Potato Diet (The Potato Hack) - Chris Kresser & Joe Rogan

and this is what's really interesting you know most people think of potatoes is something that would spike their blood sugar because they have a lot of carbohydrate but when you cook and cool the potato it won't have that effect because the resistance start you can't absorb and break that into glucose whoa so something you cool a potato it's better for you yeah so that like a cold potato salad would actually not have the same effect on your blood sugar as eating a warm baked potato that you just cooked in fact crazy have you heard of the potato hack no this is probably the most effective diet that I've ever come across for weight loss and this is what I use in within my practice with patients when like nothing else has worked or if someone's super motivated and just wants to make progress quickly guy named Tim steel introduced me to this and it was he has sent me some books that he found in the 1880s that reference this diet so this is old-school and what you do is you basically eat nothing but potatoes and you but you don't they're plain potatoes so you can roast them or boil them but you don't you know in the hardcore the hardest core version you don't even add salt it's just plain baked potato or boiled potato certainly no butter chives sour cream bacon you know because that increases the reward value as we were talking about earlier right the more variety there is the more rewarding a food is okay so you just eat potatoes and let's there are different variations or different ways of doing it you can do it for maybe just three days a week and then you can do your normal diet you know the other four days a week Tim talks about a variation called potatoes by day which means you just eat potatoes for breakfast and for lunch and then you eat a normal dinner but in my clinic and what and from Tim's experience working with a lot of people most people will lose an average of a half pound a day and I think there are two there there there are a few things happening here and why it works number one it's it's totally playing towards these mechanisms that we talked about before the the the the reward value food which is called the hedonic system that drives our food craving and preferences and just let's do a thought experiment if you have two plates of food and on one plate you have a steamed potato with no salt or butter or fat of any kind and on this plate on the right you got bag of potato chips or just a plate of potato chips which one are you gonna eat less of I mean goes without saying right you're only gonna eat the potato when you're when you're hungry and you're not gonna eat probably a bite more than you're hungry for whereas the potato chips all bets are off yeah for most people and so what happens is when you do the potato diet you get a spontaneous calorie reduction and by spontaneous I mean not voluntary you're not you setting out to say okay I'm only going to eat a thousand calories today you're saying I'm gonna eat as many potatoes as I want to satiate my hunger but just by definition because of how our brain works you're only going to eat you're gonna eat less then you would typically so that's one thing you get a reduction in calorie intake the second thing is that when the when you cook the potato people the way they do this diet is they'll just cook like you know all the potatoes that they need for the week on Sunday to make it easy so then I have to cook the potato every time they sit down to eat so they cook the potatoes and then they let them cool and so then each time you can still heat them back up but but they now have a lot of resistance starch even if you heat them back up even if you hit them back up and here's what's really cool about it if you heat them up and cool them again each cooling cycle forms more resistant starch so that by the end of the week if you've if you're heating all of the potatoes back up and then cooling them again each time you're gonna have a potato that's mostly resistant starch which means it will have zero impact on your blood sugar and it will be like a feast for your beneficial gut microbiome and that's another reason this diet probably works we I'm you know all about the studies correlating disrupted gut microbiome with obesity and diabetes yeah so you're basically the way I tell patients is you're basically going on an all fiber diet mmm and you leave the skin - you can eat the skin you should eat the skin Tran yeah yeah yeah skin has vitamins in it right so people will lose up to a half a pound you know between a quarter and a half a pound a day that they're on the potato diet it's amazing so if you let's say you know you decide I want to I want to lose one and a half pounds a week you do it for three days a week and you do that for six months then by the end of that six month period you've lost a pretty significant amount of weight if you can keep that up if you can keep it out the blandness of it yeah that's another fascinating aspect about diet it's like how much of our life we we are willing to forego health happiness all these different things just for some simple mouth pleasure for a few moments you know I mean if you think about a pizza that you would eat that Pete I mean how long you need it for 20 minutes 20 minutes out of a 24-hour day and you're gonna feel like for at least an hour - afterwards you know if you try to do anything like physical it's gonna be more than two hours before infinitely if you really want to go to the gym or you want to go for a run oh and look I'm not saying I think everyone should do this I think food should be pleasurable and I think you know the way I eat for example I love the foods that I eat you know it's but and this is why I say I don't suggest that anyone should start here but I think it's interesting because it gets at some of what we've already been talking about how why the modern food environment contributes to obesity and how using that knowledge and understanding of what triggers you know us to eat we can turn that around and use it in our favor so another strategy that similar is to just eat but not quite as Extreme as just eat the same thing for breakfast lunch and dinner for like two or three days in a week so until you get bored with it that way exactly you [Music]

Channel: Louis Barr

Views: 358,772

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Id: niwqfwA2Lb8

Length: 6min 24sec (384 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 09 2017