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If You’re Already a Couch Potato, Why Not Go All the Way?

Last week, we posted about a nutritionist who, to make a point, went on a diet of nothing but junk food, albeit in rigidly limited amounts, for two months, and wound up losing weight. This week, our subject is Chris Voigt of the state of Washington, who recently went on a two-month diet of nothing but potatoes. Okay, he used seasonings, your herbs and cinnamon and bouillon cube gravy, but other than that, it was just potatoes. Mashed, baked, sliced and fried, roasted, deep-fried, cubed and shoestringed… potatoes.

Voigt put away roughly 20 potatoes per day for 60 straight days, some 400 pounds in all. And at the end he had lost weight — down from 197 pounds to 176 — while reducing his blood sugar and slashing his cholesterol by more than 30 percent. The problem with the all-potato diet, of course, is the same as with the junk food diet: if you maintained it for any serious length of time, it would probably land you in the hospital, or worse.

All we learn from these dietary escapades is that you can lose weight either by eating a very limited amount of whatever you want or by eating an unlimited amount of a starchy root vegetable so bland that you will soon be mortally sick of it. Unfortunately, with either ploy, your body will soon be deficient in all manner of fairly important nutrients.

In sum, the potato diet may work short-term, but you’d have to be crazy to try it. Or, as is the case with Chris Voigt, you’d have to be the executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, a job we are vastly grateful that he has and we don’t.

“Get Fat or Get Taken” is Not a Reasonable Choice

In possibly the dumbest collegiate eating fad since live goldfish, a student at the University of Maryland has founded what is apparently the first official major college competitive eating club. The club’s rules and regulations are still rather a work in progress, but the founder hopes to inspire the creation of similar clubs at other colleges, the ultimate goal being intercollegiate chow-down contests, culminating presumably in championship Food Bowls. That’s an understandable goal — it’s hard to have a competitive club without any competitors — but it threatens to turn the legendary Freshman 15 into a three-digit figure.

This is still mostly a tongue-in-cheek news item, but if it turns into something bigger and more widespread, the University of Maryland will be partly to blame for it. That’s because the school’s student meal contracts have expiration dates, beyond which any unused points are worthless, creating an incentive for students to pig out as the deadline nears rather than waste food money. The competitive eating club was a way to lend a kind of mock legitimacy to the phenomenon.

Since binge eating is one of the least healthy habits that college kids can acquire, and since use-it-or-lose-it rules encourage binge eating, schools who offer such eating plans may want to rethink the terms of the agreement.

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

The Insane All-Potato Diet, and the Problem With College Students’ Eating Contracts is a post from: CalorieLab

Well, Other Than a Major Amputation, That is

Mark Haub may have provided the answer to several fairly important questions with regard to weight control. Questions such as, if you ate nothing but healthy and nutritious food, would you be able to eat as much as you wanted? Are “fattening” and “unhealthy” the same thing? If you’re trying to lose weight, can you eat whatever you want as long as you don’t eat much of anything?

The answers, based on Haub’s experience, seem to be No, No, and Evidently. Here’s the story.

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Haub is a Human Nutrition professor at Kansas State, and as such, ate wisely: whole grains, plenty of fiber, fruits and veggies, occasional treat meals (burgers, pizza), and so forth. And yet, he seemed stuck on the high side of 200 pounds. He was eating healthily, but, he observes, “I wasn’t healthy. I was eating too much.”

It occurred to him to wonder if perhaps the key to weight loss had nothing to do with nutritional quality, but merely the quantity that one consumed. He decided to try a little experiment with himself as guinea pig. For one month, he determined, he would consume very little other than junk food, but with a strict control on calorie intake. At 211 pounds, he would ordinarily pack away about 2,600 calories per day; he gave himself an absolute limit of 1,800.

But those 1,800 calories were mostly composed of a diet that would make a nutritionist’s head explode. Instead of actual meals, every three hours he would scarf down a few Hostess Twinkies or Doritos or powdered donuts or Kellogg’s Corn Pops or Oreos. He avoided meat, whole grains and fruit. His central focus was on portion control, not nutrition. In all, 2/3 of his daily intake consisted of junk food, augmented by a multivitamin pill, a protein shake, and vegetables such as celery or baby carrots.

The Surprising, and in the Wrong Hands, Dangerous Results

At the end of the month, he found that his weight was down a few pounds, and he felt reasonably okay, so he stuck with the regimen. Finally, after ten weeks of this, he took inventory of his vital statistics. In a little more than two months, he had lost a total of 27 pounds, down to 174, had lowered his body fat from 33.4 to 24.9 percent, and reduced his BMI from 28.8 (overweight) to 24.9 (normal). Even more unexpectedly, his LDL (bad) cholesterol was down by 20 percent and his HDL (good) cholesterol was up by the same, 20 percent.

Had Haub stumbled upon a Miracle Junk Food Diet? Alas, not unless you believe that a human body can survive in good health over the long haul on essentially convenience store food items. What he had stumbled upon were two things we already knew. One, weight reduction is, overwhelmingly, a matter of calorie reduction. Two, excess weight is the primary driver of high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and reducing the former will reduce the latter.

The problem is that “health” is a matter of much more than cholesterol or body fat or even weight, and a diet of few vegetables and no fruit almost certainly has unpleasant longer term consequences. Almost nobody in the health profession would recommend Haub’s example be followed. First, because there are far safer ways to lose weight. And second, because 90 percent of those who might try it would, lacking his discipline, probably wind up continuing to eat too much, but now mostly of junk food.

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

The Twinkie Diet: Worst Successful Weight-Loss Program Ever is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

Fat is Fine…able

Providing people with products that contain excess fats or that lead to excess fatness can’t get you arrested just yet, but there are hints of a trend in that direction. Several U.S. city councils have discussed the possibility of placing legal restrictions on the amount and kind of fats that dining establishments can serve up, and at least one city, Baltimore, is serious about it, having enacted a legal limit of 0.5 grams of trans fat per food item.

So far they’ve sent warnings to over 100 local restaurants, and just slapped a $100 fine on one eatery for racking up more than one violation. Given that some studies suggest trans fats may cause up to 30,000 premature deaths, our hat is off to Baltimore. But what really caught our attention was the name of the cited restaurant: Healthy Choice.

Actually, the Healthy Choice owners got off easy. Instead of Baltimore, they might have been located in Sao Paulo, Brazil. That’s where a former McDonald’s franchise manager sued the company, claiming that the requirement that he sample the fare each day to ensure quality, and the provision of free meals to employees, caused him to put on 65 unhealthy pounds over 12 years. The court bought the argument and ordered Mickey D’s to pony up a $17,500 settlement. We trust that the plaintiff will apply some of the funds to exercise equipment.

Putting the Din in Dinner

Weight Loss Tip # 7,449: Play CDs of bagpipe bands very loudly whenever you’re eating. Or hire someone to scrape their fingernails on a blackboard during your meals. Or eat your takeout lunches at the nearest auto body shop. Or set off a car alarm just before tucking into breakfast.

Why? Because research at the University of Manchester has determined that diners find food to be less flavorful when accompanied by loud noise, and their overall satisfaction with the food is aligned with whether the sounds they’re hearing strike them as pleasant or not. Based on that, just imagine the pounds you could shed simply by taking every meal while listening to the recorded speeches of either Nancy Pelosi or Sarah Palin, depending on your political persuasion.

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

Busted For Dealing Trans Fats, and the Noise Pollution Diet is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News