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Eat Twinkies, be happy, and lose that weight? — 47 Comments

1. Dietology is a junk, not its subject. Views on what comprises “healthy food” are revised every decade, often to diametrically opposite. Organisms are too complex to understand them in simplistic terms of reductionist science, and their reaction to any voluntary interference can be contre-intuitive and paradoxal.

2. water

3. I’m with you, neo. A sweet diet holds only a small attraction. I’m waiting for someone to tell me about losing weight on a peanut butter, bacon, and beer diet.

4. Art is right. A glass of water reduces the need to eat greatly, with no calories or adverse effects.

5. I’ve understood (from endless weight-loss programs and nutrition classes) that women have a layer of subcutaneous fat that the body preserves up until the point of starvation. Something to do with childbearing, evidently.

   Lacking this, men tend to lose weight much faster and with less effort than women. Which is discouraging, to say the least!

   I do think that weight and nutrition are probably much more complex (and subject to individual genes, metabolism, etc.) than we know or can possibly guess. Which is why I appreciate Taub’s note of caution.

6. Sergey and Artfldgr: I already drinks lots of water. Always have.

   See this.

7. I thought it was 3200. But yep – the math is off.

   Maybe the sugar made him hyper.

8. He didn’t eat enough protein which is calorie rich unless defatted. I think you would get quite sick if you continued this kind of diet.

9. Granny3: Note that he said he drank a special protein drink daily. I don’t know how much protein was in it. But as a nutritionist he probably loaded it with enough protein to prevent damage.

10. Due to a health issue I survived on a diet of liquid protein drinks fed through a tummy tube for a period of about 4 months. I lost a quarter of my body weight during that time. I suppose it would be possible to get by on such a diet for an indefinite time. Not much fun though.

11. Health and weight are sometimes two different things. To lose weight you need to burn more calories than you consume – period. The source of the calories is irrelevant. To be healthy you need the proper balance of vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, protein, etc.

12. I was put on a zero-fat medical induced diet, and I starved. I lost 25 lbs in about a month and a half, and I would have these weird dreams about eating french fries including fry grease, whole sticks of butter, and other weird stuff.

    I could probably pull off a twinkies diet (star crunch, yum!) but I don’t see how that guy had any energy – I would be crashed on the couch.

13. elcrain said November 9th, 2010 at 4:38 pm

    ” … women have a layer of subcutaneous fat that the body preserves up until the point of starvation … Lacking this, men tend to lose weight much faster and with less effort than women. ”
    =================

    It’s also my understanding that due to testosterone, men have much more muscle-mass than women, and muscles are the chief metabolizers. In other words (sad to say) men -even at rest- burn calories faster than women do.

    Who ever said life was fair?

    ================
    Also remember that through most of history humans
    have survived at mere subsistence levels — and starvation has been a real threat everywhere up until the last few generations. Now we shake our heads in dismay when we hear of children starving in Africa or Bangladesh. And remember the story that circulated a couple of years ago, about a man who said he always dreamed of coming to America “where even the poor people are fat”. And of course, I have to mention that the beautiful nudes of classical paintings are “comfortably rounded” – the very idea back then, of eating enough food to become plump, of having eaten so well for so long that your ribs and hip bones didn’t stick out, the idea of so much luxury and indulgence, would have been considered a wonderful fantasy by most people of the time.

14. I’m no expert on nutritional issues, but we already know the adverse side effects of a Twinkie diet is an overwhelming desire to shoot San Francisco politicians.

    Got Milk?

15. I think there’s a misunderstanding here.

    I always thought the issue with empty calories was that the lack of nutrition meant you would want to consume more food and more calories.

    If that’s so, then this experiment is irrelevant.

16. Indigo Red wins the Best Comment of the Thread Award.

    The first paragraph was good enough, but the final sentence was a killer. [Sorry about that.] 🙂

17. I have not read about this for a couple of decades, but back then, they said you’d lose weight faster than the simple arithmetic predicted, because the fasting speeds up the metabolism.

