How Magician Penn Jillette Lost 100 Pounds on the Potato Diet
Penn Jillette can make just about anything disappear, but the famous illusionist performed perhaps his most dramatic (and riskiest) vanishing act on himself. The taller half of Penn & Teller dropped over 100 pounds by adopting an intensely restrictive diet several years ago.
Now the magician is up to new tricks on the duo's CW show. The sixth season of Penn & Teller: Fool Us airs on Monday, June 17 at 8 p.m. ET. The special premiere will feature the legend David Copperfield as the two acts face each other head on.
Viewers might remember a different version of Jillette, however. The 6-foot, 7-inch magician weighed 322 pounds several years ago, when doctors discovered a 90% blockage in his heart. The father of two then decided to take drastic measures to see his young kids grow up. Under medical supervision, Jillette embarked on the "potato diet," eating only plain potatoes for two whole weeks. Why potatoes?
"I picked them because it's the funniest word," he told Good Morning America in 2016. "I could have chosen beans or just almost anything." This arbitrary but restrictive method is what's known as a "mono diet." After subsisting on spuds alone for 14 days, he started phasing in vegetable stews and salads for added variety, but Jillette did not include other important foods groups that provide lean protein and other essential nutrients.
Despite the intense restrictions, the performer stuck to it, losing 75 pounds in three months without exercising until he hit his target weight of 225 pounds. The 64-year-old says the boring menu helped him break bad eating habits he'd fallen into before. "I'm not good at moderation. I wanted to do hardcore stuff," Jillette told GMA in 2016. "I wanted to lose the sense of eating socially ... It was just a way to lose all the habits I had gotten into."
However, this type of extreme diet can pose serious health risks due to its severe limitations. "While there's no doubt that potatoes - just like all vegetables - are supremely nutritious, eliminating almost all other food groups in totality is not only dangerous, but can really backfire," says Jaclyn London, M.S., R.D., Nutrition Director at the Good Housekeeping Institute.
The dramatic changes usually slow down your body's metabolism and result in binging later on, she explains. "While veggie stews and potatoes can be amazing weight-loss allies, it's never good advice to completely eliminate food groups in order to lose weight for the long-term," she says.
For example, subsisting almost entirely on potatoes and veggies would make it extremely difficult to get sufficient protein - an essential macronutient that makes up our muscles, bones, skin, hair, and virtually every other body part or tissue, according to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Jillette eventually transitioned to a more traditional diet that focuses on "whole plants" and adopted a new workout routine after shedding all of that weight. The entire process inspired him to write a book, Presto: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales.
Even though it ultimately worked for him, the potato diet is not the most sensible way to approach weight loss, Jillette admitted to USA Today in a 2016 interview. If you're still tempted to copy this restrictive plan, he has a word for you: "If you’re getting medical advice from a Las Vegas magician, you are making bad life choices."
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