The Cookie Diet

The New York Times had an article about a "Cookie Diet". The premise is pretty simple; you subscribe to a diet program where you get a certain number of little cookies for breakfast and lunch each day, and you pair those up with a "sensible dinner".

The doctor that started the program in 1975 has since started a website called cookiediet.com to sell his cookies in addition to selling them through stores like GNC and Walgreens.

It's just another system, put into a different perspective. The six cookies are roughly 800 calories; you have a light dinner, adding another 500 calories at most, and you end up with about 1200 calories for the day.

When you consider how many calories overweight people are probably taking in on average then it's a no-brainer that they'll lose weight on a 1200 calorie a day diet.

The doctor also sprinkles in some woo-ery in the form of "special ingredients" for protein and health (from his website: "Dr. Siegal’s foods contain his proprietary amino acid mixture that results from the blending of various protein food substances. They satisfy hunger without drugs and help you stick to a reduced-calorie diet.")

Take a step back and strip away the flowery talk; it's a reduced calorie diet.

Would it work? Stick with the program, sure, I don't see why not. You'll also lose weight by not eating a lot, which is essentially what this is.

What if you change this system a little? Say, encourage people to use a system where you assign points to portions of different foods, then sell charts, books, guides, and pre-packaged portions of food with your program's seal on it so people can eat healthy portions without thinking about portion sizes? That would be a sneaky way of getting people to eat fewer calories and lose weight. I'd probably call something like that...I don't know...Weight Watchers sounds good.

The key is the same as others in the field have said, once they strip away the flowery language and other BS. Eat less. Find a system of lifestyle you can live with. Weight Watchers does it by giving a simple point system for people to track and makes a metric crapload of money on the books and guides and foods carrying their logos. Other systems do it with "simple rules" that on one level are easy to follow (don't eat carbs!) but under the surface strip out a large number of calories from your diet (do you know how many calories are in common carbohydrates, especially if your favorite foods are pasta and bread?)

Is it healthy? I'm not a nutritionist. I've read countless times that these system diets usually mean having to supplement with vitamins or increasing certain food types you normally don't such as vegetables in order to make sure you don't have deficits. Others require monitoring or checkups to check your mineral levels in your blood. Generally speaking it's probably not a good idea to cut something out entirely from your diet; your body does require cholesterol and fats along with amounts of all the other things that various fad and gimmick diets vilify.