A man walks down the street.
He says, “Why am I soft in the middle now?
Why am I soft in the middle?
The rest of my life is so hard.”
—Paul Simon, “You Can Call Me Al”
The grocery store located a mile from my house sometimes seems like an amusement park. I push a cart past shelves bursting with colorful boxes of breakfast cereals that promise both happiness and improved athletic performance. The dozens of yogurt variations boast recipes from distant lands. I can’t decide if the packaging wants to inspire me to travel more or stuff my face. A bag of chips clearly wants to throw a party in my mouth, while a jar of coconut oil promises that it will make me smarter. Even vegetables get in on the game. One brand of broccoli suggests that simply eating it will help save the world. And let’s not even talk about what’s going on in the candy aisle.
Everywhere I look, shimmering packages of food are trying to tell me something vital about who I am and what I could be. The messages appeal to deep-seated emotions that I’ve carried my whole life. I feel hungry for whatever it is they’re selling. But at the same time that I desire all these amazing, world-saving foods, I feel a little manipulated. What sort of party is that bag of chips really going to throw? I know the broccoli won’t do a damn thing to curb climate change or stop mankind’s indifference to the rest of the species.
I avert my eyes from the onslaught and walk to the back of the store, where I grab two large bags of red and brown potatoes, drop them into my cart and head to the register. The clerk, a young woman in a green apron, sees the pile of root vegetables and raises an eyebrow.
“Whatcha makin’?” she asks.
“Just potatoes,” I say.
She probably imagines that I’m making a delectable starchy side dish. Nope. I really am making just potatoes.
For the next few days, I’m going to try to disentangle the emotional associations I have with food from actual hunger by eating just one rather bland thing. The humble potato is my wedge to isolate hunger from everything else I bring to the table.
…
Just a dozen generations ago, our ancestors only had access to food that grew a few miles from home. A thousand generations before that, our forebears ate mostly roots and vegetables they gathered from their immediate area and supplemented that with occasional meat when they could hunt it. No matter where they lived, geography and seasonality limited their food supply. If any of us traveled back in time for a cave banquet, not only would we find it incredibly bland, but we would also have almost no idea how much effort it took to assemble the meal.
Our sense of taste evolved to tell us important things about our environment and how the things we consume affect our body. More than just a pathway to pleasure, our palate gives us information about the nutrients that we need to survive. Sweetness means energy. Bitterness urges caution. The experience of sharing food, what anthropologists call commensality, helps maintain social relationships and community.
In the current interconnected world, the original purpose of our sense of taste is all but obsolete. The multi-billion-dollar food and beverage industry hijacked the ancestral sensory responses and injected brand awareness into social behavior. These changes happen at the societal level from the top down, and the neural associations get wired into our bodies. Together these forces are a persistent society-level wedge into the way we relate to food. If society operates as a superorganism, then the food supply has become something of a leash that removes us from our immediate environment and lets our biology draw sustenance from the entire globe at once. There are many positive aspects to this sort of globalization, but can we even know who we are without it? Omnipresent marketing lives in our mindsets, and easy access to calories permeates everything around us. We have so much available to us that the nuances of taste have been lost on us—often in favor of simple intensity. Many of us would rather have the highly engineered flavor burst of a Dorito than the simplicity of a root vegetable.
Even so, we can still try to understand how flavors shape our understanding of the world by borrowing a page from Feinstein’s float research and attempting to turn down the signal. Because it is so pervasive and easy to access, flavor is almost an environment unto itself. As I walk down the grocery store aisles, my mouth waters with Pavlovian discipline. Even when I’m not tasting it, my mind remembers. If I cut back on the variety of flavors available to me, then perhaps my disposition toward the world will change. Indeed, I expect that by removing flavors from my diet, I’ll become much more sensitive to other sensations that I tend to drown out with high-flavor food.
In other words, I want to know how my sense of taste affects my own life. How does the anticipation of what I can put into my mouth frame the way I perceive the world around me? And can I interrupt the feedback cycles of flavor and emotion so that I can feel something about the true nature of the food I eat?
