Diet Trials of the first half of 2025

Potato diet success; Honey riff failure

Image courtesy Gemini 2.5 Flash. Also, I don’t know what’s in the bowl next to the potatoes.

TL;DR I tried five different diets in the first part of 2025. The Potato Diet seemed to be the most successful in terms of my goal to shed some stubborn body fat. It worked surprisingly well over a very short period of time.

This post is a review of several “extreme” diets I've experimented with in the first half of 2025. I also spent the last 9 months of 2024 experimenting with various diets; see here for a writeup of those.

Diets I tried

My main goal was to see if I could handle the Honey Diet. This diet, and its cousin the Sugar Diet, have made the rounds on Substack, X, and Reddit over the past 8 months or so. These diets are rooted in the principles of the late scientist Ray Peat, whose body of academic research emphasizes thyroid dysregulation as a key driver of modern health maladies. As I understand it, Peat advocates for a diet low in polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), high in non-starchy carbohydrates, and with adequate calcium and vitamin D intake. People who follow his advice call themselves “Peaters.”

I wanted to compare my “normal diet” with several other “extreme” diets to see how I felt on each. In all, I ran the following experiments (fairly rigorously, but not as rigorously as

Experimental Fat Loss

does):

• “Omega-3 maxxing” (normal diet plus adding several tablespoons of flaxseeds and chia seeds to crank up the alpha-linolenic acid)

• “Honey Diet Riff”

• Potato Diet (as implemented by

  Metabolic Repair
  )

• Carnivore Diet

• Normal Diet

Here’s a timeline of the different trials. Intervals with no color are “normal diet.”

Normal Diet

What is my normal diet? This is one I've been using for over a year now, ever since I decided to ditch Omega-6 PUFAs as much as possible. On this diet, I eat two meals (lunch and dinner) within a 6-7 hour window every day.

Lunch consists of:

• 2 cups of plain kefir

• 6 oz of fruit (usually blueberries or blackberries, but sometimes a banana or some tangerines)

• 1/4 cup of macadamia nuts

• ~40g of raw milk smoked cheddar cheese cubes

• 1 cup of diced cucumbers and sauerkraut

• 2 Chomps beef jerky sticks

Dinner varies from day to day but is made from raw ingredients as much as possible. Examples include:

• beef chili with homemade beef tallow tortilla chips

• hamburger lettuce wraps and potatoes oven-roasted in beef tallow

• wild-caught salmon sauteed in butter and served with broccoli oven-roasted in beef tallow

• ground beef tacos in corn tortillas that have been sauteed in beef tallow

• shrimp breaded in panko and shredded coconut and fried in beef tallow

• ground lamb seasoned with Greek spices and served over Israeli couscous

• ground beef and sauteed carrots/zucchini on white rice topped with Sriracha, soy sauce, and sesame oil (this is meant to mimic Bibimbap)

• meatballs covered in Rao’s marinara sauce

• etc.

For dessert, I usually have a couple of squares of 90% dark chocolate or a couple of Medjool dates each stuffed with 1 tsp of almond butter.

Other Diets

Omega-3 Maxxing (Jan 1 - Mar 15)

This diet was just my normal diet except adding lots of Omega-3’s. I would mix in 2 Tbsp of ground flaxseeds into my kefir for lunch. I would also take a 670mg fish oil supplement. For dessert, I would eat a homemade chia seed pudding consisting of a mixture of chia seeds, heavy whipping cream, whole milk, cocoa powder, cinnamon, vanilla, and salt.

Honey Diet Riff (Mar 23 - Apr 23)

I didn't have great success on the Honey Diet as written (see my post from last year). Mainly, I found it made me gassy and nauseous. The only way I could get the “correct” amount of honey was to mix it into fruit smoothies. But the diet just didn't make me feel good, so I scrapped it after 7 days. I also didn't like that I had to eat early in the morning, since I have only eaten breakfast a handful of times over the past 7 years.

I wanted to see if the Honey Diet would still work for me under slightly different circumstances. The main riff was twofold: 1) eat it within my 6-hour eating window; and 2) add in some whole milk yogurt during the phase of the day when I was supposed to be eating only fruit. I realize this goes against the Honey Diet philosophy of “tricking the Randle Cycle” but it was the only way for me to not feel gassy and bloated.

