Potatoes for weight loss: the most filling food in the world

If I had to pick one food that lost me 70 lbs, it's the potato. Not a supplement, not a shake, not a rule. A five-pound bag of russets and a way of cooking them that doesn't turn them into something else. I know you've been told to avoid them. I'm going to spend this whole post telling you the opposite.

The most filling food ever tested

In 1995, researchers in Australia fed people equal-calorie portions of 38 common foods and asked them to rate how full they felt over the next two hours (Holt et al., 1995, the satiety index study). Then they measured how much those people ate at a buffet afterward.

Plain boiled potatoes came out on top. Not close to the top. The top, by a wide margin, ahead of oats, fish, beef, and every kind of bread. People were fuller after potatoes than after anything else, for the same number of calories, and they ate less at the next meal.

That's the whole case in one result. The food we were told to fear is the one that makes you stop eating sooner. I didn't need a study to tell me that once I started eating them, but it's nice to know the science agrees.

What's in a potato

A medium potato is about 80 percent water. That's why a full cup of boiled potato is only about 130 calories. The rest is mostly starch, with a few things people don't expect:

• Fiber. Around 3 grams a cup with the skin on. Keep the skin.
• Potassium. More than a banana. A medium baked potato is one of the best everyday sources there is.
• Vitamin C. A decent chunk of a day's worth, which is why sailors used to carry them.
• Resistant starch. When you cook potatoes and let them cool, some of the starch changes into a form your body digests slowly. It feeds your gut, and it's part of why cold potato salad feels lighter than the same potato hot.

Nothing exotic. Water, fiber, minerals, and a starch that fills you up. That's a weight-loss food by any honest definition, and it costs about a dollar a pound.

Potato vs what we do to it

Here's where the reputation went wrong. The potato was never the problem. It's what we turned the potato into. Same ingredient, six preparations, calories per pound:

The bottom three are the potato with oil and cheese poured into it until the water is gone. That's the version that shows up in the studies linking potatoes to weight gain, and it deserves its reputation. The top three are the version I eat. They're not the same food. A potato and french fries are not the same food.

How I cook potatoes so they're the easy choice

The secret to eating potatoes every day is having them already cooked. A raw potato is forty minutes away from dinner. A cooked one is two. So I cook them in batches, usually on Sunday, five pounds at a time.

• Batch boil. Cut into chunks, boil until a fork slides in, drain, cool, fridge. They keep four or five days and reheat in a pan or the microwave.
• Batch bake. A tray of whole russets at 400°F for about an hour. Let them cool, then keep them whole in the fridge. Split and reheat one for dinner in five minutes.
• Cool and reheat. Cooling builds resistant starch, and reheating only undoes part of it. Cold potatoes are the base for potato salad, hash, and wedges that crisp up better than fresh ones.
• Air-fry without oil. Cubed, cooked potatoes tossed in spices and air-fried at 400°F for ten minutes. Crisp outside, fluffy inside, no oil anywhere.

I go deeper on every one of these in how I batch-cook potatoes five ways, including the parboil trick for crisp oil-free wedges.

Toppings that keep a potato a potato

The rule is simple: the topping should add flavor, not oil. Everything on this list is either in my fridge door or five minutes from a blender.

• Salsa, hot sauce, or mustard. Cheap, zero effort, always there.
• Soy sauce or tamari with a splash of rice vinegar and green onion.
• Nutritional yeast and black pepper on a baked potato. Tastes cheesy.
• A ladle of bean chili. That's a whole dinner.
• A spoon of hummus thinned with lemon juice and water.
• Any of the oil-free sauces I keep in jars.

What about the potato diet?

Every few years someone loses a lot of weight eating nothing but potatoes, and I get a flood of messages asking if I recommend it. I don't.

Will it work for a couple of weeks? Probably. Potatoes are so filling that most people eat far less without trying. But eating one food is not a life. It's a stunt. There's no protein plan, no variety, no restaurants, no birthday cake, and no version of it you'd want to keep doing. And if you can't wait to stop, it didn't work. The weight comes back with the pasta.

What I'd take from it is the lesson underneath: when potatoes are the center of the plate, hunger stops being a fight. So put them at the center. Then add beans for protein, vegetables for volume, and a sauce for flavor, and you've got a way of eating you could do for the rest of your life. That's not a potato diet. That's just dinner.

Potato meals I make every week

I rotate the same handful of potato meals and never get bored, because the topping does the changing. Most of these have a free version on my recipes page:

• Loaded baked potato with black beans, salsa, and corn. My default lunch.
• Breakfast potato hash with peppers, onions, and smoked paprika, from Sunday's boiled batch.
• Potato bowls with roasted wedges, greens, chickpeas, and a creamy sauce.
• Potato and leek soup, a big pot, half in the freezer.
• Mashed potatoes with plant milk and roasted garlic under a bean chili.

Try this today: cook one potato the plain way. Boil it, bake it, air-fry it, whatever's easiest. Season it with salsa or hot sauce instead of butter and cheese. Then notice two things: how good it tastes, and how long you stay full. That's the food you were told to avoid.