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I appreciate the New York Times’ coverage of the cookie diet. The normal problem with crash dieting is that you inevitably go through periods of obsession with denied foods, then cheating on the diet, and then eventual reinvigoration of the original diet in an effort to punish yourself for cheating. Cookie diets (more accurately, “puck of random undisclosed shit” diets) are brilliant, because they take the whole process and wrap it up into a cohesive, yet insanely expensive package. The very food you obsess over is the food you’re asked to eat - because they’re cookies! - and so the inevitable failure of the diet is the diet itself.
And you get to pay a ton of money to do it, because otherwise you just have an eating disorder.
“I thought, ‘That diet looks so incredibly easy,’ ” said Ms. Kane, 43, a legal secretary in Washington, who started paying $56 a week for the prepackaged cookies in June, when she weighed 255 pounds. Three months later, she was 40 pounds lighter. “If you can make it through the first week you’re in the clear,” she said.
Ms. Kane is one of an estimated 500,000 people who have lost weight on Dr. Sanford Siegal’s diet — at least according to Dr. Siegal. The gist of it is simple: Eat cookies and lose up to 10 pounds a month.
Or, in blunter terms: Consume a substance whose ingredients and nutritional value are somewhat vague and drop weight, because how can you not when you’re only consuming 800 to 1,000 calories a day?
Now, when you think about it, paying $224 a month for cookies as a starvation metric is the perfect counterbalance to (and evidence for) the epidemic of poverty-linked obesity. We push calories lower and lower on the socioeconomic scale, making cheap, calorie-rich food with mysterious ingredients a common dietary staple while creating a separate niche of insanely expensive, calorie-deficient food with mysterious ingredients for people who don’t want to look like they eat the other shit.
Luckily, though, cookie diets function in clear and explicable ways that are not at all reeking of bullshit:
Never mind that there are no clinical studies on any of the diets and that a key ingredient in Dr. Siegal’s cookies — special amino acids, which supposedly curb appetite — is known only to Dr. Siegal and his wife.
“It’s the particular mixture of proteins that does the job,” Dr. Siegal said. “All foods do not handle hunger the same way, and high protein foods curb hunger.” The cookies, he said, contain protein derived from meat, eggs, milk and other sources. They also contain microcrystalline cellulose — a plant fiber that acts as a bulking agent, emulsifier and thickener — and are sweetened with sugar.
While Dr. Siegal is circumspect about some of the ingredients in his product, the people at the Hollywood Diet are eager to share. “There’s nothing magic in ours, it’s all based on the formulation of the protein and the fiber to satisfy your appetite for a relatively low amount of calories,” Mr. Turner said.
The main ingredient in the Soypal cookie is okara, or soy pulp, which absorbs any liquids you drink with the cookies. “To let the okara fully absorb the liquid and expand in your stomach, two glasses or more are recommended,” they note on their Web site, soypalcookiediet.com. “Feeling full is an important part of weight-loss success.”
So, basically, one diet is based on a secret “amino acid” mixture coupled with food thickener, the other is a glorified water diet with 22-calorie cookies as your gorging mechanism. I, for one, am ready to start this thing. Alternately, I may just put some wallpaper paste in bottle of low-calorie Gatorade and sell it for $300 a month. Health!
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Jesse Taylor on 02:01 PM •
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special amino acids, which supposedly curb appetite — is known only to Dr. Siegal and his wife.
This is where I started laughing out loud. Ooooh, do those cookies have electrolytes like Brawndo™, too? ‘Cuz electrolytes sound real healthy n’ sciencey like special amino acids.
One question, though: when’s Dr. Siegal (dressed in scrubs and accompanied, no doubt, by his wife) gonna be on Oprah?
I find 6 hours a week in the gym easier than choosing food correctly, budgeting for proper nutrition while shopping, preparing and fixing ingredients then crying into my specifically chosen wine because I’m eating alone again.
