Why do bodybuilders eat rice instead of potatoes?

Rice packs more calories into less food and has almost no fiber, so it's easy to eat a lot of it. That's a plus when you're bulking, eating carbs around training or batch cooking. On a cut, the same traits make it the weaker pick.

Is it okay to replace rice with potatoes?

Yes. To keep calories the same, swap 1 cup of cooked rice (158g, 205 calories) for about 236g of boiled potato. To eat a little less, swap the same weight and save about 68 calories. Either way, log the state you weighed: cooked rice and boiled potato, not dry rice or raw potato.

What's the worst carb for belly fat?

No carb targets belly fat, and no carb removes it. Belly fat comes off as your total body fat drops in a calorie deficit. The carbs that make that harder are the calorie-dense ones you overeat, like fries or rice cooked in oil, not any single food.

Is 2 potatoes a day too much?

No. Two medium baked potatoes (about 173g each) are roughly 320 calories, which fits a 1,900-calorie fat-loss target with room to spare. The butter, oil and toppings are what push them over, so measure those.

Potato vs Rice for Weight Loss (Gram for Gram)

For weight loss, potatoes beat rice, but not because rice is fattening. Gram for gram, a boiled potato has 87 calories and cooked white rice has 130. So 200 calories buys you about 230g of potato or 154g of rice. In Holt's 1995 satiety index, boiled potatoes scored 323 and white rice scored 138. Rice isn't bad. It just costs more calories per bite.

I made a reel on this with the caption "I'm rocking with potatoes every time." That's a preference backed by numbers, not a ban on rice. Here's the math, the studies (and who paid for them), and the cases where rice is the better pick.

Potato vs rice: which has fewer calories?

A boiled potato has about a third fewer calories than the same weight of cooked white rice. Here's 100g of each, from USDA FoodData Central:

White rice, long-grain, cooked (FDC 168878): 130 calories, 28.2g carbs, 0.4g fiber, 2.7g protein, 35mg potassium, no vitamin C, 68% water.
Potato, boiled in the skin (FDC 170438): 87 calories, 20.1g carbs, 1.8g fiber, 1.9g protein, 379mg potassium, 13mg vitamin C, 77% water.
Potato, baked with the skin (FDC 170093): 93 calories, 21.2g carbs, 2.2g fiber, 2.5g protein, 535mg potassium, 9.6mg vitamin C.

Spend 200 calories and you get about 154g of rice, 215g of baked potato or 230g of boiled potato. A full pound of cooked rice is about 590 calories. A pound of boiled potatoes is about 395.

The carbs are almost the same. Per 100 calories, rice gives you 21.7g of carbs and boiled potato gives you 23.1g. The potato isn't a low-carb food. The difference is water. A potato is 77% water and cooked rice is 68%, so each bite of potato weighs more and costs less. The potato also has about 4.5 times the fiber per gram.

One logging note: these are cooked numbers. Rice ends up about 2.8 times heavier than it starts, so if you weigh it dry and log it as cooked, most of the calories go missing. Here's whether to weigh food raw or cooked.

Which keeps you fuller, potatoes or rice?

Potatoes, and by a lot, at least in the hours after a meal. The best-known evidence is Holt and colleagues' 1995 satiety index. They fed groups of 11 to 13 people 240-calorie servings of 38 foods, rated fullness for two hours, and scored each food against white bread at 100. White rice scored 138. Boiled potatoes scored 323, the highest of all 38. Fullness tracked water, fiber, protein and serving weight, which is the whole idea behind high-volume, low-calorie foods. Barbara Rolls makes the same case in a 2017 review on energy density.

Three meal studies put potatoes against rice directly:

Erdmann 2007. 11 people ate potatoes, rice or pasta with a 150g pork steak until they were full. They ate about the same weight of food each time, but fewer calories with potatoes, and they didn't make it up at the next meal. The limit: fullness faded in the fourth hour after potatoes, while it held for the full 4 hours after rice.
Akilen 2016. Children aged 11 to 13 ate meat with mashed boiled potato, white basmati rice, pasta or fries. With mashed potato, they ate 30 to 40% fewer calories at the meal than with any of the others.
Amr 2024, Journal of Nutrition. 26 healthy adults ate a fixed portion of meatballs (or a plant version) with as much baked fries, instant mash or white basmati rice as they wanted. With either potato, they ate 23 to 25% fewer calories at the meal, and 13 to 16% fewer in total once a pizza meal two hours later was counted. Each test was a single morning in a lab.

