The Rich Roll Podcast - Andrew “Spud Fit” Taylor: How He Lost 114 Pounds Eating Nothing But Potatoes For An Entire Year

Episode Date: November 21, 2016

One of the great privileges of hosting this podcast is the occasional opportunity it presents to shift focus from conversations with globally prominent thought leaders to shine a bright spotlight on the struggles and triumphs of the everyman. Folks living average, relatable lives. Anonymous individuals dealing with issues all too many of us confront and combat — obesity, depression, disease, addiction and/or a sense of general dissatisfaction with their current life status. Authentic souls who reach the limit of their pain threshold and cross that tipping point to finally proclaim, enough is enough. On a personal note, nothing gives me more satisfaction than celebrating those who courageously challenge their life paradigm, step outside the cozy comfort zone, and attempt the extraordinary — all in the interest of gaining control of their well being and seizing the reigns of their life path. Folks like Josh LaJaunie, who lost over 200 pounds to conquer ultramarathons and even grace the cover of this month's Runners World magazine. Or Brett & David Wilcox – the father-son duo who ran across the USA to raise GMO awareness. Luke Tyburski fits the bill — a guy who overcame depression to conquer The Ultimate Triathlon. And I'd add Adam Sud to that list — a young guy who kicked adderal, reversed his diabetes and found a life. Sharing these experiences is what makes this podcast different from the others — meaningful and special in a very unique way. So if you enjoy the uplifting everyman story, then you are in for a treat today. About a year ago, Andrew Taylor stepped onto the scale — 334 pounds. The Aussie didn't like what he saw. He didn't like how he felt. Clinically depressed, medicated and hopelessly addicted to unhealthy foods, his elevator was going down — fast. Fed up and sick & tired of being sick & tired, he drew a line in the sand and decided to step over it. It was time to finally wake up and seize the reigns of his physical, mental and emotional health and well being. To once and for all reclaim the life he felt quickly slipping away. Blessed with self-awareness, he saw his path to freedom would lay not in balance but rather in what most would consider drastic and extreme measures. Andrew decided that he would eat nothing but potatoes for an entire year. Nothing. But. Potatoes. For an entire year. On January 2, 2016, all 334 depressed pounds of Andrew popped open his phone, clicked record, and announced his quest on YouTube — to a subscriber base of exactly zero. The single video soon morphed into a daily vlog, a raw, personal and authentic look into the highs, lows, how to's and whatnots of a potato-fueled journey Andrew dubbed Spud Fit. He presumed nobody would care. This was for him. Surprisingly, the world took notice. It wasn't long before the global media picked up Andrew's personal interest story and before he could even blink, his wild adventure was foisted into the white hot spotlight. Enjoy! Rich

Desperate times call for desperate measures, you know. Don't be afraid to step way outside the box and do something totally different and really just attack the problem. Don't be passive with it, just get after it and go all out. Put all your chips on the table and just really do something big. Also, I think it's really important to just embrace simplicity. Simplicity is such a powerful thing. That's Andrew Taylor, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast.

Hey everybody, welcome or welcome back. I'm Rich Roll.. Hey, everybody. Welcome or welcome back. I'm Rich Roll. This is my podcast. Thanks for tuning in, you guys. This is the program where I get intimate and go long form with some of the most intriguing thought leaders and positive paradigm-breaking changemakers all across the globe, all in an effort really to help all of us, the collective, unlock and unleash our best,

most authentic selves. If you would like to support the show, there are many, many ways. You can share it with your friends. You can use the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com. You can contribute on Patreon, but perhaps the single most powerful way that you can help is just to subscribe to the show. It's totally free. So if you haven't done that already, please, please click that button on iTunes or on whatever app you use to consume your podcast content. And thank you so much. So one of the things that I really love about what I do, and something that I think makes my show distinct a little bit different from a lot of the other podcasts out there, is that I occasionally take the opportunity to depart from what I usually do, these conversations with thought leaders,

and instead shift focus and shine a light on average people, everyday folks, people who are living anonymous lives, who reach that point where they're just fed up with how they're living and decide to step outside their comfort zone, try something new, sometimes something extraordinary, all in the interest of seizing the reins of their health and their well-being and their life path. And over the years, these have been some of my favorite,

my most meaningful, and most resonant conversations. People like Josh Lajani, I think Luke Tyburski falls into that category. There was the father and the son that ran across country together. Maybe even David Clark fits the bill there. So if you've enjoyed those episodes, then I've got a real treat for you guys today. One year ago, Andrew Taylor was an Aussie living in Melbourne who tipped the scales at 334 pounds. He was clinically depressed, who tipped the scales at 334 pounds. He was clinically depressed, medicated, and a self-admitted food addict.

He basically decided that he was sick and tired of being sick and tired. He was fed up. The elevator was going down. And he reached that point where he was ready to do something about it, to take his mental and physical and emotional health and wellbeing back, to reclaim the life that he felt was

slipping away. He had enough self-awareness at the time to understand that for him, this path to freedom was going to require some pretty drastic and specific action. So he decided to attempt something I think we'll all agree is pretty extreme, and that is this. Get ready for it. He decided that he was going to eat nothing but potatoes for an entire year. Nothing but potatoes. Let that sink in for a minute. So back on January 2nd of this year, he proclaimed this quest on YouTube. He did it on a channel that he just started with

zero subscribers and without any expectation that anybody other than himself and his wife would care. But instead, the world ended up taking notice. And as the weeks and the months clicked by, he was sharing his journey, the high highs, the low lows, the hardships, the how-tos, the whatnots in a daily vlog, a new video every single day. And the media ended up picking up on this story. And suddenly, and kind of surprisingly, he found himself in this sort of global spotlight. Dubbing himself Spudfit, over the last year, Andrew has been profiled in everything from the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph to BuzzFeed. He even made appearances on the Today Show and even television's The Doctors, The Doctors Show. And as of today, he's nearing the end of his one-year experiment.

Andrew has overcome his depression. He's off his meds. And he has lost 114 pounds. So today, I'm going to share his wild, crazy story with you guys. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good

in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how overwhelming

and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former

patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, so this is a conversation about a lot of things. It's about the pitfalls of moderation. It's about the benefits of taking a risk and attempting something extreme. Because in Andrew's words, if you want extreme results, you have to do extreme things.

It's a talk about food addiction, the adaptability of the human body, and our cultural attachment to balance, what balance really means. It's also a talk about simplicity, a minimalist approach to diet and lifestyle. And it's about meditation, mindfulness, and the power of the mind to heal. But ultimately, I think this conversation is about thinking and acting outside the box. It's about accessing untapped reservoirs of human potential to radically and positively impact the trajectory of one's life. And it's about the power that we all have, but all too often deny or overlook, to better control our health and our happiness.

Let's do it, man. So great to have you here, Andrew. Thanks for coming up to the house to do the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's an honor. It's a pleasure to meet you. I've been following your journey for a little while now, man. It's quite a ride you've been on. Yeah, unbelievable.

If you told me that I'd be doing what I'm doing this time last year, I would have thought you were certifiably insane. Well, we live in a crazy time because it wasn't that long ago that for somebody like you to be able to get your story out to the world and share it would have been a Herculean task. And now you can put up a YouTube video and doing it consistently and sharing your journey kind of transparently and very authentically has obviously struck a nerve. I mean, it's insane. I went back and I haven't seen all your videos. You put up way too many. But there's a lot there insane. I went back and, you know, I haven't seen all your videos. You put up way too many. But there's a lot there.

And I went back and watched the very first one. And you got like over 100,000 views on that. Yeah, yeah. And as a result of kind of sharing, you know, very consistently, you've picked up like a lot of momentum. And there's a lot of people following you. And you're getting all kinds of press and attention. It's just an insane ride you're on.

Yeah, it's been just totally just mind-blowing to me it's uh when i started it all i thought it was a pretty boring thing to do and i just for a while there i couldn't understand why anyone would be interested in a fat guy eating potatoes you know so but yeah like the more i thought about it the more i realized that it's um I'm just sort of being authentic and I'm expressing um uh my problems that I think a lot of people relate to and a lot of there's obviously there's a lot of overweight people in the world and um and a lot of them feel similarly about food to have similar relationships to food to what I did and don't anymore. So, yeah, I think people relate to it. And I think people appreciate my openness and honesty in my battle. So, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that first video, you kind of, you know, first of all, you look like a totally different person. But also, you know, there's kind of a heaviness emotionally to you that you can see like you're kind of trudging down the sidewalk. And, you know, I don kind of a heaviness emotionally to you that you can see, like you're kind of trudging down the sidewalk. And, you know, I don't know if I would call it depression, but, you know, you look like a little bit lost and unsure and kind of at the end of your rope. And I would imagine on some level, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this, that that, you know, that that's really what inspired you to take such a dramatic leap into this adventure that you're on. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was actually, beginning of last year,

I was diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety. And that video that I made on day one, I didn't actually watch it. I just uploaded it without watching it. And I didn't watch it through again until maybe July when I thought, oh, I wonder, I'll go back and check that video out and I actually just cried watching it it was um just uh it's heartbreaking to me to think of how I was back then as a as a difference to how I am now it's um yeah it's a totally I'm a different person in uh in just about every way and it's been been pretty good and yeah it was um yeah desperate times

call for desperate measures you know it's not like I'm not here to say that everyone should eat only potatoes for a year but it's um yeah I was I was in a desperate situation and uh and my outlook on life was really bleak and uh I just yeah it's a there's a lot to talk about with how i came to doing this but yeah it was uh i felt like i needed to do something extreme to to really um break the back of what was going on yeah well i can certainly relate to that and i'm the last person in the world who's going to give you a hard time for doing something extreme you know i mean i i understand that completely like when you're in a place and you feel like there's no exit out and there's no way of shifting your lifestyle it's almost i mean the way that i see it is that's the best way to shift it is to do something so crazy yeah and create these rules these like hard and fast rules that remove all the decision fatigue and all the kind

of arguments that go on in your head and make it as simple as possible. And, and even like, you know, we could take out everything about nutrition and science, but just creating something that simple that you can just say, this is my rule book. And there's only one rule basically, you know, really narrows your focus and makes it it's, it makes it seem more doable and on a very symbolic level it's a it's very much of a tabula rasa like you're wiping the slate clean like i'm going to start

totally fresh and do something so insane that's the only way i can kind of shake myself up enough to be able to gain some perspective and and and uh you know move in a new trajectory yeah definitely the way i think about it is um for someone like me who is a food addict, I think about that when you're thinking about having junk food, let's say chocolate cake or whatever, you've got a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other shoulder and there's this internal debate going on and the devil on one shoulder just wants you to have the cake and I look at him as like he's a junkie,ie an addict and he doesn't care about your health or your well-being or anything he just wants a hit and he just and he'll he'll tell you he'll you know talk in your ear about all the different

