The difference is that people report that the potato diet is /easy/. No cravings, no endless hunger & having to force yourself to calorie count and stop eating when you hit your target. Eat as much as you like, when you like.

That’s radically different from other diets.

I guess it's easy on the hunger/cravings side of things but it eliminates your ability to enjoy food and enjoy the social aspect of dining. I achieved similar by swapping out white bread for whole wheat and mostly eliminating dessert from my diet. I also have no hunger/cravings/calorie counting but I still enjoy all my meals. I don't mean to say that any one diet is the answer, just that if your goals are modest you have many options that will work, and most will be more pleasant than the potato diet.

Eliminating deserts doesn't make cravings go away for me. I feel hungry (or a weird similar feeling) until I eat something sweet, no matter how much I eat of a main course.

But I tried the potato diet and my cravings were gone. For two weeks it was trivial to keep, but then social aspects intervened and I gave it up.

That sounds really challenging. I guess people vary a lot in their experiences of hunger, which is probably why different diets work/don't work for different people

The problem is SMTM seems obsessed with finding some explanation for why the diet works other than it being an easy method to reduce calories and generally appears convinced theres a non-CICO explanation for obesity and weight loss/gain that these potato diet experiments will be able to discover.

[delayed]

The attrition rate was very high. The claim that it's easy was based on a few anecdotes, which aren't representative of the trial participants.