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Wes: Me want cookie! Welcome everyone to episode seven of Healthy Mind Fit Body podcast, this is Wes and Kevin is on the other line. Hey Kevin!
Kevin: Hey, how’s it going?
Wes: Good! I was going to get into my new role on this show because our topic today is Cookie Monster Diet!
Kevin: Me want cookie!
Wes: Yeah the Cookie Monster, everybody knows him, at least people that are Gen X’ers and older know the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street. I don’t know if they’ve done reruns of that show or not but I know that character was a big fan of cookies.
Kevin: Oh I’m sure it’s out there, I’m sure the YouTube clips are readily available.
Wes: Oh yeah, always living in perpetuity on YouTube. But I came across an article today from the New York Times fashion style section titled “A Few Cookies a Day to Keep the Pounds Away,” and I’d never heard of a cookie diet before, had you?
Kevin: Uh, no. But it made me think if there could be a cookie diet then really we could base a diet around just about anything.
Wes: Exactly. Ice cream diet?
Kevin: Yeah I was actually thinking of the chocolate fudge sundae diet.
Wes: Or how about just chocolate sprinkles diet?
Kevin: Yeah, that could work. As long as you’re exercising enough to keep those pounds away, then everything works out fine, right?
Wes: Yeah, this is an interesting take on how to lose weight. Obviously it violates pretty much all the principles of the Healthy Mind Fit Body sort of a lifestyle program that we have outlined in our book ‘Healthy Mind Fit Body – how the mind body connection can help you achieve your perfect weight.’ And we discuss in the bonus audio which is on the home page if you just opt in with your email address you can download the audio that we talk about, the Three Pillars to Managing Your Weight, losing weight, getting down to your optimal weight and maintaining it for a lifetime, and actually coming to terms with it psychologically, this new way of looking at food.
But it seems that the kind of ‘get rich quick’ sort of diet schemers out there are trying to promote this way of eating that is not geared for a lifetime of eating healthy is it?
Kevin: No this is what I would consider a fad diet because it’s trying to capture those people that they want to get ‘rich’ quick, it’s like the get thin quick, the get in shape quick, just do everything like really fast and not have to deal with anything that would potentially be painful. So it sounds great to be able to eat cookies and lose weight, so it’s just a catchy name for a diet and really it’s more about the marketing aspect than it is about something that actually works long term.
Wes: Yeah it says this is Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet which is eating six pre-packaged cookies a day plus one real meal, say skinless chicken and steamed vegetables which is basically protein and a minimal carb sort of a regimen there. But I’m not sure what the constitution of the cookies is, if it has protein mixed in because there are protein cookies out there on the market that you can buy.
They have a little fat in them too but the person that’s in the story says that she tried all the other diets including Atkins and they had no success with her and then she switched to this diet, which is pretty darn expensive. You’re paying fifty-some dollars a week for these pre-packaged cookies and then I don’t know how long you stick to it, I guess until you lose your weight and then you go back to your old way of eating right?
And that explains why most people can’t keep the weight off, they try one of these diets and they lose the weight because they’re all really geared towards the calorie theory of weight loss which is reduce your calories and then you’ll lose the weight but then you’re left with a diet that is not so healthy.
Kevin: Right, and that’s what it says in the article. There’s a quote here that says, “In blunter terms, consume a substance whose ingredients and nutritional value are somewhat vague and drop weight because how can you not when you’re only consuming 800 to 1,000 calories a day? So that’s not many calories, and of course that kind of diet you will lose weight and especially if you’re incorporating exercise into it, it’s pretty much guaranteed to lose weight.
But for how long and how long can people keep that up? What do you think? I mean I’ve tracked my calories in the past, I mean we’re not big on the idea of counting calories but I’ve done in the past and depending on the activity level is…in college I think I was eating like 4,000 calories a day with my workouts and everything. Of course now I’m not nearly that much but I just don’t see how eating 800 or 1,000 calories a day is a good idea for any reason.