absurd reasons why it's a good idea to have have that piece of chocolate cake and eventually you might resist for a few days but then well this is my story anyway and then eventually you'll give in and and it's um he's like a you know that devil on your shoulders like a like a slime bag lawyer trying to find loopholes in the rules that you've got you know and and uh eventually he'll say something that doesn't make sense but you'll go yeah like i'll i'll just have the chocolate cake it'll be okay i'll i'll get back on i'll get back on the diet tomorrow and it never happens and yeah so like you said the rules the simplicity of just saying potatoes is all i eat there's no loopholes there for that slimy

grease bag lawyer to try to put a wedge in you know it's just it's so simple and easy and that it was an easy it was a good way to quiet that internal debate that was going on. So yeah, I feel like the internet avails us so much information that's at our fingertips and we can find out all of this, all of these things that can help improve our lives, but it also can be very confusing, right? So that's slime, slime ball lawyer on your shoulder who's looking for an argument as a way out. If you go

online you can probably find that argument you'll find some article or some study that will support whatever unhealthy habit it is that you want to rationalize and then you're off to the races right yeah yeah there's there's so much mixed information out there and it's really hard to um if you're for a lay person anyway to really understand what's going on with nutrition and science and all of this and um yeah it's there's just you can find any any article to support any point of view and uh yeah for me i i did do quite a bit of research before i started this and i was confident that potatoes were uh gonna gonna keep me healthy but the point of it was um was that i just wanted to just stop that internal debate and just just focus on other things in life for a while because food was an

obsession and it was you know you spend so much time even for you i don't i guess food's not such a problem for you like it was for me but you you do even when it's not a problem i think you spend a lot of time thinking about food planning what what you're going to eat, shopping for it, cooking it, cleaning up after it, all of that. And then for me, you've got the obsession on top of that. And just to remove it all and go, when I go to the shop, I just buy potatoes and leave. There's nothing else to do. And, you know, it's just so simple in so many ways. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I definitely consider myself a food addict i think there's a spectrum of that but perhaps my you know food addiction isn't or was not as pronounced as

it was for you um but i certainly uh believe that um you know i have problems around food yeah historically had problems around food and of course you did and it was i've read your book but i mean you know my my drug of choice was alcohol you know that sort of masked everything else but at my core i'm an addict and i'm an alcoholic and i'll use whatever's around me to get out of whatever i'm feeling at the moment right and it wasn't until i'd been sober for some time that i started to realize the extent to which i was using food to modulate and regulate my emotional state like that never occurred to me ever. And I would hear people, you know, in the rooms of sobriety talk about that. And I'm like,

I don't know what you mean. You know, I didn't understand it. Uh, even though I had some sober time under my belt and I'm going to, you know, eating a fast food every single day. And I still couldn't do that math. And it, you know, it took a while for me to really understand that. But once you kind of see, Oh my God, you know, my God, whenever I'm feeling like this, I naturally gravitate towards eating like that. And I can't really stop myself. And one of the things you learn in addiction recovery is this idea of, like we said before, removing the decision fatigue. There's no gray area. It's like you're either drinking or you're sober or you're using drugs or you're not like, it's not

like, well, I drink once in a while, but I'm sober. Like it doesn't work that way. But with food, it's different because you have to eat, right? So you can't just say, I don't eat food anymore, but you have basically stripped out all of the decision fatigue to its core more in a more extreme fashion than anyone I've ever met by just saying, this is what I'm eating and this is all I'm eating, which makes it very simple. And of course, you know, the,

the, the immediate question that comes up for everybody, well, there's a bunch of questions, but the first one is like, aren't you going out of your mind, like bored? Don't you crave other foods?

Like how have you been able to do this? I guess you started in January, right? So it's been quite, you're coming up on a year. Yeah. I guess you started in January right so it's been yeah quite you're coming up on a year yeah I started the January on January 1st and the plan is to go through the whole year and um yeah it's interesting to hear you talk about your experiences with addiction because basically it was obviously as an alcoholic the best thing you can do as an alcoholic most

people would agree is to quit alcohol and never do it again and it'd be hard to find someone that would say it's okay rich you can have a you can have beer in moderation just have one every now and then and that'll be fine like well the the sleazy lawyer on my shoulder will tell yeah yeah so i when i was first had this realization that i was a food addict i started thinking about how if you're an alcoholic you should quit alcohol and if you're a drug addict you should quit drugs and if you're a gambler gambling addict you should quit gambling but obviously you can't quit food like you can with those things so I thought maybe I could get as close as possible to quitting food by finding one food that would be healthy enough

to keep me keep me going and keep me thriving and um and yeah so that was that turned out to be potatoes and um yeah so that's that just made it super simple to reduce that decision fatigue and just uh yeah take all the all the uh all the emotion out of eating so the I had this uh realization like you were describing that I was I was relying on food for emotional support and comfort and enjoyment and you know you celebrate with food when something good happens and then if something bad happens you commiserate with food and it's like just foods there every step of the way and I wanted to retrain my mind and my brain to get that comfort and emotional support and enjoyment from other areas of life and and uh yeah that was that was a big thing behind i want my food to be boring and bland and uh and not make it a feature of my day anymore not make it something that i look to for

a good time and it's foods just become fuel and it's something i do to uh just keep my body running to be able to do the other things I want to do with my life that give me pleasure and enjoyment these days and yeah the first two weeks was pretty hard it was um it was a challenge and uh yeah I got through that though and then really since since the end of the second week it's been pretty easy really it's like my mind changed pretty quick and in hindsight i didn't really need a year but i set out to do a year so that's what i'm doing but i think a couple of weeks to a month really did what i wanted to do and since then it's just been an interesting

challenge to get through the year right it's it's almost a very stoic approach to food to strip everything else away um and and really get in touch with what it is that gets triggered in you emotionally that creates that obsession and that craving right because the food isn't the problem just like drugs and alcohol aren't the problem they're the solution to whatever is emotionally disconcerting for you and the real work and the healing comes in you know wrestling with that and trying to you know heal yourself emotionally so that you can go back to these things with a different kind of uh you know a different kind of relationship yeah definitely and when i was

researching this i read a lot about nutrition to help me figure out what food i would eat but i also read a bit about addiction and i read some stuff by Russell Brand and I love that he said a quote along similar lines that alcoholics don't have an alcohol problem they have a reality problem and alcohol is the solution yeah I really related to that that I was doing that with food and uh yeah it was um yeah I didn't didn't find a lot of information about food addicts but I could really relate to the things I read about alcoholism and relate that to the way I was treating food. And yeah, it's really nice to have learned other ways to deal with things when I get problems. Did you ever consider like 12-step for food addiction, like OA, Overeaters Anonymous or anything like that? Yeah, I've read about Alcoholics Anonymous, but I didn't actually consider that it existed for food addicts.

Oh, man. In LA, those meetings are everywhere. Yeah, okay. I did. I don't know what it's like. No, I have since found out that there's one not far from where I live. So I don't know why I didn't look that up. It just didn't occur to me that that would exist for food addiction.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, let's like step it back and unpack this in a little bit more detail. So I want to kind of get a sense of how you were living and what your life was like prior to the commencement of this experiment and gain an idea of when it occurred to you that actually you are a food addict like how did that epiphany come to you and how are you living yeah uh so i've got a wife and a little boy who's just turned three years old so he was he'd just turned two at the time uh this time last year

and um yeah i was i was vegan i've been vegan for eight years and uh but I was a junk food vegan so I was trying to eat healthy like I felt like I was reasonably well educated in what what a healthy diet was but I just couldn't make it stick I would do a few days at a time of of you know green smoothies and like lentil pasta salad lentil bolognese and uh you know and salads and all that and then you know that little devil on my shoulder that i was talking about would just be in the back of my mind saying eat some cake eat some cake and uh and i would go a few days resisting and then then i just i would cave and then i would get a pizza and follow it up with a box of ice cream and then and then a liter of coca-cola afterwards and uh and yeah and then i'd feel shit about myself after that and uh and it was just a

it was a cycle it was just going around in circles like that trying to stick to a healthy diet and then not being able to and i think that's yeah something that most people can relate to yeah yeah and uh i've had a lot of people write to me this year about having similar experiences, which has been cool because, well, not cool that they're having those experiences, but cool that I'm not alone, you know. I've felt a lot of support from that. But yeah, I was really, like I said earlier, I was depressed. I was really down.

I was crying nearly every day for reasons that I I didn't know at the time I was just I would be like one time I remember I was out for a walk with my little boy and we're walking we walked along the lake it was a beautiful sunny day I was like there's nothing to be upset about you know and and I just started crying and I was I don't know why I still don't know why well I know why I was depressed but there was nothing particular that happened to trigger me like and that sort of thing was happening most days and and uh yeah life was life was no good and I remember the moment where I had the realization that I was a food addict and I was sitting on the couch at home and uh yeah I was I

was just I think the night before I'd had like another binge night and another failed attempt at losing weight and I was um I was sitting on the couch just basically lamenting the fact that I just couldn't like just no matter how hard I tried over and over again I just couldn't make it work and I couldn't lose weight and keep it off I'd just come back on every time and um and I started um getting really down on myself that why can't I just do moderation like a normal person like why don't why I realized that I moderation wasn't something that would work for me but I just I was at a loss and I thought why can't I just do this why it's so simple for everyone else why can't I do it and

then then that was when I had the thought that maybe it's just maybe I've just got to accept that I'm not a guy that can do moderation and maybe I've just got to rather than rather than trying to fight that maybe I've got to start working with it like maybe I've just got to accept that I'm an all or nothing kind of guy and just go with it you know and and then um yeah it got me thinking about my behaviors in general and i i thinking about how like i described i could go for a period of time doing things really well and then i would one you know after two weeks a month whatever that was a really good effort if i could make it that long then i would binge and i'd go back to square one and it struck me how

similar that behavior was to what I've heard about alcoholics how you might I don't know your experience I read your book a few years ago so I can't remember it that well but you know you might have tried to quit alcohol and you might last two or three months and then one night that little devil on your shoulder would say just one beer is okay Rich you can have one beer tonight it'll be fine and then tomorrow you'll go back to not drinking again and when you're when you're in that state you're you're convinced that you will never drink again or never eat that terrible food again like there's no doubt in your mind so when the relapse happens it's it's so baffling and demoralizing yeah yeah it's not about self-will yeah and i think that's what a lot of you

