Not to piss on your parade- that amount of weight loss is not easy to do, but just a couple of years isn’t enough to prove that you’ve permanently kept it off.
I lost 60 lbs / 22% of my weight back in 2000, getting down to roughly 215 lbs through a combination of very rigorous calorie-counting and regular exercise.
I gained back about 5-10 lbs fairly quickly, but I stayed at 220-225 until about 2002, when I started gaining it back during graduate school, a gig as a consultant, and my current job.
Basically as long as my routine stayed the same, I didn’t gain or lose weight, but a lot of stress or discombobulation tended to make me start gaining weight until I could reestablish a new routine where I’d stabilize.
The big problem isn’t that it’s particularly tough to lose weight- I’d think anyone could muster the willpower and motivation to do what is needed for 6 months. The big problem is that in order to keep that weight off, you have to apply about 70-80% of that diligence and willpower EVERY SINGLE day or you’ll inadvertently eat too much of the wrong things, or exercise less, or whatever.
Nobody really wants to make counting calories and monitoring your dietary intake a primary lifetime task like you have to when losing weight, and your set-point mechanism will tend to actively work against you there, in ways that people of normal weight don’t have to deal with, above and beyond any portion control or nutritional considerations.
I lost half my body weight via calorie counting, I have kept it off for 6-7 years via calorie counting. I take comfort in the maths and it takes about a minute of my day thanks to the Internet.
I lost it slowly over 2 years rather than crashing down biggest loser style, I think that is important. We need to talk about losing fat rather than losing weight. Keeping and enhancing muscle seems to have given me an eqivalent metabolic rate to other women my weight but when I do overeat I seem to hold more of it than most, I suspect it is the billions of extra fat cells I made that are just waiting to catch that extra slice of pizza. I can put fat on very quickly in a calorie surplus. I am utterly hyperactive though so out eating my training and general fidgeting takes a lot of doughnuts.
I tend towards weightloss when not paying attention.
I’m getting bits and pieces of the book from my son, who seems to be working up to trying it. He’s mentioned that the method used required, at the beginning, “experiencing winter” in order to, theoretically, trigger the body to produce hormones that tell it to live on fat stores. There are cold showers and lowered thermostats involved. Also no exercise during the initial “winter”.
Also Penn wasn’t directly concerned with his weight. He was trying to get his blood pressure down. He was successful with that within the first month.
For most people, food is more of a drug than a source of nutrition. They eat to satisfy a craving more than because the body needs calories or nutrition. Asking them to “just eat less” is like asking a drug addict to “just take less drugs”.
Part of the reason for a drastic diet change is to break the reward cycle of “eat->feel pleasure->eat->feel pleasure”. Put the body in food rehab so it doesn’t eat as a way to feel good. But just like a drug addict, the difficulty comes later when they have to constantly battle the urge to eat as a way satisfy their reward center.
I used to believe the old calorie in-calorie out thing until I got a dog with an obese metabolism. I mean, clearly at base the calorie in-calorie out principle is true because you never see fat people in famine-stricken areas, but the metabolism is complicated and doesn’t work just like a furnace. It adjusts itself in an effort to maintain the body at a certain set point as best it can.
But back to the dog. She gained weight, so I cut her food back. And cut it back. And cut it back. She never lost a pound. This is a dog-she can’t comfort-eat, order pizza, open the fridge, or lie to herself about how much she is eating. At one point she was running what on paper was a 500 kcal deficit per day and maintaining her excess weight.
I switched her to exactly the same number of calories per day of an extremely low carbohydrate, high fat, moderate protein diet, didn’t change her exercise, and she started losing around 0.5 pound per week. At the same on-paper 500 kcal deficit per day.
I’m not sure the weight loss looks too great on him, as he’s so tall it makes him look lanky and angular. Maybe if he stopped dying his hair and aged a bit more gracefully, and wore properly tailored suits that didn’t look so baggy on him, he’d look okay. But every pic I see of Penn he looks haggard and saggy.
I actually heard Penn talking about this in a radio interview. The “potato only” part was not meant to be a calorie counting tool or anything like that. He picked the most bland food he could find and ate nothing else, in order to fix the fact that he had become desensitized to flavor. The potatoes were meant to just help him fix his taste sensitivity, like a “reset” button for his palate for salt and oils and sugar and fat.
After he spent awhile eating potatoes exclusively, he found that other foods were much more satisfying than before, and the really bad stuff was just way too sweet/salty/rich/etc for him to enjoy. This helped curb his appetite and made him feel satisfied with healthier food.
This was only about 5 minutes of the discussion before they moved on to better topics, but I remember at the time thinking it made a lot of sense.
There are a lot of forums out there where people discuss and swear by some form of “the potato diet,” including many pale/primal (ostensibly low carb) folks. It’s pretty much you just eat potatoes, as plain as possible. Most people are OK with salt and vinegar or a pat of butter.
A lot of people do this as a sort of “reset” for just 2-3 days or so.
Personally, I prefer the steak and eggs diet or some other all-meat high fat diet and think it’s more effective with more aesthetically pleasing results (sorry but a lot of people who lose weight on low calorie vegetable diets look really weird to me).
I assume his diet relates somehow to the “Potato Hack” which was a web paleo thing a few years ago and published in book form earlier this year. Part of the claimed benefits relied on the fact that cooking and cooling potatoes changes the chemical properties of the starch in the potatoes making them into resistant starch which is the food of the friendly bacteria in the intestine.
I recall probably 30 years ago reading about a group working with teens. One of the diets they tried was “eat what you would normally eat but eat a large cooked potato before every meal.” It had the best results of any diet they trialed.
