Two pieces of information that would really help me to unterpret this post
1. How old are you? Weight loss seems to get exponentially harder with age (up to about 70 years old)
2. Were you able to assess how much fat was lost as opposed to how much weight was lost? No-one cares about losing weight, the goal—which is what should be measured—is fat loss.
Comments:
Potato only diet sounds a lot like Shangri-La diet—nothing tasty. I did lose weight on the SL diet but it takes away much of the pleasure of consuming food.
A lot of the other things you mentioned seeme to be stimulants (e.g. LSD, Cocoa). These do help weight loss but at a cost.
Unfortunately not. I only had a normal scale at my disposal. Subjectively it feels like it was mostly fat, but it was probably muscle too, My push-up count and chin-up count didn’t change, and I would have expected them to go up had I lost only fat and kept all my muscle.
Comment on taste: I always made my potatoes tasty, adding butter to taste or a bit of sour cream, or hot sauce or other sauces and spices or herbs I liked. I just didn’t add table salt (or MSG). Also remember that it is only one meal a day, all other meals are unchanged.
Comment on other things: Sorry, my typo, I meant to say Cacao (chocolate) not the precursor to cocaine is what I used after christmas (fixed in the text), basically making myself a cup of hot chocolate. Other things also worked too which I mentioned such as red or black kidney beans meals that worked even better than potato meals.
They can me made tasty indeed. Though the fact you have to do things to make them tasty suggests they are not inherently that tasty. Monotony can also be a factor in how motivating-to-eat a diet is.
I did measure my waist circumference. It went from 106cm (mid-filled lungs) at the beginning to 89cm (maximum air-filled lungs, I changed my method mid-way, I figured it was harder for me to decieve myself if always max-filled my lungs rather than doing it “mid”-way) at the end. But I quickly noticed that waist circ tracked weight surprisingly well, just that it had a ~3 day lag, so I ended up paying more attention to weight.
The standard method to measure waist is with lungs neutral (neither full nor empty) and measure at the point of the belly button. E,g, not necessarily where your belt goes. I assmume you did this.
I did it at the belly button, but I did it at lungs-full because I thought it would be harder for me to cheat myself at lungs full. lungs neutral felt like I could unconsciously be little less full when it would support my hypothesis and little more full when it wouldn’t …
My smartwatch can scan body composition electrically. So can my bathroom scale, although I never figured out how to work the thing. It’s the kind with metal foot plates. These things are probably not very accurate, but certainly affordable and convenient (compared to an immersion tank) and even noisy data is useful when you collect enough of it. I prefer the watch because it records the results on my phone.
Ya, I know … by the time I thought it might be nice to get one of those because it really worked much better than I ever expected so I was going to write about it thus have more data might be nice, I had already reached my target weight.
If you shifted a large portion of your diet to potatoes, which are only 2 % protein, unless you compensated for it actively with protein elsewhere through further shifts in your diet, I think muscle loss playing a role in the weight loss you observed is not implausible. If one had, say, 2,4 kg of potatoes a day (that would come to 1750 kcal, which is compatible with its use as a sole food while losing weight), one would only be getting 48 g of protein a day, while at a caloric deficit—I’d expect muscle loss with those values. And indeed, if you had maintained muscle mass, body weight exercises would have gotten markedly easier. Muscles weigh more than fat, too, so the loss shows quite a bit on the scale, and hence, may make up a significant proportion of the loss you observed.
Also, as a German, I strongly protest the notion of the poster above you that potatoes are not tasty or varied. There are over 3000 potato breeds, covering all sorts of colours (white, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple...), shapes, consistencies (festkochend (with bite, e.g. great for fried potatoes), mehlig (creamy, e.g. if you want to mash them), vorwiegend festkochend (an interim)) and tastes, from sweet, fruity and subtle to intense and hearty with earthy, aromatic and nut-like notes. A good potato cultivar, harvested fresh or at least stored correctly, is delicious, needing nothing but a bit of salt and maybe a hint of fat. We’ve had outright campaigns to keep particularly tasty cultivars on the market (e.g. Linda), and German farmers traditionally name their potato cultivars they are proudest of for their wives. American potatoes bred to look pretty and become huge may be bland, but good potatoes really are not. They should be an excellent stand-alone, and enrich any dish they are added to. - And now I crave potatoes.