It’s a worthwhile goal. In the developed world, we no longer suffer from diseases of deprivation; now we suffer from diseases of excess. It’s not very likely that you’re going to starve in America. And yet the aristocratic diseases of too much sugar—diabetes and gout—have seen exponential rises in the last couple of decades.
At first I contemplated doing an all-out fast for a few days to help reset some of my taste associations. Nearly every spiritual tradition has a long-established fasting practice associated with cleansing the body and ritual purity. Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days. Mohammed and Buddha fasted, too. In previous books, I’d written about a group of people known as breatharians who decide to forgo food altogether in the belief that they can survive on the energy of the universe—prana—in lieu of calories.
That second group made me reconsider my approach. The Wedge is a tool that separates stimulus from response; in the case of an all-out fast, that could mean learning how to dissociate the stimulus of hunger from the response of eating something. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that such a thing is possible. But it’s not hard to see how that’s also a stepping stone to an eating disorder. Denying myself food for an extended period of time to overcome the biologically important hunger signal—or through popular intermittent fasting protocols—would no doubt change my relationship with food. But it’s not the way that I want to apply the Wedge. This is because hunger isn’t really the problem I’m struggling with; rather, it’s the association I have between a world of abundance and my impulses to eat emotionally. What I was looking for was something that satiates hunger without stimulating too many food associations.
And then I found the Potato Hack.
I don’t know exactly where I first heard about the Potato Hack, but it has done the rounds on podcasts and social media for at least a few years. It would probably be accurate to call it a fad. It received some acclaim when the formerly-rather-obese-and-now-sort-of-gaunt magician Penn Jillette subsisted on only potatoes in a crash diet that allowed him to lose 100 pounds. The idea is fairly straightforward: You eat just potatoes for a short stint of three to five days and then lose a bunch of weight. This doesn’t mean French fries and baked potatoes stuffed with bacon and sour cream. At most, you can add a pinch of salt or a sprig of dill for garnish. Just potatoes means just potatoes. Nothing but potatoes. So help you God.
It’s a bland counterbalance to the oversaturated palate that we have a hard time escaping. It also has a sort of absurd aspect that I find deeply appealing. Who, after all, doesn’t like potatoes? They’re starchy, cheap, sort of bland and go with everything. I would be hard-pressed to find anyone in America who hasn’t had some variety of potato in the last week. The potato diet is a sort of reverse gorge. And there is some rather interesting science that makes potatoes look a little like superfood for fasting.
In 1995, food researcher Suzanna Holt at the University of Sydney wanted to find out which foods make you feel the most full—a quality that she called satiety. She defined satiety as the feeling of fullness that you have when you eat a specific number of calories of any one type of food. Doughnuts and Mars Bars sit fairly low on the satiety scale, with satiety factors of approximately 75, meaning they gave you a lot of calories in return for barely taking away hunger pangs, while steak and beans sat closer to the top of the list, with factors of about 180. However, in the study Holt put together, one food stood out head and shoulders above the rest, at 325. The average human needs to eat about 2,000 calories a day to maintain a stable weight. Potatoes are so satiating that you only need to eat 800 to 1,000 calories’ worth of them in order to feel the same level of fullness that you would with an ordinary diet. In other words, there’s a magic tipping point at which you can eat enough potatoes to not feel hungry anymore but still build up a serious caloric deficit. It’s scarcity without the cost. Thus, a hack.
…
Since a lot of people use the hack to lose weight instead of a method to supercharge their senses, it’s useful to know how the digestive system processes a potato-only diet. Potatoes are packed with vitamins, minerals and protein, which will keep your critical systems functioning, but starch makes up the vast majority of their mass. Starch sounds like a lot of empty calories, but it’s not just any starch. It’s what nutritionists call “resistant starch,” because it resists the gut’s efforts to break it down. Starch is more resistant when it hasn’t been cooked, which means that you can find the perfect amount in potatoes that have been heated and then left to cool down or are mostly raw in the middle. Potatoes more or less pass through your system without adding any real caloric load to your body’s metabolism. Since your gut can’t chew its way through potatoes, your body needs to find energy elsewhere in the body and starts to burn white fat instead.
