In today’s Diet, we’re going to learn a bit more about the illusionist called Penn Jillette. As he’s famous for his magic tricks and his illusion shows, we’re going to skip this part for a bit and look into his story. More precisely into the day, he chose to start the One Food Diet, and in this case, it was potatoes. Let’s talk about the Penn Jillette Diet.

Who is Penn Jillette?

Penn Jillette is mostly known for his magic tricks; he’s famous for his ability to make everything disappear. And in today’s diet, we’re going to see how he made 100 pounds disappear. He used to weight around 322 pounds and learned that he had a problem in the heart that would block about 90% of his heart. And, being the father of two, he decided to change his lifestyle and alimentation to make sure that he would be able to see his children grow up. And that’s where, under medical supervision, he started the Penn Jillette Diet, or also known as the Potato Diet. We will see that thanks to this diet, Penn Jillette lost more than 100 pounds eating only two things during the three months he did the diet, and he skipped the exercise because it wasn’t useful for him to work out.

Penn Jillette did one of the hardest diets to lose weight because it was vital for him, but we’re going to see that if you want to do it, you can, and it may help you lose a lot of weight in a concise amount of time. You can take a look at the what is BBG diet.

What is the Penn Jillette diet?

So let’s talk about the fundamental of this diet. It was named after him because of his notoriety and his success about it, but the real diet is called the One Food Diet or more specifically in this case, the potato diet. When you follow the potato diet, you will not have to think about the Forskolin diet plan. Forget about diet pills and pharmaceutical weight loss pills. The Penn system relies on one ingredient that is: potatoes!

What is the exact goal of the one food diet? To lose weight, that’s obvious, but how does it work exactly? Because we often hear that to lose weight, we have to eat healthy food, and non-fat or low carbohydrates food, but apparently, there would be a lot of diets that don’t work like this, and as it may seem odd, these diets seem to work perfectly fine.

The One Food Diet, or Mono Diet, is a diet that reduces the calories consumed and help the dieters feeling in control. Because if people sometimes get too much weight, it’s because they feel gluttonous and want to eat junk food in high amount. And doing this diet can help these people. To come back with Jillette, while he did the diet that consisted of eating only potatoes every day, he had at the end of the day eaten around 600-700 calories with about five daily potatoes. And it’s obvious that having only 600 to 700 calories taken in by your body, on a daily basis, will make you lose weight. If not, you can always take a look at the 30 day diet menus.

The risk with the potatoes is that, even if it’s very good for health because they contain vitamins, minerals, and fiber, they have a very poor input in proteins. And to take the Penn Jillette example, he lacked about 75% of his daily need in proteins, which is very unhealthy. A low protein diet can be wrong for the body’s metabolism. And doing this for two weeks can be very dangerous. If you are an individual who values his muscles and curves, you have to know that the potato diet is not the right one for you. You can actually take a look at the high protein diet for weight loss.

It has been proven with studies that when some people eat the very same food items and try to keep the same meals without much variety, it helps reduce the desire for sugar and saturated fats that can be found in tasty high-calorie foods. You can take a look at the 21 day fix diet plan to learn some of the basics of this system and how amazing its results can be.

Potato diet: is it healthy?

Now even if it has been proven that this diet can help you lose a lot with weight loss, it has been questioned multiple times for the level of effect it has on your body and health. It’s not only the potato diet in itself; but, it is the overall group of diets that involve eating only one food that is dangerous.

The illusionist Penn Jillette lost a lot of weight while doing this diet, but it doesn’t mean that it is the perfect weight loss system for anyone wishing to lose weight. This man did eat only potatoes for the first two weeks, but after that, he ate only vegetables for the next three months to follow a nutritarian diet. Sometimes, you need to look closer to a specific diet to understand how effective it is.

