The Cookie Diet - Diet Review

 
Dr. Siegel’s Cookie Diet is a meal-replacement plan. One eats six of his cookies throughout the day in addition to one meal at the end of the day. That meal should include approximately six ounces of lean white meat protein and one cup of vegetables. Also drink at least 8 to 10 glasses of a non-caloric beverage, such as water, each day.

Dr Seigal advises his patients to eat six cookies throughout the day whenever hungry. The cookies are the only foods eaten all day and then the patients are ‘rewarded’ with dinner.

Depending on one’s individual food choices, the diet is between 800 and 1200 calories a day. Each cookie contains 90 calories and each dinner meal should contain no more than 500 calories. In addition, one is to drink eight glasses of liquid a day (ideally water). Coffee and tea are allowed on this diet. There are five varieties of Dr. Siegal's cookies that you can choose from: chocolate, oatmeal raisin, coconut, banana, and blueberry. Each week’s box of cookies contains a bottle containing a 7 day supply of generic type multi-vitamin pills, which are to be taken daily.

The cookie’s ingredient label is full of things you'd recognize or be able to pronounce. The first ingredient is sugar, with 9 grams of sugar in each serving. The cookies have less than a gram of fiber per serving. Dr. Seigal states that the cookies contain a "particular mix of proteins" as being key to keeping users feeling full. The cookies are relatively low in sodium, with no more than 200 milligrams per serving. The ingredients appear to be nutritionally similar to most of the popular meal replacement shakes that provide a quantity-controlled diet product.

Dr. Siegal states that his cookies are scientifically designed to help to control appetite and reduce hunger. Each cookie contains 90 calories and contains ingredients such as whole wheat flour, bran and oats. However the main reason he says they work is due to a secret blend of amino acid proteins. 

 The cookies are edible but not the tastiest. Even Dr. Seigel’s website states that ‘we wouldn’t call them delicious’. They say delicious cookies make people fat and there certainly is some logic to this as dieters are less likely to overindulge in really good tasting cookies. Cookies are packed in boxes containing 42 cookies packed in 7 daily bags which will last for one week if the diet is followed according to the instructions above. The price is approximately $56 US plus shipping and handling. 

 As a part of my own dieting hobby, I personally experimented with this diet for a couple of weeks, and thereafter occasionally for a few days at a time. I enjoyed the novelty of the idea, and the cookies were acceptable to me, however, NOTE: that a Dr. Siegal’s cooke tastes better after sprinkling a packet of Splenda on top and placing it in the microwave for 10 seconds just before eating.

Since I was already normal weight and used to small portions when I did my experimentation, I didn’t find myself hungry on the diet, but the lack of food variety was a problem for me. Also, I kept comparing my own homemade recipes for portion-controlled foods to the purchased cookies … such as my microwave cookies made from protein powder which have more grams of protein and less calories. After comparison, I felt that if I really wanted to only eat cookies all day, I would be better served to eat 6 of my own homemade portion-controlled protein cookies. 

 I found “Dr Siegel’s Cookie Diet Book” (2009) to be rather an interesting book, and I’ve read it a few times. I enjoyed the chapters dedicated to weight loss history, and found Dr. Siegal’s attitude about weight-loss to be refreshing. In his opinion, speed of weight loss is a critical success factor because when people don't get results right away, they're more likely to get demotivated and quit.

Dr. Siegal's positon is that weight loss and weight maintenance should be recognized as two different tasks and two different skills, like fixing a car when it's broken and then taking ongoing care of your car so it doesn't break again.

I was especially interested in that part of the book in which Dr. Siegel refers to the scientific principle of 3500 calories equaling one fat pound as “The Great Calorie Theory and in his discussion as to why, although he accepts that principle as a working model, he considers it to be an unproven Theory. 

  I found Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet to be a reasonable diet for anyone who wants to eat pre-packaged meal-replacements during the daytime and other foods only at dinner-time, and who has a body with an average personal calorie burn which consistently falls within the number averages of the Harris Benedict and Mifflin formulas.

Since I am a short, normal-weight, older, sedentary, reduced-obese, female ... one of my own problems with the plan is that the daily cookie total was 540 calories. Adding another 500 calories for dinner brings the plan up to 1040 calories… which my 8 years of careful food records show is actually very close to my present daily calorie burn for maintenance of my current weight. At 1,200 calories, my body gains weight, so this plan was actually NOT calorie-restrictive ENOUGH to cause weight-loss for me personally, and I didn't enoy the plan enough to use it long-term for my ongoing maintenance.

Dr. Siegel’s official website is: www.cookiediet.com

Below are two videos about the Cookie Diet.

The FIRST video is an ABC news broadcast about the Cookie Diet. 
Click inside the video twice to see it on YouTube.
 

The SECOND video is a rather amusing negative diet review.