If he sticks with it, it's going to work. All starch diets bring people to healthy weights. I've been doing (mostly) ketosis for years and I still know his all potato diet can work for weight loss. It's just going to be a very… tasteless… few weeks/months. Your poop is going to be unpleasant too.
It's always interesting to me that people can succeed on extreme diets like this rather than adjust their lifestyles to whole food home cooked healthy eating. Like almost no one can tolerate ketosis but they can do extreme diets like day+ fasting or fad diets.
The shower thing is completely off base but whatever, this is all extreme. No salt / olive oil on the potatoes is off base too, there's no reason the diet needs to be that boring.
> It's always interesting to me that people can succeed on extreme diets like this rather than adjust their lifestyles to whole food home cooked healthy eating. Like almost no one can tolerate ketosis but they can do extreme diets like day+ fasting or fad diets.
They don't actually succeed. They succeed for a short time, because of the motivation rush, and will post about their success; then they will lose the motivation and consequently their shape, but then obviously won't post about that.
Restrictive diets are bound to fail, because it's like fighting gravity, and it's impossible to succeed for one reason or another - burning motivation/mental health being another factor.
Dieting is something successful in the extremely long term, ie. decades.
- overweight person loses weight in the short term: interesting blog post (for uninformed readers)
- overweight person loses shape in the medium/long term: uninteresting because it shows that silver bullets don't work.
- fit person stay fit through exercise and balanced diet: uninteresting, because it goes against the silver bullet approach.
As someone who lost 30 kg of excess weight and kept it off for many years, I second this comment. I have a few acquaintances ("friends" as Americans like to call them) who have gone through literally dozens of fad diets over the years, and either never lost a single pound, or gained it all back after they stopped "dieting". Not a single long term success story among them.
When they ask me how I managed to keep the weight off for such a long time, I simply answer "eating what I always have, and calorie counting". Nobody likes to hear that for some reason.
I’ve been calorie counting for many years and work out an hour per day on average. My father insists that I’m “skinny” (not fat) because I was “born that way” and “lucky”
Many people don’t like to attribute their failure, or others success, to personal responsibility.
> When they ask me how I managed to keep the weight off for such a long time, I simply answer "eating what I always have, and calorie counting". Nobody likes to hear that for some reason.
That'll be because of the human condition of cheating which is roughly a combination of "I'll do it next week" and "It wont hurt me if I do this a couple of times (a week)" and the worst of all "I don't have to count this if I apply some magical condition to it".
It only doesn't work if you don't do it which all of the above are. And people don't want to hear that because they don't like hearing that they're failing, especially when they are.
While Nutrition science is kind of a joke and you can find papers supporting any position, this is a summary of "Long-term weight-loss maintenance: a meta-analysis of US studies":
>People on a very low energy diet (VLED) were more successful at dieting that people on a hypocaloric balanced diet (HBD) which is basically a normal diet with slightly lowered calories to allow for weight loss. The average weight-loss maintenance on a VLED was about 15 pounds (29% of the total weight they had lost), compared to about 4.5 pounds (only 17% of the total weight they had lost) on a HBD. Basically, very low energy diets result in more weight loss and you’re likely to keep more of it off.
I feel like a lot of people in this thread are missing the point of the potatoes with no salt or oil.
The entire idea is that this diet is incredibly boring and will make a well-balanced vegan diet seem for more appealing by comparison. This way, the author's new diet will seem more exciting and interesting than if they jumped straight from steak and ice cream to rice and beans.
A diet of pure potatoes is obviously unsustainable and unhealthy, but this is only temporary. (IMO the keto diet that I've seen other commenters pushing is also unsustainable, but whatever works for people.)
Oh joy another diet fad. They’re just stupid. Just eat a balanced diet with less calories and do exercise. It works. If it doesn’t it’s because you’re cheating.
231lb to 157lb here this year doing just that. 1600 calorie cap and regular exercise, mostly walking. After weight was gone, calories back up to normal and maintain the exercise.
