I’ve seen the Cookie Diet ads many times on morning news. CNBC seems to be sponsored in large part by Slimfast and these Cookie Diet people (maybe they are one and the same, I don’t know).
You’ve never heard of such a thing? There are three of which I am aware: SmartForLife (they are the ones with the CNBC ads), The Hollywood Cookie Diet and Dr. Seigal’s Cookie Diet (watch for a scary-ass photo of Denise Richards holding a cookie to appear on that page).
I have not been watching morning news as regularly as I used to do. After Rick Santelli got the smack-down for his tea party comment, Squawk Box got a whole hell of a lot less interesting. I had forgotten about the Cookie Diet – something that I thought was hilarious until I’d seen the ad so many times that I got ear wormed with their *annoying* little song.
A blog I read regularly, Zeroing In On Health, pointed out a NY Times article criticizing Cookie Diets. ZIOH is the blog of one Charles Washington. He runs an active diet forum of the same name, and it supports Washington’s way of eating: zero carb. He consumes only meat and water – just beef, I think. He and the other folks on there that follow a carnivore approach appear slim, fit and healthy, and I have no doubt that it works, but it is not something I could or would ever do. Charles is smart and interesting, as are a lot of the forum regulars. I’m off topic here, but ZIOH is worth a visit. Anyway…
The gist of the cookie diet is this: eat four to six special cookies per day and one real meal that is low in calories. I suppose it’s easy enough if you like cookies, but it sounds dreadful to me as it resembles nonsense like Optifast where you drink two or three shake meals and then eat a “regular” diet meal. I’m not a big fan of sweet foods generally, and I would feel condemned to consume such things for two meals a day. Yuck.
From the New York Times article:
Dr. Siegal insists that low-calorie diets like his are safe. “I have heard experts say that very low calorie diets are unsafe,” he said. “I have yet to see the first case where anyone suffered the ill effects of a low calorie diet.” That’s not what Diane Pierson thinks. Ms. Pierson, who is in her 60s and lives in Manhattan, tried Smart for Life cookies, which come in chocolate, banana coconut, oatmeal raisin and blueberry last year, and lasted about three days. “I was weak, tired, irritable and hungry,” she said. “I hated it.”
OK, so she was weak, irritable and hungry? That’s pretty much par for the course on a semi-starvation diet. You’re going to be hungry at anything below 1,600 calories or so. It depends on the person, of course, but believe me, if you’re going to induce a calorie deficit through diet and exercise with no drugs or other aids, you’re *going* to be hungry. Again, from the article:
“For weight loss to stick, you have to be able to settle into an eating pattern that you can adhere to over time,” said Suzanne Havala Hobbs, a clinical associate professor at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “That eating pattern needs to provide you with all the nutrients you need while holding calories in balance with the number you expend.
Because they actually believe that you can control what you expend. You can’t, and that’s been known for at least 60 years, but let’s pretend that you can. Conventional wisdom says that a woman should eat a 2,000 calorie diet to maintain her weight. Men can eat 2,400 or so, roughly. If you’re going to create a caloric deficit to move the scale noticeably, just how many calories *can* you eat? Most diets they *do* recommend take you to 1,200 – 1,800 calories, depending on your gender, age and height. Believe me – that’s not something you can maintain for the rest of your life. No matter *how* you lose weight you will have to sort out how to keep it off.
Heck, the Cambridge Diet has been around for at least 30 years and it can take you as low as 415 calories! Of *course* you can’t do that forever. You diet to lose weight, then you transition back to something comfortable for you that does not cause weight *gain*. It’s how any diet works! Oprah famously lost a bunch of weight on Optifast – a 800 calorie diet that replaces two meals with shakes. She gained it back, of course, but she also went right back to what she was doing before (apparently). The post-diet period (maintenance, real life, whatever you want to call it) is hard NO MATTER WHAT. If people are satisfied eating meal replacement cookies and lose weight, more power to them!
Charles says:
Now, the nutritionists of course believe this is a “fad” diet and that the people who do this are totally misguided. But when I think about it, I am surprised these types of things don’t happen more often. The dietary advice is to eat less and move more.
The Cookie Diet is just a trick to get you to eat less and nothing more. I really think that the modern school of nutrition, something that apparently only has one thing to offer (eat less and exercise more) has no room to criticize a cookie diet.
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