Spud Fit

I have completely fallen down a rabbit hole. A month or so ago I was watching a Potato Mastermind video – as one does. It is a contemplation of a bunch of videos by Dr. John McDougall about potatoes. (There are actually two of these videos and I don’t really remember which one I was watching. If I had to bet I’d say it was the second one.) He advocates a vegan, starch-based diet. He is also a very strange dude in my opinion. I can only handle him in short doses.

In the middle of the video he started talking about a guy named Andrew Taylor who lived on only potatoes for a year. I thought that was interesting so I looked him up. He has a YouTube channel too.

Briefly, he was unhealthy and binge eating foods that he knew weren’t good for him. He had a thought that if he was an alcoholic he could stop drinking alcohol but he couldn’t stop eating. He decided that the next best thing would be to limit himself to only one food for a month or so to see if he could modify his behavior around food. He started researching to see what food he should eat. He came up with potatoes. By the time he had settled on a plan it was the end of December 2015. So he decided to start on January 1, 2016. Since it just happened to be the first of the year he decided to try to eat only potatoes for the whole year. It worked. It controlled his binge eating with the side effect of greatly improving his health.

While I was looking at his story, I saw that he had a cookbook.

This is an interesting style of cookbook. He went to many vegan doctors, chefs, and athletes to get their stories and their favorite potato recipes. It is a fascinating book to read. I love potatoes and there are so many fun ways to fix them in this book.

The irony is that the more I read about potato diets the less likely I was to use any of the recipes in this cookbook. During Andrew’s potato diet he wouldn’t have eaten them either. He ate only potatoes with a very small amount of condiments on them.

This led me to a diet challenge called Mary’s Mini. Mary is Mary McDougall, the wife of Dr. John McDougall, so we’ve come full circle. The Mary’s Mini challenge is a 10-14 day challenge where you pick one starch to eat. The most popular seems to be potatoes. You eat 50% that starch and 50% nonstarchy vegetables for the course of the challenge. The idea is not to try to get fancy with recipes but to eat very simply. It is used as a reset if you’ve been eating too unhealthly or if you feel the need to clean up your diet for any reason. There are thousands of videos about it on Youtube. I’m not sure why I’d never heard of it before.

I was already eating cauliflower and sweet potatoes for breakfast every morning. I decided to try to eat potatoes at every meal for a while. I was nervous about telling the husband about this but he loves potatoes too so he got on board. We’ve been eating so many potatoes. We aren’t sick of them yet. I roast up a bunch of sweet potatoes every week so they are on hand in the fridge. We’ve been air frying potato wedges, microwaving potatoes for a quick meal, using the instapot to cook up mashed potatoes, or baking bunches of potatoes at a time. They are so filling and satisfying.

Health-wise, I haven’t really lost any weight with this but the husband’s blood sugar is much lower when he is eating white potatoes than when he eats any other food. I definitely see us focusing on potatoes for a while. It is easy and yummy. It is also super quick and inexpensive to grocery shop when you are mostly eating potatoes!