You can have your cake and lose weight too. Curbing obesity is all about eating less — and you can choose naughty foods if you like, according to Dr. Mark Haub (PhD), a professor of nutrition at Kansas State University.
To prove it, he’s eating cake and junk food for a month.
Haub is promoting the idea that diets fail because they don’t take individual preference into account.
For his experimental diet, he aims for 1,800 calories a day. He looks after his basic nutrition needs with multivitamins, a few vegetables and some milk and protein drinks.
But the other 70 per cent to 80 per cent of his diet is junk — snack cakes, hot dogs, peanut-butter chocolate bars, chocolate cake rolls, breakfast pizza, donuts, chips and sugary cereal.
“The premise is very simple,” he says, “eat less energy than expended.”
Haub had high cholesterol when he started the diet in late August. Two weeks later, Metro contacted him to see how he was doing. He had lost 10 lbs and his cholesterol levels and blood glucose levels had improved.
“Now my cholesterol values are normal, which surprised me as I was not expecting such a dramatic improvement in just two weeks.”
While he doesn’t suggest people pig out on junk food, he does feel that foods notoriously known to ruin diets may be OK in moderation.
“I’m not promoting this or recommending it; it’s just an exercise in nutrition,” says Haub, who teaches undergraduate students.
He feels that instead of telling people what not to eat, a better way to reduce obesity is to encourage people to keep their calories in check, and to fortify popular foods with nutrients.