know normal people that don't struggle with these issues have a hard time wrapping their heads around they're like why can't you just modulate your behavior yeah it's the same thing with balance like why can't you just eat a balanced diet why can't you just you know it just doesn't work for everybody yeah yeah yeah it's um yeah what you said about willpower is interesting too because a lot of people have told me wow you've got amazing willpower and i'm like if i had amazing willpower i wouldn't have gotten that yeah i wouldn't have found myself in that situation you know so it's uh it's for me it's about removing the need for willpower and uh so you kind of slowly it slowly dawned on you like this is an addiction type relationship

i wouldn't say it was slow it was like it hit me like a ton of bricks in that moment on the couch i was like yeah this is i'm the same as i didn't i had limited knowledge of alcoholism basically apart from reading your book that was the only book i'd read about alcoholism but you know you hear stories and watch movies about alcoholics whatever and yeah I just had that realization that my behavior was with food was basically the same as what I knew of how alcoholics had their relationship with alcohol and it was like a lightning bulb moment that that's me and so and so what do you do with that like armed with that self-awareness yeah that's the next step so yeah basically straight away the next step was um wondering about why don't we treat food addiction

the same way as we treat alcohol addiction and obviously we can't quit food you're gonna die if you quit food but i thought since i can't quit food maybe i can quit all foods except one so um what inspired like where did that come from though oh i don't know most people would say well i'm just gonna eat you know vegetables or i'm just gonna you know i'm gonna eat a low-fat vegan diet or whatever you know what i mean like it's a it was an interesting tick where you went i'm gonna find one food to eat and just eat that like that's not an like that's not that's not a realization that most people would yeah yeah i guess it was just i really wanted it to be thinking about alcohol

it was like like you said you either drink or you don't and it's black and white there's no gray area there's um there's no loopholes for the slimy lawyer to to put anything into and you know break it break the break the door open and um yeah so i just wanted it to be as simple as possible because that decision am i going to have a beer or not is a really simple decision well not that simple if you're an alcoholic but the it's black and white so i wanted it to get as simple as possible like that and and i thought yeah i can't quit every food but maybe i can just get as close as possible. So before you decided on potatoes, were there other candidates? Well, the first thing I did, interesting,

I did have some other candidates, but the very first thing I did was do a Google search for, I can't remember exactly what the words were, but something along the lines of what is the perfect food. And the first thing that came up was actually, it's interesting because i've been to the veg sauce expo and uh and it was a veg sauce video that came up um with dr john mcdougall talking and it was called potatoes the perfect food and it was about a four minute video of uh of dr mcdougall talking about the history of potatoes and the science behind potatoes and how great they are so that sent me down the rabbit hole of researching potatoes but also in my research I

found um like the 30 bananas a day yeah you knew that was coming yeah yeah so I looked at bananas too with um you know there's a durian writer and freely they have information on that and uh what was the the doctor's name that wrote the 80 10 10 oh doug graham yeah so i found found that book too and so i read about bananas and i read a bit about mangoes as well and uh yeah so there were a few candidates i thought the thing that brought me back to potatoes was that um bananas and mangoes in theory I think they could have done it but the benefit with potatoes was that there's a lot more science and historical evidence to back them up of people that have actually like lived that way for extended periods of time and obviously I found lots of people that have done like they call it banana island for a

month or whatever on bananas and lots of people have done that but i hadn't found many examples of people that had done that long term for like years or decades but there was lots of that with potatoes so that just gave me confidence and the other thing was that potatoes are cheap and there's also like you can make a lot of different things with them exactly so i thought i thought it was going to be a really hard thing to do and i thought it would be the hardest thing in my life but it hasn't turned out that way but um i thought if i could have a bit of variety then then that would help with bananas i thought i could just peel it and eat it or maybe i could make a smoothie and i couldn't think of anything else so that was yeah right so all. So then how long after that did you, did you like prepare yourself to begin this or did

you just jump right into it right away? Yeah. So that was, um, that realization on the couch I was talking about was late November. So it was at least a month, maybe six weeks of research. I did like at least probably a couple of hours of reading or watching, um, online lectures or things like that every day. So it was a lot of hours of reading or watching um online lectures or things like that every day so it was a lot of research that went into it and we should probably sorry to interrupt you but we should probably like at least elaborate a little bit on you know what

is essentially consistent with john mcdougall's starch of war you know yeah diet perspective and there have been quite a few studies of people that have subsisted on potatoes i think john always talks about yeah one that was in like 1928 dating all the way back then where people were subsisting on potatoes and their all their blood markers were good and yeah so this isn't a new thing like other people have have like sort of walked this path before yeah exactly and that was part of what gave me confidence so i'm i don't claim to be like a trailblazer here this is something that's been done lots of times before probably not for the same reasons that i'm doing it but um but i know that i've read that study you were talking about i think it was a marathon running couple um that i'm pretty sure they did six months

of only potatoes and uh and i think they ran this is what like it's nearly a year ago that i read it but i think they ran personal best marathons at the end of six months on potatoes so they obviously it was pretty good for them and um yeah and there's you know the history with the irish population they they lived on mostly not all potatoes like me but nearly all potatoes for a couple of centuries and there they went through a population boom which wouldn't happen if they were unhealthy and um yeah the dutch had a similar experience with eating a diet of mostly potatoes and at the end of the second world war the german population was that was most of their diet because they couldn't get much else in in the you know the nazi germany that was hard for them to get food in so and then you can look

through history like there's there's uh other tribes in the andes that lived off mostly potatoes and even to this day there are um there are tribes in the papua new guinean highlands that live off mostly sweet potatoes uh the okinawans in japan have a diet of mostly uh purple sweet potatoes and and they've got the highest rate of centenarians i believe of anywhere in the world so blue zones yeah yeah so like i said there's not that many people have done only potatoes like me but there are a lot of examples of people that have eaten almost only potatoes like 95 of their calories from potatoes and extrapolating on that just on the starch of war you know kind of tip there's plenty of examples of populations throughout human history who've subsisted on essentially a similar

maybe not potatoes but you know the chinese eating rice or yeah you know the aztecs eating uh what were they eating down there i forget something yeah there's all sorts of different grains and and just you know indian populations eating corn and things like that that are kind of similar to potatoes in a circle yeah yeah potatoes are pretty good they got you know there's they're pretty we sort of write off the you know the russet potato because it's like a white food and you think it's doesn't have any nutrition in it i had three of them for lunch just now did you raw do you have you been eating them no i don't eat them bake them or yeah just bake them i just went to uh there's a brew house across the road from my uh where i'm staying and yeah they've got

a takeaway section i just i've been going there for a few yeah just grab a few spuds yeah yeah they call them spuds yeah yeah i mean yeah we call them spuds i mean i don't know if we call them it's sort of colloquial yeah i wasn't sure if that was just an australian slang term i mean people know spuds mean potatoes yeah okay yeah um but they have correct me if i'm wrong but i think they have a they have a complete amino acid profile yeah yeah yeah they they they've got yeah exactly they exactly they've got all the proteins we need and in all the right ratios too and everyone knows they've got carbs they've got a lot of carbs but they've also something most people don't know is that they've got a little bit of fat in them too

not a lot maybe one to two percent but just enough to help you absorb the fat soluble vitamins and minerals in them and yeah they've they've really got everything we need they've got a heap of vitamin c i've had a lot of people writing to me saying that i'm going to get scurvy but you know that's a that's a lack of vitamin c and potatoes have heaps of that they've obviously heaps of fiber um yeah they've really got everything we need. Yeah. It's interesting in, in doing a little bit of research to get ready to speak to you today. You know, there's a lot of articles out there that kind of, you know, they cast a spotlight on what you're doing because it's an interesting kind of human, human interest story. But then there's always the the disclaimer the caveat where they bring in the nutritionist who

says you know we this is very unhealthy and he's going to be and i've read a bunch like everyone had a kind of a different opinion on how you were going to be deficient you know whether it was protein deficient fat deficient uh you know this mineral or that vitamin deficient and how you were going to have all these kinds of problems and your immune system was going to get run down and blah, blah, blah. So we're at, how long are we into it now? Oh, it's coming up to 10 months. 10 months.

Have you had any deleterious health impact or any struggles or issues? Yeah, no, it's been all positive. I've had four blood tests now throughout the year and they just keep getting better. Yeah, I've really had no issues at all and I read these articles with you know diet experts or doctors saying that things are going to go wrong and they say crazy things like I've one of them said she was worried about this is like a big expert that's well known in the media in Australia said she was worried I was going to get bowel cancer from a lack of fiber,

which is crazy. It's like there's so much fiber in potatoes. How could you, you know? Especially if you're eating the skin. Yeah. And like there's, I just don't know why people say these things. It's just, yeah, it's baffling to me that they clearly don't know what they're talking about and they just, you know,

I just, I can't figure it out. Why would you say that potatoes have no fiber or no vitamin C me that they clearly don't know what they're talking about and they just you know i just i can't figure it out why would you say that potatoes have no fiber or no vitamin c or like i've had people say that i'm going to get no iron and my last blood test my doctor said to me that if i was an elite athlete like riding in the tour de france or something my oxygen carrying capacity of my blood is almost at the borderline of where they'd start to suspect me of blood doping and so yeah it's incredible that you know there's there's got to be despite it being kind of labeled the perfect food i mean it can't there's no way that it has you know everything that you need though right there's got to be some things that it's deficient because no

food has every single vitamin and mineral that you would that you would yeah well theoretically like according to the um the stats on what's in a potato i should be getting a little bit less calcium than i need and i've forgotten the name of it now it starts with an f and you need it when women need it more when they're pregnant folate folate yeah folate should be um low well. But in my blood test, folate's actually on the high side and calcium is just normal. What about like selenium and vitamin D? If you're out in the sun. Yeah, I get plenty of sun.

You're supplementing with B12? I'm supplementing with B12, which I think that's important for anyone on a plant-based diet. But theoretically, you could get B12 if you bought organic potatoes and you didn't wash them properly you might get some b12 from leaving a little bit of the dirt on but that's not something i want to play around with so that's the only supplement i take well a lot of it i think a lot of it also depends on the soil in which the potatoes were

grown right if they're if they're grown in in mineral rich soil that's going to be it's going to have a different you know profile nutrition profile for that food versus maybe a conventionally grown potato in a depleted soil. Yeah, yeah. And I've not really paid that much attention to where exactly my potatoes come from. I know they're all from local, like in Victoria or South Australia, which is not too far from where I live. um and i know that yeah they come from good quality soil so that's not something i'm really worried about and you know i've read a little bit about uh that about the way they've tested for to figure out what nutrients are in a potato and i don't know how how true this is but what i've read is that they

haven't actually done the testing for a few decades now and maybe if they did it again with better equipment that they'd find different things and there's also like i wonder if i've really cleaned up my diet and and um obviously it's about as clean as you can get there's nothing in there but potatoes and um yeah i would just wonder if my body has just become more efficient at maybe absorbing and using the calcium and the folate and the selenium and whatever else that that um so maybe it doesn't need as much because it's just better at absorbing and using it now i don't i don't know the the answers to all this but the blood tests show that yeah i'm good for that stuff that's amazing so there's no it's not showing

any deficiency or any kind of red flag on anything no no everything's good there's i don't know i don't know enough about the blood test so i rely on my doctor who's a he's a really uh knowledgeable uh whole food plant-based guy he's a qualified nutritionist as well as uh as being a doctor and he flies around the world to study and all that so i don't i don't get too involved in what my blood tests say like i i did my research before i started i don't i don't really feel like i i don't really feel like i want to spend time researching my blood tests and everything so i just leave that up to my doctor and he's not everyone wants to ask you about it though right yeah i probably should well the thing the thing that i take away from this and what I've learned over the years, over the last couple of years, is the human body is unbelievably resilient.

