Dr. Sanford Siegal’s face stares out at me on my big box of his Cookie Diet oatmeal raisin cookies. He has the sweet face of a little old man -- your grandfather, perhaps -- but at the moment, I’d like to draw a mustache on it, or worse.
It’s 1:48 p.m. on a Monday, and I’ve just chewed through one of six of the cookies I’m allotted for the day on Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet. Three cookies for breakfast; three for lunch, then a lean protein meal of chicken or fish and a cupful of veggies are my food pickings for the week. At 1:49, I give in and sauté myself some spinach and tomatoes in a teaspoon of olive oil, and pack the cookies away for another stab at the diet the next day.
It’s not that I’m cheating, I’m just hungry. I didn't eat a slab of chocolate cake or anything. What kind of diet says you’re cheating by eating spinach and tomatoes?
The Cookie Diet has gotten a lot of national attention over the years -- Siegal is a South Florida physician who specializes in hypothyroidism and weight loss. In 1975, he created his cookies in his home kitchen with a secret blend of amino acids designed to curb hunger.
“People blow their diets because they get hungry and eat things that cause them to be fat,” Siegal told me in an interview before I decided to try the diet. “This blend of amino acids actually helps curb hunger.”
Really? ‘Cause I was feeling pretty hungry right around 1:47. I had eaten three cookies for a late-ish breakfast with a large glass of water as recommended, but by lunchtime, I wanted real food. And not just because I was hungry, but because frankly, Dr. Siegal’s cookies don’t exactly taste like Mrs. Field’s.
“They taste like a slightly spicy sponge,” my daughter offered as she promptly spit the bite she just took of one into the garbage. I can’t argue -- they don’t taste very good at all. Maybe I should have bought the chocolate chip-flavored cookies instead. But at almost $70 a box (which is a week’s supply of 42 cookies), I couldn’t afford another flavor.
“Isn’t successful weight loss about changing habits and lifestyle?” I ask Siegal, who was on the phone from his South Florida home. True confessions: I’m an anorexic/bulimic who’s been in recovery for nearly 30 years, and really never go on diets. I don’t even own a set of bathroom scales. I’m also not overweight -- but after a long winter and some minor surgery that kept me out of the gym, I was feeling a little heavier than usual and wanted to get back on track.
“You don’t think reducing your diet to 800 to 1,000 calories a day is lifestyle change?” comes his answer, going against the grain of everything I learned in Overeaters Anonymous. There, I was taught that highly restrictive caloric intake for someone like me leads inevitably to binge eating. Eating regular, healthy meals and exercising regularly are the best ways to maintain proper weight.
"Let' s face it, you can lose weight on an all-sugar diet if that's what you choose to do," said Elizabeth Somer, a registered dietitian and author of "Eat Your Way to Happiness" (Harlequin, $16.95, 2009). "It's keeping weight off that's the issue for most people."
Somer's book touts lifestyle and habit changes to help do that, particularly exercising and eating properly -- sticking to a low-calorie diet free of highly saturated fats and what she calls “junk” carbs.
“Carbs are not a bad thing,” explained Somer, “they just need to be high-quality carbs like whole grains, and they need to be eaten in the proper portion size. We eat truckloads of cruddy carbs and fat.”
She explained that when serotonin levels in the brain get too low -- and they can plummet if a diet is too low in good carbs -- then eventually our brain chemistry is going to make us crave starchy things.
“Our brain chemistry hasn’t changed that much from 8,000 years ago when we needed to pad ourselves with extra weight to survive lean times,” Somer said in a phone interview. “But in modern society, we don’t have those lean times; we just still pad with our cravings of sweet and creamy. The idea is to override our animal brains -- don’t even bring those foods into the house.”
So all the latest research is basically telling us what we’ve known all along: There is no quick cure to weight loss. The best way to get well is to not get sick in the first place, and one way to not get sick is to maintain proper weight by eating healthy meals and exercising regularly.
As for me, I tried Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet for a few days and lost — a few pounds, maybe, and a few days of sanity. Being hungry makes me grumpy.
And I’ve got an expensive box of unappetizing cookies to prove it.
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