There’s reason to believe that the potato hack might also be good for general gut health. After passing through the stomach, food passes through the small and large intestines and then the colon; each stage has its own bacterial profile. In Western diets, we often have too much bacteria in the small intestine and not enough in the lower areas of the gut. The small intestine can’t break down resistant starch in potatoes, but the large areas can. Gut bacteria ferment and digest the potato starch in the lower regions of the gut and then send it on its way. So flushing just potatoes through the system can help rebalance the gut microbiome. Rebalancing confers all sorts of health benefits and bodily regulation upon the superorganism that is you.
…
I return from the grocery store and pile ten pounds of gold and red potatoes on the kitchen counter. I arrange them in a pyramid inside of a large serving bowl. As with many of the wedges I’ve explored, Laura is coming along for the ride once again. She looks at me with all the excitement that a person who is about to eat nothing but potatoes can muster. Which is to say, not very much excitement at all.
The next morning we weigh ourselves on our bathroom scale. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about how eating only potatoes might alter my waistline. But it has to be said that measuring our weight is in many ways an arbitrary metric, and the number on the scale cannot ever tell the whole picture of what is happening inside our bodies. A person’s weight tends to fluctuate a great deal on any diet; we tend to shed water weight first, and eating soft foods reduces the overall mass of undigested material in the intestines. So whatever readings we get over the next few days are simply an aggregate reading and don’t really indicate whether or not we’re losing fat or if we’re getting any healthier. That said, it’s a metric that most people can relate to and can measure at home. There’s something to be said for simplicity.
The first order of business is to put a pot of water on the stove, throw in seven or eight potatoes, and set it to boil. Laura wrinkles her nose at this idea of “cooking.” Much more so than me, she aches for variety, and when in command of the kitchen, she can make just about any type of cuisine. I marvel at her ability to look at what I think of as uninspiring cupboards and refrigerator shelves and return a half-hour later with a gourmet meal. I am a creature of habit. I once went an entire year eating nothing but egg sandwiches for breakfast. It’s that sort of habituated monotony that makes this an easier diet for me than for her. According to the rules, we are at least allowed coffee and tea, which makes breakfast a little more appealing than what we’ll make the rest of the day.
If, before we started the hack, there was a certain romanticism to eating only potatoes, the first bite through the skin of a red instantly disabuses me of the notion that this is anything like surviving on French fries. Potatoes do have taste, just not much of it. I supplement each bite with a pinch of salt for enough flavor to keep on chewing, but it’s clear that our palates won’t get much nuance in the days to come. In the morning we boil potatoes; for lunch we mash them up in a bowl and add sprigs of dill. In the evening we grate spuds and press them into oil-less hash browns.
It doesn’t take long for the cravings to set in. You’re not supposed to engage in vigorous exercise while on the hack, but I do manage to fit in a few rounds with a kettlebell with no obvious negative effects. Afterward, though, I notice that my mind flits regularly to my pantry, where I’ve got a stash of assorted nuts and snacks. I think that a banana would be pretty nifty.
At one point, some unconscious ghost takes control of my feet and absentmindedly walks me over to the refrigerator to pull out a yogurt. It’s only when I’m peeling back the lid that I realize that my brain brought me here on autopilot. It’s not that I feel hungry; the potatoes more than satisfy the ache, or perhaps pain, in the stomach that it gets when it’s empty. Instead, there’s a sort of full-body craving for nutrients that hijacks my movements. It’s as if my cells registered a complaint with my brain to feed them strawberries or steak. Later in the night, I want chocolate and maybe a glass of whiskey on the rocks.
The automatic movement toward my cupboard probably isn’t the result of a deep connection to an ancestral relationship with nutrients. More likely, the pull stems from subconscious patterns where I have learned to use food to alleviate boredom or satisfy some vague emotional need stored in a barely discernible neural symbol. After all, I learned in the float tank that my brain is constantly taking cues from the environment and chewing on neural programs that never enter conscious thought.
