good source to support the idea that there is a "growing understanding" that "low-card diets and fasting work"?
I'm fairly well-read on this subject (though a complete layman), but my general understanding of today's scientific consensus is that there is nothing, or almost nothing special about low-card diets or fasting. Most of the people who are purporting that these diets are somehow better (for various meanings of better) are stating heteredox views.
They might still be right! (Though I doubt it.) But I'm specifically pushing back on the narrative that this is a growing consensus.
The difficulty with disentangling "what is obesity" is that the body is full of feedback and feed-forward mechanisms. You can look at any part of the machinery and say "here is the problem". There are a significant number of systems that deal with adiposity, hunger, and energy management and allocation.
Once we find something to blame for a problem we often stop looking. Processed carbs are not compatible with a sedentary lifestyle, that is true. But our ancestors ate carbs for generations. Many modern cultures eat carbs and don't have a big problem with obesity.
The body gets very conditioned to eating patterns. Something to ease into.
I'm not sure the average person can succeed on a diet predicated on greatly limiting the variety of foods you eat. It's an interesting idea though!
curious, how young do you mean? Human metabolism doesn't really change during adulthood until old age:
> Fat-free mass–adjusted expenditure [...] remains stable in adulthood (20 to 60 years), even during pregnancy; then declines in older adults.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5017
I'm not going into my life story, but I've had fast that have lasted for more than 2 weeks and have had loved ones ask me to stop. Fasting is not an eating disorder, but it can be a path to one if you are not careful. Sounds like you are. I hope others, who may not be, know this.
Cheers.
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He's also autistic and has food texture issues.
Somehow he's good with potatoes (generally baked "fries") and milk with some infant formula mixed in. He's the only young (<5 YO) patient they've personally had that has gained weight during treatment, and the attribute it to his "milk and potato" diet. To be clear, he's continued growing, if not normally, something approximating normal, during his chemo. That's highly unusual.
Anecdotal, but it's my experience.