Potato diet - Epic Fail, Glorious Victory page 9

[magicmerl]

Oh and Leida, be careful with the 18 squares of chocolate, you could have theobromine toxicity. I'm very sensitive to caffeine and I know that if I eat too much chocolate I get dizzy.

The lethal dose is something on the order of 71 kg of dark chocolate in a sitting. So she's probably pretty safe

[J. Stanton]

pklopp: Thank you for the exhaustive self-documentation.

Don't worry about the haters: these arguments are always circular. If the fashionable-hack-of-the-month doesn't work for you, it's because you did it wrong -- and if it does work, it's because you did it right!

Richard Nikoley added butter, onions, beef liver, and BCAAs (extra protein) to his potato regimen. Clearly he did it wrong! But since it worked for him (at least in the short term...the jury's still out on long-term effectiveness), the advocates give him a pass. Whereas when it doesn't work for pklopp, it must have been because he added tuna and egg whites instead of butter, onions, beef liver, and BCAAs.

Riiiiight.

pklopp isn't the first person to report that the potato hack doesn't work for them. If you don't want to hear that, go ahead and register 30potatoesaday.com.

[bloodorchid]

lol...

sigh...

the point of it was, he set out to debunk otzi's potato feast

to do so, he did not do the plan as planned

therein lies the point of contention

[pklopp]

pklopp: Thank you for the exhaustive self-documentation.

Don't worry about the haters: these arguments are always circular. If the fashionable-hack-of-the-month doesn't work for you, it's because you did it wrong -- and if it does work, it's because you did it right!

Richard Nikoley added butter, onions, beef liver, and BCAAs (extra protein) to his potato regimen. Clearly he did it wrong! But since it worked for him (at least in the short term...the jury's still out on long-term effectiveness), the advocates give him a pass. Whereas when it doesn't work for pklopp, it must have been because he added tuna and egg whites instead of butter, onions, beef liver, and BCAAs.

Riiiiight.

pklopp isn't the first person to report that the potato hack doesn't work for them. If you don't want to hear that, go ahead and register 30potatoesaday.com.

Wow,

Thanks for the words of encouragement. I loved your book and your site is great. I'm especially fond of your "Caution Contains Science" disclaimer on your articles!

-PK

[J. Stanton]

I agree that pklopp didn't do it like otzi...but neither did Richard, and no one's telling Richard he did it wrong.

No, I'm not arguing that it's a dumb idea that doesn't work! Clearly it works very well for some people, at least in the short term (the jury's still out on long-term effects) -- just as VLC/keto works very well for some people.

However, I am not personally invested in its success or its failure. Based on what I've seen so far, I am still skeptical of the following claims:

• None of the weight lost is lean mass
• Eating anything but potatoes, including lean protein, disqualifies you (already disproven by Richard)
• The weight will always stay off in the long term (>1 year)

Again, it's funny to watch these fashions swing back and forth. "OMG weight loss on keto" "OMG weight loss on potatoes" Human metabolism is complex, we don't fully understand it, and there are a bewildering variety of sound biochemical reasons for why you might carry more fat mass than you'd like.

pklopp: I'm glad you find my articles useful, and I'm glad that you enjoyed The Gnoll Credo.

JS

[JoanieL]

lol...

sigh...

the point of it was, he set out to debunk otzi's potato feast

to do so, he did not do the plan as planned

therein lies the point of contention

+1

Once you get out of the Potatoes-Only zone, you're just eating a potato heavy diet. Nobody ever said that potatoes were magic. IOW, the Potato + tuna + eggs regiment isn't a whole lot more valid in disproving potatoes-only than would be the Potato + peanut butter cups regiment.

And no matter how many articles you write, no matter how many graphs you generate, while the information here may provide something useful to someone, it does nothing to prove or disprove the potato-only hack.

[bloodorchid]

i'm not annoyed at richard because i don't go to his blog, and i don't care what he does

but it would have been nice to see a study with graphs done on the actual potato hack to go with the gloats of 'it doesn't work, plebes'

[Terry H]

Is that a bowl of mashed potatoes???

Nah, it's sour grapes.

[pklopp]

I'm sorry it took me a while to get this out, but these graphs are a bit time consuming to produce.



The above graph shows my body weight and body fat percentage starting from the baseline and throughout the various phases of the intervention. Each of the dotted lines is the trend over the similarly colored phase.

As with all things in life, there is some good news and some bad news. The good news is that in all phases of the intervention, the body fat percentage is trending downwards. The bad news is twofold:

First, we are only measuring lower body fat here because it is a bioelectrical impedance measurement scale that is being used, and the electric current will take the shortest path through the body, hence legs and pelvis only, no upper body.

Second, the nature of this measurement makes it very susceptible to hydration levels, and as one retains water, electrical resistance drops, and that is interpreted as a decrease in body fat. This is most clearly seen with the observation I've marked on the graph as "confounding effect of water weight."

On that particular day, you will notice that my weight spiked relative to the previous and subsequent days. This is pretty clearly a change in retained water. This spike in weight also happens to coincide with the lowest measured body fat percentage during the rice CHO phase. So, either I gained some muscle mass and immediately lost it overnight, thereby causing my body fat percentage to change, or, it was all water. My money is on the water argument.

But there is a silver lining here, and that is in the high fat phase. By all rights, in this phase I should be shedding water due to the significantly restricted carbohydrate intake relative to the potato and rice phases. That muffled sound you just heard was ChocoTaco bellowing an "AHA!!" Of course, as the wheels slowly grind, Choco may eventually come to realize that this should cause the electrical resistance of my body to increase, which would accordingly be interpreted by the scale as an increase in body fat. But that doesn't happen, in fact, as my body weight drops ( and Choco claims this is all water ), so does the measured body fat.

Interesting, eh Watson?

-PK

[pklopp]

lol...

sigh...

the point of it was, he set out to debunk otzi's potato feast

to do so, he did not do the plan as planned

therein lies the point of contention

Please don't speak on my behalf until I nominate you as an official spokesperson for me. I have not, nor do I intend to ever do so.

I didn't set out to debunk Otzi's potato feast. I set out to try to come up with an explanation for what the underlying mechanism might be. If you are incapable of distinguishing between those two things, then we are too far apart to have a meaningful discussion.

I fully expected that this "hack" works as an involuntary caloric restriction diet. The very first post that Otzi wrote explicitly advises people to not count calories and to eat until "full." This is pretty much a blaring alarm klaxon telling you that you're being lured into a calorie restricted diet.

Because of this analytical framework, I fully expected that any calorie restricted isocaloric diet would produce the same results, irrespective of macro nutrient composition. This explains my approach with the three phases. I was wrong. I surprised myself with the results. I'm sorry that they didn't correspond to mine, yours, or anyone else's preconceived notions, but that's the nature of the beast. Data doesn't generally lie.

Lastly, deconstruction is trivially easy, all it takes is to point your finger at someone and tell them they suck. Construction, on the other hand, requires a bit more effort. If you wish someone had done this with the genuine, full bore, Otzi approved, all potato, all the time regimen, what exactly is stopping you from doing that? At the very least, I've made it easier for you by providing a template for how one might go about it. And again, let me repeat this ... for anyone that wants to do this, I will gladly help you with your data presentation, all you need to do is invest a modicum of effort.

-PK