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After reading this, you may want to just toss your cookies

That is, if you’ve undertaken one or more of the currently faddish and enormously profitable “cookie diets” now on the market. The basic pitch is alluring: eat a certain number of our “special formula” cookies each day, and watch up to 10 pounds per month melt away.

The miracle ingredients vary from one brand to another — in one case it’s amino acids, in another it’s soy pulp, which absorbs all the liquids you wash the cookies down with and leaves you feeling full. But in all cases, the cookies are priced as if they were largely platinum: $279 for a 35-day supply of Smart for Life cookies, for example.

The catch, and the reason weight is lost, is that the program limits the dieter to a handful of cookies and just one meal per day, for a total daily calorie load of 800 to 1,200. Limit yourself to that caloric intake, and it matters little what you eat — you will lose weight.

Alas, so few calories will also provide you with such scanty nutrition that you become a prime candidate for gallstones, weakened kidneys, potassium deficiency, dizziness, heart palpitations and eating disorders.

Nutritionists and dietitians are generally critical of the whole diet cookie concept, and make the following points:

• You simply can’t meet your body’s nutritional requirements with a half-dozen cookies and one meal per day, even with vitamin supplements on the side
• To maintain weight loss you must stick to a healthy long-term eating pattern, and cookies plus dinner doesn’t qualify
• Gimmick diets, especially one-word diets, have a deplorable track record over time

So, however attractive the “cookie diet” may sound, it’s almost certainly a waste of time and money. Sorry, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

Think of it as the Really-chewy-cookie-that-you-never-get-around-to-swallowing Diet

Our old friend chewing gum, on the other hand, gets a thumbs-up as a possible weight-loss aid, based on a University of Rhode Island study, which found that after participants chewed sugarless gum in the morning, they reported feeling less hungry and consumed 68 fewer calories at lunch.

Moreover, the simple physical act of chewing boosted the rate at which they expended energy by approximately 5 percent. According to the test subjects, gum chewing also seemed to reduce fatigue and the effort requited to perform tasks.

The study estimates that, between the energy expended and the fact that the chewer isn’t snacking instead, the net effect of an hour of sugarless gum chewing could be a “savings” of 62 calories. Have another stick of Dentyne.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 and is filed under Diet pills, drugs, supplements and devices, Diet programs, Food miscellaneous. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Permalink.