A man in Australia has lost 10kg after eating only potatoes for a month. In a bid to cure himself of binge-eating, 36-year-old Andrew Taylor from Melbourne began the diet on New Year’s Day 2016. He has vowed to continue his tuber-based regime – which also includes sweet potatoes – for a full year, despite nutritionists’ warnings against regimes based on a single ingredient or food group.
“I wanted to change the way I thought about food so that it’s not controlling my life,” he said. He made the decision to start the diet after a lifelong struggle with food, and is documenting the experiment on the Facebook page ‘Spud Fit’. He was the heaviest he had ever been before starting the experiment on January 1, weighing 23st 12lb. “When you’ve got an addiction, a drug addiction or an alcohol addiction, the best thing you can do is stop taking drugs or stop taking alcohol,” he said. “You can’t do that with food. So I thought, what else can I do? Perhaps I can choose one kind of food. Lots of people in the past have lived on nothing but potatoes.” Mr Taylor described potatoes as a “much maligned food”.
“People tend to think of them as empty calories. I’m hoping to show that potatoes are a health food.” For variety he bakes, boils and steams his spuds, and has experimented with potato pancakes. “I’ve changed from seeing food as a way of getting comfort or getting pleasure,” he wrote online. He claims that 99 per cent of his calories come from potatoes, and the rest from sauces and seasonings.
Experts confirm that the potato alone is not sufficient for a healthy diet. Despite this, nutritionist Fiona Hunter explains that potatoes are much more nutiritous than we are lead to believe. “In addition to carbohydrate they contain good amounts of important vitamins and minerals like potassium, B vitamins, vitamin C and fibre.”