And it's capable of physical feats that we don't know we're capable of. And it's capable of survival feats that I think we're only now starting to really wrap our heads around. Yeah. that I think we're only now starting to really wrap our heads around. Because nobody would tell you, oh, yeah, you should just eat bananas, and you'll be able to rock it. But I know Michael Ernstein, and he's been eating nothing but fruit forever, and he was the fifth fastest American finisher at the New York City Marathon like five years ago.

And he's done all these amazing athletic things. And so, you know, not that I take away from that, oh, I'm going to be completely fruitarian, but I do develop a greater appreciation for what the human body is capable of. And it helps me to feel better about questioning, you know, longstanding conventional sort of perspectives around nutrition and medicine and appreciate that there's so much more that we need to learn and that we don't fully understand. Because if Michael can do that and you can do what you're doing when

all these, every single nutritionist and doctor, you know, for the most part in the mainstream culture is kind of, you know, rolling their eyes at you yeah you're a living example of somebody who's doing something that's completely at odds with what everyone is telling you is safe and healthy and yet here you are looking better and you know than you have as an adult male and and happier and seemingly not depressed and all of these sort of amazing ramifications as a result of making this decision that it just makes me go you know we have a lot to learn and and now even with all the intermittent fasting stuff that's coming out and the experiments that are going on there i think it's a really interesting time and

and i think the human body is incredibly adaptable yeah yeah it's the i think it's a case of we just need to get out of the way really and just let our bodies just do what they do we've we've all of us every one of us is born with this incredible machine that knows exactly what to do and we some sorry sometimes we we don't allow it to just do its thing so i think that's what i'm doing now and i feel like it's more important what i'm not eating than what i am like potatoes are great but more important than eating potatoes is that I'm not eating all the processed oils and sugars and all the processed flours and all the junk that I used to eat I'm not eating meat and dairy and eggs and you know all these things that really don't allow our body to to be at their best so

yeah I think that's don't quote me on this but what are you going it's on it's on there now but yeah i'm quoting myself it's gonna be the quote at the top of the park yeah but um but yeah i just i feel like there's probably a whole heap of foods that we could do this on and um and it's yeah as long as you're getting enough calories to to satisfy your body's need for energy, I feel like there's probably a lot of foods that we could do this on. Just get out of the way and let your body do its thing. That's what I think is more important.

All right, so you make this decision. You're going to do this potato thing. Walk me through day one. Yeah, well, first of all i had uh i made the decision that i was going to do it and just by coincidence it was like it was three days before january 1st and anyone who's an experienced dieter knows that your diet doesn't start till monday right so so so for me it was well january 1st coming up i'll wait until then so my original idea was that i'd do a month or maybe two months

and uh and I thought that would be enough but then since I was waiting that three days I can't really can't explain where the idea came from it just the idea came to me that I could do it for the whole year since I was starting on January 1 why not just go until January 1 and so I've really got no justification for for that side of things but um but yeah I was I was scared I thought it would be the hardest thing I've ever done and uh and I was not sure that I was thought I probably wouldn't be able to actually do it but it was just something that I really wanted to give it a try it was like I just had this deep feeling that if I could do this, I don't know how or why, but life's going to be different.

Things are going to be, for better or worse, things are going to be different. I didn't like my life the way it was. So any sort of difference, I was happy with that. So yeah, I started and day one I put my backpack on and walked up to the store and filled my backpack with potatoes. And that's the video you were talking about earlier. I decided to film that on the way back. And it's interesting, actually, the filming, I wasn't going to record this year at all.

And my wife said I should write a journal so that I had something to go back on and have a look at. And I said, I've tried writing journals before and I never stick to it. So there's no point to that and so then she said what about you just use your phone and talk to your phone once a day about your experience i thought that's a that's an idea i could do that that's that's pretty easy but then the next thing i said was you know it's a year of films i'm going to run out of places to store that and she said well put them on youtube then and then you don't have to store them anywhere okay no problem so i did that and somehow it got out from there that's so interesting because yeah i was going to ask you you know what when did it occur to you to try to share this

you know story transparently and simultaneously i mean you made you made that video from day one so obviously like okay i'm gonna i'm gonna put this out there did you think i mean i think a big part you know i would imagine that a positive result of doing that i'm sure there's been many but one is it keeps you honest right you if people are expecting you to put a video up and share what's going on and you know people are watching that video that that keeps you kind of honest and and on the path yeah yeah that wasn't really something I thought about before I did it. It was really just I needed somewhere to store the videos. So I really didn't promote it at all.

There was like through all of January, I probably maybe had 50 views in total. And I didn't really tell anyone. I told my close family and that was it. Nobody else knew that I was doing it. And then one night, maybe at the end of January or start of February, I went for dinner at a friend's house. And that was like the first time we'd been out because I was avoiding going out

because I didn't want to have to justify myself to people. But this was a close friend, so I was happy to tell him about it. So I went for dinner and he made me potatoes and we had a good chat about it all and then after we left I didn't know this until like three months later when he sheepishly came to me and said it was me but he was on a news website in Australia and there was a link on the side that said have you got a story email us so he clicked on that and and he didn't write anything he just copied and pasted the link to my youtube video in and sent it and then uh the next day i got a phone call well i

didn't know how i thought it was out of the blue i thought somehow this guy had stumbled on me and uh so i was in one of australia's biggest news websites on a sunday afternoon and um and I did an interview and then they published it that afternoon I was I thought oh cool I've been in the news that's that's fun and then I really forgot about it but then uh so I went to bed Sunday night woke up Monday morning to 400 emails from all around the world and how long into the journey was this this was the beginning of Februarybruary so it only 30 days yeah yeah so i'd lost uh 10 kilos by then 22 pounds i think that is 24 i don't know something

like that a bit over 20 pounds because there was a lot of news stories right around that period yeah yeah so i basically spent two weeks uh doing interviews with tv and radio and newspapers and websites from all around the world and i had very little sleep for two weeks doing that you're like i guess i have to do this yeah exactly you're only 30 days in yeah i was just yeah i was sort of you know by that time i was feeling better about life i was i'd say i was still depressed but i was things were looking up and i was like i gotta've got to ride this wave. If people are asking for interviews, I'm going to give them, and let's just see what happens.

And if that had happened... And Spud Fit was born. Exactly. So at that point in time, I didn't have a website. I didn't have a Facebook page. I just had the YouTube channel, and that's it. And then, yeah, once I woke up in the morning, and I had all those emails, and then a couple of days later,

I'd done a lot of days later i'd done a lot of interviews and i thought i should really try to do something with this so i made the website and the facebook page and yeah that was that's how it that's how it took off yeah it's interesting because there's i think there's a misconception that that you're out trying to push some kind of diet like you're trying to advocate for this way of life when in truth you've said many times over like i'm not you know i'm just this is what i'm doing you know you could do it or not do it i don't care like this is just my journey and i'm kind of sharing it as i go exactly yeah so if i had to advocate for any diet it would be a whole food plant-based diet like like you advocate for

as well i think that's the best diet i'm definitely not here to say that potatoes only is the way forward for people but i do think it's it's uh got value as as a as a way to hit the reset button you know and and uh yeah like joe cross uses you know juicing for that purpose yeah it's kind of a similar thing he does he drinks nothing but juice for a period of time to reset or whatever yeah and i've been since in the last couple of months i've lots of people have thousands of people over the year have been sending me questions and asking for advice and all that so a couple of months ago i started guiding people through doing their own i call it a spud fit challenge so yeah it's something

that i'm i'm helping people do but it's it But I look at it as a stepping stone to getting to a whole food plant-based diet. And it's just a way to change your relationship with food and adjust the way you think about food and see food. And, yeah, hopefully you get you to a point where you can stick to a healthy diet for an indefinite period rather than rather than constantly be battling with that devil on your shoulder so right well i could tell you that uh that uh i know one person who's done the spud fit challenge yeah that's my sister yeah have you talked to have you talked to molly yeah i have on facebook yeah yeah she was all about it she's like you gotta get this guy on she just went nuts and she had been trying to go vegan and she had her ups and downs with it and was frustrated and i was trying to help her and and then i don't know how she found you but once she found you it was like game on and like she

just totally went for it i don't know if she's still doing it it's but for i'm not sure if she was on it i have spoken to her talked with her online recently but i don't know if she is either i haven't she was on it i have spoken to her talked with her online recently but i i don't know if she's still doing the potato challenge but um yeah it was funny when she first wrote to me and we talked a bit on email and and uh and yeah i was just she had questions and i was answering them the first time she wrote to me i noticed that she had her last name was roll right and i thought oh that's not a common name. But like, I listened to the Rich Roll podcast. And it's interesting. I've never heard of another person with the name Roll,

but I didn't for a second connect that you would be related. And then, yeah, after a while we'd been chatting and then she said, hey, you should go on my brother's podcast. And I was like, oh. Yeah, it takes what it takes. It's funny. She, you know, despite all the stuff that i've been doing for almost 10 years now for whatever reason it didn't connect with her or she you know just

didn't interest her to make this kind of change and then something changed in her um i don't know maybe six or eight months ago and she watched forks over knives i think that's a great movie why didn't anybody tell me about this before and i was like i've only been doing this for 10 years i got you know it's like no one wants to hear it from your family member you know what i mean like you got to hear she needed to hear the message from you and not from me and she's so she's been trying to like make that leap but you know i think that that she struggles in a way that is very common and and like we said earlier relatable to a lot of people like a little bit of a rubber banding or not knowing how to quite quite get it right and so to do something so extreme whether it's you know joe cross's reboot or you know your potato challenge whatever

it is i think it does rewire your brain and and you know take you out of your routine to such a such an extreme extent that it helps you sort of basically like Joe has it right. You rebooting, like you're literally turning your system off and back on and powering up and you have an opportunity to form a new relationship and new habits around, you know, around these foods. I mean, I did it with a seven day juice cleanse, you know, maybe I should have done it longer or whatever, but like that was the extreme thing that i needed to do just to shift into a new diet and i and i think it it brings up an interesting you know sort of thread that we can that we can chase which is this idea of balance right because everyone will tell you oh eat a balanced diet and live a balanced life and you know exercise

everything in moderation and all that stuff it's like which i don't get and it's never worked for me and i and then i feel badly about myself because like oh why can't i do this in a balanced way and i'm just being a crazy addict in other ways with all these other things that i'm doing and yet my life continues to improve so what does that really mean about balance like my relationship with balance is different than somebody else and it sounds like you know you have an interesting relationship with balance as well yeah yeah well first of all to talk about a balanced diet i've had a lot of people say hey this is crazy you should just be eating a balanced diet and there's a couple of ways to look at that but first thing i think is we need to think about what is a balanced

diet and and why do we even have that term and i think that term the balanced diet came up because obviously people are getting sicker and less healthy and uh and health health practitioners of all kinds need something to tell us about how you should eat a balanced diet and to me a balanced diet is they call it a balanced diet because it's supposed to uh to provide us with a balance of all the nutrients that we need to be healthy. And if you look at it that way, I am eating a balanced diet. I'm eating a diet that gives me a good balance of all the nutrition that I need. And yes, so to me, that is a balanced diet. It's not balanced at all in the way if you want to think about eating a wide variety of foods.

