After writing about getting started with potato starch, I wanted to follow up with how things were going. As I stated at the end of the article, I stopped taking potato starch after 14 days. I continued to see positive results in days 7 to 14, and really had no reason to stop other than my desire to experiment with my body and digestive system. My goal was to find out how long the benefits of taking potato starch (4 tablespoons per day split into 2 doses) would last once I stopped “the treatment,” or, put another way, the residual effects.
As you can probably gather from the title of the post, things went pretty well for the first 7 days. My bowel movements continued to be solid and on a once a day routine. It wasn’t until after the first week where I started to lose regularity. My diet during all of 2014 has remained constant, low carb paleo from waking until dinner. Post-dinner (which is also post-workout for me) I eat fairly high carb (think Haribo gummy bears, Cadbury mini-eggs, butterscotch ice cream).
The changes in my digestion were subtle. I went from 1 bowel movement a day to 2. The consistently was still firm, but slightly degraded each day. After day 11 I threw in the towel. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice myself to science any longer, but based on my daily progression I expected to be back to pre-potato starch performance levels by around day 14.
So I am currently back on Potato Starch, varying between 2 and 4 tablespoons a day, and that variance is mostly due to forgetting to take the second serving around dinner time. I would say it’s likely that people who have spent more time with resistant starches would be on the longer end of the curve for residual effects, but it’s actually good to see that after only taking potato starch for 2 weeks, that the residual effects measured about half of that time.
I encourage others to tinker with this, especially people who have been on a resistant starch regiment for longer periods of time, to see what their residual effects window are.
