Cookie Diets: Real Weight Loss or Another Diet Fad

Can cookie diets lead to real weight loss or are they just another diet fad on the market? It is unbelievable how many dieting fads are out there and how much money people make off these dieting techniques, but I must say some do work. I have tried a few different dieting fads just to see if they worked and which ones worked better. My favorite was the Special K diet and now one that is very possible from my research thus far; the cookie diet.

What is the Cookie Diet?

Well it is what it sounds like; a diet using cookies as a food supplement. Now, don't confuse this with eating any Chips ahoy cookie as a food supplement. What I am talking about are cookies that are full of nutrients, like oatmeal cookies.

The cookie diet began through the scientific research of Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet in 1975. He devised the idea that if you eat six cookies throughout the day and eat one real meal then you will lose weight. In fact, he created his own cookies that contained milk, eggs, soy, wheat, and non-vegetable protein. He began the cookie diet fad by creating weekly boxes containing seven daily bags of six cookies all of which would replace fourteen meals throughout the week.

The key to this diet is each time you feel as though you are hungry and then you will eat one healthy cookie as a snack. You would do this six times throughout the day and then eat a normal meal in the evening. Like all diets the goal is to burn more calories than what you consume throughout the day. Cookies that are high in nutrients and are not full of sugars and fats will contain fewer calories. So this diet is very plausible, if you also exercise lightly throughout the day. With this information I decided to see for myself.

My Experiment With the Cookie Diet

Writing about a fad diet without having tried it would not have allowed me to speak from my own experiences. So I gave it a try. I did the cookie diet for one week without exercising and one week with exercising to see if it would indeed work. Here are the results.

Week One: I baked two dozen oatmeal cookies twice a week during the first and second week so I would have enough cookies to consume six cookies a day for seven days. The first week I did not exercise at all. I went about my normal day and consumed six cookies: one for breakfast, two for a snack before lunch, one for lunch, and two for a snack before dinner. For dinner I ate a regular meal my wife cooked that evening. In week one I lost two pounds using the cookie diet and without changing my normal daily routine.

Week Two: I did the same exact routine that I did in week one plus I added in a daily workout routine for Monday thru Friday. In week two I lost an astounding seven pounds.

Does the Cookie Diet Work?

Honestly, I believe with any diet, fad or not, that anyone can lose weight as long as you are burning more calories than what you consume throughout the day. That is the key to any weight loss. So does the cookie diet work? Yes it does indeed work as long as you add in exercise in order to burn off more calories than what you consumed that day. So is it the cookie diet that helped me lose weight in week two or was it the fact that I burned off calories through exercise? Undoubtedly the answer is exercise. You can honestly eat almost anything you want, including McDonalds, as long as you burn off all the calories you consumed. The more calories you consume in a day makes it harder to burn. So controlling what you eat throughout the day and taking in few calories will make it easy to burn them off later. Cookies taste good and if you eat the right ones don't contain many calories, which are easy to burn off.