Potato Hack Diet

We’ll go through this again here for that diet, and I’m going to start off actually with the same disclaimer here which is that, this is not a diet that I use in practice. It’s not something I’m really comfortable with without medical supervision, but really, as long as someone is doing it for a few days, I guess I wouldn’t be terribly concerned about it, but most of my clients tend to be people who are—I work with digestive health clients, so they’re often people who are severely restricted in their diet already and are actually looking more to incorporate more foods into their diet, so they’re not really the type of clients who are going to be interested in a potato hack diet. Also, just by virtue of the type of clients who I’m working with, IBS-type patients, they tend not to be in the overweight or obese category and not looking to lose a lot of weight, so again another reason why this doesn’t make sense for my patient population, but I’ve got nothing against it. It’s just I don’t really end up using it a whole lot.

To answer your questions to the best of my ability here, first of which, “Is the potato hack diet appropriate for people with gallbladder removal?” I would say yes because it is inherently low fat, really not eating much if any fat on a potato hack diet, and it’s going to be higher in fiber because you’re just eating potatoes. That’s generally what your kind of looking for with someone who’s had their gallbladder removed is lower fat, higher fiber-type of diet. We’re going to get into this actually a little bit more if you’re not super familiar with the gallbladder removal diet because there is another question about this which will get to in a few minutes.

“In your experience, does it work for weight loss without adding additional physical activity into person’s lifestyle?”

I’m going to say the same thing or relatively the same thing that I did with the protein-sparing modified fast in this case. With the potato hack diet, it doesn’t have to be as low calorie as the protein-sparing modified I’d say, but a lot of people, of course, which is kind of whole point of the potato hack diet, they are going to be eating fewer calories just by the nature of the potato hack diet. You don’t want to eat tons of plain potatoes. That’s just not how we’re made. A lot of people are going to be eating much fewer calories than they were before potentially when they’re doing this kind of diet, in which case depending on the type of physical activity that they were doing or are interested in doing, it may not be a great time to add that in any way. When I have someone who’s working out heavily and consistently, truthfully, I like to just make sure they’re eating a calorically appropriate diet, and they’re not doing major caloric deficits because you can kind of get yourself into trouble with those sorts of diets, really low-calorie diets compared to what your body needs and when you’re doing a lot of exercise. Personally, I would say first of all, it’s not necessary to do a bunch of physical activity to lose weight while doing the potato hack diet. At the end of the day, they’re going to be in a caloric deficit which should cause weight loss, but I would actually add, though, just thinking about this here, it could beneficial for someone to start incorporating exercise before they do the potato hack diet just to kind of build up muscle mass, improve their insulin sensitivity, and then do the potato hack diet and depending on how long they’re doing that for just not exercise during that time because that way they may find it really difficult and tiring when they’re just eating potatoes, and then going back to the physical activity. I think your main question is really like, can someone lose weight without physical activity while doing the potato hack diet? And to answer that, I would say yes.

Contraindications for the potato hack diet.

I’d actually say they’re pretty much exactly the same as protein-sparing modified fast, with the exception that I would think for hypothyroidism this would be totally fine, whereas I did have some degree of hesitation with the protein-sparing modified for hypothyroidism. This isn’t something I’d be doing with adolescents or the elderly, I would say for me personally. I want to do this with someone who is relatively healthy other than being overweight, obese, or has metabolic syndrome. Those are kind of the main things I’m looking for, and if they’ve got major issues outside of that, I’d at least hesitate a little bit more unless, I’m just thinking if it was maybe something like an autoimmune condition I could see either of these things, the protein-sparing modified potentially being helpful just because hopefully you would be reducing inflammation pretty significantly, which could help with that condition as well. Really, I would say you want to avoid doing these kinds of diet on the extremes of population, meaning the elderly or the very young into adolescence, those types of population. That’s who I would be avoiding this in.