For one or two weeks.

Experiment Rationale

One core principle of the Patchwork System is matching your diet to what works best for your body. One major part of this is which foods do you extract the most energy from in a usable form for the rest of your body. Based on your current answers, we have determined that your body most likely works best with starch as a primary source of energy in it’s current state.

You have also shown a high level of interest in achieving results quickly and are willing to modify your diet to a large degree to achieve this. If you find these recommendations too extreme, you can try the more flexible High Starch Diet instead.

Because of this, we want to do a very direct experiment for a couple of weeks to see if you respond well to starch to save you time and remove confounding factors. If it works well, then we would transition to the Mostly Potato Diet.

Stages

• Potato Only Experiment (1-2 weeks): Eat only potatoes, along with fat free low calorie sauces, such as soy sauce, siracha, vinegar, pepper and so on. The goal here is to isolate variables and see how your body responds to a very high starch diet without anything else potentially interfering with the results.
• Mostly Potato Diet (1-3 months): If the intial experiment shows good results, we can move to a more flexible diet. Potatoes will remain your primary source of energy, but we add other foods and supplements to fill out micronutritional needs to make it sustainable.

Later Stages Available in Patchwork Premium

• Expanding your diet to include other sources of starch and other foods to increase variety.
• The next diet you need to do to continue your fat loss after reaching a certain fat loss target.
• Finding out your end state ‘forever diet’ that you can stick to for the rest of your life that works with eating out with friends and whatever you feel like generally once you’ve reached your end goal.

Potato Only Experiment

The goal here is to see if your body responds well to eating a diet of mostly starch. Potatoes are ideal for this because they contain a lot of nutrition on their own and several other properties that make them an ideal test of how your metabolism responds to a starch heavy diet.

The diet is pretty simple, just eat potatoes (not sweet potatoes) of any kind you like and as much as you want. You can eat it with various sauces that are fat free and low calorie, such as soy sauce, various hot sauces, maggi sauce, spices, salt, vinegar and so on. You can also cook them any way you want. You cannot have it with fat although, it isn’t the french fry diet after all.

Some people are sensitive to eating a large amount of potato skin, so we suggest peeling all of your potatoes, especially if you start feeling sick at any time on the diet.

This diet causes you to eat 90% of your calories from carbs.

Potato Tips

• See our Potato Prep Guide!
• Peel all of your potatoes, gouging out brown spots and growth spots under the peel, and peeling anything that looks green in the flesh. The large amounts of solanine that are in the skin and green parts of the potatoes make people feel sick as it builds up in your body. The oxo pro swivel peeler is fairly popular with potato dieters and much nicer to work with vs. other cheap peelers.
• Getting the largest potatoes you can find reduces your labor in preparing the potatoes. You get more potato flesh in volume but less potato surface to peel.
• We also suggest scrubbing the potatoes with water before peeling to remove dirt and pesticides you might be sensitive to. This will probably be some of the cleanest food you have ever eaten.
• Russet potatoes tend to be the ones that people don’t get sick of. Yellow potatoes, as tasty as they are, have people get sick of them after a week.
• Storing your potatoes in a dark, dry bag reduces the amount of solanine buildup and keeps them fresher longer.
• Bake using an air fryer or oven. Or steam them in an instant pot or other steamer. Boiling or microwaving the potatoes makes them taste far worse, and reduces their nutrition.

Goal

While you do this, you should track your weight and how you feel on the diet in a note somewhere. If you feel fairly good on the diet, don’t feel hungry, are losing weight or have other generally positive results, then that is a good indicator that starch is a good match for you.

We only want to do this for a week or two to see how you respond. If you respond well, then we can expand to a “mostly potato” diet that includes other foods to round out your micronutrition and improve taste.

If the diet doesn’t agree with you, even after peeling your potatoes, using russet potatoes and cooking them in an air fryer, baking or steaming, then it is probably not a match for you. This tells us that starch is might not be your macronutrient of choice, or you don’t agree with potatoes specifically. If you’ve done all of those things and still feel bad, please stop the diet!

With Patchwork Premium, we can help you determine what would work best for you in this case.