I should note that this was achieved by eating less potatoes and fruit and eating more broccoli and cabbage. 99% of it was replacing my broken relationship with food with a healthy one, not an even more broken one.
Well, that's the catch, isn't it? The meta-technique is where the problem is. "Study hard for the exam. If you can't study, that's the problem". Useless advice to the guy addicted to games.
And we know one true answer for effective weight loss: pharmaceuticals. Ludicrous success rate. All of this other stuff is slow.
Are there actually any pharmaceuticals proven to aid weight loss? As far as I knew it was mostly all supplement bullshit to get you to waste thousands of dollars with nothing to show for it.
My doctor wants me to look into bariatric surgery but the side effects of that look horrifying long term.
Bariatric surgery is more effective than the pharmaceuticals for long-term weight loss AFAIK. Non-surgical intervention is slow in every form: lifestyle change, pharmaceuticals, all slow.
Not going to name the drugs, sorry, but your doctor will know of them. He knows your situation better, so I'll leave it to him.
I know two people who had surgical intervention. It was a way out that they could put money into and make the problem go away. Both are fucking miserable and it ruined their lives. But no one tells those stories.
If you're in line for bariatric surgery and your doctor doesn't inform you of the risks and possible adverse outcomes then she hasn't received informed consent from you yet.
This took a few months. If you have to cheat to make a life changing health difference then you’ve not solved the problem. You’ve replaced it with another one.
This is classic Hardship Theology which rests upon the tenet that things must induce some hardship in order for there to be benefit. Reality has no such restriction.
There are side effects certainly but they're well understood. Many are undesirable, as you no doubt are alluding to, but I believe they are rarely unexpected.
I would guess at stimulants, such as amphetamine, methamphetamine, cocaine etc. Will work to increase activity and reduce appetite. Major dose-dependent side effects in that they are bad for the heart, reduce impulse control, loss of sleep, addictive, amongst others
Sorry to point it out but you went on a low carb diet to lose weight. The more extreme version of that is keto. Both could be considered fad diets. Keto is exceptionally effective in losing body fat because you stay satiated for longer and don't eat junk. Excess sugar gets converted to fat in the liver and stored for later.
Actually it wasn’t low carb. The entire diet was balanced properly based on what the body required. Aggregate less carbs yes but less of everything and everything in proportion.
I found myself regularly having to eat more carbs to make up what I wasn’t eating.
Well, technically not nothing. Exercise can get you a few hundred extra calories burned a day, which will have an impact.
But the sentiment is correct. 90% of losing weight is eating less calories. Exercise is still good though, without it a lot of the lost weight is going to be muscle.
>Exercise can get you a few hundred extra calories burned a day, which will have an impact.
Not if the increased appetite after the exercize (and the "I exercized for now I'm entitled to some nice food") gets you to gulp more at lunch/diner....
Of course it does. Or I should say it can. It's burning calories. If calories in are less than calories used, you lose weight. What is true is that it's very easy to eat more calories than you can practically hope to burn off by exercise. The people doing physical labor for 10 hours a day who are still fat are probably eating Big Macs, Fries, and 48oz cokes for lunch and having 3-6 beers after work.
Not really. The human body doesn't have a power saving mode like computers do. The vast majority of burned calories are burned simply by the body existing and keeping its metabolism running.
This x100. I known plenty of people who spend the day on their feet lifting heavy things, and are classed as overweight. I sit at a desk all day and I'm skinny AF.
I really watch what I eat.
Never heard of this potato diet before... Human metabolism is complex!
> Your physical labour people probably consume more calories than they use.
It really comes down to this at the end of the day. Assuming someone is reasonable about what they eat (not garbage), if you consume more than you expand, you're gaining weight that is mostly fat, unless you're doing some type of resistance exercise like barbells, which would result in both fat and muscle gain if, again, you don't eat trash diet.
Completely. It’s also about the psychological impact. Building physical strength up through exercise has mental health benefits too which are added to the feedback loop of trying to fix your head, which is the real issue.