And yet at some point, those urges must hide a deep-seated evolutionary purpose.
There’s a story about pregnancy that just about every mother I’ve met recounts in one way or another. Sometime in the middle months of carrying a child, an expectant mother has an uncontrollable urge to raid the refrigerator for strange things. I’ve heard of women sending their husbands out of the house on an emergency food run for pickles. There are tales of women going into the garden to eat handfuls of dirt. Others gorge themselves on brownie mix, raspberries or Cheez Whiz. One reading of these odd cravings is that the pregnant woman suddenly senses a lack of a certain nutrient, and her unconscious mind triggers a desire for a specific flavor that it associates with a specific taste. I’ve met other people who eat like this almost exclusively. Once when I visited Wim Hof in Poland, he came back from the grocery store with a bag full of pickled clams and mayonnaise. And although the Dutch occasionally dabble in culinary oddities, this was assuredly not among them. Perhaps he was just listening to what his body told him it needed.
I’d only felt sensations like these when I was reaching the limits of my endurance on the last leg of Kilimanjaro. We stopped on a slope of jagged and loose rocks, and I fished out the only food that any of us were carrying from my backpack: a single granola bar. I broke it into three pieces and shared it with the people I was climbing with. And the sugars and carbohydrates in that mouthful spoke to something deep inside my body. I could feel its energy in a way that I could appreciate how many more steps upward each chew lent my reserves. I knew this information the moment it hit my tongue; it was a type of knowledge I never knew I was capable of.
I felt the tangible relationship between energy and taste when I was pushing the limit of my capabilities. Of course I’ve been hungry before, but never so starved for food that my life depended on it. It’s been rare for me to have to wait more than a few hours for a meal if I wanted it.
Most of us take flavor for granted. Like any sensation, our experience of flavor first enters through the affective nervous system as a measure of volume and intensity before we encode an emotional response to its profile somewhere in the paralimbic system. These associations live on inside of us as neural symbols. Throughout my near-40 years on this planet, I’ve developed associations and flavor habits that subtly regulate my mood and anticipate the sorts of energy that I would most like to deploy in a given day. The instant that a food touches the palate, our brains associate the flavor with the incoming nutrients—we experience this as taste—but the meat of our body likely experiences it as data and fuel. We need different nutrients and vitamins to keep our bodies running, and I’m a little surprised that after only a few hours of just potatoes, I’m starting to feel those nutrients again individually. I don’t actually need to touch on a life-or-death physical threshold. Cultivating the interoceptive link between flavor and nutrients is as easy as decreasing my food’s flavor profile.
…
The modern-day messiah of the potato hack is an Air Force retiree in Alaska named Tim Steele, author of the aptly named cult-classic biohacker manual The Potato Hack. In it, he outlines his own history with crash diets and constant weight-management routines that never quite seemed to work. Then one day he stumbled across the April 1849 edition of The Water Cure Journal, which described a “Potato Diet” of prisoners in England and Ireland. Wardens supplied the inmates only the cheapest food available—potatoes—and much to the surprise of the vindictive guards, after two or three months the inmates no longer had their characteristic bouts of indigestion. “Lean men grew fat, and fat men lean.” The article called for severe restriction of all other foods—“no salt, or butter or condiments of any kind”—and promised that in a few days, all digestive troubles would miraculously vanish. (Interestingly, when I looked up that issue, the journal also had articles on cold-water therapy, which just goes to show you that history moves in cycles.) Taking heed of the old-timey advice, Steele followed the prescriptions for a two-week potato-only fast and went from 190 to 179 lbs. After a few shorter potato-only stints, he hit 170. At 5'11'', he was trim and in the best shape he’d been since his early 20s.
Thus a potato proselytiser was born.
