Cookie diet can help you lose weight quickly, but is it good for your health?
Replace meals with cookies to shed those extra kilos, so claims a particular fad diet. But it is not just any regular cookie that can help you achieve this.
South Florida physician Sanford Seigal reportedly developed a mixture of certain amino acids and baked them into a cookie while researching a book on the effect of natural food substances on hunger, in 1975. The cookie, with its high protein or fibre content, was intended to control his patient’s hunger. Seigal asked his patient to consume six cookies (about 500 calories) during the day, followed by a dinner of approximately 300 calories in the evening.
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As per the official Cookie Diet website, these cookies are made in a way to naturally suppress hunger. The specially-baked cookies for “cookie diet” continue to be available in the market, especially in the West, in natural flavours like chocolate brownie, cinnamon oatmeal, maple pancakes, and butterscotch.
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Cookie diet for weight loss
The weight losing phase involves eating nine Seigal cookies (one or two cookies every two hours), as per the official website. The dinner that follows the cookie diet should be restricted to homecooked vegetables or lean meat or fish (low fat content). Once you achieve the required weight, one should continue to eat low calorie cookies between healthy meals to maintain the weight.
The diet can make you lose about five to eight kilos a month on a daily regimen of 1000-2000 calories, claims the website.
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Is cookie diet effective?
There have been mixed opinions about this fad diet. While most experts agree that it promotes weight loss, this low-calorie diet may not provide enough food. Nutritionist Marisa Moore was quoted as saying in an article in everydayhealth.com, “Most people cannot get the nutrients they need from an 800-calorie diet.” With cookie diet, people also miss out on fruits and whole grains, which contain essential nutrients, she had said.
Besides, eating the same cookie every day can become boring, making it difficult to sustain such a diet plan. According to Dr Melinda Ratini, this form of diet does not really develop healthy eating habits in people. So even if cookie diet can prove to be effective for short-term weight loss, it may not be as beneficial for the long-term, as mentioned in a WebMD article.
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