But maybe we don't need to do that necessarily. in that way i'm happy with with the balance yeah yeah that's a that's a non-issue for me and but yeah i hear what you're saying about moderation and um yeah i i uh i talked about this a bit earlier in the year and i talk about it a lot actually that um for i think for a lot of people moderation just doesn't work in in one way or another and i think addicts is a prime example like no one would advise you to go and drink beer in moderation and no one would advise a heroin addict to take heroin in moderation and i don't know why someone would advise me to eat chocolate cake in moderation it doesn't make sense you know yeah so i think um moderation leads to media

mediocrity i think it's just that's just a fact of life you wouldn't you know does roger federer practice tennis in moderation right like yeah it's like anybody who's done anything extraordinary has lived their life sort of out of balance in the conventional yeah yeah if you want if you want extreme results you need to do extreme things that's just that's just the fact of the matter and it's funny though when you when you first jump into doing something extreme everybody applauds you yeah but then you know five seconds later then they want to tell you why you're wrong and why you shouldn't be doing that and how it's it becomes threatening becomes threatening, I think, on some level.

Yeah, I don't really understand that. It's never been something that I've subscribed to. I've never obviously been, I've never had great success at anything until this year. I've had reasonable success at a couple of things in my life, but nothing extreme. But I would never be someone to say hey you should you should i wouldn't have told you to ride your bike in moderation when you were training for you know your big sporting events that you did i would have applauded you for having the balls to

get out there and have a go at that and i don't really understand people that want to want to bring other people down for just stepping outside the box and trying something different you know well because it is threatening because if if you can do that then it means that they can too and that's a very scary prospect for somebody who's kind of living you know living in a box and and you know i i mean i can relate i understand that yeah yeah putting it that way i guess it makes sense that um yeah you're holding a mirror up to people. The way people react to you says much more about who they are than who you are. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And to be honest, overwhelmingly, the response to what I've been doing as far as I've been connected with people has been overwhelmingly positive.

And I'm sure there are forums online where people are just talking about what a maniac. Yeah, exactly. But I avoid all that stuff. One time, I can't remember what the article was, but I read the comment section in an article and I was like, no, I'm not doing this anymore. So I stopped that. But yeah, as far as people contacting me, it's overwhelmingly positive and it's been really good. So, yeah, I've really had too much trouble with haters only once or twice yeah on the depression tip when you began this were you were you taking

medication for depression or had you been diagnosed I had been I think it was like March last year that I was diagnosed with depression and I did get a subscription for medication but um and I didn't I didn't actually take the subscription it was like I'm not here to say that um medication for depression is a bad idea that's that's up to individuals and I've not really done a lot of research about whether or not it's a good idea but it just didn't feel right to me and it's yeah I so i didn't take it and i debated with myself about whether i should or shouldn't but it's just i i guess i had a there was something in me that made me think if i start taking this i'm worried that i'm not going to be able to stop that was one of the things i considered and i i'd heard before of people getting addicted to depression medication and

things like that so there was there was that side of things and yeah it was just i just i knew that there was a way to fix it without medication i knew that it must be possible like people don't people don't just surely people don't stay depressed forever and i don't at that time i didn't know that much about depression other than i had it but uh yeah i don't really have have a great justification for why I didn't take the medication. It just didn't feel like the right thing to do for me. And how has this journey impacted your depression or your emotional state in general? Yeah, I think it's been massive.

It's that idea that I was talking about earlier about having to uh not rely on food for comfort and enjoyment and emotional support and try to find other areas in life that i can get that from as i think that's where it's all been at and uh yeah i've done a lot of meditation and uh and i've i've done a few other things like i've done. So this is not all about the potato this year. The potatoes, I say the potatoes, a vehicle that's allowed me to journey inside to do what needed to be done to fix the problems that I had. It's not obviously it is about the potato, but for me, it's potatoes, just a vehicle. So, but everyone wants to just talk about the potatoes. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Potatoes are just something that helps me do what needed to be done and um so yeah i've i've done a lot of hard work on uh on the way i think and the way i relate to food and the way i relate to the world around me and and on mindfulness and what so tell me what some of those practices are or you know what that looks like for you okay one of the things was have you have you ever read the poem if by Rudyard Kipling probably but probably not since like eighth grade yeah it's a it's a short poem but uh I should know it off by heart because I read it every day but that's it's been a really helpful it's sort of a it's just a really powerful poem and it gives me,

tingles up my spine every time I read it. It's sort of, I think it's rooted in Stoic philosophy. It's about, it's a poem that Rudyard Kipling wrote for his son that he, that it's about, it's all about how to live life basically and yeah it's a, it's a, if you read it it's, I'm sure you'd agree that it's based on Stoic philosophy so I've, I've read that every day and it's, um, it's really helped me when, uh, when things are tough to just put things in perspective and, and move on and, uh, and just do what needs to be done and try not to worry about, um, and get stuck on, you know, what things I can't control, basically just focus on control, the controllables and let go of other things. So that's been, that poem has been a really big help for me. And, uh,

and I've done some meditation too, from your advice, listen to your podcast. I downloaded that Headspace app and I've, uh, I'm not as consistent with it as I'd like to be, but I, yeah, I, I go through spurts of meditating for a few days in a row and then i have a few days off but i do feel like that's helped and you need like the potato version of meditation yeah yeah yeah so and i've done a lot i've started exercising a lot more too and i'm getting pretty fit now and uh like at the beginning of the year i couldn't have run up a flight of stairs and right so you were like 300 plus at the beginning right yeah i think it was yeah 151 kilos which i think is like 335 pounds or something like that and i've lost 110 now

110 pounds less now so yeah and like a couple of weeks ago and you're pretty tall you don't look like you weigh 220 how tall are you i'm six five okay yeah so you're super tall yeah i'm a pretty solid build too so i carry the weight're super tall yeah i'm a pretty solid build too so i carry the weight fairly well but yeah i ran up a mountain two weeks ago so i couldn't run up a flight of stairs at the start of the year and i i ran the course of near hobart in australia they call it um the world's toughest half marathon it starts at sea level and goes straight up a mountain and i just i didn't run the event but i just I was there and I went did the course just for fun like tell me the last year that I would have done that it was insane yeah so right so meditation roger kipling yeah and i know mountains yeah and i just make more

of an effort to um not that i didn't last year but i just didn't have it in me to play with my boy as much as i do now you know i was i tried my best to be a good dad but i just wasn't as good a dad as i could be just because i just how can you be when you're feeling like that you know yeah all the time yeah but so i just I make more of an effort to you know wrestle with him and read books with him and go walking to them play at the playground and throw the ball and whatever and yeah I just spend more time joking around with my wife and it sounds like your wife has been very supportive she's amazing yeah she's even from the beginning, she wasn't like, you're a crazy person? No, no, she knew my struggles.

I don't think she knew the extent of how bad things were. I didn't want to burden her with my problems, you know? So she knew I was depressed, and she knew that I'd been diagnosed with depression, but she didn't know that I was crying every day. And I don't think she quite knew how bad it was but she was aware that that's that's a that's my problem I should have made her more aware of it I should have shared it shared it with her but I felt like you know I don't want to bring her down you know it was uh so I sort of I kept it to myself a lot um which I don't advise people to do but um but yeah she's she's just been amazing from the start when

I first came to her with the idea like she didn't even know I was researching it I just told her when I made the decision I said this is what I want to do and she didn't flinch she just said just do what you got to do that's right yeah and she was really supportive from the start and the only thing was I was um I was not gonna I didn't have any plans to get medical supervision i was just confident in my research and um the only thing she said was that yeah i will support you if you get medical supervision right and um so yeah that's what's smart you know and also i think it gives everything that you're you're doing a lot more credibility when you have when you're under doctor supervision and you're getting these blood tests and you can kind of, you know, really monitor everything that's going on. I think it, it, you know, it, it really makes

your, your case and your experience, you know, uh, a lot more substantial given that it's like vetted in that way. Yeah, definitely. That was a good idea. I was, I would have been silly to do it without medical supervision and, uh, and yeah, I would never advise anyone else to do it without medical supervision either. I think i would never advise anyone else to do it without medical supervision either i think that's a really important thing but it's yeah i just hadn't thought of that and yeah i'm glad she she said that because it has given the whole thing some credibility yeah she's sick of cooking potatoes she's probably eating a lot more potatoes than she bargained for though yeah exactly now she's not doing it with you no she's done a week here and a week there but um yeah she's just she's just doing her thing she is eating a lot more healthier than she was like she didn't have the same issues

with food as i did so um she doesn't have the same need to do it that i do but uh yeah she's she's eating more potatoes than she used to and her diet's improved she's not eating as much not that she ever ate a lot of junk but she's not eating as much junk as she used to and yeah she's lost a little bit of weight too she was not overweight to start with though she was she's beautiful always has been sweet uh so walk me through a day of food like what does this actually look like yeah it's it's i going to say it's different every day, but it's not really. Not that different.