My lunch ended up being a bunch of fruit mixed in with 2 cups of plain whole milk yogurt, topped with a generous helping of honey and supplemented with some fruit leather and the cucumber/sauerkraut “salad” (or a Ray Peat inspired carrot salad).

Potato Diet (May 8 - May 12)

I did the potato diet as

Metabolic Repair

suggests. This involved eating liberal amounts of peeled, cooked potatoes. I ate 3 poached eggs each day and also a handful of berries and 2 squares of dark chocolate. I added nothing but salt (NaCl) to the potatoes. I baked the potatoes in the oven and either peeled them before baking or just scooped out the insides after baking.

This diet turned out to be pretty easy and enjoyable. On a typical day, I would eat 2.5kg of potatoes. I've always liked potatoes, being somewhat connected to Idaho (my Dad grew up there most of his life and we would visit my Grandmother every Thanksgiving when I was a kid). Fortunately, my body seems to respond well to them.

Carnivore Diet (May 29 - May 31)

I’ve been wanting to try the carnivore diet for some time, and there was an opportune moment in my schedule. For this diet, I followed the protocol of user tarheals31 on X. Lunch each day was 1 lb ground beef patties (topped w/56g raw milk smoked cheddar), 1 large banana, and 2 cups plain kefir. Dinner was about 1 lb of a combo of ribeye or filet mignon.

Experimental Fat Loss

called this “Decadent Carnivore.”

Results

Subjective Eating Experience

How did each of the diets make me feel?

Omega-3 maxxing

I don’t have great journaling records for this one, but mostly it felt fine.

Honey Riff

I had basically the same digestive symptoms as the honey diet, but toned down. That makes sense, given that I was trying to add more fat and protein into the “honey window” to dilute the most severe discomfort.

Potato

Potato was interesting because, between lunch and dinner, I would feel the same way I do every time I get to the end of a 24-hour dry fast (which I do monthly)—sudden onset of fatigue and lightheadedness. I also felt a bit bloated after meals, perhaps because I was trying to cram too many potatoes into my 6-hour eating window.

I also had some intense parenting situations while on Potato (since I ran the experiment while single parenting over a long weekend) and found myself emotionally unsteady. It’s hard to tell if that was the potatoes or if it was the single parenting.

Carnivore

Carnivore was also interesting. After each meal I would feel very tired and like I was in a “food coma,” especially after dinner. But then I would feel amazingly clear-headed in the morning, 12 hours after my previous meal. I’d like to maybe run a longer version of this one, since 3 days isn’t enough time. Mostly I just wanted to see if I was allergic to protein like some people say.

Weight

Did I gain or lose weight on any of the diets? Potato is the clear winner here, as you can see in the figure below. Not only did I lose 2 lbs during the diet, I lost another 2 lbs during the following three weeks to get back down to my goal weight.

EDIT: An interesting thing with the potato diet is that my temperature reached 98.6°F on day 4 after ending the diet. Usually my temperature is always between 97.1°F and 97.9°F. This makes me think something changed metabolically due to the potatoes.

Vacations in yellow

For a longer-run perspective on the trials I did in 2024 and 2025 and how they effected my weight, see this next graphic. The story here is that I messed up myself while on vacation last August (I know I ate a non-trivial amount of PUFAs due to the number of restaurants I had to eat at, as well as what was on the menu for other non-restaurant meals). Unfortunately, I did my liver pills experiment overlapping with this vacation, so maybe it’s time for me to try those in isolation.

I never got back down to my July 2024 weight even after that vacation. And it’s pretty clear that “Ex-150 + Fruit” is not a good diet for me (or possibly anyone). It was during this time that I also discovered Ice Cream for Bears which was deliciously dangerous.

But this chart also clearly shows the effect of the potato diet, even doing it for just 4½ days.

Looking at body fat percentage (as measured by my Renpho scale, not a DEXA scan), I might be carrying a tad bit more fat now than a year ago at the same weight, but it’s probably the same.

What’s next?

I will probably do my Normal Diet moving forward, with strategic use of the potato diet as a way to rein in any poor trends. In the past (e.g. Jan 2024) I would use long water fasts (3+ days) for that purpose, but the last time I did this I lost quite a bit of lean body mass. The potato diet may be a way to mimic those effects without losing the LBM.

As mentioned above, I may also try a longer run at carnivore.

Code and Data

If you’re interested in looking through the R code and data that produced the above graphs, it’s available here [code] and here [data; .rda format].