The Potato Diet: How This Comfort Food Can Help You Lose Weight and Live Longer
Experts reveal how potatoes boost metabolism, control hunger and promote weight loss like Ozempic!
Do you skip potatoes because you’ve heard they’re fattening or not good for you? Then prepare to have your mind blown. A massive new study just found that people who eat 14 or more spuds a week live longer, healthier lives than those who eat six or fewer. On top of that, fairly recent research in the journal Nutrients showed that dieters given two sweet-potato-based meals a day lost double the body fat and over 10 times more fat from their hips than a no-potato group. No wonder WeightWatchers just made potatoes zero-point foods.
“Potatoes are antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic and anticancer,” says scientist and author of The Potato Hack Tim Steele, MS. “And they can make weight loss so easy.” He notes that all types of potatoes offer benefits, with brightly colored purple, blue and sweet potatoes offering bonus doses of antioxidants that can help us heal and slim. Montana mom Heather Weibel, 47, says eating a variety of potatoes certainly worked wonders for her. She’s down 102 pounds! Keep reading to learn how to reap the benefits for yourself.
How the potato diet got its start
French fries and potato chips are a big reason potatoes get a bad rap. But it’s actually “the highly processed vegetable and seed oils in commercial chips and fries that science links to weight gain and type 2 diabetes,” says Steele. Meanwhile, numerous studies have shown that potatoes themselves boost wellbeing and weight loss.
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To raise awareness of this fact, Chris Voight, the head of the Washington State Potato Commission, once famously ate nothing but 20 potatoes a day—about 2,200 calories worth—for two months. He lost 21 pounds and cut his cholesterol by 67 points. Impressive, right? Now, no one is suggesting we eat only potatoes, but the experiment makes it plain to see what a positive impact they can have on the body. Steele even goes so far as to compare baked, mashed potatoes and air-fried potatoes to popular new weight-loss meds…
How potatoes are a little like Ozempic
To get us lean, drugs like Ozempic artificially raise levels of GLP-1, a hormone that kills hunger while improving blood sugar and metabolism. “Eating a lot of potatoes naturally stimulates GLP-1,” says Steele. So you get these Ozempic-like benefits:
1. Exceptional hunger control: In a study at LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center, overweight test subjects were given meals that replaced 40 percent of the meat they normally ate with potatoes. This hack lowered appetite so much, participants “often didn’t finish meals,” says lead scientist Candida Rebello, PhD.
A key reason for the effect: A potato contains 26 calories per ounce. By contrast, salmon has 59 calories, beef has 71, bread has 75, sausage has 85, cheese has 114 and oil has 250. To feel full, “people tend to eat the same weight of food regardless of calorie content,” says Rebello. So potatoes, with few calories per ounce, make us full very fast.
There’s more: Potatoes also contain nutrients called proteinase inhibitors. That, along with their ability to spike GLP-1, dramatically slows digestion, holding food in our systems and keeping us full 200 percent longer than steak and 600 percent longer than most foods.
2. Lasting sugar control: Like all carbs, potatoes temporarily increase blood sugar. Yet people in Rebello’s study ended up with significantly better blood-sugar control after just eight weeks. They shed 12 pounds too. Why? Their potatoes were cooked and cooled before being added to meals, a process that causes lots of a compound called resistant starch, or RS, to form. (Reheating won’t affect RS.) “Resistant starch resists digestion until good gut bacteria finally turn it into short-chain fatty acids,” says Steele. The fatty acids then do amazing things, like activate anti-diabetes genes. RS has been shown to help improve the way the hormone insulin works in our bodies by 73 percent, leading to shifts in body chemistry that allow fat to burn far faster.
3. Enhanced metabolism: Short-chain fatty acids “also help fuel metabolism,” says Steele. In fact, a University of Colorado team found that a single resistant starch-rich meal revs metabolism for a full 24 hours. Fiber in potatoes also helps stoke a temporary increase in metabolism during digestion. And even white potatoes have up to triple the vitamin C of many fruits—a factor that can increase fat burning by 320 percent. The bottom line, says Rebello: Potatoes can help you “lose weight with little effort.”
Potato diet success story: Heather’s 102-pound weight loss
After years of fast food and extreme diets, Heather Weibel’s weight hit 263 pounds and tests showed inflammation so severe, “my doctor thought I might have a heart attack,” recalls the Montana cashier, 47. “I went on steroids, but they didn’t work.”
Tired and in pain, Heather watched a lot of Netflix. One day, she flipped on a plant-based foods documentary called What The Health. “I couldn’t believe the changes people had from going vegan,” she says. She gave it a try. But there was a hitch. “Oreos are vegan, so it didn’t go well at first,” she laughs.
Luckily, Heather eventually read How Not to Diet by plant-based expert Michael Greger, MD; she also joined a TOPS weight-loss support group. She soon switched to mostly unprocessed plant foods—including a huge potato-based midday meal jazzed up with beans, veggies, seeds and other tasty toppings. “I prep a week’s lunches at once. The container can be so heavy, my husband has to carry it,” she says. Just four weeks of eating this way and her inflammation was gone. “I’d used a sleep apnea machine for a long time, and I got off of that after four weeks too!” Shedding up to 10 pounds a month, she felt good enough to add exercise.
As Heather experimented with plant-based eating to figure out what would work best for her, “I found the app Cronometer, which analyzes your meals to see if you’re getting enough nutrients,” she says. It’s how she found that eating lots of potatoes was crucial to keeping her potassium intake to a healthy level. What she didn’t know at the time: Getting enough potassium, an electrolyte mineral, has been shown in informal studies to lower appetite by 47 percent! Heather definitely noticed how filling spuds are. “They make you so full,” she says. Of all of Heather’s staples—which include hearty options like avocado, tofu, lentils, broccoli—“potatoes are definitely the most filling food I eat.”
Heather adds: “I don’t know for sure if it’s the potatoes, but I’m losing fat faster than ever!” Does she miss meat? Actually, not all—because she still eats meat. Though she eats only whole plant foods most of the time, throughout her journey she has enjoyed one “anything goes” meal a week, and it’s often a burger and fries. Heather has lost over 102 pounds and is the healthiest she’s ever been.
How to try the potato diet for yourself
Experts say swapping potatoes for some of your usual meat or processed carbs can help you lose a little weight. To lose faster, use a free app like Lose It! to keep portions healthy. Or try Heather’s approach: At most meals, eat unlimited potatoes and other whole plant foods, then allow yourself one meal a week to eat anything you want. To learn more, check out the beginner’s guide at ForksOverKnives.com.
Easy potato diet meal ideas to get you started
Purple sweet potato smoothie
Blitz 1 cup of nut milk, 1⁄2 cup of cooked/cooled sweet potato (orange or purple!), 2 Tbs. protein powder and 2 Tbs. nut butter.
Easy baked potato wedges
Slice any potato in wedges. Dry with a paper towel. Toss with optional olive oil and seasoning. Bake at 415ºF for 40 minutes, flipping once.
Protein-boosted mashed sweet potatoes
Mash 1 large baked sweet potato with 1⁄4 cup of Greek yogurt, a little optional olive oil and seasoning to taste.
Additional reporting by Cailey Griffin
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