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Wellness Wednesday for October 26, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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On the unreasonable efficiency of the Potato Diet

I'm still absolutely amazed by how well the Potato Diet works.

I want to start with the amazing parts of this diet: I have terrible adherence compared to other diets and I'm still constantly lowering my weight. I got to a restaurant, eat whatever I want, no prep or "goody boy points" I'm accumulating that I'm cashing in like a cheat day. I just do it.

My variant on a perfect day is: Eat potatoes ad libitum and once a day I eat a regularly sized meal. Those are admittedly relatively healthy meals and good portion sizes, as I'm sourcing them from Hello Fresh recipes.

But I constantly don't have perfect days and I still lose weight over the long term.

If anyone has struggled with weight in the past and wants to try something that works different from any other diet (that I know of anyway) I can only recommend trying the potato variant. You can do it in the hardcore version that is bound to work (see link above) or a less hardcore version that allows one to have social meals once a day (per plan/system) or several times a day (in a vacation setting or something).

Not all is roses and something that is very new to my experience with the Potato diet but worth pointing out: I've had two days since May where I've had very little energy intake and those days felt REALLY weird. I'm usually happy-go-lucky but that energy slump turned my positive outlook quite negative. Pretty soon after eating I was back to my former self and had an evening full of productivity.

I've had to restrict my diet for health reasons over the last six months.

I eat soaked oats with fruit, brown rice with vegetables and eggs, and vegetable soup with occasionally a little meat. This isn't a particularly amazing diet, but it serves to keep the symptoms under control.

Over this time, I've also lost 5 kilos. It's not a huge amount of weight, but my diet isn't particularly varied. I think simply restricting yourself from eating a large variety of foods is enough to get weight loss going.

Just wanted to say that I'm doing the potassium trial (conceived on the idea that potassium is why the potato diet works) and am around day 10. The first week was consistent losses (and I'm not a person who usually has a lot of spare glycogen) but I've now leveled out for three days and my appetite actually came back yesterday. My hangover from a non-enormous amount of wine was also brutal. I'm still stepping up the amount of potassium so hopefully I'll see a new low number in the next couple of days but I spent last week wondering if I'd finally found "that one weird trick" the internet is always promising us.