I can run a 5k now. Now that has some calorific consequences.
Yes and then people who don't have their diet under control will eat all the calories back up (because of the bigger deficit and exhaustion) and then some.
So no I would say you should get your diet under control first.
No a bad diet makes people vulnerable to cheating. A good diet helps you not cheat. That’s the whole goal in designing weight-loss diets! Help people reduce their calorie intake while not going mad or cheating.
An otherwise brilliant diet that drives everyone to cheat is useless.
That’s just not how people work. Their weaknesses are exposed differently by different diets. That’s why people are encouraged to find the diet that works for them, and why diets are more than just absolute maths and science.
That's where the point of failure is. Procrastination through finding the right diet rather than throwing science at it (backed up by our health authority here in the UK). It's easy to keep changing and pretending you're doing something than actually doing it and people are lazy and need to fix that first.
I have absolutely no idea where you're coming from with this angle.
If people could just magically decide to be perfectly disciplined and motivated all the time, then we wouldn't need any diets would we? We'd just say 'great now just eat healthily all the time'. But people struggle to do that, so we have diet programmes to help them.
The diet plan is there to help work around the laziness and ill-discipline which is a natural and eternal part of being a flawed human being.
I assume the point of the potatoes is to make you hate eating to the point that you stop wanting to eat anything, and once you don't want to eat, you can tolerate a vegan diet for basic maintenance calories.
Penn Jillette is a remarkable guy… three quick stories…
One of my friends used to work backstage in Las Vegas, and got invited to Jilette’s mansion for a party. Besides being obese (at the time), he is also very tall, 6’6”. According to my friend, the entire mansion is built to his scale —- every light switch is 6” higher than you expect. Every counter is high. Every chair is a little too tall. It has the effect of making folks feel a bit crazy.
He wrote a pulp mystery novel called Sock. It is told from he perspective of a detective’s plush sock monkey. The last sentence of every paragraph is a line from a classic rock tune.
He used to write a tech/humor column for PC/Computing magazine back in the nineties. In one column, he described a practical joke wherein one could write an autoexec.bat file that would print a countdown to detonation for airport security dudes who snooped in laptops to find.
(As for the efficacy of this “diet,” most of you are overlooking the fact that, like everything Jillette does, it’s a trick. Some folks just need a bit of psychology to get on the track, that’s fine.)
This diet is stupid. Objectively. But honestly... I feel like many people (myself included) who eventually ended up with healthy eating patterns actually started out with something stupid.
I really do think some people can mentally handle an "extreme" diet more easily than a moderate adjustment. It's just more exciting I guess. And the weirdness of it makes it feel like you've discovered some secret that nobody else knows. In the end, just realizing that you can in fact change your bodyweight is a huge mental win. And as long as you transition into something less stupid after a month or two, I think the net benefit can actually be very positive.
...but seriously; of the three macronutrients, carbs are the only one you don't need to stay alive. It's fine for a while, but I just don't get why if you're going to cut calories to below 1k per day you wouln't instead eat some fats and protein. When you realize that a good part of your weight loss is muscle mass disappearing the whole thing gets a lot less exciting.
>why not copy the diet of bodybuilders that get lean for a living!?
Because bodybuilders (a) also have strong wills in dietary matters and everyday regimen, (b) tend to follow complex diets strictly, (c) tend to get supplements, including non-healthy ones, (d) also do hard exercize to go along with the diet, (e) getting lean is basically what they do 24/7.
So, yeah, if (a), (b), (c), (d), (e) being the same for someone, then it would be a good idea for them to follow a bodybuilder diet...
I'm not suggesting that anyone follow a bulking diet, but following a cutting diet would work and isn't extreme.
For example a diet of 10-30% carbs, 40-50% protein, 30-40% fat, with a 400Kcal deficit isn't extreme by any measure! That kind of die, avoiding alcohol and sugar, seems pretty reasonable?
