twinkie diet

It's been dubbed "the Twinkie diet" by the media: Mark Haub, a professor in Kansas State University's Department of Human Nutrition, has been surviving on junk food for the past month.

And, he's lost weight.

Haub started the "Twinkie Diet" on 25th August. As well as the junk food, Haub has milk (for protein), and vegetables (for vitamins) with dinner.

By sticking to 1,800 calories a day - around 600-800 fewer than he'd need to maintain weight - Haub lost 10lbs in the first three weeks of his "diet".

Nutrition is about a lot more than calories. Weight loss "no surprise," say nutrition experts

The Kansas State University nutrition professor who lost 27 pounds in two months by eating Twinkies proved, well, nothing.

It's a well established fact that to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you eat. Calories are calories--it doesn't matter where they come from.

Naturally, when he practiced calorie restriction, he lost weight.

Haub is hardly the first to try to lose weight by focusing primarily on one food, or in the case of Twinkies, a synthetic food-like substance with 39 ingredients.

Since his dramatic weight loss, Jared reportedly has "eased himself into eating other foods" according to the Subway Web site. Mark Haub, a nutrition professor at Kansas State University wanted to find out what would happen if he cut calories, but loaded up on the junk food, especially Twinkies.

A lot of weight - 27 pounds in two months. He cut his calorie intake to 1800 per day (800 less than he probably was eating daily before the diet), took vitamins, ate mostly junk food with a daily protein shake and only a serving or two of vegetables. The calorie cut accounts for the weight loss, but what's interesting is that his LDL (bad cholesterol) dropped and HDL (the good kind) increased.

I wonder what he'll eat now that his diet is over?

A diet of Twinkies and other snack foods helped a college professor lose so much weight over a couple of months that he went from being overweight to being normal.

Nutritionists have long said that the amount of calories matters more than the kind of diet.

No one was recommending the diet.

An overweight nutrition professor at Kansas State University put himself on a predominantly snack food diet, with Twinkies prominent, for two months. Rather, it pretty emphatically rebuts claims in such works as Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, which suggests that the role of calories in weight is subordinate to the source of calories.

The Twinkie diet was a dreadful diet. But it was, nonetheless, a diet in the conventional sense, meaning it was calorie-restricted. A deficit of roughly 3,500 kcal is required to lose one pound of body fat. It takes smaller calorie deficits to lose other body tissues -- such as muscle -- and none at all to lose body water, which tends to happen with dieting. Calorie restriction produced the professor's weight loss, and was not particularly helped -- and certainly not hindered -- by the fact that these were mostly "bad" calories.

Drug addiction, chemotherapy, cholera and advanced HIV are all associated with weight loss. Foods of high nutritional quality include, among their many virtues, the capacity to produce fullness on fewer calories.