he also likely lost a lot of muscle mass on a diet like that, so I’d think twice before following the latest “Celebrity Miracle Diet.”
Every weight-loss plan that works is based on just Calories out minus Calories in. But the devil is in the details. The reason that people need weight-loss plans in the first place is that our instincts go against eating less than we’re burning. So you need to find some way to not only increase your exercise and/or decrease your diet, but also to make that tolerable. Different people will find different methods tolerable, so there’s no one single Right Weight Loss Plan.
For some people, “eat what I always have, just less of it” works fine. For others, it might not, but they might be able to increase their exercise enough, etc.
Also the serious lack of protein probably lead to a lot of muscle loss. Potatoes aren’t very nutritious-just a hunk of starch, primarily.
As an aside, I saw a study published recently somewhere (aka it will take some time to find if you’re that interested) that reported that people who consume a lot of potatoes in various forms are much more likely to be obese and overweight than people who don’t.
Thats actually pretty interesting, it validates why he’d pick potatoes.
He explains it here:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.yahoo.com/amphtml/katiecouric/penn-jillette-on-trump-his-new-book-magic-and-more-140138045.html?client=safari
Potatoes are high in carbs, but also in vitamins, protein, potassium, and not bad in fiber either. They are quite nutritious when combined with other foods to round out the diet.
Also, 2 weeks without any particular nutrient won’t be a problem for most people.
Not true. Once your body reaches a certain weight, it’s essentially set at that weight. Your body will try to maintain that weight and if you drop below it, your body will try to regain the weight it lost.
You can overwhelm this on a short term basis. Wesley Clark says that Jillette reduced his caloric intake by 75%. But in the long term, he’s almost certainly going to regain all the weight he lost. He can’t continue on a 1000-calorie-a-day potato diet and once he starts eating something resembling a normal diet - even if it’s well below his pre-diet intake - he’ll begin gaining weight again.
That’s why dieting alone won’t lead to long term weight loss. You need to combine dieting with increased exercise. The exercise forces your body to maintain a high metabolism so it can’t adjust down to the reduced calories.
If you want a cite, here’s an article from the New York Times. I’ll acknowledge they’re writing the story around participants on the TV show The Biggest Loser. But these were real doctors and scientists who were using these people as a study in what happens to people who lose weight and their ability to maintain their reduced weight over the course of a few years.
Just don’t let it.
Eat fewer calories.
Way to ignore the science.
From the article I cited:
"The key point is that you can be on TV, you can lose enormous amounts of weight, you can go on for six years, but you can’t get away from a basic biological reality. As long as you are below your initial weight, your body is going to try to get you back.” - Dr. Michael Schwartz, an obesity and diabetes researcher at the University of Washington
“There are no doubt exceptional individuals who can ignore primal biological signals and maintain weight loss for the long term by restricting calories. For most people, the combination of incessant hunger and slowing metabolism is a recipe for weight regain - explaining why so few individuals can maintain weight loss for more than a few months.” - Dr. David Ludwig, the director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital
“What was surprising was what a coordinated effect it is. The body puts multiple mechanisms in place to get you back to your weight. The only way to maintain weight loss is to be hungry all the time." - Dr. Joseph Proietto of the University of Melbourne
Dr. Lee Kaplan, an obesity researcher at Harvard, says the brain sets the number of calories we consume, and it can be easy for people to miss that how much they eat matters less than the fact that their bodies want to hold on to more of those calories.
I don’t think this bit is science, though:
Penn can increase his caloric intake above 1000/day. There’s nothing magic about 1000/day. As long as his (increased) caloric intake is still less than his caloric output, he won’t gain weight. Changes in his metabolism may reduce his caloric output, in which case the statement becomes “As long as his (increased) caloric intake is still less than his (reduced) caloric output, he won’t gain weight”.
1000/day is not sustainable, but it serves the short-term purpose of breaking poor eating habits, and “rewarding” the change with signficant weight loss. The tricky bit comes now; he has to develop new eating habits which are sustainable, but which still give him a caloric intake more or less in line with his caloric output. This is challenging, and it’s the point at which most dieters fail. But failure is not inevitable.
The science is pretty simple: you eat fewer calories than you expend and one of two things will happen: you lose weight or you die. There’s no third option and there are no exceptions.