No, no. But it's basically 95% of what I do is either mashed or boiled or baked potatoes. What else is there? Yeah. I do every now and then make something a little bit out there. Like I make a potato waffle sometimes which is you just boil a potato until it's soft and then you squash it in your waffle

line and you got a potato waffle after 20 minutes or something and i've made potato everyone i always get people writing to me asking me to how to make these potato pancakes that i took a photo of and i'm yeah i've only like people want to eat them every day for breakfast i'm like i've eaten them twice this year it's not like so yeah it really is i've got a big um 10 liter pot i don't know what that is in like two gallons pot or something like that and uh so i boil up a big batch of potatoes and i'll eat them all through the next day and then then i'll uh i'll put two whole trays of potatoes in the oven and so then they're ready for the whole next day and then I'll make a big huge pot of mashed potato and then I'll eat that through the next day so I try to cook in big batches so that I've always got something ready and you just

bring this stuff with you right yeah just take it with me it's been a bit different while I've been here because I haven't had kitchen facilities but like I said there's the the griller across the road that does me baked potatoes so I just before I came here I went over there and grabbed three of them and there we go yeah and so all right so no oil on any of these potatoes but you do allow yourself some spices yeah and yeah some like sort of condiment sauces yeah I keep it pretty plain like I said I want my meals to be bland because it forces me to to look outside food to to get enjoyment but i do uh i do use a little bit of salt or you know a bit of chili or onion onion powder or garlic powder or things like that and i do use a little bit of plant-based milk to help me make mashed potatoes and

a little bit of ketchup or barbecue sauce or sriracha sauce or something like that but all that's really minimal so like i could have a big plate of say uh what would it be two to three pounds of potatoes and that would have maybe a tablespoon of ketchup spread over it so it's not like i'm drowning it inside like a little bit exactly just something so that it's not like i'm not going to go totally insane with boredom you know and so are you sitting down and eating meals or you're just kind of grazing on these all throughout the day yeah that that varies but most of the time it's meals i've really um i've really stopped having snacks it's just uh i feel like snacks to me uh it's something you do to help you tide you over to the next meal and i've just like if i'm hungry

i'm gonna have a meal you know so it varies day to day though some days i'll have two meals and uh and some days i'll have six meals it just i don't it depends on what sort of exercise i've done how much sleep i've had a variety of things but yeah i just i just eat when i'm hungry and i keep eating until i'm full and then yeah that's that's it all right so the first two weeks you're doing this i would imagine you had some pretty strong cravings yeah so you had to probably had to struggle for a spell there to get through that yeah and i learned a lot about myself in that first couple of weeks and i learned a lot about how to deal with cravings or how i can deal with cravings too so I can share you yeah I'd like to hear about that yeah so the first thing I learned

was that um I always use the example of chocolate cake that was a bit of a weakness for me so uh when I started craving chocolate cake I I came up with this plan to sort of trick myself into uh into not having it and it was like if you tell yourself you're never going to eat chocolate cake again that's like that's a big deal you know i imagine it's the same with you drinking alcohol i'm never going to drink again that was probably a big deal and it worried you so rather than taking that approach i i just said to myself i can eat the chocolate cake that's fine but first i'm going to eat a big plate of boiled potatoes and uh and if I can get through that, I'll eat the chocolate cake afterwards. That's a page right out of 12-step, basically.

Is it? Yeah, I mean, it's called future tripping, right? So a lot of people, when they're new, they'll be like, how am I going to stop drinking? I've got to go to this bachelor party next month, or my birthday is in June. How am I going to do that? It's like,

don't worry about it, man. All you have to do is make sure your head hits the pillow tonight. Sober. Like if you want to drink tomorrow, drink tomorrow, that's fine. Just don't drink today. And we'll deal with tomorrow, tomorrow. Right. So it's like, it's basically rooting yourself in the moment. Like the more you can be present and not worry about what's going to happen or what happened yesterday, then the more fortified you are to like manage whatever situation is causing you that level of distress, whether it's a craving or some kind of emotional problem. Yeah, yeah, well that's interesting you say that, because that was me, I was just, I'm just going to focus on the next meal, that's all

that's important, it doesn't matter what happens tomorrow or next month or next year, it's just this meal that I'm about to eat is the important one so I would I'd get my big plate of potatoes and eat it and then when I finished I just didn't want chocolate cake anymore and that happened a lot of times in the first couple of weeks that let's just eat the plate of potatoes and see what you want afterwards and every time I didn't want the cake afterwards so So that was a big thing to remember. And I always took potatoes with me. That was really important because if you get hungry, if you allow yourself to get hungry,

then that's when you make your worst decisions. So I made sure that, and these days it's not as important because I'm comfortable with being hungry for an hour or two if I have to be, that's fine. But I wasn't comfortable with that in the beginning. And so I always had potatoes with me. And then when those situations came up, I could just get my box of potato out and many times I sat in I would sit in the car park of whatever fast food restaurant and I would sit

there and just be eating my potatoes going I wish I could just finish this so I can go inside and get whatever I'm going to get but then sure enough I'd finish the box of potatoes and I didn't want it anymore. Yeah, it would pass. Yeah, so... And there's a couple of other things. Have you seen the movie The Matrix before? Of course, like 20 times. Yeah, me too.

So there's this one scene near the beginning where Neo gets in the car with Trinity and the others and they go to drive him away and this is when he doesn't really know what The Matrix is, whether he ever figures out what The Matrix is, who knows but i think he figured it out yeah yeah at the end yeah but anyway so um yeah he's driving along and the guy in the front seat turns around with a gun and they get that machine to get the bug out of him and all that and he goes this is too much i'm out of here and he goes stop the car he opens the door and looks down that long dark rainy road and

and he's about to leave and Trinity grabs his arm and says says trust me Neo and he says why and she says because you've been down that road before you know where it leads and I know that's not where you want to be and I replayed that scene in my head plenty of times because I had cravings and I wanted the chocolate cake and I said to myself you've been down that road you know exactly what it tastes like and you know that if you have the cake now you're going to have it again tomorrow and the next day and you've got the weight of evidence throughout my history told me that it's not going to be just cake just once and then I'll go back to eating potatoes that's not how it

works I can't trick myself into that anymore I know exactly what's going to happen if i do that and is that the road that i want to be on and when i really broke it down and thought about it logically and tried to remove emotion from my decision making it was um it made the decision easy to picture my life in six months time if i eat the cake now what's going to happen what am i going to be doing in six months and that was that was it made it an easy decision to make you know yeah it's back to that that balanced discussion um you know for me i have a hard time understanding uh you know diets that allow for like a cheat day or just say just have a little bit of this because if you really are if you really do have

an addictive type relationship with certain kinds of foods if you allow yourself that cheat day or that little bit of that every once in a while you remain imprisoned to that craving like you're never free of it because you're constantly you're feeding it even if you're only even if you're feeding it a lot less and just here and there, you're never allowing your body to move past it. Like for me, I have to just completely abstain. Right. And so like cheese, you know, for me, it was a big thing. So I had to go, I had to weather a couple of weeks of being uncomfortable, not eating cheese.

And now, you know, nine years later, like, yeah, if I see cheese or smell cheese, like that looks appealing to me still like i'm not going to tell you that it disgusts me because it doesn't like i'll smell that and i'll be like that that looks good but i don't have that obsession like i don't start thinking about it all the time like that i'm past that but you have to go through that uncomfortable period of time to get to that place and the only way to do that in my experience experience with me, is to completely abstain. Yeah, I agree. I read Tim Ferriss' book, The 4-Hour Body, a few years ago, and I tried that cheat day thing. And I found myself, it didn't do anything for my obsession with food. I did, I don't know how long it lasted, maybe a month or a couple of months.

But I found myself, sorry, with a notepad during the week writing down what i was going to have on cheat day you know it was like it didn't do anything well i would just walk around all week obsessing about what i was going to eat on cheat day yeah and and so you you become a prisoner of cheat day yeah exactly and look at you know other people have had great success with his diet so i'm talking about my own experience yeah i'm not saying it's cheat day is a bad idea for everyone it just is a bad idea for me, yeah. Yeah, it just didn't work for me. But a couple of weeks and you were able to kind of get over that hump.

Yeah, well, I guess really it was a couple of weeks. I learned these techniques and it was really like, I'm not going to say it was easy. It was a really, really hard couple of weeks for me. And it was every day I wasn't sure if I was going to make it through the day but somehow I did and I just learned these techniques and I guess I probably shouldn't say it was easy from then on but it was when I got in those situations uh where I where I wanted to eat something else I just knew what to do and I knew how to talk myself through that situation and so it wasn't I'm not

going to say like I don't really crave anything anymore but maybe after a month or something it was like the cravings totally went away or but it was just like I was when the cravings came up I was calm about it I didn't panic anymore I was I just I knew if the craving comes this is what you got to do you got to you got to go and picture that scene from the matrix or you've got to eat your potatoes first or you just got to be honest about the whole situation it's it's emotional eating is is a problem for a lot of people and you know people use food to comfort themselves or to celebrate or basically to make themselves feel better and it's about um it's about understanding that in the long run this chocolate cake is not going to make you feel better you're going to feel like shit because

of eating that chocolate cake you're going to enjoy the experience let's be honest it's chocolate cakes takes chocolate cake tastes great and it feels good in your mouth and it's a great experience eating chocolate cake but how you're going to feel in 10 minutes time and how you're going to feel in an hour and you know you're going to feel shitty about making a bad choice and then how you're going to feel in six months when you've eaten chocolate cake every day or every couple of days it's like this is emotional eating is is not helping it's doing bad things for your emotions rather than good it's not giving you what you want out of food and it's just just being honest with myself about that and really uh understanding fully the consequences of my choices and yeah just embracing that rather than trying to block it out well just eating

eating mindfully yeah as opposed to reactively yeah just sort of impulsively grabbing for whatever without thinking about why it is that you're grabbing for it so yeah as a result of walking this path and when those cravings pop up or you're more mindful about you know kind of where you're at with everything have you been able to get a get a grip on what your triggers are emotionally that lead you to those thoughts or previously those choices uh well like for example you know what i mean like oh now i've now i know after doing this for 10 months like when when this when i'm in this situation that comes up every once in a while that's when i notice that i'm craving that you know what i mean like yeah connecting the dots emotionally

with the choices that you used to know i know it yeah i know what you mean but it wasn't really a thing for me i didn't really find that there was trigger situations it was just all the time yeah it was like yeah there wasn't really i would eat because i had a good day let's celebrate with the pizza or i'd eat i had a bad day so let's commiserate with some ice cream or whatever it was just every situation called for some sort of using food for something it was like yeah it was just it's a behavior change thing for me and uh it's like yeah there's just there's just no situation that calls for me to put crap in my mouth and it's a self it's self-harming really when you think about it it's like you're putting junk in your mouth and it's immediately from the moment you swallow it starts doing bad things to your body and you know you i'm a teacher i've been for a long time and i've

