Shahar Madjar, MD

On a sunny day in May with only slivers of snow still on the ground, I stopped at the grocery store and bought a pack of two Twinkies. It wasn’t a particularly brave act, I admit, but still an unusual one for me. I didn’t do it because of a sudden craving for a Twinkie, but rather as a part of a larger attempt to fully understand the Twinkie diet.

The Twinkies I bought came in a package of two yellow, spongy cakes wrapped around white pasty vanilla cream. Each was about the size of a fat thumb. Their dome was round, smooth, and mildly sticky. At the flat bottom, I recognized three little openings through which the cream was injected. I can’t remember how much I paid, but these cakes weren’t expensive at all. And the promise of a cream-filled miniature cake was, well, enticing.

The list of ingredients was long, about 30. The nutritional label read that the package contained 20% of the recommended daily dose of saturated fat, 12% of cholesterol, 16% of salt, 17% of total sugar, only 2 grams of protein, and 280 calories for both Twinkies. This read like a warning with blinking red light all over, This Isn’t Good For You! And yet, deferring judgement, I bit into one of them.

My Twinkie smelled of vanilla, was too sweet, and felt soft on my palate. It tasted artificial.

In eating my Twinkie, I followed in the footsteps of professor Mark D. Haub from Kansas State University who decided, in 2010, to embark on The Twinkie Diet. His goal was to demonstrate to his students ” … that in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most, not the nutritional value of the food.”

Professor Haub isn’t the first to conduct scientific self-experimentation. There are numerous examples, but here is a particularly intriguing one: In 1984, the Australian Barry Marshall drank a petri dish crowded with the bacteria Helicobacter pylori. Soon thereafter, he developed gastritis (infection of the stomach) with abdominal discomfort, nausea, vomiting, and halitosis (bad breath). For his discovery–that H. pylori, rather than stress or spicy food, is the cause of gastritis–he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005.

Professor Haub wasn’t the first to try a highly restrictive diet either. Lord Byron, the 19th century English poet, had a “morbid propensity to fatten.” In attempts to lose weight, he perpetually cycled between binge eating and self-starvation, living on a diet of biscuits and soda water for days at a time and then on a horrid combination of “cold potatoes, rice, fish, or greens, deluged in vinegar,” which he “gobbled up like a famished dog.”

A bit later, my late mother, bless her heart, decided that she needed to lose weight “no matter what.” She replaced three of her daily meals with half a grapefruit, sprinkled on top with a teaspoon of sugar. After two weeks of engaging in this miraculous citrus circus, I saw her stepping on the scale, her face long and sour (too much citrus? I wonder). “I was so sure I lost a lot of weight,” she said disappointedly, “my bones must be too heavy!”

Being too restrictive–as restrictive as the Twinkie Diet–is one of several characteristics shared by multitude of diets commonly called ‘fad diets’: Their popularity often draws energy from a media storm built toward a climax by appearances of charismatic doctors, the rich and famous, or mere celebrities. These diets make unreasonable claims of rapid or extreme weight loss, are simple to follow because they restrict the menu to a single or only a few food items, and are often fashionable for only a short time.

There are numerous examples for fad diets, but several are particularly curious, memorable, almost grotesque in nature. The Tapeworm Diet calls for dieters to swallow a pill that contains an egg of a flat, elongated parasite, a tapeworm. The tapeworm is expected to grow within the body and to consume some of the ingested food the dieter consumes. In the Sleeping Beauty Diet, dieters are encouraged to take sedatives resulting a slumber that would last at least 10 hours a day because when dieters are asleep, the thinking goes, they don’t eat, feel hunger, or gain weight. To top these off, in The Cotton Ball Diet, dieters are advised to eat cotton balls dipped in juice, milk, or smoothies because when their stomach is filled with cotton-balls dieters feel full.

More often than not, life calls for reason. Do any of the fad diets I just described make sense to you? And what about professor Haub’s Twinkie diet? Over a period of two months, Haub ate a very restrictive diet composed mainly of Little Debbie snack cakes, cereal, cookies, brownies, Doritos, Oreos, and yes, Twinkies. All I can say, for now, is that the results were somewhat surprising.

Should we all go Twinkie? And what are the characteristics of an ideal diet? I will answer these questions in my next article.

Editor’s note: Dr. Shahar Madjar is a urologist at Aspirus and the author of “Is Life Too Long? Essays about Life, Death and Other Trivial Matters.” Contact him at smadjar@yahoo.com.