While I personally agree with approach to ask to those successful in order to establish a strategy to tackle a problem, there are a few crucial factors about professional bodybuilders:
- they dope themselves to death (in some cases, literally)
- they, in general, spend lots of time in the gym, although this is not a requirement to get fit in general
- they are gifted in genetic terms, which makes their practices incompatible with regular people.
Probably, the best role models are regular people who keep fit with a balanced lifestyle, and even better regular people who do so in shortage of resources (ie. time), since they have to be very effective.
While many bodybuilders do take drugs, you don't need to take such things to get lean. Having said that, gaining muscle beyond a certain point naturally is physically impossible, although staying within a health 10% - 15% body fat range is simple with a reasonable diet.
I would argue that the idea of being genetically gifted is largely a myth, as anyone that appears gifted is most likely taking performance enhancing drugs.
Because bodybuilders also live in the gym. And getting into shape and getting lean are two different paths. It is a lot easier to cut when you have lot's of muscles and lots of fat, than just a lot of fat.
You can't just copy third of someone's lifestyle. And let's not forget that lots of bodybuilders eat clen and tren hard. When you get a nice cocktail of all kinds of shady substances to modify your metabolism it also makes difference.
The only thing that will reliably make you lose weight is putting in less energy than your body consumes. To my knowledge all the dietary fads (low-carb, high-carb, all-starch, interval fasting, ...) have failed to produce any measurable effects in scientific studies.
There are studies for all of those diets that show weight loss results.
"Putting in less energy than your body consumes" is an unhelpful thought that you should stop using. It's both too obvious and also too obtuse. It completely ignores what certain types of foods do inside / to your body. It's possible to gain weight on a caloric deficit and it's possible to lose weight on caloric excess. People who struggle to lose weight while intentionally under eating and trying to exercise more and end up failing, feel terrible about themselves because they believe this unhelpful statement you keep repeating.
The thing is it's hard to measure the inputs and outputs of your body. And with the same inputs, different bodies will produce different outputs.
The thing about scientific studies is they're generally looking for something that works for everyone. If a small number of people in a small study have good results from a fad diet, and they can stick to it, that's good for them, but the study is going to show no significant difference between control and test.
The key is finding something you can stick to, has good results for you, and doesn't cause other problems. For a lot of people, that's easy, and for some people it's hard.
>have failed to produce any measurable effects in scientific studies.
That's not a problem, because scientific studies have also failed to produce any great way of losing weight (including the "sticking to it part"), whereas non-scientific diets have worked wonders for individual people...
My impression is that studies find that any diet can help people lose weight if that’s why they began it - hypothesis is that it’s the change and increased attention that works, not what you change to.
Adam, if you’re reading this, I wish you all the best and hope you do succeed in keeping with the plan. With any diet, all that matters is whether you’re able to transform it into a lifestyle change.
I know it’s not easy to do this and expose yourself on the web for others to see and read what you are and what you’re trying. But your courage and updates will hopefully inspire someone else.
Try not to get disappointed if you hit a plateau in your weight loss journey. It’s not very difficult to lose the first few (or few tens of) pounds, but later it may seem more and more of an uphill battle (depending on many factors). Just stick to the program and keep working on it.
If your aim is to loose weight you absolutely have to provide a varied, balanced, healthy diet. If nothing else, learning to provide it without calorie restriction is already going to help. Your body has to extract what it needs from less food so the food has to be more rich in quality content.
Also eating only carbs will mean opening a can of other problems. Your body needs to exercise various metabolic pathways every day. Avoiding fats and proteins in your diet is only good if you are fasting.
Who are we to tell him what his body needs? Diets like these are usually more psychology than science. What science teaches us that the human body is remarkably resilient at survival and it doesn't say much about lifestyle. What this guy wants to do doesn't sound all that different from the bread/potato/rice diets most humans subsisted on until the twentieth century. So probably harmless. I believe in encouraging people who want to make positive changes in their life. There's also YouTube videos of others who've apparently had success changing their lifestyle by potato dieting.
