[skocznymroczny]

> (some days we were losing almost a pound of bodyweight due to ingesting only ~500 calories).

This is the key. There is no magic to lose weight. There are no magical ingredients and secret diet foods. Outside of some specific medical conditions, if you consume fewer calories than your body burns, over time you will lose weight.

Personally I am a fan of low-carb/keto/intermittent fasting diets, but there isn't much magic to them either, they are in the end a way to eat fewer calories. What food you eat makes a difference in terms of nutrients and satiation however.

It's possible to lose weight even eating only chocolate bars. Assuming 600kcal per chocolate bar, you can eat two chocolate bars a day and you should be losing weight. But chocolate bar is almost pure carbs, so it will play tricks on your sugar levels, make you experience mood shifts and you'll deprive your body of nutrients. And it won't take long until you start cheating when you keep getting hungry all the time.

Personally I wouldn't go for a potato only diet, because potatoes are carbohydrate heavy as well. I don't like the idea of eating only a single food. Eating the same meal every time might work better though. Something like fried chicken breast and broccoli or cauliflower is relatively low in calories and can keep you satiated for a long time, while also being a relatively healthy meal.

[aredox]

Short-term it is true, but long-term not: your body is adaptable and will adapt to lower caloric intake to maintain weight. This is why "you just have to reduce calorie intake" advice is shortsighted if not just plain dumb: if I eat less calories, is my weight going to fall down to zero? Of course not! (Save for real starvation, where one reduces intake below the body's ability to adapt)

It follows that one can lose weight without reducing calorie intake - and studies prove it: https://mobile.twitter.com/T_Fiolet/status/16435288286968176...

[meindnoch]

Huh?

Of course the answer is yes: if you keep eating 500 calories a day, like in the article, eventually you will die of starvation.

Starvation is less than 600kcal/day for the average person.

[matthewdgreen]

I think the point here is that most people have a large range of calorie consumption that they can maintain without gaining or losing much weight: there is a range of efficiency in the digestive process, your energy levels, unconscious behaviors like fidgeting, and variations on metabolic efficiency in general. These obviously won’t keep you from losing or gaining weight when the amounts are substantial enough, but that they can potentially overwhelm a few hundred calories in raw food consumption. Simple CICO calculations assume a constant food-to-useful-work ratio, but that’s an unrealistic model of the human metabolism. Hell, even my electric car does not have constant wall-to-wheels efficiency, it varies depending on voltage and battery state and whether the battery heater is active.