The Crooked Cookie Diet

A friend of mine, Julie Deardorff, the health writer for the Chicago Tribune, recently posted the following as her Facebook Status Update:

Friends, please, please, please stop sending me cookie diet pitches. I'm now begging.

Oh, how I know what she means.

I receive an e-press release for Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet approximately once every 14 seconds.

The twisted logic involved in these pitches include statements such as “[A]pparently 75% of dieters fall off their diets within the first 4 days because they haven't lost any weight; therefore, diets that enable you to lose immediate weight are the most successful.” Intrigued by all the nonsensical, sugary hype, I contacted the PR company (perhaps not coincidentally, the same company that recently presented me with the chance to interview a SCORES stripper) and they set up an interview with  Josie Raper, a woman who lost 140 lbs on the Cookie Diet and landed herself on the January 09 cover of People Magazine's weight loss issue because of it.

Josie told me she had gone from a 240 lbs-size 24 to a size 0 – five sizes smaller than her original goal – all by eating six cookies a day, each alongside a full glass of water, starting within an hour of waking until 4pm. That would be followed by a low-calorie dinner, typically six ounces of chicken and two sides of veggies. Her total calories for the day would hover around 900.

“I was expecting it to taste like a PowerBar but it was pretty tasty. I mean, not a Rice Krispie Treat or tacos from Taco Bell…but they made me full – like they would expand. But they didn’t expand, it’s the proteins.” (Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet promises a “mixture of proteins” derived from “a proprietary amino acid formula” that offers “unusual hunger control per calorie.”)

Taste aside, wasn’t she hungry and tired from working a fulltime job and raising her daughter while subsisting on cookies?

“During the day, I was at work so I didn’t miss food so much. It’s different from a diet pill – those don’t give you that eating satisfaction. The cookies did fill me up – at first, it hard to eat all six cookies! I thought I wouldn’t have enough energy because of the small amount of calories, but I had so much energy.”

Two things struck me about Josie and her Cookie Diet success. First, the ability to live on such a diet. When I asked her if she was prepared to live on cookies for the rest of her life, she didn’t exactly say No. “I don’t know, but for now, it’s convenient. I don’t have to prepare breakfast or lunch. I like to be out and about, don’t like to cook. I grab and go.”

But what about the social aspect of eating, like going out for Sunday brunch with her girlfriends? Or preparing a delicious holiday meal with a loved one? Or making cookies from scratch with her daughter?

Second, the cookies do not taste good. The PR company sent me a huge package and I tried the Oatmeal Raisin, Chocolate and Banana Diet Cookies. They were foul. I’m sorry, but they were. I can’t possibly imagine choking down six of those bad boys spread out over the rest of my years on earth, let alone every day.

Also, they had very little to offer, nutritionally-speaking. I no longer have the cookies (they shipped them to me many months ago) and for some reason am having trouble finding their nutritional content online, but I absolutely remember being shocked that they were low in both fiber and protein. I’d rather eat six Fiber One Oats and Chocolate bars a day – each of them has a third of your daily fiber plus a good amount of protein, and they taste good!

That’s the problem with the Cookie Diet. It doesn’t have to be the Cookie Diet; it’s the Fill-In-The-Blank Diet. You could insert any food noun, from banana to sushi to fudge, and the “diet” would still work, so long as the daily calorie tally was lower than what you burn. You could eat two Hershey’s Bars, a small dinner and eight glasses of water a day and theoretically still lose weight. On that note, I’ve concocted four other Fill-In-The-Blank Diets I’d MUCH rather go on, rather than the Cookie Diet:

The Cadbury Crème Egg Diet
The Whoopie Pie Diet 
The Quaker Oatmeal Diet 
The Challah Back Diet 

What food would you rather eat all day than icky cookies?