Junk Food Diet

Related Comics: Arctic Zero

Originally my coworker Justin wanted me to do the Twinkie diet, to which I refused. Then he promised to do it with me if we could find some gluten free Twinkies, which we couldn't. Finally he proposed a combination of junk foods to lend variety to our "diet," to which I finally accepted so long as he continued on the diet.

The Diet:

The follow things are acceptable to eat, as long as you stay under a 2,000 calorie per day diet:

• Oreos
• Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Potato Chips
• Ice Cream
• Candy Bars
• Pretzels

We were also allowed 1 serving of protein shake in the morning.

The Experience:

Junk food is high in calories, so I knew that this would mean eating a lot less food altogether relative to any other diet. Therefore I had a master plan to find the lowest calorie food from each category in order to maximum the volume I got to eat.

This was a great plan on paper, but fell apart as soon as I started doing some research. Possibly due to some elaborate comspiracy, nearly every candy bar on the market is 133 calories per ounce. I was lucky to discover that Payday candy bars were only 125 calories/ounce, and they had 7 grams of protein. Those seemed like a great start, but I quickly grew to dislike how many calories are in candy bars on a whole.

Sour dough pretzels have slightly fewer calories than regular ones, bakes potatoe chips, like Pringles, Sun Chips, or the new baked Lays are obviously less fatty that ones cooked in oil. I bought a 20 pack of Sun Chips which were each 140 calories. That made them easiy to add up, but depressingly small.

For cookies I got a pack of those 100 calorie snack deals. They came with Oreos and Chips Ahoy cookies, they too were small and sad. Sadder still, since they were less than 1 ounce of food for 100 calories.

And then there was the ice-cream. Since I knew this week was coming I did a little research online to find the lowest calorie ice-cream that existed. After some searching I came across a product called Arctic Zero (by the way, is anyone else concerned that Amazon sells things like ice-cream?).

Arctic Zero advertises itself as a ice-cream product which is only 150 calories per pint. This sounded like a dream come true, not only could I gorge myself on ice-cream for a week, but I would remain well under my allotted calories while doing it.

Although their website makes all the apperances to lead you to stores where their product is sold, this mostly just a sick game they play. I went to two different Harmon's with no luck before eventually finding it at a WholeFoods store. I don't care for WholeFoods, I'm more partial to partial foods. Wholefoods only had one flavor available, vanilla maple, and it was $4 for a single pint.

They advertise this as an ice-cream product, and I suppose it is. I suppose if I had just suffered a massive head injury, and while in the hospital I awoke in a semi-conscience state and was offered this substance, I might mistake it for ice-cream.

To say the vanilla flavor is over-powering is an understatement. I was immediately reminded of my ice-cream experience at the Jumbo Buffet. Eventually I was able to find 3 other flavors at a Sunflower Market, which I originally assumed would only sell me various sunflower seeds.

Of the 4 flavors I tried (Maple Vanilla, Peanut Butter Chocolate, Chocolate Mint, and Strawberry) strawberry was by far the best. It tasted authentic because they used real strawberries, and the texture seemed a little better than the other ones. The peanut butter chocolate was terrible, at one point I tried adding my oreos or other cookies to the "ice-cream" to try and improve it, this didn't really help all that much.

But the end of the week I was pretty sick of eating junk food, never have I been so looking forward to eating fruits and vegetables again. Thursday Justin informed me that he wouldn't be able to continue the diet through Saturday because he had to do quite a bit of physical labor. I was very relieved, and Saturday I had a number of different foods.

The Result:

Since I was eating foods which are greater than 100 calories per ounce, I had little more than a pound of food each day. As a result my weight dropped 4 pounds initially in the week. On the other hand, I notice my stomach appeared to be gaining back fat, fat which I have so tiresomely tried to eliminate. This was pretty depressing. Because I ate other foods on Saturday I wasn't 4 pounds down for the week, but I was still 1 pound down, which was surprising. Hopefully I didn't lose too much muscle.

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