16lbs of fat loss & 2.5 months later on the potato diet
How I lost a lot of fat without much pain or time consumed
I’ve been on the potato diet for about 2.5 months and lost about 16lbs of fat mass with no real lean mass lost. I’ve been taking a monthly DEXA scan to help track my progress, and I was really surprised that I lost only fat on the first scan and surprised when I gained back some lean mass and still lost a lot of fat mass on the second round 5 weeks later. Considering the slight variation of lean mass lost and gained as noise, I probably have not lost any lean mass.
Previously, I tried a high-fat keto diet for one month around June and lost 10lbs during that month. My energy levels weren’t that great even at the end of it, and keto induction was pretty brutal for me. On the other hand, the high starch potato diet was the opposite, where my energy levels were better than baseline. Overall, since May 2024, I’ve lost about 30lbs. I also dropped from a high of 1.9 lbs of visceral fat to 0.8 lbs. The other 5lbs lost were other small experiments in between. My DEXA scan showed 189 lbs was from my clothing and 1 or 2 lbs of weight gain after stopping the diet for a week, which I’m not worried about. I‘ve done my last 2 or 3 DEXA scans fasted to limit variation more.
I am probably the slimmest I’ve been since I was 4 or 5 years old. Even when I was lighter, my belly had never been this small. I‘ve been doing Apple Fitness weight training for about 1.5 years, so I’m guessing I’ve gained some muscle mass compared to those years. Other benefits are better mental energy, my general heart rate for everything (resting and exercise) dropping ten bpm within a week, much better general cardio performance, and a warmer body temperature overall.
My Potato Diet Experience
If you don’t know, the potato diet is eating unlimited amounts of potatoes as you feel like it, along with fat-free, low-calorie sauces and calorie-free drinks like coffee, water, etc. I avoided artificially sweetened zero-calorie drinks for most of it. I had a lot of soy and other sauces with my potatoes, peeled the skin, and steamed them in an instant pot.
I’ve found it to suppress my appetite like no other diet, and I’m not craving any more food. I‘ve tried eating a lot of bread and rice, and there is something special about potatoes that stops me from craving more food or being hungry, along with probably other special effects. This effect was powerful, especially in the beginning. I’ve written up this article for my guesses as to why and more details about the diet in this article.
While on the diet, I did moderate strength training 1-3 times a week, ice skating with my partner two times a week, and other walking-level activities. Most days of the potato diet, my energy was better than usual. When I started tracking my calorie intake later in the diet, I would naturally only want to eat about 1600 to 2300 calories daily.
Nutritionally, about 2000 calories a day are consumed with soy sauce and coffee. You eat 411g of carbs, 47g of protein, and 2.6 g of fat. Potatoes eaten in large volumes have way more nutrition than you would think.
Mostly Potato Diet
3 to 4 weeks into the potato-only diet, I started not feeling the best and wanted to stop the diet. I guessed I was not feeling the best due to missing micronutrition. So I went into the Cronometer app and calculated the minimum of what I could eat that would cover most of my missing micronutrition, and it comes down to adding this in addition to unlimited potatoes:
🥚 3 eggs, poached in the microwave with runny yolks to have more nutrition from runny vs. hard yolks (choline and many others, 250 cal)
🫐 100-120g of frozen acai berry + 10-15g of honey or maple syrup (vitamin E + minerals and others) (120 cal)
🥕 1 large carrot (vitamin A, 50 cal)
🍙 Nori seaweed sheets (for iodine + spice) (2 cal)
💊 Methylfolate, partial zinc (23mg), selenium, and sometimes vitamin K supplements.
It is about 450 calories, with most of it coming from the eggs + acai. I also added some bites of raw honeycomb and some small bites of dark chocolate squares. Dark chocolate was especially calorie-dense, and I chose it because there was a pattern of dark chocolate accelerating some potato diet experimenters’ weight loss further. It was theorized that dark chocolate's potassium and stearic fatty acid were doing that. I was also trying to avoid large amounts of PUFAs in whatever I added.
I was considering adding oysters or snails for zinc and selenium but found it annoying prep-wise, expensive, hard to find, or something you can find canned but put in a vat of vegetable oil, which I wanted to avoid. I also used mung bean sprouts as my folate source but also got sick of them quickly. So, I added supplements to cover the small missing parts left. I timed my zinc supplement outside regular large potato meals so the copper and zinc in the potatoes wouldn’t compete in absorption. I also don’t take a vitamin D supplement since I try to generate all my vitamin D with sun exposure as another experiment.