    Thirty five years ago, they were predicting a new ice age, so I got ready, dammit! If I lose another fifty pounds, they’d better not tell me that the global warming is canceled, and the ice age is back on. If the rage makes me go postal, I won’t even have the Twinkie defense. The cup cakes, now, I’d kill for those.

18. A couple thoughts on this as an athletic middle-aged male who has experimented with numerous diets:

    1. This diet, like any other, would take extreme will power. Cravings not just for natural foods, but even more sweets, would be intense.

    2. This is anecdotal at best. Who knows yet how others of different body composition would react? That this is being reported as confirmation of anything is only going to lead many to more dieting frustration. The discipline to stick to this eating schedule, even with snack foods, is extreme and probably unattainable by most.

    3. Under-reported is the fact that he let his stomach empty between each “meal”. Three hours is more than enough for the body’s organs to process that amount of food, no matter the calorie content. I would argue (from my own anecdotes 🙂 ) that letting the stomach empty between meals, but not reach a starvation reflex where metabolism slows down, is the Great White Whale of weight loss. Both extremes of hunger and fullness are dooming to weight loss, and this just might have been a situation where he hit the sweet spot.

    4. Calories are not as important as how the food affects your body. One size does not fit all for weight loss. Insulin response is far more of a telling factor than calorie content or ingredients. Find out how to manage your blood sugar properly, and most of the other positive health factors should follow.

19. Reminds me of the Woody Allen movie “Sleeper”. When Woody wakes up in the future,he is asked what he did way back in 1970. He says that he ran a health food store, selling wheat germ, soy and other stuff, to the total befuddllement of the others. Then, another pipes up, “Oh, that was before the found out that ice cream and soda pop were good for you!”

20. I have tried a few diets of my own invention over the last few years and the most successful were always the ones where I worried solely about calories, not what I was eating. I could eat a McDonald’s breakfast a curry for lunch and nothing particularly healthy for dinner and as long as this was within 1800 calories, the weight fell away super-fast. I even started to feel really good after a week or so. I think these nuts who practice calorie restriction throughout their lives are really onto something. I just wish I had their will power.

21. Simon – I am a male, and my experience is the same as yours.

    In my first two years in college, I basically stopped playing sports and just began to naturally put on weight. I didn’t get fat per se, just bigger, and I could see that if I kept going that way I would eventually wind up fat.

    So, the Summer after my second year I read some websites and the most reliable advice, it seemed to me, was from doctors who said the only surefire way to lose weight and keep it off, instead of yo-yoing, was to calculate calories and exercise.

    So, I chopped my calories from about 2,500 a day to around 1,000, and I ran every single day. It took the whole summer, but I lost around 20 pounds.

    The next year was very interesting. I went back to school and stopped working out again. I was absolutely starving every day, and I ate everything in front of me – I was like a food vacuum. But I didn’t put on any weight until the end of the year.

    Then I did the same “austerity” diet and exercise routine the next Summer, and so on.

    Now, when I moved to New York some years later, I really didn’t want to do the diet thing, but I still thought I could work out. So I did – I was running on a treadmill about 5 or 6 miles a day, four times a week, with no diet. I lifted weights too.

    And I started to HULK. Boy, that was a lesson. The obvious denominator was that in my former efforts I dieted by calorie-intake, and in the latter I didn’t. The results were hugely different.

    Fortunately, dieting by calorie restriction does work. Unfortunately, as you noted, it is the hardest of all diets to pull off, because it depends entirely on sustained will-power and the constant fighting of one’s natural impulses. I could never do it as a lifestyle.

22. I’m holding my breath for the ice cream diet.

    The diet I’ve had the most luck with is “The Frozen Dinner Diet”. Most have about 300-400 calories, are balanced, easy to prepare, and many of them have actually become pretty tasty.

    Not gourmet but if you are eating to live instead of living to eat…

23. “Does this mean the Twinkie diet is an especially effective weight-loss tool?”

