Scientifically Blonde | Lose weight with the Twinkie Diet

My father’s always on a crazy new diet. Books with titles like Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle and Eating Right for Your Blood Type line the bookcases of our home. But despite his looking in all directions, the answer to weight loss continues to evade him.

That is until, over the phone, he excitedly told me about a promising study he recently read about. “Sally,” he said, “it seems that the real key to losing weight is eating less!”

Well, duh. Didn’t everyone already know that?

But, to amuse him, I looked at the study that he was referring to anyway — and found the results surprising and pretty relevant to college students like me who tend to eat like crap.

In short, Kansas State University Nutrition professor Mark Haub conducted an experiment on himself. His hypothesis? That it really doesn’t matter what you eat — low-carb, low-fat, high-protein, liquids, bars. Simple calorie counting is all that matters. His diet became known as the “Twinkie Diet” and he put it to the test.

For two-and-a-half months, instead of meals, he chowed down on Twinkies, Little Debbie treats, Hostess cupcakes, Oreo cookies and other convenience-store junk food every three hours. To cover his bases — as you can imagine, the nutritional content of a Twinkie isn’t great — he also popped a multivitamin, ate a can of vegetables and chugged a protein shake.

If you’re like many college students, his diet sounds all too familiar.

So it should come as good news to most of you out there to learn that Haub lost 27 pounds over the 10 weeks of his Twinkie diet. Astonishing? Definitely. But really, you can make sense of it when you do the caloric math. Each Twinkie rings in only 150 calories, and a chocolate-frosted Hostess cupcake is 180 calories. Compare that to a turkey club from Au Bon Pain, which packs about 800 calories.

Okay, so he lost weight. But what about his underlying health? Well, not only did Haub drop 27 pounds, but he also lowered his bad cholesterol and increased his good cholesterol by 20 percent each.

So it seems that it really doesn’t matter what you eat; it just matters how much you eat. I thought this idea wouldn’t sit so well with most nutritionists, so I asked one of Penn’s nutrition professors what she thought about the whole affair.

“In the long run, the old caveat of ‘you are what you eat’ might result in some significant consequences,” Nutrition professor Audrey Caspar-Clark said. She pointed out something important that I had carelessly missed. Twinkies are typically high in dreaded trans fats, which are associated with heart disease and type-2 diabetes, among a ton of other negative health problems.

Eat Twinkies, lose weight and get healthy? It did seem too good to be true. From experience (rather, unfortunate experiences), I know that when I enter a junk-food vortex and consume a strict diet of donuts, cookies and brownies, I just feel gross and constantly hungry — making me consume more food, and calories, than I usually would. When you’re hungry for lunch, eating a single Twinkie isn’t very satisfying.

To follow a diet like this one would require some amazing self-control. And a diet that leaves you hungry is a crappy diet anyway. Going hungry affects your mood, performance in school and energy levels. Before I see anyone promoting an eat-whatever-you-want-but-count-your-calories diet like this, I’d like to see research addressing the effects on mood, executive functioning and energy — at the very least.

Nonetheless, Haub’s findings are intriguing. With finals coming up, I’m not even going to step foot in the kitchen for two weeks, but it’s comforting to know that my health isn’t necessarily going down the drain.

Sally Engelhart is a College junior from Toronto, Canada. Her e-mail address is engelhart@theDP.com. Scientifically Blonde appears on alternate Thursdays.

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