I have no issue with people doing whatever they want to themselves.
I have issue with people advocating uninformed and frequently dangerous practices and spreading that misinformation on the internet.
There exists no magical diet. This is just cranking dials on your body and see what effects it has with regards to your weight, without understanding what it actually does.
Obesity is a symptom of unhealthy diet. The solution to this is a healthy diet.
Agreed. He’s avoided learning anything about food, cooking and nutrition in favour of treating potatoes like coal. Also why is he cooking an individual meal for every family member? Can’t they all just eat something healthy and he eats a smaller portion of it? Or is this common in the US?
I know this person and you are dead wrong. He probably knows more about nutrition than most people because of this battle. He has done pretty much everything you can do to help yourself stay well and lose weight. Try being less judgmental of a person you know nothing about. He’s been kind enough to share his journey to help others who have tried everything and lost hope. Crappy remarks like most of you have shared are why people won’t seek help. Try being more kind, people. It makes the world a better place. Would you hammer a vegan like this? I didn’t think so.
My mother went fully vegan after reading Forks over Knives, and she started having to cook two meals as the other household members (I became an adult and moved out years ago) refused to eat vegan.
A year later, mom is now the healthiest of us. Her blood work is perfect and she feels great. Rest of the family is in the same situation we always have been.
I have nothing against vegan diet. You just need to know what you are doing and be committed to be balancing the diet yourself. Meat is an easy choice that gives everything the body needs plus some stuff that it doesn't.
They didn’t say potatoes are unhealthy they made the valid point that eating nothing but potatoes might be. As well as unnecessary, there’s a whole world of vegetables this guy could choose to discover and eat and still lose weight.
To expand on this, vegan diet is more demanding with regards to planning than meat-based diet as there is no single vegetable that contains nutrients that people need and even then you still need to balance your macro (ie. proportion of carbs to proteins to fats).
Meat is an easy choice as it roughly contains what you need in roughly right proportions. It is not the best solution to the problem (I don't want to say eating meat exclusively is healthy or better than vegan) but it puts you in roughly safe spot in that you can be extremely lazy with the diet.
With vegan diet you can quickly cause a lot of damage to your body if you are not paying attention to what you eat.
If you don't want to spend your days with calculators and tables the safest bet is to just vary everything -- eat a little bit of everything every day or different things every day.
One tip I would give even if you don't want to pay a lot of attention to details is to still try to manage proteins / carbohydrates / fat content of your food. Just add olive oil when you don't see enough fat in your food, etc.
Eating potatoes for two weeks is not going to seriously unbalance him (any more than he already is at 330lbs). For someone who is a habitual overeater, a varied balanced healthy diet may have too many opportunities to cheat. Sometimes you need an extreme change to snap out of old habits.
You haven't read the conclusion: "I’m off to eat more potatoes!"
Listen, if you change your diet drastically it is possible that just reducing amount of salt in your diet is going to cause drop in amount of water in your body and reduce your body mass.
>You haven't read the conclusion: "I’m off to eat more potatoes!"
Yes. This is his first day of a 2 week potato-only diet. So?
>Listen, if you change your diet drastically it is possible that just reducing amount of salt in your diet is going to cause drop in amount of water in your body and reduce your body mass.
If only that wasn't covered already in the book/diet...
Worth remembering Penn Jillette used to be a champion for obesity and not taking responsibility for yourself - I'm thinking particularly of the "Bullshit" episode where he attempted to corral science into justifying his own condition, undermining the whole premise of the series.
Perhaps he has issued a mea culpa.
As he himself says though, this is not a man to follow on this subject.
Best wishes to the author here though; moderation and discipline over the long term will be key.
