Can You Lose Weight If You Eat Only Potatoes?

 Can you lose weight if you eat only a high-carb food, specifically only potatoes? Yes you can. In fact many people have successfully tried this trick.
Here’s one example, Andrew Taylor, 36 years old and Australian. He ate nothing but potatoes for six months (!) and dropped a whopping 94 lbs (43 kg).
He feels that the diet has helped him control his food addiction, in addition to losing weight.

Video report after 6 months of eating only potatoes

Losing weight on high carb?

So how is it possible to lose weight on a high-carb diet? And does this not invalidate the simplified carbs -> insulin -> obesity theory behind low-carb diets? Some opponents have claimed that.
I think all this shows is something that should be obvious: there is more than one way to lose weight. Eating a low-carb and high-fat diet is clearly not the only way lose weight, just a very effective and often pleasurable way to do it.

Sensory-specific satiety

The potato trick I believe uses another phenomenon to lose weight. It’s an extremely monotonous diet, resulting in something called sensory-specific satiety, mening that the monotony results in wanting to eat less food.
After months of eating only potatoes the urge to snack on some more potatoes is quite low, so people end up eating ONLY when truly hungry (an effective way to lose weight).
This is probably extra effective when starting out with a lot of excess weight due to food addiction and processed high-carb foods, like Andrew Taylor apparently did.
If potatoes do not trigger his food addiction and he keeps eating only potatoes, that means he’s getting his food addiction under control, resulting in way less food intake, clearly resulting in weight loss.

How about insulin?

How about insulin? My bet is that if someone would measure Andrew Taylor’s insulin levels before and during the potato eating, they’d be way down, due to simply eating way less food. And if so there’s no problem for the “insulin hypothesis”.
Eating an extremely monotonous diet, resulting in strong sensory-specific satiety, resulting in eating way less, is just another way of lowering insulin levels.
You could do this trick on a low-carb high-fat diet too, and it will probably lead to even lower insulin levels and even faster weight loss. How? Eat only eggs, nothing else.
It’s a nice trick. But it’s probably not very enjoyable for most people long term to eat only one single thing ever, for the rest of their life. So I believe there are better ways to lose weight.

Sweet potatoes are creamy and sweet enough to be made into delicious holiday pies, but they are also surprisingly healthy and nutritious. In addition to this, new research suggests that even the cooking water from sweet potatoes may help with digestion and weight loss.

Researchers suggest the wastewater from sweet potatoes may aid weight loss.

Sweet potatoes are an exceptionally nutritious vegetable. High in carotenoids, sweet potatoes are a great source of vitamin A, which is great for eye health, has antioxidant and anti-aging properties, and has also been linked to cancer prevention.
Additionally, sweet potatoes are rich in a wide range of B vitamins, including B-1, or thiamine, B-2 and B-3 - riboflavin and niacin, respectively - as well as B-5 and B-6. According to the National Institutes of Health, B vitamins help our body process food into energy, as well as form red blood cells.
New research - published in the journal Heliyon - suggests the starchy water left over from cooking sweet potatoes may have slimming effects and help digestion.
A team of researchers - led by Dr. Koji Ishiguro from the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Japan - were looking for ways to reuse the wastewater resulting from processing sweet potatoes on an industrial scale. As such, they thought of testing its nutritional value and dietary effects.

Environmental impact of sweet potato industrial use

According to the International Potato Center, sweet potatoes are one of the world's most important food crops, with 105 million metric tons of the vegetable being produced every year around the world, and 95 percent of the crops being grown in developing countries.
Sweet potatoes are very suitable for processing due to their high starch content. Sweet potato is currently used to produce flour, noodles, bread, candy, pectin, liquors, and other starch and starch-based industrial products.
In Japan, around 15 percent of sweet potato is used to produce starch-derived products, as well as processed foods and distilled spirits.
The result is a large amount of wastewater that contains organic residue and is usually discarded in rivers and oceans. This could cause serious environmental problems.
Since the wastewater also contains proteins, Dr. Ishiguro and team decided to investigate its effects on digestion in mice.

"We throw out huge volumes of wastewater that contains sweet potato proteins - we hypothesized that these could affect body weight, fat tissue, and other factors. Finding alternative uses for the sweet potato proteins in wastewater could be good for the environment and industry, and also potentially for health."

Dr. Koji Ishiguro

Protein found in sweet potato water has slimming effects in mice

Researchers fed three groups of mice high-fat diets. One of the groups was given the sweet potato peptide protein (SPP) in a high concentration, and another group in a low concentration.
After 28 days, researchers weighed the mice and took a series of measurements. They examined their liver mass and measured their fatty tissue, fat cholesterol levels, and triglyceride levels. Scientists also measured the levels of leptin and adiponectin, which regulate the body's metabolism and play a key role in obesity and metabolic syndrome.
Mice that were fed higher levels of SPP had significantly lower body weight and liver mass.
These mice also had lower cholesterol levels and triglycerides, as well as higher levels of the metabolic hormones leptin and adiponectin.
The findings suggest that SPP suppresses the appetite and controls lipid metabolism in mice.
Further research is needed to see if the same effects apply to humans, but Dr. Ishiguro says the results are "very promising."

"We were surprised that SPP reduced the levels of fat molecules in the mice and that it appears to be involved controlling appetite suppression molecules. These results are very promising, providing new options for using this wastewater instead of discarding it. We hope SPP is used for the functional food material in future."

Dr. Koji Ishiguro

Penn Jillette can make just about anything disappear, but this time the famous illusionist performed a dramatic vanishing act on himself. The taller half of Penn & Teller dropped over 100 pounds by eating only two things and skipping exercise altogether.

The 6-foot, 7-inch magician weighed 322 pounds over a year ago, when doctors discovered a 90% blockage in his heart. The father of two then decided to take drastic measures to see his young kids grow up. Under medical supervision, Jillette embarked on the "potato diet," eating only plain potatoes for two whole weeks. After subsisting on spuds alone, he started phasing in vegetable stews for added nutrients.

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Penn Jillette before (left) and after his dramatic weight loss.

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Despite the crazy restrictions, Jillette stuck to it, losing 75 pounds in just 83 days without exercising. The boring menu helped the 61-year-old break bad eating habits he'd fallen into before. "I'm not good at moderation. I wanted to do hardcore stuff," Jillette told Good Morning America. "I wanted to lose the sense of eating socially... it was just a way to lose all the habits I had gotten into."

But the potato diet won't work magic for everyone. "While there's no doubt that potatoes — just like all vegetables— are supremely nutritious, eliminating almost all other food groups in totality is not only dangerous, but can really backfire," says Jaclyn London, R.D., Nutrition Director at the Good Housekeeping Institute. The dramatic changes usually slow down your body's metabolism and result in binging later on, she explains. "While veggie stews and potatoes can be amazing weight-loss allies, it's never good advice to completely eliminate food groups in order to lose weight for the long-term."

Despite his dramatic diet, Jillette says he's happier now more than ever, comparing the transformation to "night and day." You can read more about his weight loss in Jillette's new book, Presto: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales, out now.