    I’m guessing a combo of skipping a few Twinkies because he was not hungry (should be in paperwork if that is it) and water. He probably had some extra water before he started the diet. Seems whenever I start one I loose a few extra pounds the first week in water…

24. Gabriel Syme makes an important point at 4). (about insulin and blood glucose) as does ThinkAsTheyDoOrElse in the comment about empty calories. When I read about this diet, I wondered how all of the sugar and white flour (and various processed fats) in the twinkies, etc. affected him. I was curious why, for instance, he doesn’t report what his fasting blood glucose was. I wonder how much the Twinkie diet might have changed that, if it did at all.

    In the past few weeks I’ve been reading a lot about health and have been trying to reduce or even eliminate my intake of empty calories just for general health purposes. I’m not interested in losing weight, just seeing if I can improve my energy levels and if there are other benefits. (My weight is already fine, as are my general cholesterol, ldl and triglyceride levels; hdl is a bit low, but nothing serious.) So when I read about this diet, I had to wonder what negative impacts there might be that aren’t reported in the news story.

25. Loosing weight is a simple thing – expend more calories than you take in. Do that and you will loose, do not do that and you never will.

    Some “diets” like the Atkins foll your body into taking in more calories than they normally would (the Atkins diet forces ketosis – otherwise known as starving), but it is still ultimately using more calories than you intake.

    Anything else and it just isn’t gonna work. You can loose water, you can loose muscle, and you can short term loose a great deal of things but it will not last. At some point unless you change your habits you will consume mroe calories than you spend in a day again and gain the weight back. Further it turns out that unless you set a long term diet then the fluctuations make things *worse*.

    This has been known for – well a *long* time. It isn’t easy to do, you have to count calories and exercise regularly with a specific workout. However it is the *only* thing that works on the long term (or even medium term).

    Someone will always tell you why the Diet of the Day is obviously superior and no one has thought if this thing before – and heck maybe one day it will work out. Yet each one only really lasts for a few years at best – the simply truth is that weight is so closely related to calories intake and expenditure that anything that ignores this is destined to failure.

    Low caloric intake is hard for most of us and a high caloric usage is probably harder.

    To note: I’m fat by any stretch of the word, I’ve been skinny, I’ve been trim, and I’ve been fat. It was never a mystery as to why – the left over cheeseburger and beer I consumed 30 minutes before going to bed is why I am currently fat and the four day a week Judo practice and 3 day a week weight training is why I was trim back in college. I was skinny through much of my childhood due to illness and was not a pleasant thing. Even now I can easily drop 30 pounds (still fat, but down to not having issues in smaller booths in restaurants) by simply working out twice a week, while I have a membership I have so many other commitments it is hard to do so for more than once every two weeks.

    Really, isn’t something that takes a great deal of study. It never has been and never will – only our drive for a simple solution that requires little to no effort is hard.

26. The twinkie diet on a long term basis would lead most people to insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes. I would like to see what his glycemic numbers were after the diet. Of course losing weight usually results in better lab tests. His loss of 27 pounds vice 16 may have been due to a minor increase in physical activity that he was not aware of.

    It’s always possible to lose weight by taking in fewer calories than those expended. However, our bodies evolved during paleolithic times when food was often scarce at various times of the year. Eating a restricted calorie diet for over a couple of months usually leads to your metabolism adapting to the lower calorie intake and the weight loss slows drastically or ends. There are two ways to defeat this tendency. Step up the exercise to expend more calories or pulse the calories.

    Our ancestors spent their days hunting and gathering. That meant long periods of low intensity movement (aerobic exercise while hunting/gathering) interspersed with spurts of high intensity activity (anaerobic exercise) while chasing and killing game. That is why any gym exercise routine will yield less results after a month or two. The routine must be changed up to stimulate the body to adapt.

    The body will adapt to a regular low calorie eating routine too, so eating low calories for two or three days and then eating more calories on the third or fourth day will send the message to your body that there is enough food around and it can continue to metabolize normally; not go into preservation or “starvation times” mode. Bodybuilders can diet like this for six months and never hit a plateau in their weight loss. (Unless they start to get too lean.)

