Hostess Twinkies of Interstate Bakeries Corporation - Photo Larry D. Moore
A college professor says the secret to losing weight may be eating a lot of junk food.
Mark Haub, a professor at Kansas State University, said he lost 27 pounds while on what he called the “Twinkie Diet.”
Haub said the idea for the diet came to him while he was teaching a class on human nutrition.
In order to convince his students that calorie counts were more important than food’s nutritional value, he cut down his daily calories from 2,600 to 1,800 and ate junk food.
“It’s not starvation; it’s not liposuction, it’s using diet to lose weight,” Haub said. “It’s completely altered a lot of things we’ve been taught for last five years about nutrition.”
He said his cholesterol levels even improved while he was on the “Twinkie Diet,” going from 214 to 184 in two months.
“I avoided whole grains, I avoided fruits. I did eat some raw carrots and celery at dinner … [and] I tried to pick foods that most people would consider unhealthy,” Haub said.
For most days, he ate four items from a vending machine or convenience store, plus milk and protein shakes along with a couple serving of vegetables.
Haub said his success proves that people who want to loose weight do not have to themselves to regimes like Adkins or the South Beach Diet. All you really need to do is eat healthy, exercise and pay attention to your calories, and then the weight will start to come off.
Haub said it was all an experiment.
“Let’s say we reduce obesity, reduce body weight, move somebody — me — from overweight to healthy weight, but we do that with foods that aren’t recommended,” he said. “Is that healthy?”