LITTLE ROCK — Just when we’ve repeated the “eat healthy, lose weight” mantra to the point where we actually might think about heeding it, here comes this story about the guy who lost 27 pounds on what CNN.com called the “Twinkie diet.”
No, this wasn’t some yahoo who decided, on a lark, to hit the bad-food booths at all the fall fairs and festivals.
This was a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University who wanted to test his hypothesis that calorie count - not what you eat, but how much you eat - is the main factor in weight gain or loss.
Mark Haub put himself on a 10-week, less-than-1,800-calorie-a-day regimen more formally referred to as the “convenience store diet.” Two-thirds of the diet was junk food. As in Twinkies, Nutty Bars, Doritos and Oreos (all my longtime personal favorites), as well as sugary cereals. He ate these every three hours in lieu of meals. The rest of the diet consisted of multivitamin pills, protein shakes and adaily dose of veggies.
Guys Haub’s pre-diet size need about 2,600 calories a day to maintain their weight. With the drop to less than 1,800 calories, he went down to 174 pounds from 201 - and a body mass index of 24.9, down from 28.8, a number in the “overweight” range.
And get this: Haub’s other health readings improved, too. His bad cholesterol dropped while his good cholesterol increased; his triglycerides level fell by 39 percent.
Well, eat your heart out, Morgan Spurlock. (Spurlock, if you recall, was the guy who went on the onemonth, fast-food diet chronicled in the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, and whose results were the total opposite of Haub’s.)
The thought of losing weight on Twinkies and Oreos has to be anyone’s idea of heaven - although the folks who are dealing with certain physical conditions and diseases are no doubt having their convenience-store-diet daydreams rudely interrupted by theimage of their scowling doctors, shaking a finger and snapping, “Uh-uh-uh! Don’t even try it!”
And let’s not leave out the woman’s lament: “Oh, yeah, something like that will work for a fat-burning man. Even if I do only 1,200 calories a day, those doughnuts and Nutty Bars are going directly to my fat-storing hips.”
Even Haub doesn’t recommend trying this diet at home. Although the premise of his experiment was proved, he doesn’t have enough information to recommend it.
Nonetheless, can’t you justsee the junk-food commercials now? “Twinkies have been proved to be a source of weight loss when part of a restricted-calorie diet!” And can’t you see the package, emblazoned with the words, “Lose 30 pounds in 10 weeks!”
Somewhere on that package will be a disclaimer such as the one Haub issued himself. But it will be in tiny print, and Twinkie-makers will be betting that the package will be torn open too fast for said disclaimer to be read, letalone heeded.
Ah well. For those of us who wouldn’t try the Twinkie Diet with a 10-week pole, there’s some consolation. It’s the forthcoming, four-day Thanksgiving Weekend Diet, which goes something like this:
On Thursday have some turkey and dressing. Have the sweet potato and/or pecan pie. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, have some turkey anddressing, sweet potato pie and pecan pie leftovers. On Monday, or whenever the leftovers are gone, switch back to those salads. Waste not, want not, and sadly, lose not.
No one can e-mail just one: hwilliams@arkansasonline.com
Style, Pages 55 on 11/21/2010