For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too. His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food. The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.
Weren’t we ALWAYS told that calorie counting is the only real way to lose weight?
Hmmm. I guess in a vacuum, I believe this. Low calories and exercise is much different than too many calories and no exercise=====or is it?
Two related tangents: I do think I bought too much into “30 Days on McDonalds” diet that supposedly brought on near death. That couldn’t have been a set up could it?
I’ve read with interest the 2 cases of healthy adult male drivers going off road and getting stuck in winter time. They stay with the car with water but no food. On this zero calorie per day diet they last about 45 days and lose a stead one pound per day. Interesting. I went on the Zone Diet for a few weeks: lost 2/3 pounds per day until I went of vacation and fell off the wagon.
Choices and consequences.
Yup. Don’t exercise that old heart muscle at all. Lungs don’t need too much air passing through either. Atrophied muscles aren’t needed on a couch in mom’s basement.
You’ll be the skinniest dude in the libertarian meatlocker.
Yep, eat nothing but junk food and lose weight.
At the same time, watch your cholesterol count soar so high that you can feel the globs of fat flowing through your veins, your blood pressure will exceed the ability of it to be measured, your blood sugar be so high that you need insulin shots, and your poop to be similar to that of one suffering from typhoid.
You lose eight because you are starving.. there is no ‘food’ in a Twinkie, just junk that poisons you.
Here’s another good experiment to try John… do a Slurpee diet, where you drink nothing but Slurpees for a month. Plenty of calories there… care to guess what you will look like after that month?
-maybe he never heard of “empty” calories.
-s
Just read a little bit more and you discover…
“Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.”
So what did he prove? Not much…. only that eating less made him lose weight… not necessarily for anyone else on that same diet. Metabolisms react to starvation in different ways and extremes. Also, since high sugar diets can lead to diabetes and other problems, don’t be led to believe that only eating sugar is “healthy”.
“Weren’t we ALWAYS told that calorie counting is the only real way to lose weight?” by people who ignore science. Indeed it is one way to lose weight. However, metabolism is complex process. You can eat 5000+ calories on Atkins diet and spend only 1000 … and you’ll still lose weight. A lot. Better yet, you’ll lose cholesterol, particularly bad one (despite eating “evil” meat and fat all the time). A lot. Because we evolved to eat like that for 99.6% of humanoid existence. Those last 0.4% brought along grains we are not designed to consume and need to count calories.
In 1981 IRA terrorist Bobby Sands showed that a reasonably healthy man could last 66 days without food, so 45 days is doable.
I prefer the crystal meth diet.
Eat anything you can find in the gutter, lose a lot weight (and some teeth).
How much of the 27 pounds was muscle weight? And how will he fair long-term?
I just want to know….where I can get that Twinkie recipe book. MMMMMMMMMMMM….
There is more to being “healthy” than just not being overweight. Developing insulin resistance from all that sugar intake over a prolonged period of time sure sounds swell.
I demand a replicated study or this is complete bs. In other news, I am interested in participating in a study regarding the Twinkie Diet.
thats the funny thing about math it works if you bother to do it
like our other favorite subject, climate change; nutrition and weight-loss is far more complex than anything you can fit in an article.
Just another case of everyone being right and nobody agreeing.
To dusanmal: That’s a bunch of nonsense. Our digestive tract is significantly longer than that of any carnivore, which is to enable digestion of vegetable matter and grains. Our teeth are also designed to eat grains and vegetables as well as meat. If you look at any carnivore’s teeth, there aren’t any teeth designed to masticate vegetation. All of their teeth are designed for tearing or crushing bone. If you stay on the Adkin’s diet long-term, you will suffer ill effects to your health due to an improperly balanced diet.
As for this “diet” I believe that the point wasn’t that it was a _good_ diet but that calories are important when trying to lose weight.
What would a strictly mashed-potato diet do to a body? I imagine rickets.
But did it turn him into a HOMICIDAL MANIAC – like Dan White in SF who shot two people to death and then claimed the “Twinkies made me do it!!!” ???
First, Chucks post is the winner of the day. Second, I used to go on a dozen glazed donut diet and lost weight. Only eat a dozen glazed donuts before 200pm and nothing after. My blood pressure and cholesterol shot to the moon, but I lost weight.
# 16 What would a strictly mashed-potato diet do to a body? I imagine rickets.
Don’t think so. Potatoes are actually pretty high in votamin c. Rickets is a vit c deficiency.
Rickets is a Vitamin D deficiency, not Vit. C
It can be treated by just going outside and being exposed to the sun for a good half hour a day.
The human body is not immune to the law of conservation of energy. If your basal metabolic rate is higher than your nutritional intake then you will lose weight.
Atkins diet removes carbohydrate from the diet, your brain only function by utilizing glucose (a carbohydrate) for fuel. If you have less than 130g/d of carbohydrate the brain will suffer and your body will go into ketoacidosis trying to break down triglycerides so it can play with the glycerol molecule to make some glucose while leaving some awesome fatty acids to get oxidized giving you some energy but allowing for a build up of ketones in the body. You piss out a lot fo the ketones because your kidneys go “Holy shit there are a lot of organic acids floating around the blood and it’s starting to screw with all the proteins, we better do something!” and you piss the ketones (and the calories in them) out, effectively losing weight.
Sounds good and all, until you realize having a lowered pH in the blood screws with hemoglobin, albumin, and just about every other protein the body needs to transport oxygen and nutrients.
You don’t see many world class athletes on the Atkins diet for a reason.
#20 common sense – my bad. I read rickets and saw scurvy. I either need to see my optician or stop the Atkins!
#1 – Low calories and exercise is much effective than too many calories and no exercise. BTW, if you want something radical and don’t like winter, try an intermittent fasting diet.