Twinkie Diet

Well, the news is all a twitter today about a subject that dovetails perfectly with my previous post about ampm and the food supplied by  convenience-stores in general. If you haven't as yet heard about it, it is the already infamous "Twinkie diet" that a human nutrition professor from Kansas State University went on for 10 weeks to see if pure calorie counting is what matters most regardless of the nutritional value of the food. Turns out his premise held up, on his "convenience-store diet" he dropped 27 lbs in just two months! For this project the good professor limited himself to just 1800 calories/day eating one of those darling little sugar-packed snacks every three hours instead of meals. To avoid the humdrum of eating the same thing over and over he allowed himself to eat Little Debbie cakes, Oreos, sugary cereal and, not to be left-out, that all time snack food favorite, Doritos. To be sure to not totally disregard some semblance of good eating habits he also took a multivitamin daily along with a protein shake, and to eat his veggies he would either eat a can of green beans (yuk) or about four celery stalks.

The key here is that he cut his calorie intake from about 2600/day to the aforementioned 1800/day, which was following a basic tenet of weight loss and that is to consume less calories than you burn. So he went from 201 pounds down to a slim and trim 174 lbs. His weight is not the only thing that went down. An unexpected result of this experiment was the drop in his bad cholesterol (LDL) by 20%, and an increase in his good cholesterol (HDL) by the like amount of 20%. He also reduced his triglycerides ( that's what your liver turns fat into ) by 39%! Pretty impressive, eh?

Well you'd better think again, impressive results aside, if you are a junk-food junky, and you think this is a validation of your misguided ways, and you can now at last  have your cake and eat it too. This eating regimen may provide the kind of short term results you are looking for to loose weight, but do you really think this is a healthy diet, long term or short term for that matter? I remember hearing a guy on the radio ( I hear a lot of things on the radio in case you noticed ) relating how the carbohydrate diets that were all the buzz, I believe back in the eighties, had wrecked his health. He became diabetic along with a whole host of other nutrition related maladies. He finally woke up, smelled the coffee and began eating well balanced nutritional meals again and reversed his diabetes and rid himself of the other bad effects that were the result of the high carb diet. What are we talking about here with this Twinkie Diet? High carbs, right? It is my considered opinion that this Twinkie Diet is an insane approach to weight loss, not to mention one that would drive a person absolutely bonkers if they were to undertake such a mind numbing food regimen.

So my pronouncement is that the so called "Twinkie Diet" is a DOUBLE-DUMB FOOD CHOICE and not to be tried at home or anywhere else for that matter!

See Tips # 2
and #4