17 Comments

Just started the potato hack 2 weeks ago. I'm excited about the possibility of set weight reset. Thanks for the interview with the participant. It helps to see what worked for her.

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Good luck! Let me know how it goes for you :) Are you doing the full 100% potatoes only? Any condiments/oils?

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Very low bit of oil, trying to stay under 20 grams of fat a day. And only butter or coconut oil when I do. Going on 3 years of no PUFA(90%) I was doing small bits of ketsup but I am reconsidering that. Eating regularly a couple meals on weekends. Former time restricted/fasting 3 years, then Ray Peat. Ray says low fat for weight loss so I'm combining all of that info-much like your article. Just stumbled on the Potato Hack book during a deep dive

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FWIW, Slime Mold Time Mold recommend staying away from tomato products/sauces during the potato diet. Seems they found some people had trouble losing weight when adding tomato sauce/ketchup type products.

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I went back and looked at this again due to myself being very much like Outlier 17 (including losing exacly 17 pounds on swamp taters, having given up PUFAs a while back, and being fairly metabolically healthy. Seems your intuition that some people can lose weight in the swamp but others can't is spot on. I should write a quick follow-up to my 'philosophical transactions' i sent to SMTM and cite you copiously.

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Please do, that'd be great! I think SM TM would be happy to publish your follow up, and if not, I definitely will.

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tried the 50% potato diet last week. only made it 7 days before the joint aches (i assume from all the nightshades?) made me quit.

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Interesting data point. Did you eat the skins or peel them off?

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No potato skins eaten here. I always peel them because avoiding fiber is better for my gut.

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Zero PUFAs?! Aw, man...

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Haha, why?

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Because they're delicious, argh.

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Lol, rly?! At this point I find them repulsive..

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Good stuff, making progress!

She mentions she gains weight on the "Ray Peat diet"... It seems unsurprising. It's hard to believe in a unified Ray Peat diet when they guy's recommendations were very specifically tailored for each of his patients. I don't think I've ever heard of someone losing weight on the Ray Peat diet, but I could be wrong.

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Yea, my experience is similar. It's very disjoint, few unified principles, and, kind of like TCD, few people seem to lose weight on it.

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> This is what we’d expect to happen in the simple CICO model if somebody woke up obese one day: they should eat very little, have almost no appetite, and lose the weight rapidly.

Eh? I'd call that a 'properly functioning homeostat' model!

I think we both agree that CICO is just tautologously true, right? It's the 'eat less, exercise more' as a strategy that we don't think works...?

Surely simple CICOists would say "If you woke up obese one day and just carried on eating normally, your weight would stay the same, what you'd have to do is to either eat less or exercise more and willpower your way through the resulting hunger pangs until you were back to normal"....

But maybe what you're calling a simple CICO model is not what I'm calling a simple CICO model?

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The problem is that there isn't one "CICO model", they bait and switch constantly. They both think that CICO is tautologically true, but won't admit that this means it's operationally useless. They keep collapsing the wave function as is convenient and deny this when you point it out.

And of course it'd be impossible to "wake up obese" without having woken up nearly obese the days before that (unless you were in a coma and somebody fed you obesogenic things? But I digress).

So yes, you're right, but the scenario is impossible anyway and merely there to demonstrate how a well-regulated homeostat SHOULD work, contrasting to "it obviously doesn't work in actual obese people."

Btw how's the mum diet going?

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