Even if it’s theoretically possible to eat only one single food, and even if it helps reduce salt and sugar craving, there is one important issue that comes here. There is practically no way that you can get enough nutrients and vitamins from eating the same thing, here potatoes, all day long. And moreover, a doctor said that the most important thing to eat if you ever wanted to lose weight, was protein, which in that case, is not a part of the nutrients. That’s why eating potatoes are good, but only potatoes might be dangerous. It’s said that one potato has about 4 grams of protein, so as Penn Jillette ate about five a day, he had only 20 grams of protein. And it was shown that for a man of his size, eating a low amount of protein like this was not enough at all. Doctors said that Penn Jillette needed about 100 more grams, so 120 grams of protein per day to start his diet in a good way. That would have meant that he should have eaten about 30 potatoes every day. And this is not good either because it would have been around 5000 calories. So as you can see, there’s a lot of problems with eating only one food a day.

A mono diet can also be called a crash diet because, in the Penn Jillette case, his five potatoes were about 815 calories, and no dietitian with a sane mind would ever recommend eating that little. But again, the illusionist’s case was particular as it was to make sure his life would be safe and he would lose enough weight to live longer.

Potato diet recipes

The potato salad with hummus-yogurt dressing: this is one very tasty meal that you can prepare easily! Such a salad is most probably originating from the Mediterranean way of life as people living in these countries add a lot of Greek yogurt to their food as well as hummus. Lebanon is a country from which Hummus started: this tasty chickpeas dip that everyone has been talking about. This dip, actually, is very high in proteins and low in fat. When you want to prepare this salad, you will need the following ingredients.

Ingredients : 2 pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes, scrubbed, one half cup of Easy Hummus with Tahini or other hummus, one quarter cup of nonfat plain yogurt, one cup finely diced celery, one quarter cup of finely diced cornichons, one quarter cup of chopped flat-leaf parsley, three tablespoons finely diced of sweet onion, the less salt and pepper as possible.

In a large pan, cover the potatoes with some water and bring to a boil. Simmer over moderate heat until the potatoes are tender when they are pierced with a knife, it takes about 20 minutes. Drain and let it cool down. Peel the potatoes and cut into pieces or dices.

In a large bowl, mix the hummus and the yogurt, celery, cornichons, parsley and the onion. Fold in the potatoes, then season with salt and pepper and serve.

Pan-Roasted Fingerling Potatoes with Pancetta

ingredients: two pounds of fingerling potatoes, scrubbed and cut into a half inch rounds, one-quarter cup of extra-virgin olive oil, two pounds of thickly sliced pancetta, cut into ⅓ inch dices, salt, and pepper, one onion, thinly sliced, one-quarter cup of finely chopped dill.

Bring a large frying pan of water to a boil. When it’s boiling, add the potatoes and cook them until just tender, so about 8 minutes. Drain and pat dry, then, in a large cast-iron pan, heat the olive oil. Add the pancetta and cook it over medium heat until it becomes lightly browned, it will take about 3 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the pancetta into a bowl. Add the potatoes to the pan, season with salt and pepper and cook it, stirring occasionally, until it is lightly browned about 10 minutes. Now add the onion and cook until it gets softened up and until the potatoes are becoming golden brown, so about 10 minutes longer. Stir in the pancetta and cook for two more minutes. Put the potatoes into a bowl. Toss a bit with the dill right before serving.

Penn Jillette diet Book: where to buy it? How much it costs?

The Penn Jillette book is called “Presto!” and it can be found on Amazon for about 12.50$. It is true that there are a lot of diet books out there. Some preach for vegan diets while others have their own food and workout system to be followed for a specific period of time. One has to be very careful when picking a diet book. Some are developed and written by experts in science and medicine; while others are developed by regular people who followed a certain system and ended up losing weight. You need to pick something with a specific scientific reasoning to them. Sometimes, these un-backed up diets do work out; however, nobody can explain how they work and why they are giving excellent results. All in all, most fad diets work at the beginning: you will end up losing weight and sometimes a lot of weight. But, you might put yourself at risk of bouncing back and regaining that extra weight right back.

A true wellness and healthy diet is one that is based on a well-balanced system that provides the body with the necessary nutrients that will ensure a proper functioning of the entire system and organs. So, pick your weight loss journey the right way from the beginning and do not fall under the charm of exaggerated claims that will sell you an imaginary end goal.