Three of the potato studies in this article (Akilen, Amr and the Rebello trial below) took money from the Alliance for Potato Research & Education, a potato-industry group. And I couldn't find a single trial that put people on potatoes vs rice for weeks and measured fat loss. So the verdict rests on the USDA numbers. The short studies support it. They don't prove it.

Are potatoes good for weight loss?

Yes, as long as you don't cook them in fat. The longest trial is Rebello 2022 in the Journal of Medical Food. 36 adults with insulin resistance and a BMI of 25 to 40 ate lab-made meals for 8 weeks at about 1 calorie per gram. One diet was built around potatoes, the other around beans. The potato group lost 5.6% of body weight and the bean group lost 4.1%, and the gap wasn't statistically significant. Note what it compares: potatoes and beans, not rice. It shows a potato-heavy diet can lose weight. It doesn't show potatoes beat rice.

The trap is how you cook them. A tablespoon of oil is about 120 calories. Toss 230g of boiled potato in one and your 200-calorie side is now about 320. Do that at two meals and you've spent about half of a 500-calorie deficit on oil. Boiled, baked, or air-fried with a spray keeps the advantage. Fries and a loaded baked potato are different foods.

And no carb burns belly fat. It comes off as your total body fat drops, which is why losing belly fat after 30 comes back to the deficit.

Doesn't the glycemic index make potatoes worse?

On paper potatoes score a little higher, but the glycemic index (GI) isn't a fat-loss ranking. In the international GI tables (Atkinson 2008), boiled white rice scores 73, brown rice 68, boiled potato 78 and instant mash 87. French fries score 63, lower than a boiled potato, because the fat slows digestion. If GI decided fat loss, fries would beat boiled potatoes. The Akilen authors reached the same conclusion: you can't judge what a carb does at a meal by its GI alone.

GI also moves with how you serve the food. Fernandes 2005 measured boiled red potatoes at a GI of 89, and the same potatoes eaten cold at 56. Rice does the same thing. In Sonia 2015, white rice cooked, chilled for 24 hours at 4°C and reheated went from 0.64 to 1.65g of resistant starch per 100g. The blood-sugar response in 15 adults dropped from 152 to 125.

Cooling changes the blood-sugar curve, not the calories in any way that matters. One extra gram of resistant starch per 100g of rice is a rounding error on your log. Meal prep because it's easy, not because it's a trick.

Why do bodybuilders eat rice, then?

Because sometimes you want more calories with less fullness, and that's where rice wins. The traits that make potatoes great on a cut make them a chore on a bulk.

Bulking. At 3,000-plus calories a day, fullness is the problem. A pound of rice is about 590 calories. Getting that from boiled potatoes takes almost a pound and a half.
Carbs around training, or a touchy gut. Rice has almost no fiber (0.4g per 100g), so a big serving sits light.
Batch cooking. A rice cooker makes a week of carbs with no chopping.

Brown rice doesn't change the cut math much. It's 123 calories per 100g with 1.6g of fiber (FDC 169704). That closes the fiber gap, not the calorie gap: it's still about 40% more calories than boiled potato.

How I eat my carbs (and the swap math)

Rice isn't bad, but I just default to potatoes. Most of my carbs come from potatoes and fruit. My reasons are the ones from the reel: they're more satiating, they're more volume, you can cook them different ways, and there's a bunch of different kinds. I would just, in every case, rather have potatoes than rice. I'm 37, I work full-time as a software engineer, and I went from 285 lbs to about 200 at 8–10% body fat, which I maintain year-round. Rice and potatoes are both on my list of what to eat to lose fat and gain muscle.

If you want to try the swap, run it one of two ways:

Match the calories. 1 cup of cooked white rice is 158g and 205 calories. About 236g of boiled potato gives you the same 205 calories on a plate that's half again as heavy.
Match the weight. Swap 158g of rice for 158g of boiled potato and you save about 68 calories.

Be honest about that second number. Once a day, it's about 475 calories a week, or roughly 0.14 lb of fat at 3,500 calories a pound. That's small. The real lever is fullness: more food for the same calories makes a deficit easier to hold.

The rest is the boring part. Maintenance is about your bodyweight × 12, and a fat-loss target is maintenance minus 500. Here's how big of a calorie deficit to run. Make the swap, log it, and watch your 7-day average weight for two weeks before you judge it.

The potato meal I build around is meal 1 in the free 200g Protein Blueprint: 4 scrambled eggs and 300g of air-fried potatoes, the breakfast I eat almost every morning.

I'm rocking with potatoes every time. Are you team potatoes or team rice?