Of course, every diet plan out there has testimonials like this. The American weight-loss industry is just as prolific as the one that encourages us to feast: They go by names like the Paleo Diet, the 4-Hour Body, the Alkaline Diet, the Baby Food Diet, the Israeli Army Diet, the South Beach Diet, Fit for Life, SlimFast, Weight Watchers, Sugar Busters, the Morning Banana Diet and so on. To some degree, these fads are successful because in at least some—perhaps many—cases, they work for people. Following a strict protocol, almost regardless of the specifics of said protocol, adds an element of mindfulness to eating, which can absolutely garner results.
…
What separates the Potato Hack from other methods is that it’s not really a diet so much as it is a hack. There’s no reason for anyone to build their life around potatoes. In fact, if you do, it will probably result in an eating disorder. But as a short-term intervention, the potato hack doesn’t require as total a lifestyle change as, say, veganism, where fully adopting the ethos seems to infect every part of your life and politics. Every meal you go out to doesn’t have just to revolve around an odd number of restrictions. Indeed, you’re unlikely to go out at all while you’re actually on the hack. Its rules are simple: If all you’re eating is potatoes, you’re doing it right. The hack is a limited venture, not something that’s supposed to continue for months on end. It’s a three-to-five-day reset. You could call it an intervention in ordinary patterns—something to shake up established routines but not replace them altogether. It’s a wedge. Though I shudder to use the word for its tech-bubble connotations, it’s disruptive. In terms of what I learned in Feinstein’s lab, it’s something you can use to interrupt self-reinforcing feedback loops to return to your baseline.
This is the real lesson that I’ve begun to take away. Yes, we denizens of the modern world have a pretty dysfunctional relationship with food, but that doesn’t mean that the only way to correct course requires an entire change of lifestyle. Too many diet programs offer results by completely remaking a person from the bottom up by counting calories, or cutting out sugar-fats-carbs-shellfish or whatever else. Any way they couch it, the key traits for success are discipline and grit. But maybe it’s just as important to find ways to break up established patterns as it is to remake all of your habits.
Most of the interventions in this book that have helped me understand the Wedge don’t take a lot of time. They’re short and simple and offer a brief glimpse into a different way to organize the pattern of interactions and reactions that proceed on autopilot. After the intervention, the body has an opportunity to reset to a homeostatic baseline.
…
After a day of just potatoes, I am more sensitive to what my body is telling me it wants. It is similar to what it would be like to sit in a soundless room and be able to hear my own heartbeat. The following morning, I weigh myself in and find that I am down two and a half pounds. That morning, we bake potatoes in the oven and garnish them with truffle salt and smoked paprika. The second day is entirely easier. The cravings change from a search for quick, fast and fatty calories to a mind focused on fruits and vegetables.
In the afternoon, I call Tim Steele to see how his senses changed with the hack. His country accent lights up on the other end of the line. “Any diet will let you lose weight; you can eat just candy bars, and if you keep the calories low enough, the pounds will melt. But the problem is that there’s no nutrition in that. In eating potatoes, you chew and stimulate the vagus nerve. You get fiber and process chemicals that talk to your brain. It has almost everything you need to be a healthy, happy human. You don’t need other food experiences, even if you might crave them. Of course, if you fight it—if you cheat and look for exceptions—your mind always wanders to other options. Your mind fights against you and you’re miserable. In America, we’re surrounded by almost infinite choice and have tasty treats available to us all the time,” Steele says with the confidence of a man who has spent a lot of time thinking about food. Indeed, until you’ve gone without it, it’s hard to truly understand how taste and flavor color every aspect of the environment. It’s part of the Wedge that’s so omnipresent that we don’t even recognize how it frames everything around us.
Chronic oversupply of food in the Western world doesn’t only mean constant calories, but also near-limitless flavors. Our brains code every nutrient that we’ve ever had as a flavor and bonds that sensation to an emotion in a neural symbol. Now that emotion is only as far away as a cupboard or grocery store.