If you want to reproduce this diet but are worried about eggs or other food, replacing them with different foods should be easy by playing with the Cronometer app more. For example, you could get choline from a lecithin supplement if you need to avoid cholesterol in eggs, want to be vegan, or have an egg allergy. Or find some other source of vitamin E if acai is hard to get. You can get vitamin A and many other nutrients from a small amount of liver, red, orange vegetable, or tuber. If you don’t like runny eggs or any other prep method, this modified diet doesn’t restrict prep methods; it’s just how I want to do it myself.
My goal was to fill in the missing RDA amounts of vitamins and minerals that I had on the potato diet. I would suggest covering most of your nutrition with food if possible because supplements can have additives or other issues that do not agree with your body. I find when I have too many supplements, it makes me feel bad, while food does not.
My Mostly Potato Diet Experience
After some very intense gym days that I wasn’t recovering well, I sometimes would have 20g of collagen peptide powder, a 30 cal dried miso soup packet, and soy sauce in hot water. This solved my issue with not recovering well in those days, but this was to solve a persistent recovery issue that I was feeling in my joint/tendon areas specifically. If I felt a recovery issue in my actual muscles, I would eat more protein explicitly. I tried adding it as a daily thing, but I wasn’t craving it unless I had a recovery issue, so I only had it when I felt like it.
I continued to lose weight, and my VO2 max on Apple Health and cardio performance improved very quickly while on this diet and not explicitly doing any cardio exercise. Walking up the hills around my house got easier quicker, and I was surprised by how quickly it came on.
In the last week of the diet, I stalled. My VO2 max performance flatlined on Apple Health, I wasn’t doing as well in the gym, and I felt general issues in recovery. It was a bit of a mystery as to why, my guess is I pushed too hard maybe in the gym and I was having recovery issues, or some micro nutritional issue that you couldn’t calculate in the cronometer app was asserting itself. Calorie-wise, I stayed within my usual 1800-2400 calorie band.
Overall, I think mainly going potato helped me to stay on the diet for far longer than I would have on full potato, but in the end, it wasn’t enough to stay on it without a break.
I tried adding more protein, up to 120g/day, but I was still having issues, so I decided to stop the diet until my next scheduled blood draw. I was going to have a DEXA scan right after I stopped, but it got canceled on me, and I had to push it out a week, so for about 1 week before the scan, I was off diet eating intuitively. My weight has stayed mostly the same since I wrote this.
My Weight Loss Method Goals
I’m starting a company that will give people easy, painless & convenient weight loss plans. These plans will be customized to people and will update as people lose weight since you need to change techniques as people lose weight or have other issues that pop up. It will all be within an app, so they don’t have to do exhaustive research, do a lot of work and be a big nerd about it like I am. It’s like Google; it’s a complicated machine under the hood but a simple experience for people who use it.
Because of these goals, I am doing a lot of self-experimentation based on research into various dietary fat loss methods and the science behind them, so I’ve been trying many things. Some of them have been failures, others were experiments in ‘very lazy slow weight loss’. I also act as a free diet advisor for my friends who want to help me try things out, and I have some successes already. I‘ve also been putting a bunch of restrictions on how I do this weight loss because this weight loss has to be easy to execute and not annoying or expensive.
This means:
No exotic, expensive or hard-to-get ingredients
Not a large amount of supplements, beyond some potentially simple ones
No additional prescription medications, special peptides, exogenous hormones, or anything you would inject or require a doctor
Of course, you can take whatever you take currently, but our stuff won't need any.
If you have some pronounced issues that look medical, we strongly suggest you see a doctor.
Minimal labor in preparation.
If you like cooking, it won’t restrict you that much either.
A minimal amount of extra work or exercise
I like my exercise, but actual exercise wouldn’t be required beyond people who have already lost a lot of fat. I would recommend strength training for them specifically.
It cannot feel bad or be an uncomfortable experience
Since I’m exploring/experimenting with this, I can feel like this a little bit, but the end products cannot feel like this.
No explicit calorie accounting or other boring things
I’m doing detailed tracking for research purposes.