    Any low calorie diet will work for a short time, it takes pulsing and being very knowledgeable about calories (You have to weigh and measure your food.) to diet successfully over a long period. It also helps if you don’t “live to eat,” but “eat to live.” Eating sensibly (balanced to get the necessary vitamins, minerals, protein, carbs and essential fats) is also necessary over any long term.

    Hmm, all this talk about diet has made me hungry. A twinkie sounds like just the thing.

27. J.J. I think has it mainly right. He may have done a micro version of the change up of the starvation-plenty cycle. Every time he ate junk food, there were plenty of calories, and fat to satisfy- at that moment-, so it triggers a plenty reading. The body keeps the metabolism up since there’s no worry of low caloric supply. Then he keeps the actual total calories down- weight loss.

    I suspect genes are part of it, and I’ve pretty much always been thin to average, whether I’ve been exercising (sometimes as much as marathon training) or not. Even when I was in training, and trying to eat a more healthy diet, I never stayed away from some junk and fatty foods, but I also try to have at least a little balance in my diet- the occasional fruit and vegetable, some fiber, but carbs and protein and some fat, and it’s all good.

    In my neighborhood, there are a lot of food nazi parents of various stripes (sugar, artifical whatever, organic only…) and their kids are often the worst behaved and most hyper. I wonder if the restrictions don’t actually make the kids worse.

28. For majority of normal (relatively healthy) people the best strategy would be to eat everything you wish, but somewhat less than you want. There is a problem of addiction, though, when whishes do not reflect the true needs of organism. This vicious circle can be broken by general restriction on food consumption, up to complete abstinence for two or three weeks. Diets are arbitrary and do not correspond to individual needs, and in most cases futile.

29. “Loosing weight is a simple thing – expend more calories than you take in.”

    Not quite and certainly not simple. The body has a powerful anti-starvation response that derails most dieters around day 4 of austerity. More important is WHAT food you put in, not how much, as a long-term, non-fad weight loss strategy.

    Think automobiles and fuel. Mere BTU content is not adequate. Try putting coal in your gas tank rather than gasoline. Results will not be comparable. The body is analagous.

    Calorie restriction will lead to failure more often than success because we have evolved mechanisms to compel us to eat. Trying to circumvent those mechanisms is a low-odds game.

30. I like twinkies….. 😀

31. Like Neo I’m a small person who needs to basically starve to lose any weight at all. It doesn’t particularly matter what you feed yourself as long as it’s in small servings. Drinking water is fine but it quickly gets tiresome to run to the head every half hour. Heh

32. Lots of my friends swear by the Weight Watchers program, which involves assigning a point value to everything you eat. As long as you stay within your point range, you can eat whatever you want (have that ice cream cone, but you’ll use up a good chunk of your points for that day) and you’ll still lose weight.

    The protein part is key here…if this guy only ate the Twinkies he would be crashing and burning all day long in terms of energy levels, hunger pangs, etc. Just like when you eat a candy bar in the middle of the afternoon because your energy levels are lagging. You might have a burst of energy but then you blood sugar plunges and you’re left more tired and cranky and hungry than you were before.

    That’s what kills you on a diet…you’ve got to keep your energy and mood stabilized while curbing your hunger or you’ll eat everything in sight. Or at least I will! Protein is the magic bullet.

    I speak from painful experience here!

33. The people who say with such authority that losing weight is simply a matter of consuming fewer calories than we burn always make me thinking of someone who say that the sky is blue because the clouds filter out the rest of the light spectrum. Yes, that’s right. So?

    The important question is not, “Why are you fat?” It is, rather, “Why are you hungry?” Hungry in excess of your body’s needs. Consider the opposite problem, anorexia nervosa. There are two convincing and opposite explanations for that one. We don’t know which one is right, of course. The people who have spoken here about insulin balance seem to be on the right track. If lap swimming and calorie counting and a diabetic diet, i.e. no concentrated sweets, get my weight down another fifty pounds, I would like to try some experiments on myself, to see what will work to maintain ideal weight without constant calorie counting. It should also be interesting to see whether the Type Two Diabetes goes away completely, abates, or still requires medication for management.