Wait, the cookies contain amino acids? They’ve gotta be special and effective, then; since, as the basic building block of life on Earth, amino acids are only in every single thing we consume except for water & salt.
Why do newspapers like the Times always print puff pieces on what is obviously crap?
“I thought, ‘That diet looks so incredibly easy,’ ” said Ms. Kane, 43, a legal secretary in Washington, who started paying $56 a week for the prepackaged cookies in June,
56 bucks a week? What the hell is in those cookies, gold dust? The cure for cancer? Viagra?
JMPEsq: the answer to that question every time it’s asked is because “someone at the NYT has a friend who’s doing it”.
So, basically, one diet is based on a secret “amino acid” mixture coupled with food thickener,
I thought, by law, that packaged food couldn’t have any “secret” ingredients, even imaginary, pseudo science secret ingredients.
“What the hell is in those cookies, gold dust?”
...oh, there’s gold in them there cookies all right. But it’s all for Dr. Sanford Siegal…
(...BTW, he’s no M.D. He claims he’s a D.O. or Doctor of Osteopathy. Just more woo...)
I must have that cupcake. Where can I acquire it?
Dear NYT,
For the 3,256,943rd time:
DIETS DON’T WORK. THEY ARE BULL$HIT.
One question, though: when’s Dr. Siegal (dressed in scrubs and accompanied, no doubt, by his wife) gonna be on Oprah?
As soon as Oprah drops 20 lbs eating his ‘special’ amino acids...which she will immediately put back on afterwards.
Wait, so is he an osteopath or an American Osteopathic physician. Cuz obviously he’s still a quack, but there’s really no need to smear all DOs like that.
As the saying goes, losing weight is as easy as holding your breath. Keeping it off is as easy as continuing to hold your breath.
All diet mongers thrive on the fact that limited term success is stupendously easy. In a different way, they also thrive on the fact that long term success is virtually unattainable. Plenty of fat people to go around after all. Nearly all of whom bounce from diet to diet never stopping to blame the diets. After all, they *did* lose weight eating cookies. Clearly the diet worked, but they failed. It seems right, so no one ever bothers to ask if it is. Of course, its not. When something fails at a rate above 95%, its long-over due to blame the system. But the system can only exist as long as no one questions if it should exist and they’ve done an exceptional job ensuring that no one does. Even most people who find the diet industry distasteful are still unwilling to question its purpose. They’ll call out the snake oil, but still endorse the sense of a need for that snake oil. A position which accomplishes precisely nothing except to allow people to luxury of feeling moderate and reasonable when the status quo is propped up by their equivocation.
The Cookie Diet is just another version of the Slim Fast plan, with the cookies replacing the shakes. BFD.
I work in the fitness community as a consumer advocate, and even after all these years, it’s tough for me to believe that so many people still fall for these “quick fix” gimmick diets, supps and programs. Can people lose weight on them? Most assuredly… but most simply end up as smaller, “deflated” versions of their former selves, thanks to the muscle loss that inevitably accompanies such short-sighted attempts. And weight regain is a virtual guarantee.
I’m a recreational (natural) bodybuilder, and am quite familiar with the diet/workout strategies that work to get people “lean and mean”. Trust me, this ain’t one of ‘em. Every single lifter I know who’s ever achieved a genuine “six pack” (inc. yours truly) did it the old fashioned way: via a healthy, balanced diet with sufficient calories to support focused training and recovery. Uprooting old habits, establishing new ones and building the foundation needed for long-term success can’t be rushed, and can’t be done on auto-pilot.
A bulk item isn’t a bad plan when you’re switching to a lower activity level, either through intention or restriction (new job, driving, injury, winter).
But it’s certainly not a complete solution. It didn’t get the weight off me, but it helped push me toward the right direction.
I understand the desperation to lose weight. (seriously)
But I don’t understand throwing common sense out the window and giving a bunch of money to a huckster who won’t even tell you what’s in the really expensive cookies that you’re eating.