I - like many other - gained some weight during lockdown last winter. Now round 2 of lockdown I figured something needed to be done, So I have invested in a walkingpad (treadmill for walking speed - it folds up and tugs under the bed when I am not using it.) I have been walking for 2 hours WHILE WORKING FROM HOME now and its perfect ! - loosing around 1 kg/week while eating pretty normal (though I am trying to only have 1 big meal a day and just snack the rest of the time). The walking is not hard and I can walk 10km/day without really thinking about it, because time flies by while working. When work time is over I have all my time free and don't need to spend time on excersise. I would highly recommend this. Walking is a low effort thing that burn more calories than you would think. Its also good on general well being to not sit down all the time.
This sort of thing is very effective if you manage to keep the pace just right. After a certain heart rate threshold, the drain on your focus makes it very difficult to be productive.
The equation is pretty simple, you need to burn more than you consume. So decrease your input or increase your exercise - or both. There's no shortcuts. Speak to a specialist, they tend to know what they are doing.
A few additional points to consider:
* First weight you lose will be water (it's why most of these diet programs make big claims in just a few weeks)
* As you burn fat, you'll need to drink more water and you'll flush out your electrolytes - take supplements
* If you don't workout and eat a certain-ish amount of protein (not too much or less) you'll lose muscle mass instead of fat
* Fasting helps you burn fat rather than food intake
* It's better to consume fats than carbs - if you can get your body into ketosis then you'll burn almost exclusively fats
* Don't underestimate the importance of exercise, even walking (for a heavy person, you're burning a lot more to move the additional mass around)
I’ve gone so far as to maintain a consistent weekly schedule of food and water intake and weight myself under the same conditions each day. It’s easy to become distracted by wild weight fluctuations due to water variations if you’re not conscious of how dramatic those variations are day by day.
Since I am on this road. Getting in shape is paramount. Swimming is probably the easiest way to build lots of muscles for very out of shape person. Long walks.
With every gram of muscle you build your lean/fat ratio improves, you BMR improves, any kind of health markers.
You're all wrong. The correct way to diet is totally different than what you think it is. You'd have to be a complete idiot to do it one way when another way is obviously more scientific. I once dieted a third way and it was way more effective than the second way, but it wasn't as healthy. You just have to look at the facts. Anyone who isn't doing the right diet - like I've been doing for years now - just doesn't understand how the human metabolism works. It's sad, really, this stuff is just basic. Stick to what's natural and you'll be eating in no time, trust me.
I honestly wish I had an appetite pushing me towards caloric surplus. I have difficulty intaking anything about maintenance calories, so I stay skinny. If I COULD eat a surplus, I would just hit the weights more than I currently do. Compound lifts every day. Throw in some strongman exercises. Being able to eat enough to get fat is a super power, people just don't know where to channel it.
This also requires virtually no change in diet, except ensuring you're reaching your protein goals every day.
Four Burger King Regular Chocolate Shakes will put you above maintenance almost certainly. If you don't want to GOMAD or anything and just want calories, just go do that. You can do it in four eating cycles if you don't have allergies / intolerance. Don't know that pure caloric surplus is worthwhile but there you have it.
Can you get scurvy in two weeks? I'm thinking probably not, and when the this phase is done, he's supposed to transition to a vegan diet.
I'm guessing that the potatoes-only period is to make it more likely that the new diet will stick. A cleansing of the old eating habits before establishing the new ones.
EDIT: Also, potatoes have a lot of vitamin C in them apparently, however cooking does reduce the content. Does eating an ungodly amount make up for the cooking loss?
Best of luck and sorry about the comments here. The keto people need to take a chill pill sometimes. There's no reason why this diet won't work if you stick to it.
If I were him, I'd just start walking (in addition to fixing the eating habits). One can put "all in" also in walking. Walk until your feet are bleeding :)
for me 13kgs dropped off in about 5 months after lifestyle changes.
Stopped adding sugar to drinks (and drinking sweet drinks/ artificial or no)
Fast between 8pm and 11am
go for a 1 hour bike ride a few times a week.
be conscious of how much food i was eating (quantity) I dont have a sweet tooth but savory food I have bad habits of eating until I'm full.
