14
votes
Semi-formal study of people trying a fad diet where you eat mostly potatoes for four weeks
Link information
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- Title
- LOSE 10.6 POUNDS in FOUR WEEKS with this ONE WEIRD TRICK Discovered by Local Slime Hive Mind! Doctors GRUDGINGLY RESPECT Them, Hope to Become Friends
- Authors
- slimemoldtimemold
- Published
- Jul 12 2022
- Word count
- 24 805 words
If you take the word "potato" out, the hard empirical results, as well as the testimonials, sound quite a bit like Keto...
Really makes me think that the main benefits people get from Keto have nothing to do with ketogenesis, and it's just the extraneous dietary restrictions.
I wonder if you could even replicate it with other relatively nutrient complete foods. Just do some arbitrary hard restriction and people will see weight benefits.
Almost certainly the case. Actually remaining in ketogenesis is very difficult, requires a very tightly regimented diet (there’s small amounts of sugars and carbs in almost everything flavorful), and is quite uncomfortable and even unhealthy to remain at for long.
Most fad diets operate on just making it more unlikely for people to eat a caloric surplus by making meals more boring/less addictive.
Yeah. And even the Atkins diet, I think, largely just operated on encouraging people to eat foods with a lot more protein and fat so they felt fuller longer and ate less as a result.
Carbs aren’t bad per se, but it is very easy to house 600 calories worth of white rice or bread without thinking about it. I think any mechanism that forces you to not do that inevitably pushes weight down because everything else you can eat is so much more filling.
Apologies for the clickbait title. That’s what they used, though they’re being ironic.
This is a very long blog post reporting the results of a semi-formal study of people trying a fad diet where you eat mostly potatoes for four weeks. I don’t know if I’d recommend the diet, but I’m impressed by the report, which seems very thorough while being open about the various minor screwups during the study.
I’m also impressed by people’s ability to try something weird for science. It seems like a rather rationalist community thing to do.
You don’t have to use the original title. It’s funny in an article but since on tildes it competes with other titles it’s important to keep them clean.
If you or @skybrian can think of a more appropriate title, let me know and I can change it to that.
For now I have just changed it to skybrian’s description of the article from his comment.
You might be interested in this story of a professor of human nutrition eating only twinkies
https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html
Honestly thought you were a bot at first, before I read your comment.
I'm absolutely cackling at the demographics of this study, confirming all my biases about the fanbase of slatestarcodex. But good on them for being so game for some informal science