It makes me sad.
But there will always be hucksters I suppose.
Wait, so is he an osteopath or an American Osteopathic physician.
You’d think you’d be able to find out on his medical group’s Web site, but it’s like that of no other physician I’ve seen—no mention of schools attended, board certifications, hospital affiliations, papers delivered, journal articles, specialist procedures, etc.
However: lots and lots of news clips from the MSM, a blog, and running announcements of live personal appearances and new retail kiosk openings. There are also several lovely photos of the doctor wearing a white coat and stethoscope.
I clicked on the “About” link, hoping to discover professional bios of the doctors involved in the practise—no dice. The “For Doctors” link offered more hope, since this is usually where docs tell each-other about their accomplishments. Alas, it was only a form exclusively “for use by medical professionals who wish to offer Dr. Siegal’® COOKIE DIET™ products in their own medical practices.”
Confidence-inspiring medical site.
If there were any benefit at all to anorexia, I would think it would be not having a grocery bill of over $200 a month.
Special Amino Acids, huh? Lemme guess; phenylalanine and aspartic acid.
Uprooting old habits, establishing new ones and building the foundation needed for long-term success can’t be rushed, and can’t be done on auto-pilot.
Yep. Most people can lose weight, as in if they cut their calories down low enough, they can temporarily lose some pounds on the scale. It’s much, much, much harder to change the habits of a lifetime and, for a lot of people, to learn a completely new way of relating to food. Some days it really is like being an alcoholic when I have to talk myself down from eating a handful of mini Hershey’s bars because (A) no one needs a handful of mini Hershey’s bars and (B) frankly, Hershey’s makes sucky chocolate so obviously I’m not eating them for the taste.
very single lifter I know who’s ever achieved a genuine “six pack” (inc. yours truly) did it the old fashioned way: via a healthy, balanced diet with sufficient calories to support focused training and recovery.
That “sufficient calorie” thing is what gets a lot of people. A couple of years ago I went on a serious weight-loss bender, combined with a pretty intensive weight training program. Once I got into the groove of eating less (and I was overeating), just for the hell of it, I sat down and figured out what I’d actually eaten that day, and was stunned to realize I had basically worked myself down to a famine level of calories and hadn’t actually consciously noticed it. I realized immediately that I was in the process of harming myself and upped my intake considerably to get more balanced.
What caught me by surprise, as I said, was how easy it was for that to happen. After that I gained a new appreciation for people with eating disorder.
What caught me by surprise, as I said, was how easy it was for that to happen. After that I gained a new appreciation for people with eating disorder.
Many people don’t think eating disorders are valid medical issues (not saying you’re one of them Keith). They don’t understand that like with many other destructive behavior it starts out as trying to control the uncontrollable then quickly descends into a debilitating illness. When I struggled with anorexia at the end of my senior year there were still people making those “I want that disease,” or “Just more for the rest of us,” lame ass, cliched jokes. Har Har Har.
What caught me by surprise, as I said, was how easy it was for that to happen. After that I gained a new appreciation for people with eating disorder.
It is, unfortunately, not uncommon for a diet to trigger an eating disorder, even in people who haven’t had problems before. There’s an even higher incidence if you have a propensity towards addiction. So if, say, your mother is an alcoholic (just like her father was) and you never touch a drop, you would still be at risk of developing an eating disorder by dieting. Not because your mother was a horrible mother who caused it (which is how they’ve been treating it), but because you have that biological predisposition to addiction. I actually know someone who developed anorexia after getting sober with AA—she just traded the one addiction for a new one. She did successfully manage to shake both, though, once she realized how similar her thinking was with both.
keshmeshi beat me to it. That cupcake is just awesome.
keshmeshi beat me to it. That cupcake is just awesome.
I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s a real, meaning edible, cupcake or amigurumi. If it’s real, I’m thinking his fur must be coconut shavings died blue. In which case I want to try to make some, then stuff them into my piehole with libdev and kesh.