For me, the potato hack is surprisingly easy. After a day of cravings, I settle into a routine. I don’t leave the house much (except for a run to the grocery store to get more potatoes) and don’t actually think about food all that much. Laura’s experience is something of a different story. She admits that she fought the hack. And on the third day, she falls into some sort of rut. At dinnertime on the last day of eating only potatoes, she just sits on the couch and can’t stomach the idea of eating another one. “I’d rather just not have dinner and wait for tomorrow,” she says. For better or worse, she’s turning a hack into a fast. I scarf down some bland hash browns and make sure she has at least a few bites.
“The thing is,” she says with a philosophical raise of her eyebrow, “potatoes quell the hunger, but they don’t staunch my appetite.” Our different perceptions might come down to different body compositions. She’s usually 50 pounds lighter, with a lot less mass to lose. She also has less tolerance for boredom than I do, a greater drive to exercise, and less experience meditating.
On the last morning, we weigh ourselves a final time and see that we’ve both lost five pounds in just three days. That’s more weight than what you would expect to be possible in that time frame. Humans use about 2,000 calories a day, roughly equivalent to the amount of energy stored in a single pound of fat. We somehow lost more than you would expect from not eating at all. I suspect that at least some of the loss has to do with expelling some of the matter that we typically store in our intestines.
That said, it is the fastest I’ve ever lost weight outside of climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro without a shirt—where the cold and heavy exertion cannibalized my waistline.
We break our hack with a trip to a nearby diner. Laura couldn’t gin up any more excitement if she tried. We order up healthy portions of eggs, pancakes, bacon and anything but a potato. Starved tastebuds wake up to the sensation of ambrosia. No pad of butter ever felt so full before; no piece of pork was ever this divine. As to be expected with an intervention like this, after resuming my ordinary diet, my weight comes right back to the earlier baseline in about a month.
But that aside, there’s an insight that comes with restriction that doesn’t fade back quite as quickly as the springs that power the scale. I’m a little more attentive to the sensory changes that came along with a bland diet. I try to keep observing how food makes me feel—not only by listening to a grumbling stomach, but through the subtle cravings that permeate every moment of our oversaturated lifestyle. I’m a little more aware of how my body automatically makes associations between sweetness and pleasure, and of my Pavlovian response to the presence of food in my house. It’s harder than when I’m not eating only potatoes, but at least I’m aware of how those urges somehow influence my conscious cravings.
Every diet since the beginning of time hinges on our individual ability to choose what foods we put into our bodies. Unless we’re consciously on a diet with a goal of losing or gaining weight, most of us let our associations between taste and emotions dictate our menu. How often have you asked yourself what you “feel like eating”? That act of looking inward is a wedge that you work unconsciously into your brain to form and reinforce neural symbols. For me, the potato hack is a lens to examine how I let those passive associations control my behavior, and an opportunity to make a change.
There’s no question that a potato-hack lifestyle would be a bad idea over time, but it’s telling that many spiritual and meditative traditions recommend either fasting or various bland diets before partaking in a new practice. A restricted diet offers a reset to a physical baseline and makes a person more sensitive to the sensations that their body detects. And this goes for any sensation. When you increase the intensity of one signal, others get drowned out. Lower intensities in one area makes the others seem louder. An important aspect of the neural symbols that make up our cognition is that they not only register emotion and sensation together, but also the volume of those signals. An intense emotion or sensation is more likely to get picked up by the limbic librarian than one that doesn’t stand out. Insofar as the Wedge requires a person to be attentive to their sensations and feelings, learning to play with the volume levels is another tool we can use to subtly alter the way we experience the world. As counterintuitive as it may seem, sometimes diminishing our senses is the key to connecting outward.
And yet that volume can also go the other way. What happens when instead of reducing stimulation, we try to ramp it up almost to its maximum extent? I’ve gotten a taste of that with kettlebells, where I tried to stoke up enough fear that I could wire a neural symbol. But the fear of an injured foot still sits on the lower end of the threshold. Ice water will trigger a strong primal survival program. But what happens if we turn up the heat instead? What happens when the volume goes so high that we brush against the upper limits of what we’re able to tolerate?