worked with kids that are in desperate situations i've worked with kids that are struggling and um you know i don't see that behavior the way i was treating food is no different to the kids i've worked with that cut themselves and it was uh you know trying to use it as a way to just get some feeling in the life that was without feeling you know so uh it was not really any trigger specific triggers that i had to deal with it was just i had to just totally change my behavior and change the way i thought about food and life in general yeah what do you think people most misunderstand about what you're doing yeah I think it's the probably the extreme like people think isn't that isn't that extreme you're not like I think that that's the main question I get after

where do you get your protein where do you get all this stuff after that it's isn't that too extreme that's the main thing i get and it's for me it's like well isn't weighing 335 pounds extreme and isn't using food as a coping mechanism and using food to celebrate and just being overweight and unhappy and all that like to me that's extreme and what i'm doing yeah i guess it in a way it is extreme but extreme doesn't have to mean bad like we look at extreme often and then yeah if you do something extreme so often we think that's a bad thing but extreme doing being extreme can be good too if you're if you're channeling your extreme behavior to in a positive direction then yeah that's so i guess that's the biggest thing that

that uh the assumption that extreme behavior is inherently bad have you have you been in any situations where you almost went off the reservation likes any kind of compromising like i imagine traveling makes it a little trickier right like have you been anywhere where you just almost quit or gave up yeah in that first couple of weeks yeah every day yeah but uh yeah since then i have had a few times where i've not been prepared and uh and i've been out without potatoes and and haven't been able to find anything and i've i've not really got to the point where i was ready to eat something else but i have got like angry about the situation and annoyed with myself and

been in a really bad mood and like if you to you let me ask sorry to interrupt again that's all like you know an argument would be well why don't you just go grab a bunch of bananas you know like who's who cares it's it's it's still super healthy yeah it's not a potato but like it's not like you really cheated or anything like that but yeah i know for myself that if i once i break a rule it just becomes so easy to break it again like it's i may not break it the following day i may not break it for another couple months but i know that i already broke it and so it just it's like the integrity of that mission has been compromised on some level and and it's like the foundation there's a crack in the foundation yeah yeah exactly i couldn't really say it any better it's like i'm not going to argue

that bananas are unhealthy nutritionally that would have been a great choice but this is not about nutrition for me this is about my my state of mind and my relationship with food and it's about um it's just about being in total control over my relationship with food and then I need to be in total control and next year once I finish this yeah that that's what I'll do I'll go and get a bunch of bananas and eat them but it's really important to me to get through this year and and really prove to myself that I control the food the food doesn't control me and that's that's that's where it's at for me yeah right so so where are you going to take like you're going to you're going to finish the year and then yeah then I'll work back towards a whole food plant-based diet you're

coming up on that I mean it's coming up pretty soon yeah does it freak you out to to kind of go back to transitioning into a more diverse yeah freaking me out so probably the probably not the right way to say it but it is something that i think about it's um like i'm not i'm not worried that i'm gonna go back to the way that i was eating before because my mindset around food is totally different to what it was it's um i don't think about food in the same way anymore and i'm not saying that i'm totally cured i think like i've heard you say on your podcast that you consider yourself to still be an addict you're just one that's not drinking and i i feel like i'll be the same way with food and um and it's something i've just got to be

mindful of forever but i i've learned the tools that I've learned from this year can easily be applied to the next situation. I've got a very narrow rule now and I'll just expand the rules. And I feel like, yeah, I've got what it takes to make that work now. But yeah, it's going to be fun. I've got a party planned for the 1st now and um but yeah it's gonna be fun i've got a party planned for the first of january so well i haven't fully planned it yet but yeah we're gonna what are you gonna eat i don't know um i don't know how many people are gonna show up for a breakfast party on new year's day after having partied new year's eve but yeah i might be surprised yeah i don't actually i don't to be honest i really don't care what my first meal

is as long as it's whole food plant-basedbased, no oil, no salt, no sugar, that sort of thing, then I'll be happy to eat it. But yeah, there's really not any food that I've missed or have been like, I can't wait to eat that again or whatever. It's just... Have you been in some kind of funny social situations that you had to navigate as a result of this choice? Yeah, it's not been that hard, but yeah, I have to navigate as a result of this choice uh yeah it's

not been that hard though but yeah i have been to dinner a couple of times where i've just sat and had a drink while everyone else had dinner bring your own potatoes like if we're going to a restaurant i don't want to bring potatoes in with me but most of the time restaurants can make me potatoes it's no trouble but there have been a couple of times where i've sat in the car park eating my potatoes and then gone in and sat down with everyone and had a drink and then have some more after but nothing too bad I've been to a wedding where they they specially made me some potatoes and yeah in a way it helped because like I said I was keeping this a secret well not really a secret it was on YouTube but I wasn't publicizing it and telling all of my friends.

It was just something I was doing on my own. And then when it all got out... Well, now you're the potato guy. It's like everyone's going to accommodate you. Yeah, yeah. So I can ring a restaurant and say, hey, I'm the potato guy. Can you make me some potatoes? And they know who you are?

Yeah. Is it at that point now? Yeah, not everyone knows, but most of the time if I ring a restaurant, like, do you watch the news? I've been on the news'm the potato guy and i'm i want to come for dinner oh great we'll make you some potatoes it's it's easy yeah people get freaked out about the social stuff but 99 of it is pretty manageable which is a little bit of kind of uh you know some social graces yeah and i was worried about it i, you know, my friends would just give me some shit

and make fun of me and whatever for it. Well, I hope they did, right? Isn't that Australian culture? Yeah, yeah, yeah, they did. They did, but, like, yeah, they didn't really, like, it was only, like, lighthearted stuff and just some lighthearted jokes here and there. But I really, I thought it would be much worse than it has been.

I thought, yeah, I'd just, I'd get a lot of grief for it but it's been good people have been really supportive and I think um once people understood that how important this was for me and I don't think anyone around me really knew what my relationship with food was like and how much pain it caused me and and i didn't it's not something i talked about with people it was um but yeah once it all got out and um and i had some honest conversations with friends and they really um they understood that this was something i really needed to do and and it was a mental health thing as much as anything that yeah the joke sort of stopped and people just wanted to help me get through it and uh yeah it's a great it's been a crazy year for you i mean 10 months from 334 pounds or whatever it is and and living you know an anonymous you know living just living your

life like an average dude to being somebody who's been written about for the today show you've been on the doctors yeah you're you're the daily man like all these newspapers are writing to being somebody who's been written about for the Today Show. You've been on The Doctors. You're the Daily Mail. Like all these newspapers are writing about you, and you really are like the potato guy. Like you're an international superstar for doing what you're doing. I mean, what do you make of that?

I mean, to go back and look at your first video and fast-forwarding to now, I mean, obviously you could have never imagined or predicted that it would create this kind of trajectory for yourself, but like, how do you wear the mantle now? Like what, what do you, like, what do you think about this journey that you've been,

you know, that you've been blazing? Yeah, it's really been incredible. It's, it's been the most, the weirdest year of my life by a long way, but yeah,

also one of the, probably the best year of my life. It's been the weirdest year of my life by a long way, but also probably the best year of my life. It's just been an incredible year, and the support that I've had has been amazing. I just feel like now, like I said earlier, thousands and thousands of people have emailed me for help over the year, and I've spent hours every day answering emails, and it just feels so good to be able to help people. Everything that I've improved in myself is really great.

I would never play that down. It's been awesome. But to be able to use this year to help so many other people then deal with their food addiction issues and lose weight and get healthier. their food addiction issues and lose weight and get healthier and and you know people have written to me that they've cured diabetes because of uh because of doing potatoes only for a period of time or they've they've cured their arthritis or you name it i've had emails from so many different people that have cured health issues from taking some time out from food and eating only potatoes for a little while and um yeah i just i really want to um use this platform that i've now got to try to just help as many people as possible as just there's nothing

cooler than being able to wake up in the morning and check my emails and there's five emails or six emails from different people that i've helped and yeah that's that's just the best thing so i really want to so do you think you'll you to, uh, turn this into like a professional endeavor of like coaching people or like, how do you envision this playing out? Yeah. How do I envision it? I'm not even going to try to envision anything after. But I mean, of course you're thinking about, I mean, you're in a position now where you, you know, with all these people and all this attention you're getting that you really could convert this into a vocation that can support your family and help people at the same time. Yeah, exactly.

And really, like when I say like carry that mantle, like you're, you know, it's a privilege. Absolutely. And as somebody who's been doing this a little bit longer than you in a different way, I could tell you it's incredibly satisfying to be doing this kind of work. And, you know, I would love to see you, you know, really carry that and own that and convert what you have going on into a way to, into a platform where you really can help people in a really substantial way. Yeah, well, yeah, I do. I want to, I want to do that. I want to, I love it. I love spending my time helping i do i want to i want to do that i want to i love it i love spending my time helping people and i want to yeah make it my career as you said and like i've written a book um it's called the diy spud fit challenge so and it's um i got it right here yeah

i brought a cover your head actually looks like a potato yeah yeah i say i've often said that uh just as a obviously just a joke but i just decided to choose the food i looked most like and eat that for a year but uh but yeah so that's like the first half of the book is uh a lot of the stuff we've talked about about the things i've done to um to uh beat cravings and and to change the way i think about food and then the second half of the book is my wife has uh got a little bit creative because like i said i ate pretty boring but people don't want to buy a recipe book that just says boil some potatoes and eat them so so she got a little bit creative and made some interesting recipes in the back and um

yeah so i guess that's the start of maybe uh yeah turning this into my career and uh that's that yeah you can get that through my website or on kindle or ibooks but um yeah i do want to do more coaching as well i had a little i've dabbled in coaching already i've helped a few people but uh i've stopped doing that for the moment because i really i don't know how i want that to work but i will get back into that at some point and uh and i've i've got a group online uh which i've been coaching as well which uh yeah there's there's about 400 people that i'm i'm helping through a through a facebook group and um yeah that's been really cool too some of the stories that i've uh and the

feedback i've got from people in that group has been just amazing and it's uh yeah it just it makes everything worth it yeah right it's cool well and you got you got some support from from uh some pretty interesting people right like you finally got to meet uh your hero john mcdougall this is kind of the next source conference right yeah and he's been very supportive of of your journey and he appeared with you on the doctors you guys both appeared virtually on that show, but yeah, but that's good.

That's pretty cool that, you know, he sort of, uh, got your back. Yeah, it is. It's really cool.

And yeah, I met him yesterday. It was a, it was a cool moment. I got to sit down with him and, uh, and do a short little clip for my YouTube channel of, uh,

having a chat with him. And yeah, I met some other amazing people like, uh, Neil Barnard was there and, and his, I read his book about reversing diabetes, which I don't have any diabetes issues, but I just like reading about nutrition stuff now.