Wes: Well it will definitely make you lose weight and kind of reminds me of that infomercial I once saw that said ‘lose all your weight!’ which would be like stepping into an incinerator and just being cremated. I guess you’d be down to a few ounces then, just the ashes that you have. But you don’t want to lose all your weight obviously, you want to lose the excess fat that you have on.
And actually the Fat Fast diet that Atkins makes note of in his book is the fastest way to lose which is even faster than starvation because that really slows your metabolism down. So the Fat Fast was 1,000 calories a day with 90% of those calories coming from fat and 10% coming from protein. So I think it consisted of like cream cheese and macadamia nuts would be one of the regiments there but that’s just an extreme way to lose the fat and we’re not into the extreme.
We’re into a healthy lifestyle which means looking at food in a way that is not going to be causing conflict within you because obviously people love cookies and who doesn’t like the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, or peanut butter cookies, or oatmeal raisin? I mean they’re all really tasty, but do they reflect a way of eating that is going to be something that you can maintain for a lifetime? Not necessarily.
Kevin: No but eat his cookies and you’ll shell out whatever it was, a couple hundred bucks a month and then you’ll lose the weight and keep it off, right?
Wes: Yeah, well you’ll lose the weight but you probably won’t keep it off.
Kevin: That’s true.
Wes: Because maybe you’ll become addicted to cookies, maybe that’s the goal!
Kevin: Yeah and then going back to my point earlier about if you could just name any diet and call it a diet, this is from the article. It says, “Any diet that names one particular food or food group in its title – ice cream diet, whipped cream diet, low carb diet – is likely to be unbalanced and short lived,” said Bonnie Taub-Dix, national spokeswoman for American Dietetic Association.
So she’s got a point there about all these fad diets and calling them ice cream diet, or beer diet, or whatever. But that’s interesting that she added in low carb diet with that because that’s not really a fad, and it’s not a specific food, it’s actually just a way of eating.
Wes: Yeah we have a few bones to pick with the American Dietetic Association as well as the American Diabetes Association.
Kevin: We should do a podcast on all the agencies with the letters.
Wes: These institutions that actually keep people in states of unhealthy which is not about Healthy Mind Fit Body’s, it’s more about making revenue and keeping people on this assembly line into the doctor’s offices because the high carb, lower fat diets are not really conducive to living independent lifestyles that you’re healthy with but rather having an assortment of issues that seem to be perpetuated by the way people are promoting these diets.
So it’s like you have these two extremes, the cookie diets that cause people to lose weight but also keep them kind of malnourished and then the other side that says eat the typical green based diet, the complex carbs as long as they’re complex then they’re fine but that causes lots of insulin secretion and keeps people locked in a way of eating that is not conducive to weight loss or health.
So it depends on how you look at the way that they’re trying to promote this diet. I guess if the cookies were similar to the nutrition bar and then you added in a healthy meal with that, certainly you could lose the weight but what you want to do is actually eat real food most of the time, and that’s explained in our book obviously. We go through the different aspects of that and trying to kick your carbohydrate addiction because if you’re just focused on eating cookies as a way to lose weight, that’s not really kicking the carb addiction is it?
Kevin: No I think it’s encouraging that type of eating. I guess they want you to get addicted to their cookies and stay on their diet.
Wes: Me want cookie!
Kevin: Me want cookie! But I look at it as if you don’t have money and you start buying a bunch of good stuff like really expensive stuff on credit cards and you have like a nice car and a nice house and everything’s on credit, well it looks like you are doing really well and it may even feel like you are doing well because you get to live in this great place, you drive this fast car but the underlying thing is you haven’t been able to get yourself to the point where you can make that money so it’s all phony and it’s going to collapse.
So it’s just like the diet thing, you get on these fad diets like cookies, it sounds good and you may lose the weight, you’re probably going to lose the weight and you’ll start feeling like wow, I’m in shape, I’m losing weight but ultimately if you haven’t dealt with anything internally and that’s both the carbohydrate addiction which most people have to some degree and secondly the psychological issues that we talk about a lot in our book. You can’t really skip those steps and expect to have long term weight loss or long term fitness.