Among fitness enthusiasts, my weight loss over the past five months can be taken as “not impressive” or “normal results” if you didn’t look at the DEXA scan details, but as you can see, I’ve had a lot of breaks in between and a lot of restrictions. If I had purely focused on losing weight for myself, I might have visible abs by now, which I’ve never had in my life. Losing weight like I have with zero lean mass loss is the most exciting thing here, and I’m excited to see if it persists as I get leaner.
If you want to know when I will release the first version of this app, subscribe to me on this substack and sign up for the waitlist at https://www.trymetrep.com/. Following me on X is also good, but you might miss my announcement. The first version will probably be free, so I encourage you to sign up so you don’t miss it.
Ru natty bro?
I was recently diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, which partly explains why weight loss is difficult for me and why I am more sensitive to feeling deprived on a diet. ADHD is partly why I want to make methods that are easy and convenient for people so that even someone with my condition wouldn’t find it a hassle. I do take ADHD meds daily as a result, including these previous five months. I didn’t vary my medication at all during these five months, and I also drank caffeinated beverages daily as I usually do.
Otherwise, I don’t do anything else that I haven’t described already or isn’t normal. I don’t take any other medications, eat any special foods, do secret exercise, or take other supplements regularly.
People might think my results are not ‘natty’ or fair, and I would usually agree with you. But in my case, when I started taking these medications, I gained 22 lbs in 1.5 years once I started taking them in late 2021 or early 2022. These medications suppress my appetite, but I get a rebound effect in the evening. I was also less strict about what I ate on my “default diet” during those years because, finally, I had something that helped me manage my constant hunger issues. I thought I was ok, but I slowly gained weight month by month. Because I show an opposite effect than most people while on these meds, I think it’s ok to say that I’m “natty.” It showed me that what you eat still matters, even with appetite suppressants.
Overall, I think I am a complex case in weight loss, and you can see all the failures I have endured trying to fix this issue here. I am very elated with my results on the potato diet so far.
Why does this work for me and potentially many others?
The potato diet, unfortunately, is not a one-size-fits-all diet. Some people who try it do not get any weight loss and feel bad with the diet, or get some weight loss but feel pretty bad on it. My internet friend
tried the potato diet, but it didn’t work. His keto diet seems to work very well for him, and keto, although it works for me, causes lean mass loss and makes me feel low energy.I wrote an article about the general mechanisms of why the potato diet could work, but I think there are additional reasons why it matches well for me.
Genetics
Part of my research for this company is genetics research, blood work testing, and other things. I did a whole genome sequencing with Nucleus and got much of my family sequenced with MyHeritage, the cheapest SNP test I could find. I used multiple services to interpret this data, and many interesting things about my genetics led me to believe that this high-starch diet matches my genetics best.
Gene Food’s service matched me with their high starch, low fat, low protein ‘villager’ diet, based on my genetic profile. I found it very interesting and somewhat surprising because eating a lot of carbs or starch caused me to gain weight in general, and having a ‘meat and veggies’ diet kept my weight stable. I put that result aside, but once I started getting surprisingly good results with the potato diet, it made me think about that result. I believe they are probably on to something. I also saw the patterns they pointed out in other more complicated tools, and I think they may have a case with me.
Unlike other services, it’s too bad they don’t let you download your raw data from Genefood.
The Peater & Prometabolic Camp
In the food world, there are a lot of camps, carnivore, vegan, paleo, ‘animal based’, keto, calorie counting, etc. People, unfortunately, get very dogmatic about food very quickly. I think they do because most people don’t think about food this deeply, and the people who do probably have significant issues that need to be solved.
Once they find a method that works well, they treat it as a silver bullet and recommend it to everyone else, unable to imagine that their method might not work for many. Most people are bad at creating a theory of mind outside their own experience, and the amount of mental work needed to have a more complicated view of things is too much for most. Also, you can’t communicate complex messages online, so complicated people probably don’t have large followings.
I believe there are no silver bullets or single universal techniques, which is a major thing missing in this space. As Alex Hormozi says, it’s probably a lot of golden BBs.
That large disclaimer aside, I think the Prometabolic/Peater camp probably has many points that match well with me here. They are fairly unique in their advocacy of sugar and carbs, while many other camps avoid carbs because they do not work well in many cases. Peaters say that a lot of carbs can restore your insulin sensitivity. They also talk about body temperature, which matches my experience, and I think they are probably onto something with large amounts of the world probably being subclinically hypothyroid at this point. I believe this unique perspective might match a bunch of my symptomatology, but I need to research more.