And yeah, Alan Goldhammer, I love his book, The Pleasure Trap. So it was cool to meet him. That's Doug Lyle. Doug Lyle and Alan Goldhammer. Yeah, they wrote that book together. Right, right. Yeah, they wrote it together. Yeah. Yeah, so Doug Lyle wasn Doug Lyle and Alan Goldhammer. Yeah. They wrote that book together. Right. Right. Yeah. They wrote it together. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah, Doug Lyle wasn't there, but Alan Goldhammer did

a great talk yesterday as well. And I got to meet him and, uh, and chef AJ as well, which is also really cool. Another food addict who, uh, I heard her on your podcast too. And that was, uh, a really cool thing. And yeah, I'm actually going to have dinner with her tonight so you are cool yeah yeah so it's uh and you're hanging out with jeff nelson and his family yeah so it was jeff nelson ran the veg sauce expo and this all came about the reason i'm in la in the first place was because uh jeff had a competition on youtube for a youtuber to win uh a trip to la to go and cover the veg sauce expce Expo on their YouTube channel. So I entered that and I didn't win. Who won that?

Klaus, who runs the Plant Based News channel. Not the vegan cheetah? No, he was there too. He was there though. Yeah, I hung out with him. He's a cool, yeah. I watched a bunch of his videos. Yeah, I didn't know what to think about him before I went there.

He's a character. Yeah, I thought he's not really my kind of guy, you know. I'm not really into gossip and that sort of thing. But I hung out with him a fair bit over the weekend. He's a cool dude, man. It was really cool to hang out with. A lot of drama. A lot of vegan drama on YouTube.

Yeah, there is. And that's something I didn't really know a lot about. I stay away from that. Yeah, I do too. But he's got an interesting perspective on it he did a talk at the festival and we gave a talk to yeah and it really uh at the very least it'll make you think about if you get the chance to watch the talk it'll make you think about the value of gossip and drama that there is a place for it i'm not still i don't think it's something that i'm going to get heavily

involved in or like a lot of people do but still it's an interesting perspective and yeah he was a cool guy to hang out with and yeah anyway i entered that competition to to come to win the trip and i didn't get it and one of my followers said hey you should crowdfund the trip and we'll all chip in money and we'll get you there and i just like i hadn't made a dollar out of this but at that point in time and i just thought that's a weird thing who's going to pay for me to come to la that's so yeah and then i said that's awesome yeah so he sent me a link uh to go fund me i thought i can't hurt to put it up so i did it and raised the money in two days so yeah so here i am yeah so i just i'm really thankful to all of my uh supporters that have that have kicked in to get me here

because I'm having the time of my life meeting all these guys. Yeah, there's a lot of great – I spoke at that event. It's been a couple of years, but I love Jeff. Yeah, Jeff said, yeah. Yeah, I love Jeff. He's a great guy, and what he's doing is a great service, bringing all those people in and hosting that thing every year. Yeah, it was a real life-changing event, being able to sit and listen to all these amazing people and absolutely thing every year yeah it was a it was a real life

changing event being able to sit and listen to all these amazing people and meet them and talk with them personally and uh and yeah there's so there were so many great speakers there that are doing amazing things and providing the service and yeah just getting the message out there of good health and it was just such a positive vibe in that place just to be surrounded by so many people that just just want to help each other and help the world get healthier and yeah it was just a really cool place to be well you got to move to the u.s you can go to conferences like that all the time i have i have had that idea oh yeah yeah just this weekend i was thinking i want to do this more often i can do this like once a year

at home but next week actually there's a the world vegan day in melbourne which is a pretty big event and uh and i'll be speaking there but then i gotta wait until next year for that again right did you speak at veg source no so not officially there was a on saturday night they had a little bingo fun game and i just i a little 10-minute talk before that. But, yeah, that was cool. It was fun, and I got a lot of good feedback from that talk. But if you sign up through VegSource to get the downloads of all the speakers, you won't get me.

They're not putting you on the YouTube? No, that was just a little fun thing I did. And you're going to keep up the YouTube channel, yeah? Yeah, yeah, I'm going to keep it going and I'm going to uh next year I'll I'll be able to I can't really talk about how to transition off potatoes because I haven't experienced it so I think that'll be an interesting thing to do and look at uh and you know share with people how I deal with food addiction when I go back to a more inverted commas, normal way of eating. And yeah, I'll just document my journey

and hopefully keep helping people get healthy, yeah. Well, there's a vibrant vegan community in Australia for sure. Yeah, yeah. The podcast listenership there is pretty big and so I would imagine there's tons of stuff that you can do locally. Yeah, and I've got all sorts of ideas of things I want to do. I would love to at some point have a retreat where people can come and hang out with me for a week and eat only potatoes.

A spud treat. Yeah, yeah, something like that. Yeah, so maybe something along the lines of the retreat that you do where I'm just, yeah, we'll do a lot of lectures and education on healthy eating and on addiction and have a week where people can try to escape the vicious cycle and hang out with me and eat potatoes and see if we can help change some relationships with food that way. That's an idea at the moment. It's not anything organized, but I think that would be a cool thing to do too. Yeah, very cool.

Well, we're going to, like we were talking about before the podcast, we're going to be in Australia. End of February, we're doing our retreat in Western Australia, south of Perth. South of Perth, right? Yeah. But after that, we're planning on going to melbourne and sydney and we're trying to line up some events or something you know something cool that we can do

in those cities to cultivate community and we have a couple people like trying to yeah you know putting feelers out you know if we have to set up our own event maybe we'll do that i was going to say that i'm sure you wouldn't have any trouble filling a room of people uh there's a lot of a lot of rich roll fans in australia yeah it'd be cool but if we end up doing that maybe you can uh come out and share your story yeah i'd love to yeah that'd be cool cool man all right man i think we did it yeah i think so how do you feel i feel great this is this has been awesome why don't you leave us with uh well there's two things i want to ask you before we totally wrap it up. I mean, the first thing would be, that's kind of how I end a lot of these podcasts,

with just something that you can share for the person out there that's really struggling, that is in that cycle that took you so long to figure a way out of. Like they're in that rubber banding, I want to eat healthy, maybe I want to be plant-based. I do it for a while and I go back and i just can't get a grip on it like what kind of advice or inspiration can you impart to that person yeah well that's a that's a tough one because uh it's sort of everyone everyone has a different experience but for me desperate times call for desperate measures you know it just don't be afraid to step way outside the box and do something totally different and really just attack the problem.

Don't be passive with it. Just get after it and go all out. You know, put all your chips on the table and just really do something big. And also I think it's really important to uh to just embrace simplicity it's just such a simplicity is such a powerful thing and uh yeah you're very you're a minimalist yeah yeah minimalism is uh yeah it's something i have explored a little bit in other areas of my life but i never thought about it with food until this year and yeah i really think just taking away that

those decisions is a is a big thing yeah cool and if you had to boil down your message to like one sentence like what is at the very core of what you're trying to convey yeah just stop worrying about um what you need to eat for nutrition i guess it's just it's simple yeah you can you can get everything you need to eat for nutrition i guess it's just it's simple yeah you can you can get everything you need from a potato all right now well you guys a perfect way to end it thanks so much thanks so much for having me it's an honor yeah it's super fun i really appreciate uh you being so open about this and it's fascinating man and uh i'm i'm proud of you and i wish you the best of luck.

And if there's anything I can do for you as you continue to kind of blaze this path, consider me a resource, man. I'd love to help you. Thanks, Rich. I appreciate it. I'd love to be able to see you a year from now with Wingspread and helping as many people as I know you're capable of helping. Thanks so much. It's an inspiration. And you're an example of a different way of living,

and it's cool to see you making it work and impacting so many people. So congrats for that. I appreciate it. I appreciate everything you do too. There's countless lives are better for having you in this world and everything you do. So yeah, same goes, man.

And I look forward to seeing you in Melbourne in February. All right, man. Thanks. We did it. Peace. Plants. And spud up. do so yeah same goes man and i look forward to seeing you in melbourne in february all right thanks we did it yeah peace plants and spud up potatoes all right a shout out put some wind in his sails on the internet, on Twitter, leave a comment on one of his YouTube videos. And let's let this guy know that we support him as he culminates, as he's about to finish this crazy one year potato journey. As always, please make a point of checking out the show notes at richroll.com on the episode page. Lots of links to take your experience of Andrew beyond the earbuds. And as always,

thank you for sharing the show with your friends and with your co-workers and your family members around the water cooler. If you have a moment, it would mean a lot if you left us a review on iTunes.

Only takes a minute. And again, click that subscribe button. We have an Amazon banner ad that you can find on every episode page on my website. If you click that for your Amazon purchases, we get credit for that. Amazon kicks us some loose commission change. It doesn't cost you guys anything extra,

but as we're going into holiday season and people are going to be making purchases on Amazon, it's a really great free way for you guys to support the Rich Roll podcast without having to go out of pocket. So I appreciate that very much. People have made a habit of that. If you do want to support us even further, we have a Patreon and you can find that banner also on every episode page on my site. If you guys would be interested in hearing from me on a weekly basis by way of

email, I have something called roll call. Every Thursday I send out a short blast with like five or six recommendations, things I've enjoyed, documentaries, articles I've read, books I'm reading, products that I think are cool, Kickstarters, things like that. Just useful, fun stuff. I'm never going to spam you. And it's totally free. I've been doing it, I don't know, 15 weeks or something like that at this point. And I don't share this information on my blog or anywhere else. So if you want in, just subscribe on my website and totally free. If you want signed copies of Finding Ultra or The Plant Power Way, you can get those

on my website, richroll.com. We also have t-shirts and schwag and stickers and tech tees and all kinds of other cool stuff. So check that out. I also want to thank everybody who contributed to the production of this podcast today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production. Sean Patterson for all his wizardry on graphics. Chris Swan for additional production assistance and also help compiling the show notes and theme music, as always, by Annalima.

Thanks, you guys. I appreciate the love, and I music as always by Anna Lima. Thanks you guys. I appreciate the love and I'm gonna share one last final thought with you. My takeaway from this conversation isn't that we should all stop what we're doing and just adopt an all potato diet. Rather, I think it serves as a reminder of what can be accomplished

when one questions the paradigm, when one steps outside the box and has the courage to really try something new, something radical, something unknown, and perhaps something extreme. And in a culture that prioritizes balance and safety and security above everything, what have we reaped? We've reaped depression and illness and discontentment. So if these emotions are familiar to you, perhaps it's time to question your own paradigm, to seek out your version of Andrew's challenge, if for nothing more than as an opportunity to more deeply connect with yourself, to take control and power over your life and to more deeply connect yourself with who you are, what's important to you,

and how you choose to live in our short, shared time here on Earth. See you guys soon. Peace. Plants. points. Thank you.