Potato diet day 1

I'm doing the potato diet. Again.

I actually did it for a few weeks in November/December and experienced rapid, basically effortless weight loss. However, I unintentionally ate way too few calories because potatoes are so goddamn filling, which led me to have reduced immune function and get really badly sick (like covid-level bad only it wasn't covid) at which point I stopped.

This time I will not be making that mistake. It turns out that a 5 pound bag of potatoes like you'd get at the grocery store has more or less 2000 calories in it. So my simple solution is to just eat one such bag per day. Pretty damned simple as diets go. For the time being, my preparation method will be to steam the whole bag's worth of potatoes in the Instant Pot each morning. I also have some hash brown-cut potatoes in the freezer I can optionally cook with a little oil and seasoning and eat with ketchup if I need a treat, or more calories.

My goal is twofold: weight loss, and digestive health/overall nutrition reset.

I lost a bunch of weight last time I did this but failed to keep it off for complicated reasons involving lack of planning and a misguided detour into telehealth semaglutide shortly after I stopped the diet. That failure is a big reason why I want to document my journey here on Substack this time—the accountability exercise of writing about my goals publicly should help me see them through more safely and thoroughly.

To quantify the goal, I aim to get my body weight under 200 pounds. I'm 226 today. Based on my last experience I think this is entirely realistic, but it will take at least 6 weeks. One obvious challenge will be sticking to the diet through that entire span. The other challenge will be coming off the diet afterwards without gaining a ton of weight right back.

The latter point leads to my other goal, which is a digestive health reset and transition into a more sustainable healthy diet. I've spent enough time poisoning myself with sugar and processed foods to know they make me miserable and ill, yet the only way I've found to keep from eating them is in the context of a diet where they're strictly forbidden. People can accuse me of “black and white thinking” and that's their prerogative, but the simple truth is that when I open myself to those foods I basically behave like an addict and the harm I suffer is substantial. I am not the kind of person who can safely have just two cookies out of the box of Oreos or one serving of chips from the bag. If you're like that, lucky you, it just isn't my experience. Fortunately, the last time I did the potato diet I quickly reached a point where I actually did not crave sugary or ultra-processed foods anymore (I experienced a similar change when doing paleo in 2016). This makes me think that permanently avoiding such foods can be a sustainable psychological equilibrium for me, although I do not believe potatoes-only is a sustainable diet nutritionally speaking. Hence, my intention once I reach my goal weight is to reintroduce other foods gradually, starting with other plants. The idea is to systematically test how they affect my digestion, mood, energy, etc. From there, the goal is to build out a general plant-based diet that is sustainable and well-rounded. I emphasize plant-based because in addition to sugar being an enemy for me, I have found that eggs don't especially agree with me, and meat honestly doesn't do much for me anymore either (and may even make me somewhat ill). I'm curious to see if I can handle dairy at the point of reintroduction, because I really do love cheese, but I have a sneaking suspicion it gives me gas. Stay tuned for a couple months to find out.

To sum up, I plan to eat basically only potatoes until I hit my goal weight, then carefully reintroduce plant-based whole foods to build a totally new long-term diet for myself from the ground up. This nutrition/diet project has been in the works for a long time—I am actually more than one month into it, and just now starting the potato phase. The prior phase involved cataloguing and eating through all the other foodstuffs in my house that I had forgotten about; I was not and am not in a financial position to have just trashed all that stuff and jumped right into the potatoes (also I hate wasting food). So, now that I have successfully eaten through all my perishables and trashed all the unhealthy stuff, I am fully locked-in on the potatoes.

I'm really excited to have finally reached this point in the project, and given how well my flawed first attempt in late 2024 went, I have high hopes that this one can be even better. I look forward to sharing a little about that here each day, just as I did for my minimization project.