Mark Haub, a professor of nutrition at Kansas State wanted to make a point: calorie count matters more than nutritional content when it comes to weight-loss. To argue his case, he embarked on a 10-week Twinkie diet and shed 27 pounds. He ate a snack cake or bag of chips every three hours, but only consumed a total of 1,800 calories total per day. Before the diet, he has a body mass index of 28.8, and continued his diet until he reached a BMI of 24.9, which is considered a normal weight.
However, about a third of Haub’s diet did consist of more nutritional foods. He drank a protein shake daily and took a multivitamin. He also ate vegetables, like canned green beans or several sticks of celery.
Haub deemed his super-unhealthy diet a “convenience store diet,” and does not recommend that anyone follow his example. Although his diet may have lacked many nutritional sources, many other health indicators actually improved for Haub after following the diet. His “bad” cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his “good” cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. Haub reduced his level of triglycerides, another form of fat, by 39 percent.
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