I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s a real, meaning edible, cupcake or amigurumi.
To my eye, it looks real. (And yummy.) The “fur” is deceptive, but it looks like the eyes are made out of white chocolate and you wouldn’t put chocolate on a fabric.
It’s much, much harder to change the habits of a lifetime and, for a lot of people, to learn a completely new way of relating to food.
This is quite true, and while a few people can manage it solo, strong support and guidance is often needed. I moderate two private forums (one for fat loss, the other for lean mass gains), so I’m uncomfortably aware of how much help many people need when trying to make substantive changes.
And often - ironically - the fitness community is no damned help. Within the group, there are social rewards for who can be the most OCD about their diets and workouts (I see this attitude amongst some of my Facebook “friends” who are wannabe gurus), which leaves the impression that one MUST be obsessive to be successful. Not so…
I don’t know, don’t the differing obesity rates in developed countries with similar demographics (unless you hold that it’s all due to different exercise rates, which seems suspect) imply that diets do work? Of course the ‘cookie diet’ is suspect, but the ‘don’t eat more calories than your body can use’ diet seems to work for many. That’s not to say everyone *should* diet, just that the evidence suggests it’s possible.
Just FYI, since my wife is in training to become a DO…
DOs receive the exact same medical training as MDs, *plus* OMM (Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine). OMM combines physical therapy, ergonomics, and manipulation (like a chiropractor, but with soft tissues as well). OMM can help with pain, repetitive stress, bad posture, lymphatic issues, etc., but unlike chiropractic, it’s directly targeted at the systems which are causing the problem, instead of manipulating the spine to fix everything.
The two other things which differentiate osteopathic medicine are a commitment to treating under-served populations (rural, urban, immigrant - I’m sure Pandagon readers can appreciate the need for this!) and a greater emphasis on whole body health and lifestyle. The DO will prescribe you a pain pill or muscle relaxer for your back, but first s/he’ll try to figure out why it’s hurting and see if it can’t be fixed through therapy, better posture, etc.
DOs do seem to be more susceptible to woo than MDs, maybe because while OMM has developed scientifically over the years, it started out as something at least woo-like. And the students that go into osteopathic medicine tend to be more non-traditional and open-minded than your average MD student. There are a lot of older students, many of whom were in nursing, PT, yoga, athletic training, etc. before returning to school. There is also a lot more focus on family medicine, pediatrics, geriatrics, and other general practice-type professions, rather than on high-salary specialties.
I’d rather have a DO as my GP than an MD. And, in fact, I do.
DOs do seem to be more susceptible to woo than MDs, maybe because while OMM has developed scientifically over the years, it started out as something at least woo-like. And the students that go into osteopathic medicine tend to be more non-traditional and open-minded than your average MD student.
I think another factor is that many patients end up at DOs after going through multiple MDs (if the experiences of the people I know is any kind of representative sample, I’d even say “most"). By the time patients end up at the DOs office, woo might be the only thing they haven’t already tried.
As far as the diets go, I remember some years back a comprehensive survey of research essentially proved that any diet will work for 1 out 3 people; the only variable was whether the patient could live with the diet and stay on it.
In a perfect world, we’d get back to the point where “diet” means the normal stuff we eat everyday.
The cookies, he said, contain protein derived from meat, eggs, milk and other sources. They also contain microcrystalline cellulose — a plant fiber that acts as a bulking agent, emulsifier and thickener — and are sweetened with sugar.
Or you could just eat normal-people meat, eggs, milk, vegetables, and cookies, all of which are conveniently sold by your local supermarket. The only thing they fail to provide over the diet cookies is a new Porsche for the quack doctor.
My husband has celiac disease, and has lost so much weight (after being somewhat over) that he looks like he did when he was 18; in other words, too thin. Because there is a truly limited menu of things he can eat, eating regularly is hard for him, and he has fallen, to his own surprise, into a habit of undereating. Overeating was a function of food pleasure as crutch; without that being available, he is having to fight his mind’s tendency to go too far the other way.