Two pieces of information that would really help me to unterpret this post
1. How old are you? Weight loss seems to get exponentially harder with age (up to about 70 years old)
2. Were you able to assess how much fat was lost as opposed to how much weight was lost? No-one cares about losing weight, the goal—which is what should be measured—is fat loss.
Comments:
Potato only diet sounds a lot like Shangri-La diet—nothing tasty. I did lose weight on the SL diet but it takes away much of the pleasure of consuming food.
A lot of the other things you mentioned seeme to be stimulants (e.g. LSD, Cocoa). These do help weight loss but at a cost.
I’m in my forties.
Unfortunately not. I only had a normal scale at my disposal. Subjectively it feels like it was mostly fat, but it was probably muscle too, My push-up count and chin-up count didn’t change, and I would have expected them to go up had I lost only fat and kept all my muscle.
Comment on taste: I always made my potatoes tasty, adding butter to taste or a bit of sour cream, or hot sauce or other sauces and spices or herbs I liked. I just didn’t add table salt (or MSG). Also remember that it is only one meal a day, all other meals are unchanged.
Comment on other things: Sorry, my typo, I meant to say Cacao (chocolate) not the precursor to cocaine is what I used after christmas (fixed in the text), basically making myself a cup of hot chocolate. Other things also worked too which I mentioned such as red or black kidney beans meals that worked even better than potato meals.
I did measure my waist circumference. It went from 106cm (mid-filled lungs) at the beginning to 89cm (maximum air-filled lungs, I changed my method mid-way, I figured it was harder for me to decieve myself if always max-filled my lungs rather than doing it “mid”-way) at the end. But I quickly noticed that waist circ tracked weight surprisingly well, just that it had a ~3 day lag, so I ended up paying more attention to weight.
> waist went down
OK good—all we need now is your height
The standard method to measure waist is with lungs neutral (neither full nor empty) and measure at the point of the belly button. E,g, not necessarily where your belt goes. I assmume you did this.
I did it at the belly button, but I did it at lungs-full because I thought it would be harder for me to cheat myself at lungs full. lungs neutral felt like I could unconsciously be little less full when it would support my hypothesis and little more full when it wouldn’t …
My smartwatch can scan body composition electrically. So can my bathroom scale, although I never figured out how to work the thing. It’s the kind with metal foot plates. These things are probably not very accurate, but certainly affordable and convenient (compared to an immersion tank) and even noisy data is useful when you collect enough of it. I prefer the watch because it records the results on my phone.
Ya, I know … by the time I thought it might be nice to get one of those because it really worked much better than I ever expected so I was going to write about it thus have more data might be nice, I had already reached my target weight.
If you shifted a large portion of your diet to potatoes, which are only 2 % protein, unless you compensated for it actively with protein elsewhere through further shifts in your diet, I think muscle loss playing a role in the weight loss you observed is not implausible. If one had, say, 2,4 kg of potatoes a day (that would come to 1750 kcal, which is compatible with its use as a sole food while losing weight), one would only be getting 48 g of protein a day, while at a caloric deficit—I’d expect muscle loss with those values. And indeed, if you had maintained muscle mass, body weight exercises would have gotten markedly easier. Muscles weigh more than fat, too, so the loss shows quite a bit on the scale, and hence, may make up a significant proportion of the loss you observed.
Also, as a German, I strongly protest the notion of the poster above you that potatoes are not tasty or varied. There are over 3000 potato breeds, covering all sorts of colours (white, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple...), shapes, consistencies (festkochend (with bite, e.g. great for fried potatoes), mehlig (creamy, e.g. if you want to mash them), vorwiegend festkochend (an interim)) and tastes, from sweet, fruity and subtle to intense and hearty with earthy, aromatic and nut-like notes. A good potato cultivar, harvested fresh or at least stored correctly, is delicious, needing nothing but a bit of salt and maybe a hint of fat. We’ve had outright campaigns to keep particularly tasty cultivars on the market (e.g. Linda), and German farmers traditionally name their potato cultivars they are proudest of for their wives. American potatoes bred to look pretty and become huge may be bland, but good potatoes really are not. They should be an excellent stand-alone, and enrich any dish they are added to. - And now I crave potatoes.
I had 500g of potatos a day and didn’t change the other meals.
Strong agree with potatoes being tasty and being able to make them in so many ways.