I'm kind of in the same boat. I like savory foods, although I also have a bit of a sweet tooth ( but am able to control it ).
My problem is the same though; I eat till I'm full, so I've been curtailing that by eating more proteins and really watching what kinds of food I'm eating. Still a work in progress though.
> After two weeks on potatoes, you go to a plant based, vegan lifestyle until you hit your target weight
Aren't potatoes "plant based, vegan"? I swear people go from one extreme terrible diet to another. Going from one terrible diet to another is only gonna cause more problems.
What is so difficult about eating a balanced meal. Veggies, bread/rice/pasta, meat/fish/poulty, fruits, etc?
If you are fat and want to lose weight, just put less on your plate and only eat that. And move/exercise more. Rinse, repeat. That's it. It's not rocket science.
I hope this man is getting paid to live like shit and shill penn gilette's book. Americans suck at dieting so much I don't even bother giving advice anymore. The fruits and vegetables are at the store. I'm sure you all can figure it out eventually.
There is a difference between the whole carb in a boiled potato and the processed carb in something like "potato flour". The whole carb has a much lower glycemic index thanks to fiber whereas the processed carb has a glycemic index closer to table sugar. Foods with a very high glycemic index cause glycation, which is when there is too much sugar in the blood and it starts crumpling proteins and causing other bad health effects. Whole carbs are fine for this reason because they tend to be very bulky and filling, so your stomach will usually be full before you can eat enough to cause bodily harm.
Or ask fruitarians or vegans who don't exercise and are dangerously underweight.
Also, I don't know. Maybe it's because:
- The body needs fats for more than just the krebs cycle (building hormones and cell walls, namely)
- In low fat diets, the body is starved of this critical macronutrient, so it uses its own stored fat to perform critical functions
Or they're pooping it out for all I know. Chopping off a leg will help you lose weight without "burning" calories.
Either way, the hypothesis that carbohydrates raise blood glucose which raises insulin which tells your endothelial cells to pull in fat for storage and fat cells, and that ketosis puts your body in fat storage release mode, is clearly not the whole picture.
My guess is that potato diet guy is under large caloric deficit, the body needs minimum calories to run basic functions, once those are depleted it starts using the stored fat.
But my understanding of ketosis is that it is a metabolic state during which the body uses the stored fat as a fuel and ultimately all roads must end up at that state for the stored fat to be depleted.
Being able to rapidly lose weight and then re-gain it does not give the impression that you know how to lose weight “effectively”. That’s how standard crash diets work.
I gained muscles, I was working out daily after the 2 weeks and dropped my body fat from 25% to 15%. After the fast, my body fat was 10% and I didn't like it, as I looked skinny.
If you want to stay at the low body fat, you can just reduce the food intake after the 2 week and not bulk up again. The fact is I did lose 15 kilos in two weeks and that is effective.
You could also use less extreme fast and make it gradual, but the mechanism of losing body fat became very systematic to me.
The facts are that gazillions of people every year go on a crash diet with massive lifestyle change and lose significant amounts of weight, congratulations on joining this years cohort, and 90% of them will gain it back within two years of starting, because “how do I lose weight” is not actually a question people struggle with, it’s “how do I lose weight and keep it off forever”.
Yeah because they go back to their old habits..it make sense, but that doesn't mean they didn't lose weight.
If you want to lose weight for the long run you've to eliminate the environmental, habitual and emotional factors that resulted in gaining it in the first place.
Also again I've lost fat (not any weight) and kept it, I don't want to be skinny I wanted to lose excess fat. The goal is not lose weight, it is to lose fat. I lost fat and gained muscle and kept those numbers, so where is the issue?
It's always interesting to me that people can succeed on extreme diets like this rather than adjust their lifestyles to whole food home cooked healthy eating. Like almost no one can tolerate ketosis but they can do extreme diets like day+ fasting or fad diets.
The shower thing is completely off base but whatever, this is all extreme. No salt / olive oil on the potatoes is off base too, there's no reason the diet needs to be that boring.