Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Convenience Store Diet

Did you hear or read the story about the college nutrition professor who went on a 2-month "Convenience Store Diet" and lost weight?

Story Highlights...
  • Nutrition professor's "convenience store diet" helped him shed 27 pounds (went from an "overweight" BMI designation to "Normal")
  • Haub limited himself to 1,800 calories and two-thirds come from junk food
  • Haub said it's too early to draw any conclusions about diet
Full Story at CNN

You can see the full details of Prof Haubs Diet Experiments on Facebook.

I read the full story and crunched some numbers from his Facebook postings.  I was really interested in body composition.  How much fat vs. muscle did he lose?

According to the data on Facebook...

Starting... 200.8 lbs     33.4% fat = 67.07 lbs     lean = 133.73 lbs
Ending.....174.2 lbs     24.9% fat = 43.38 lbs     lean = 130.82 lbs


Lost..........26.6 lbs       8.5% fat     23.69 fat lbs     2.91 lean lbs   


That means that 89% of the weight he lost was fat lbs!  I was impressed by that number.  That is better than mine.

Things to take away from this...
  • He kept a detailed account of everything he ate (food journal)
  • He stayed at healthy target calorie deficit for the entire time (not 'cheating' or 'starvation')
  • He took vitamin supplements everyday
  • He drank a protein shake everyday
  • He ate vegetables everyday
  • 1/3 of his daily calories were NOT junk food

This follows what I advise most people to do when they want to start making healthy lifestyle changes...
you don't necessarily have to change everything you eat to begin making changes.
Eat what you like... don't change a thing... just weigh and measure every bite accurately and RECORD IT!  Restrict your portions/calories to a healthy DEFICIT.

This is how I started... and when found that I was still hungry at the end of the day or just wanted more food I began to learn how to make (higher fiber, lower fat) choices that would be more filling AND allow bigger portions for the same calories.

If you love junk food, you can still lose weight!  You just have to keep track of the calories!!!

See Tom Venuto's thoughts on this.

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