The Cookie Diet™ Review

• Website: www.CookieDiet.com
• Author: Dr. Siegal
• Company: Dr. Siegal’s Direct Nutritionals, LLC
• Cost: The cookies are $59 for a weeks supply, you can also get shakes for the same price. Bottled green tea is $42 for 24 bottles and bottles of nutritional supplements come in at $10 each. You only need the cookies to follow the diet though.
• >> Click here to visit the site

Overview

The Cookie Diet™ was created in 1975 by Dr Sanford Siegal to help his patients lose weight. Dr Siegal firmly believes that hunger is the main problem people have with dieting which causes them to cheat and then give up, so his cookies are designed specifically to control your hunger while being low in calories.

The diet is very simple, you eat a cookie and have a glass of water whenever you feel hungry during the day, for a total of 6 cookies. Then in the evening you have a 500 – 700 calorie dinner bringing your daily calorie intake up to 1000 – 1200 calories.

The cookies taste good, like a dense chocolate brownie (I had to have the chocolate ones!) and they did satisfy my hunger for between 1 – 2 hours after each cookie, in fact by 16:00 I found myself having to cram a cookie in quick to stop myself ruining my dinner, even though I wasn’t hungry!

You are advised to consult your doctor before you start to find out what calorie intake they recommend you consume, then you use your dinner to make up the rest of your calorie intake after the 500 calories supplied by the cookies. No matter which way you look at it then the standard dinner is pretty small, so if you are used to eating large meals you will still need willpower to stick to this diet! (although it does tell you how you can eat two frozen meals for your dinner if you buy the right ones – yes two meals!).

You are supposed to lose weight at the rate of about 10lbs per month which he feels is the limit before you start to lose muscle and water at the same time. I also purchased the book just because I wanted to see what it said, in actual fact it is a very interesting 298 page book which takes you through how the diet was conceived, what he thinks of modern diets, why his diet works, a history of how diets have evolved over the years and lots more.

Obviously you also get instructions on how to use the cookies properly as well, and you get some recipes for dinners as well and tips on how to stick to the diet. You are also given a maintenance plan to help you keep to your target weight when you reach it, but that was disappointing as it was very brief and either had you continue eating the cookies for the rest of your life, or exercising for one hour a day with no mention of how to eat healthily. That part could really have been expanded on because it is an important part of any diet that you teach people how to eat healthily in the long term so they don’t put the weight back on.

In the book then a lot of concerns about the diet are addressed, including the starvation response we all fear when dieting, which Dr Siegal assures us that based on his testing only kicks in at levels of less than 800 calories per day. It is obvious after reading the book that Dr Siegal passionately believes in his cookies and diet.

Another thing explained in the book is the taste of the cookies, I said before that they taste good (not delicious), and he says that is planned. His reasoning is that while he could make them taste delicious, then people would be more prone to binge on them or eat them too quickly and ruin their diet, so this way you look forward to them but you don’t crave them.

Finally the last thing mentioned in the book which I haven’t seen anywhere else is the vitamin and mineral issue, if you look at the packs of cookies then you’ll see there aren’t any added vitamins and minerals which is strange for a meal replacement food. In the book Dr Siegal talks about this and says adding in anything else would ruin the taste of the cookies so he purposely left them out, then in every box of the cookies you get his own brand of multivitamin tablets for free to use at the same time.

Now I thought as it said ‘free sample’ it was trying to promote his vitamins and make me buy them so I ignored them, but after reading what he said then you are always supposed to get a weeks supply of the tablets with a weeks supply of the cookies – so make sure you take one every morning when you are eating the cookies otherwise you will miss out on important nutrients!

This is an extremely low calorie diet which will get results just because your body has to burn fat to make up for the calories it is missing, if you do decide to follow the diet I recommend you get the book and read at least chapters 1,2,5,15,20,21 and 22 which will really help you understand it better.

If it wasn’t for all the explanations in the book and the promise that he has tested all of this out on his patients with no ill effects and nothing but success then I’d be warning about the starvation response and possible dangers of a low calorie diet, but after reading the book it is hard not to trust him when he says it is all safe. Of course consult with your doctor about it before you try it!

What’s do you get?

You buy the cookies in weekly packs of 42, they come packaged in ‘daily bags’ of 6 so that they stay as fresh as possible. The flavours available are: Banana, Chocolate, Oatmeal Raisin, Coconut and Blueberry.

You can buy the shakes in weekly packs of 21 (one shake is the equivalent of 2 cookies). The flavours available are: Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry, Pina Colada and Crème Brulee.

I also ordered the book which is 298 pages long.

On the main site if you go to ‘resources’ you also get some free tools to help you work out how many calories you should be consuming per day and how quickly you can get to your target weight, plus some recipes for your evening meal.

User Comments

It is hard to find much talk about this diet online because any time someone mentions it then people jump on them saying it is obvious eating cookies is not going to help you lose weight, they see the name and think the diet is just eating normal cookies all day long…

The sensible comments we have found are positive, some people find it hard to stick to, some don’t like the taste, and one person had heartburn after eating them, but the majority really like it and lots of people reported losing weight with it.

Customer Support

This is not your typical diet so customer support is not really required for anything apart from delivery and billing queries. They have a contact form on the website and a telephone number for you to call, so there is always help available to you.

I sent in a test question via the contact form and had an answer back in less than 5 hours! That combined with super fast delivery means they deserve 4 stars.