There’s a show on British TV that you can watch on Youtube (I forget the name) about how people think that they’re eating right and they don’t get why they aren’t losing any weight. Invariably, they’re fooling themselves and eat much more than they realize.
Potatoes in “various forms” are likely to contain a fair amount of added fat vs. “plain potato” so you have to account for that factor.
Assuming, based on the information in this thread that Jillette ate about 6 medium-sized potatoes a day (giving approximately 1,000 calories per day of “just potato”) that would yield about 25-26g of protein. That’s about half the recommended daily protein for the average sedentary man. Jillette’s a big guy due to his height and not just his width so it’s definitely not enough for him, but it probably is enough to prevent major muscle loss over the two weeks he was eating just potatoes and nothing else.
Contrary to your statement, potatoes do have nutritional value beyond just a “hunk of starch”. 6 potatoes is around 150% of the daily recommendation of potassium, 140% of recommended dietary fiber, 420% of vitamin C, 180% of B-6, and 73% of magnesium. Granted, it’s not a balanced diet but for two weeks it’s unlikely to cause a problem. People have certainly survived living on less.
The thing is, potatoes only was just two weeks. After that, he started adding in other foods. I wouldn’t suggest anyone do this on their own, but supervised by competent medical/dietary people this doesn’t strike me as particularly risky.
We had a forum discussion about “by an eating a single dish that could provide you through ages” (Jail, Montechristo style). I believe it somewhere here on Straightdope, but I can’t find it.
No1. Mashed potatoes. No2. Beer. If I remember it right.
The evidence is what’s simple. Study after study after study shows that your odds of success at keeping weight off for the long term is exceedingly poor. Often low single digits.
In most of the studies I’ve read, long term weight loss is usually defined as 1 year. In my opinion, 1 year should be the starting point where you can even claim you’ve lost weight. Long term weight loss ought to be 10-20 years. Yet even with the 1 year definition all the evidence shows there’s no empirical reason to expect you’ll be able to keep the weight off just by making lifestyle changes or by crash dieting.
So really, the science shows you won’t be able to maintain your weight loss. Ignoring it and saying you’ll just have willpower is just obstinately ignoring what science tells us about weight loss.
I’m not sure how this qualifies as science. Yes, it’s true that a lot of people aren’t able to maintain their weightloss, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. A big problem with all of this is that when you go look for subjects for studies like this the people who tried to lose weight and were unable to keep it off are disproportionally likely to sign up.
The people who are able to keep the weight off probably already did this on their own and now no longer qualify for the study.
I lost about 38% of my weight and regained 5%. But I’ve been 33% below my starting weight for the past two years.
Let’s say a bunch of doctors and scientists repeatedly studied cancer patients and found that a particular cancer therapy reduced tumor size for at most 1 year, but less than 10% of participants had any lasting benefit beyond one year. Their cancer came back 90+% of the time.
Would you say that’s not really science, even though it was a peer reviewed double blind study that was repeated many many times over decades? Would you say 90% of those cancer patients must just be wimps who can’t stick to their lifestyle changes? Or do you just accept that the evidence shows that lifestyle changes aren’t an effective treatment for cancer? Because the evidence is pretty clear that lifestyle changes aren’t an effective long term treatment for obesity.
Personally I believe in accepting empirical research for what it is, and not wishing it away when it’s inconvenient or goes against my expectations.
I’ll chime in with an anecdotal data point : I tried to lose weight by stepping up my exercise AND reducing portion size on all the foods I normally ate.
Nada. Rock-solid stable weight. Sustained the effort for months without a significant deviation. Still exercising, and I believe I’m still eating less, but I stopped caring about that part so much.
Tried a second variation : I normally drink two cans of soda a day. Tried cutting back to one, with no other changes, saving me 120-150 calories a day.
I actually slightly gained weight, but was more or less stable.
Bottom line : Your metabolism rate matters, and it WILL adjust. And other factors feed into it, like how much sleep you’re getting.
The study I cited monitored people over a six year period. They found that even after six years, the metabolisms of the people in the study had not returned to their pre-diet levels.
Regardless, you can’t ignore thermodynamics.
There bodies may be extracting more calories from a gram of food then they were before, but that can’t be an infinitely efficient process.