According to MayoClinic.com, Dr. Sanford Siegal developed the cookie diet in 1975 for his overweight patients. The cookie diet uses a single daily meal plus diet cookies and shakes as meal replacements to help you lose weight. The cookies and shakes have a proprietary amino acid blend that the diet claims will control hunger as you lose weight.
The Program
Before starting the diet, you use Dr. Siegal's calorie burn rate self-test to determine your metabolic rate. Then you set your weight loss goals based on either how fast you want to lose your goal amount of weight or how many calories you want to eat per day. On the diet, you eat a single meal of normal food each day along with Dr. Siegal's diet cookies or shakes. You can also have calorie-free Vitazest water which comes in green tea and pomegranate flavors.
Cookies and Shakes
In addition to your single daily meal, you eat six diet cookies that come in many flavors such as oatmeal raisin, chocolate and banana. Each cookie has 90 calories, 2.5 g fat and 1 g saturated fat. To help control hunger, they have 2 g fiber and 5 g protein from ingredients including oats, beef protein and egg whites. You can substitute two cookies for a cookie diet shake. These shakes come in flavors like strawberry, piña colada and chocolate, and have about 130 calories, 9 g sugar and 12 g protein.
Multivitamin
A diet that restricts calories and food might not supply the recommended amounts of all the essential nutrients. To help you avoid potential nutrient deficiencies, the instructions for Dr. Siegal's cookie diet suggest taking once of its multivitamin and mineral supplements each day. Each tablet provides 100 percent of the daily value for 16 vitamins and minerals along with 16 percent of the daily value for calcium. The supplement has lycopene and lutein, two antioxidants with no daily value.
Benefits
The cookie diet provides about 1,000 to 1,200 calories per day from the cookies or shakes plus a single meal that you cook. Cookiediet.com states that this level of calories is low enough so that anyone that follows the instructions correctly will lose weight. Another benefit is that the diet focuses on controlling hunger. If the claims from Dr. Siegal's cookie diet are true, you will not be hungry even though you will be restricting calories and losing weight. The primary hunger-controlling nutrient in the cookies and shakes is protein.
Considerations
When choosing a diet, you evaluate whether it is healthy and sustainable. A balanced diet includes foods from all food groups, and MayoClinic.com suggests that you choose a diet with foods you enjoy so that you can maintain the diet over time. The cookie diet does not prohibit particular foods, but it limits quantities to one meal per day. This could put you at risk for nutrient deficiencies. You should always consult a doctor before taking dietary supplements or starting a weight loss program.
Member Comments