They also say many things that can be kind of goofy and even mystical at times, so it will take a while to separate what’s what. They also treat Ray Peat like a saint/celebrity figure, which isn’t a good sign for being rational. From what I've read, I‘m sure he was very kind and intelligent.
Blood work
In May 2024, I got an extensive blood panel through Function Health. Most of my blood work was good, but some heart indicators were not doing great. I‘ve always thought that this came from my general ‘meat a potatoes’ casual default diet that I’ve had for over ten years to keep my weight stable, and the fact I had some borderline good heart markers such as HDL and my LDL wasn’t that high as I got my normal annual blood work throughout the years. It meant I was in an ‘alternative’ mode due to the high fat and protein diet, and it was ok.
Greg Muschen also pointed out that I should calculate my HOMA-IR score, which was firmly at 3.0, indicating insulin resistance. This was another surprise for me since my fasting insulin has always been ‘within range’, and my fasting glucose is still in range, but borderline. I didn’t realize my insulin was high for what it was.
This potato diet is indicating something else here, along with my Genefood results, and how my heart rate drops 10bpm like a clock whenever I do high starch intake makes me think that this blood work might be pointing to something in my case, along with the peater assertion about insulin sensitivity and eating carbs. I have a blood draw scheduled in two days, so I will post an update with the results once they come in, and we will see what 30 lbs of weight loss and 2.5 months of a potato diet did to my blood work compared to my blood draw in May 2024.
Fire in a bottle / Brad Marshall: Eat springtime or summer foods
Brad Marshall is a very interesting guy who goes into a lot of scientific detail on YouTube and theory crafts a bunch of diets to lose weight on. He created the croissant diet and the emergence diet and theorizes that the significant reason why we are all getting fat is our food composition is indicative of fall time, which signals to our body to ‘get fat for winter’ and puts us in a metabolic state of torpor.
He has a video about how ‘obese humans are in protein sparing mode,’ which is my guess as to why I haven’t lost any muscle mass as I do this high starch weight loss diet. I estimate that once I cross a specific ‘not fat’ threshold, my body will start losing lean mass on this low-protein diet,
I tried his Emergence diet for a month but didn’t lose weight. I did get my high energy and lower heart rate effect, although. I haven’t tried his croissant diet yet.
What’s next
Since this is all a big experiment for me, I asked people on Reddit what the next diet I should try is. I think the high starch McDougall diet is the most interesting suggestion because it follows the same high starch, low protein, low-fat pattern that the potato diet did for me, but it gives me more diversity of foods I can eat easily on it, along with a prepared cookbook. His book is also called “The Starch Solution” 🤔. It also matches the genefood villager diet recommendations fairly well. Hopefully, this will mean I will continue to get the same results I got on the potato diet, but with even better micronutrition provided. Or it might just stay stable like the Emergence diet. Either way, I will probably see results within a week or two and can evaluate it better then.
Overall, I want to lose 20 more lbs of fat, which I can maybe achieve in 3 months. I believe it will slow down because of the adipose flux limit that
discovered. However, if I continue to lose fat at my approx 10lbs/month rate, even to 15% BF, that will be extremely interesting, and we should see it in 2 months.
I have a lot more ideas and details about why keto probably doesn’t work well for me, and maybe what I can do to make it work well for me, why I will probably not lose weight on a fruitarian diet, why a high sugar diet fails but a high starch diet works for me, the interesting patterns I got a CGM with the potato diet and many other things but this article is already over the email length limit as it is.
I will start after my blood draw on October 10th and update everyone once I’m done.
If you want more interim updates or to learn more about my other ideas about how weight loss works, follow me on X and subscribe here on my substack.
Hey, fabulous! Well done, and good luck with your app. It sounds like exactly the sort of thing that's needed.
Very interesting post. I agree that the starch diet sounds very promising. A lot of people on r/saturatedfat seem to basically be doing ex150starchdiet, with a small amount of beef + mostly starch.
I do wonder how your weight loss curve will go. Mine was pretty much exponential decay with plateaus of various length. I'd be surprised if you could just easily go down to abs, haha. But maybe?