34. Thank-you Indigo Red & Gringo; wondering if perhaps a little redistribution would solve this weighty problem, and since I’m roundly interested in this topic for more personal reasons, I googled around; you (all) might find this interesting in regard to some of the (potential) geo-politics of obesity:

    http://www.cpc.unc.edu/temp/edv/nutrans-old/research/multi-country/bellagio/papers/PHNCuba-Ojea.pdf

35. Spread the weight with a tax on the obese.

    I mean…. what does one “need” with more than 5,000 calories anyway? 🙂

36. Incidentally, my personal drink of choice for marathon days, at the computer, is room temperature tea, each cup made with one regular pekoe tea bag (for more body) and one green tea bag; then I just sip all day long, covering the cup, which is always available, between sips as I meander thru the day. That little trick has enabled me to lose 2 lbs in the last six months….

37. Baklava, I believe you’re on to something; perhaps we could have a mandatory national credit card for all financial transactions, which automatically limits food purchases with its own built in calorie register; plus, the icing on the cake, no more black-market cheating the scale!

38. I bought this book off a sale table once upon a time – I’d been on an 800 calorie diet under medical supervision and wanted to know how one could exist on _200_ calories! It wasn’t exactly what it seemed. The basic method is to cut your average daily intake by 100 calories, and then increase your physical calorie output by an average of 100 calories per day. They had excellent tables of calorie counts – both intake and outgo for _many_ different forms of physical activity. The discouraging thing was that the weight loss wasn’t very fast – though not necessarily a bad thing, still discouraging if you’re _finally_ motivated to lose weight. I think the loss was about 20 lbs per year. The most discouraging thing in the book was that if you eat _only_ 100 calories in excess of your maintenance requirements, you’ll gain 10 lbs a year. That’s 100 lbs in 10 years, for the mathematically challenged! _And_…100 calories per day is about 1 Tbsp – or one pat – of butter.

    http://www.amazon.com/200-Calorie-Solution-Martin-Katahn/dp/0425096688?tag=dogpile-20

39. Yes, genetics does make a difference. Some people are born with a gene that is quick to sense lower food supplies and down regulate the metabolism. Our ancestors who lived in areas where food was always in short supply had this gene. It was necessary for them to survive.

    My wife has that gene. She is small and eats around 1200 calories/day for a maintenance diet. If she eats 1500 calories/day her metabolism does not increase so she can slowly put on pounds at that calorie level. In order to lose weight she has to go to 900 calories/day and increase to 1200-1300 every third or fourth day. A week at 900 calories and her metabolism down regulates to burn just 900 calories/day and the weight loss stops. She eats about six times a day to keep a slow but steady supply of calories fueling her system. She also changes up her workouts. They are mostly aerobic exercise (walking) punctuated with anerobic exercise of different types (calisthenics with light weights, kettle ball exercises, fast bike rides, etc.)

    When someone says they have a hard time losing weight, my first suspicion is that they have the anti-starvation gene and know that it really is harder for them to maintain their weight much less lose excess weight.

    Refined foods (not as much fiber, vitamins, minerals, and enzymes) are a problem for many of us. It has only been in the last 50-60 years that our diets have become laden with refined foods. Our systems are not evolved to handle that kind of diet. Fiber is what protects the system from insulin spikes. For some people refined sugar in all its forms are a major problem as it creates insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes for many people. There are, however, some people who can live on refined carbohydrates and not show adverse affects. (My father-in-law was one.) We are not all exactly alike and that is what makes medicine difficult. Each individual needs to be treated as a unique individual, not as if we were all identical.

    Coupled with the increase in refined foods in our diets in the last 50-60 years there has been a corresponding decrease in physical activity. Just five days a week of walking for 30-45 minutes can make a big difference for many people. How many people get that much exercise these days unless they make a concerted effort to do so?

