Checking in with the all-potato-diet guy

When Chris Voigt ate 20 potatoes for 60 days he lost 21 pounds and gained world-wide media attention for his stunt to prove spuds can be healthier than we think. About a year later, how’s he doing? How much does he weigh?

“No problem asking about my weight,” says Voigt, executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission. “Since last year’s potato feast, I’ve put five pounds back on, so still down about 16 from when I started the diet.”

Last October through November Voigt ate boiled, baked, fried, smashed, and shredded potatoes covered in Tabasco sauce, garlic, thyme, pepper, and paprika.

Voigt recently had a blood test to check his cholesterol. His level started at 211, dropped to 147 at the end of the diet and now is around 171.

“I’m thrilled,” he says, “because I’ve always struggled to keep it below 200.”

He went on the unusual diet to sell the benefits of the potatoes to people who usually associate the starchy food with weight gain and a sedentary life. Nobody calls someone a couch broccoli. They’re couch potatoes. Now he’s trying to sell Washington potatoes to the rest of the world. He returned this week from a trip to Asia where our state partnered with Oregon to promote potatoes.

“It was a great trip,” Voigt says of their stops in Singapore, Vietnam, Macau and Hong Kong. “Our time was split between educating chefs with new techniques to prepare and use potatoes in their dishes, in grocery stores doing cooking demos and samplings, meeting with current and potential buyers, touring various markets to understand a little more about how potatoes are sold, and doing a training for new chefs at a culinary school.”

Of the cities the potato commission members visited, he says Vietnam is “wide open with lots of opportunities.” Washington grows almost 9 billion pounds of potatoes a year, and the industry is worth more than $3.5 billion to the state.

Photo courtesy Washington State Potato Commission