Tabitha was the first person to point out the “snack cake dieting” professor to me and since then I have gotten a couple of messages. Well! Let’s take a look.
First of all, here is a link to the CNN article, “Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds.”
Second, he has a Facebook page: Sample diet day with grams and calories here. Here is the discussion board topic “Diet for Fall 2010.” It follows his weight and lipid profile as time passes. I’m much more interested in reading his own words than in reading the CNN report, so let’s take a closer look at that.
This semester I decided to do it as an example for my HN 535 course (Energy Balance). The purpose is to illustrate metabolic, mental, and sociological issues surrounding “weight”. The principle is simple…eat fewer kilocalories than I expend. I have set 1,800 kcals as my goal. The basis of the energy comes from Little Debbie snacks — I eat about 4-5 a day. The other ‘limits’ of the diet include milk (for protein), 1 protein enhanced serviing, veggies ad lib (as long as they are low starch/calorie), sweetened cereal on occassion, 1-2 multivitamins, and 0 calorie caffeinate products (coffee and diet cola).
The choice of “Little Debbie” products was simply to use a recognizable snack that is processed and deemed by most as “junk” food. I have allowed other foods (that is, I have ‘cheated’) so long as they are considered “junk” or deemed by many to be “bad” for one’s health (e.g., I had a Pepsi yesterday morning, loaded with obesity-causing sugar — except I am losing weight). I recently switched from 1% milk to whole milk, as whole milk is deemed to be worse for one’s health.
I think you might be getting the picture of why I am pursuing this exercise. I am not recommending or promoting this approach. I am simply in the process of illustrating that foods deemed to wreck diets, cause obesity, lead to diabetes, etc., do not – in and of themselves – do that.
Sounds like a great idea for teaching. And I commend him, as a scientist, for refusing to stake any firm conclusions on the outcome of his anecdote.
So, let’s see here. What’s wrong with this diet? Well… what can be “wrong with” a diet?
- It can include too many or too few calories
- It can be deficient in any of many different essential vitamins and minerals
- It can be deficient in protein
- It can be deficent in fiber
- It can contain a suboptimal balance of types of fat (but note, nobody actually knows what the optimal balance is)
- It can contain toxic substances
We know how many calories he ingested: his goal was to eat less than he expended, and apparently he managed that. He says he ate vegetables, so presumably got at least some fiber. He drank milk and had a protein supplement, so there’s the protein. He took a multivitamin, which should keep him from getting scurvy (remember, he only wanted to do this for a couple of months). And despite the horrified gasps from mothers, co-op shoppers, and low-carb dieters everywhere, snack cakes do not contain any actual poison.
A key piece of information that you would not notice from the press coverage and buzz, which emphasizes all the sugar: This is NOT so much a high-carbohydrate diet. It is a low-calorie, high-fat diet.
From the Facebook page (emphasis mine), written on day 4:
So, to recap…I am eating about 50% or more of my calories from fat/day (with most of that fat being saturated), I eat mostly junk food (except for veggies & even if they’re fried), I drink whole milk, and take a multivitamin.
I noticed the number “50%.” (Although in his sample diet day it’s only 33%) During my own weight loss period, I also ate about 50% of my calories per day from fat. I’ve seen this number a couple of other times as an amount that led to successful weight loss — I think it turned up in at least one of the anecdotes in Gary Taubes’s book Good Calories, Bad Calories.
So, let me wrap this up so I can start my school day. I am interested in the larger implications for nutrition science, of course, but what are the implications for ordinary people trying to develop a manageable healthful lifestyle, avoid gluttony*, and maybe get to a healthy weight and healthy blood chemistry?
(1) Junk food can be a delicious part of this nutritious breakfast.
You may have psychological reasons why it’s a bad idea for you to have certain foods. I don’t keep saltine crackers around because I can’t stop eating them. Other people feel that way about ice cream, or cheeseburgers, or potato chips. But if this guy can practically live on Little Debbie Snack Cakes and still lose weight, that rather supports the idea that a weight loser can incorporate favorite junk food into her daily routine.
If you are not sure whether it is possible, the thing to do is try an experiment on yourself. Plan two days with equal calories. One day let some of those calories be from a Twix bar. Which day are you happier? Which day do you feel better?
(2) This man carefully counted and controlled total calories.
So did I, when I was losing weight. It’s kind of a pain, and few people will want to keep up the habit after they have lost the weight, but it is a powerful tool for weight loss and weight maintenance if you are willing to take the time and to be honest with yourself.
(2a.) Meanwhile, he ate stuff he found appealing that had plenty of fat in it.
Again: so did I during my weight loss period. I ate what I wanted. I controlled calories.
(3) A snack or meal of junk does not “ruin your diet.”
There is just no excuse at all to say after a slice or two of chocolate cake, “Wow, I really messed up. I’ll start again tomorrow.” Or (this is what I used to do) “Gosh, I just ate a whole lunch of junk. There wasn’t any nutrition there. I better eat a SECOND lunch with some nutrition in it.”
This man ate junk for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What he did, that most of us don’t, is that every day he quit eating food — he quit eating junk AND he quit eating healthy food — before the calorie count passed the limit.
If you want to lose weight, you cannot give yourself a “do-over” every time you eat something that is unhealthy or unsatisfying. You have to get used to saying “Oh well, I will have something better at another meal.”
(4) He went through a period of feeling crappy when he first changed his diet, but the crappy feeling went away.
From the discussion page:
A reporter has already distorted my diet by omitting the phrase “for one day” after stating “his head felt like it was in a vice” — thus, making it seem like I’ve felt bad for the entirety.
I think this is pretty common — the first few days of a new dietary composition cause some kind of biochemical rebellion. Fortunately we are often highly motivated in the first few days of anything, so that can help us get through it. On the other hand, it is all too easy to misinterpret “I feel crappy” as “I feel hungry.”
(5) It’s indisputable that eating fewer calories than you burn causes weight loss. The tricky part for an individual is managing behavior so that you really do eat fewer calories than you really do burn.
And here is where individual psychology comes in. Because what “works” for one person to motivate her, to help control cravings, to keep a sensation of having enough energy, all while she consumes fewer calories than her body needs (face it, dieting IS starvation) — that may not work for another person. This guy was highly motivated to stick to his diet because he wanted to use it to prove an academic point. Oh, and he also measured everything to a degree that some would call “obsessive” and others would call “like a nutrition professor with an entire lab at his disposal.”
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So what’s happened here that confirms my own pre-conceptions?
One good way to lose weight is to:
- carefully control total calories
- while eating stuff you like to eat
- that has plenty of fat in it
- and enough protein to avoid muscle loss
- adding a multivitamin and to avoid deficiencies
- while you are essentially underfeeding yourself.
The only piece of the puzzle that I really believe in that isn’t present here? I believe in pounding the veggies. Professor Haub ate some vegetables every day, but that’s a far cry from the 6-8 servings I try to get daily.
Oh, and one more thing: I suspect this guy of gunning for an Ig Nobel prize, but hey, I respect that!
*[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.
I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.
I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]
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