And Now . . . the Cookie Diet?

Oh, yes! You have to read this story in the Times, linked here (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22Skin.html?em), because it says so much about the nature of dieting, especially fad dieting.

Why is the cookie diet popular? Because it presents itself as an antidote to the deprivation and joylessness that accompany and torpedo many diets. It says: you needn't banish a favorite treat! In fact, you can subsist on it! Make indulgence itself your best weapon in the battle of the bulge! The path to thinness is paved with chocolate chips!

OF COURSE you can lose weight eating cookies, if you only eat a limited number of them and not much else, because at the core of every successful diet, be it a grapefruit-based diet or a cabbage soup diet or whatever, is a diminished calorie count. The Crisco Lard Diet would work if your daily measures of lard added up to just 1,100 calories. A tablespoon of lard every three hours! Bon Appetit!

But is the Cookie Diet encouraging a healthy relationship with food and a healthy psychology about eating? Will the Cookie Diet alumni keep their weight off?

They've followed a regimen so monochromatic and extreme it likely can't be sustained, a regimen that hasn't created good long-term eating habits. They've bought into the notion that you can manage your weight through a nifty, fun cheat (through cookies!) when you probably shouldn't, from a nutritional perspective. And the whole premise of the diet (an evil, outlawed food redeemed!) buys into a good-bad, embrace-avoid approach to thinking about eating that doesn't serve many people well. It never did anything for me.