If these diets worked as they say they do, we’d actually have a different health problem, because skinniness is treated like a competitive sport for women, and many of them would end up dangerously underweight.
Every fucking diet con artist talks about “the science of weight loss” but clearly, we have very little fucking clue about how the body actually regulates weight, and almost all of us have really screwed up attitudes towards our eating as a result. I blame the patriarchy, because weight was not considered a Men’s Problem until recently, and since it was Only a Women’s Problem before that, it was perfectly fine to turn it over to snake-oil salesman and speed-dealers.
Eat less, exercise more. One of the few simple things in life. Actually works for most people.
If what you’re doing is called a “diet,” you have already failed.
Eat less, exercise more. One of the few simple things in life. Actually works for most people.
Actually it doesn’t work for “most” people. Especially people who are overweight, meaning the people that are targeted by these diet fads. Exercise can have many health benefits one of them being helping thin people stay thin. But for people that are already overweight exercising does little to help weight loss especially as a person ages. That’s why there are tons of trainers running around trying to convince their overweight clients that the recent Mayo Clinic study isn’t right, or doesn’t apply to them, or they’re just looking for an excuse. The research is showing that what an overweight person eats affects weight loss more than exercise. Also, it’s quality not just quantity that counts. Research shows that people need to eat more often to lose weight. Dividing caloric intake into 5-6 meals helps more than just eating less by skipping a meal or two a day. The Eat Less, Exercise More chant implies that everyone that is overweight is a lazy pig. The saying is ambiguous and misleading at best, and fat shaming and physically harmful at worst.
“If you can make it through the first week you’re in the clear,” she said.
Gah!! No, you credulous moron, if you can make it through the first FIVE YEARS you’re in the clear, statistically speaking. Only ... 95% of people never do that. Ninety five percent. DIETS DON’T WORK.
And there I thought the secret was that if you eat enough cookies you lose all taste for sweets and instead develop a craving for raw vegetables.
Amino acids. Who’d have thunk.
Eat less, exercise more. One of the few simple things in life. Actually works for most people.
This is about as effective as telling teenagers to just not have sex. It works great for the few people who can actually stick to it.
Eat less, exercise more. One of the few simple things in life. Actually works for most people.
“less than 30 per cent” is an uncommon usage of “most people”.
It works great for the few people who can actually stick to it.
It works if you understand that “eat less” means “eat fewer calories than you burn, which probably translates to a larger volume of food than you’re probably already eating, if you choose the right foods” not “stop stuffing your face, you pig.” As a facile mantra, it doesn’t qualify as advice.
A side-issue here: the cost of discussing health issues with actual doctors in the US is one of the things that makes possible a veritable duck hunt of quackery. Diet and nutrition are primo quack territory even in countries with actual healthcare systems, in part because there’s an element of shame or embarrassment, and people yearn for quick fixes, but American quack medicine is the quackiest in the world.
junk science:
As a facile mantra, it doesn’t qualify as advice.
Give the guy a break. Facile mantras are all libertarianism has.
It works if you understand that “eat less” means “eat fewer calories than you burn
It works if the human body is a Bunsen burner, which ... oh. Oops.
kristin #40: It works also on humans, but, of course, the first things that will happen if you eat fewer calories than your body needs to run business as usual is:
1. reduce energy use
2. demand food
3. reduce energy use
4. go for easily accessible resources
5. demand food
6. reduce energy use
7. grudgingly go for the reserves
8. make note to fill up reserves ASAP…
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This is where I started laughing out loud. Ooooh, do those cookies have electrolytes like Brawndo™, too? ‘Cuz electrolytes sound real healthy n’ sciencey like special amino acids.
One question, though: when’s Dr. Siegal (dressed in scrubs and accompanied, no doubt, by his wife) gonna be on Oprah?