    This subject has been a continuing part of my life. As an airline pilot I was required to take a thorough physical every six months. Diabetes, a heart condition, high blood pressure, etc. meant losing my job. I began jogging before jogging was cool. I tried to learn all I could about preventive medicine (mostly diet and exercise) as employment insurance. After I retired, I took up masters bodybuilding as a hobby. As a result, I have learned quite a lot more about diet and exercise. The natural bodybuilding community (those who don’t resort to steroids) knows the best ways to eat and exercise to produce a well-conditioned body.

    I have also been frustrated and confused by the way the medical community has changed recommendations over the years. Obviously, there is still much to be learned.

40. “The natural bodybuilding community (those who don’t resort to steroids) knows the best ways to eat and exercise to produce a well-conditioned body.”

    Right on. Much of what I have learned has come from this source, along with Richard K. Bernstein and the “radical” diabetic movement. Funny that much medicine and health policy is written by people in classrooms, all the while ignoring those like bodybuilders who have decades of anecdotal success doing the very things the doctors and policy makers wish to do. Just like how our education policies are often written by people who have no children.

41. Our dietary problems are rooted in 2 major revolution in food habits: agricultural revolution (8000 years ago) and rising of food industry (50-60 years ago). The first brought about affluence, cereals and milk products, and the second – refined (processed) food. Evolutionary we are better prepared to near-starvation than to excess of food. Our organism knows how to deal with the first, but does not know what to do with excess food. Also, cereal diet is unnatural in a sense: starch is poorly assimilated, and many people have not enzimes needed to process gluten. Milk products are also problematic: it is good for babies, but many adults have not enzimes to digest lactose. The gifts of food industry are mixed blessing, too. Many vital vitamins and minerals are lost (especially microelements, like manganese, selen, zink, iodine). This can be compensated by drinking natural water – from wells, springs, ets., but nowdays many use only tap water or use filters to purify it, and so lack microelement supply. This leads to many chronic diseases and supresses immunity. Use bottled water from natural sources, not filtered water. Soda, lemonads and other soft drinks should be replaced by natural water. Use of chemical additives to food is also harmfull.

42. Here’s a link to an essay on this issue by Tom Venuto, a fitness guru. He tries to put the Twinkie diet experiment in proportion based on his extensive knowledge and experience.
    http://www.burnthefatblog.com/archives/2010/11/the_twinkie_diet.php

43. If this proves out generally, a lot of scolds are going to be reeeealy annoyed.
    I did some figuring a year or so back when I was doing readily quantifiable heavy labor. A couple of days of hauling furniture up stairs along with my own weight (about a hundred trips), was worth about half a Krispey Kreme. I looked at the tables, rechecked, hoping to find I’d dropped a decimal someplace. Rough.
    I may have mentioned this recently. When my father was at UConn, class of 43, he was supposed to have been the fastest end in the conference at 6’1″, 185. According to the feds’ newest tables, he was overweight.
    When I got out of OCS, at 6’2″, 205, I was semi-starved and in top shape. Latest feds…I was overweight, possibly obese.
    I call crap.

44. May I recommend ALMOND MILK, as a great whole milk substitute; it tastes better and is probably healthier. I’ve been using for a couple years now….

45. Thinking about this story a day later, I can’t quite get over the fact that this guy was a nutrition professor and so overweight to begin with. What does that tell you about the quality of research and education in the field of nutrition?

46. >>May I recommend ALMOND MILK, as a great whole milk substitute; it tastes better and is probably healthier. I’ve been using for a couple years now…>>

    Why?

    >>What does that tell you about the quality of research and education in the field of nutrition?>>

    Nothing. Intelligence and education have nothing to do with character and the willpower to resist the desire to do what we know we shouldn’t do. Or the character to do what we know we _should_ do – like exercise.

    Just because you _know_ doesn’t mean you _do_.

47. I know this if off topic but I’m looking into starting my own blog and was curious what all is required to get set up? I’m assuming having a blog like yours would cost a pretty
    penny? I’m not very web smart so I’m not 100% certain.
    Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. Appreciate it!

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