Wes: Very true. Yeah, it’s really about shifting your perspective to a plan that’s going to work for you rather one that seems to be appealing. And I guess they’re pitching this to some of the Hollywood celebs and I notice that this has been endorsed by the likes of Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Hudson and Kelly Clarkson.
Kevin: Well they must know what they’re talking about right, they’re celebrities?
Wes: Obviously, yes. Once you get the celebs on your side then you’re good to go. So that’s not exactly in line with what we really want to promote in terms of Healthy Mind Fit Body. In the book there is a 7-day program that helps you delve into your self-conflicts and your subconscious thoughts and feelings related to how you’re eating and how you grew up eating things because this is not something that people typically focus on. How we were treated as children in relation to the food that we were told to eat or forced to eat or told not to eat and we ended up developing some habits in that regard.
Kevin: Right, and that’s a good segway, we have another article here that I wanted to talk about briefly. It’s from the Mercola.com site and it’s called ‘Parents Can Help Their Children Grow to Love Vegetables.’ So I’ll just read the article, it’s really short. “Emerging research now suggests that parents can begin to shape a child’s palette even in the womb says Stanford University pediatrician Allen Greene. Babies actually have more taste buds before birth than at any other time of life.
They can detect subtle flavors from their mother’s diet through their amniotic fluid Greene says. These early exposures create a lasting imprint on children’s tastes. One study showed babies of women who drank carrot juice while pregnant were more likely than others to enjoy carrots when they were six months old. Infants are surprisingly adventurous from the age of six months to thirteen months, a critical time for the formation of their future preferences.
They can learn to like almost anything yet few parents make the most of this crucial window. Research shows 94% of parents give up offering new foods after only five tries. While children’s diets have improved modestly in recent years, a new study of kids under age four shows that nearly 1/3 ate no vegetables. Parents who want to raise healthy eaters need to expose their children to the sights, smells, and feel of vegetables early and often, Greene says. He encourages parents to take children’s to farmer’s markets letting them hold lumpy sweet potatoes and smell ripe peaches.”
Wes: I think that tactile sensation thing is really good, taking kids to farmer’s market is great because then they learn all about natural produce and vegetables. And I think the most important thing is to actually walk the walk and promote a healthy diet with your kids not by berating them and saying eat your vegetables or continually trying to introduce them to vegetables, but rather eating in a way that they’ll say wow, that looks interesting. In other words, modeling that you want your kids to eat.
Kevin: Right, exactly. I mean it’s like I’ve heard parents say, “Oh, my 3-year old loves French fries, or pasta,” or “My kid only will eat candy.” It’s like well what are you eating yourself? What are you having around?
Wes: Is there a correlation between what you’re eating and what your kid is eating?
Kevin: Yeah, there’s actually studies that have been done on kids that have grown up without having been exposed to pizza in these cultures and I think they were from the Caribbean or something. But when they gave these kids pizza at an older age like 12 or 13 years old, they didn’t like it. They thought it was digusting. And it just shows you that we’re all conditioned for this stuff, we don’t have to like pizza, it’s not a requirement.
Wes: True, and it just goes to show that you grow up eating in a certain way and that is reflected later on in adulthood. And then also the psychological factors in which you maybe are defiant against what your parents wanted you to eat and you end up not eating those things that they did say that were healthy, and actually were healthy but you didn’t eat them in spite of what was good for you. So it’s all these different factors that get stuck in our heads that we need to come to terms with.
Kevin: So we can sum up with, eat your vegetables and stay away from the cookie diet.
Wes: Yeah. Don’t be a cookie monster. And if you like this podcast, you can always go to iTunes and rate and review the show. We leave a link in the show notes for that as well as on HealthyMindFitBody.com.
Kevin: Yeah we also have…you mentioned the Three Pillars of Achieving Your Perfect Weight through the Mind Body Connection, it’s a 20-minute audio. You can get that, download it for free at HealthyMindFitBody.com. I think that should wrap it up for today, so thanks everyone for listening.
Wes: Talk to you again next week!
Kevin: Bye guys!