Cheeseburger Diet?

Back in college I had a physics professor who made the argument that losing weight was simple: all you have to do is consume fewer calories than you expend over the course of a day.  He suggested that even a diet of nothing but cheeseburgers would produce results so long as the calorie count was correct.  Now, granted, a cheeseburger is a massive source of calories, and for many people, one or two cheeseburgers a day, while not very filling, would satisfy their calorie needs for that day, but the premise remains.

A while ago a “documentary” type movie came out called Supersize Me, and the entire premise of the movie was that eating McDonalds every day would cause someone to gain weight.  The central person in that movie did just that, and indeed, he gained weight, a lot of it.  I’m sure a lot of people who watched that movie were deathly afraid of McDonalds afterwards, the whole thing was actually a hoax of sorts.  In the movie, the guy was eating way way more than a normal person should consume.  Had he stuck to a more appropriate calorie intake, he likely wouldn’t have gained as much or any weight.  Of course, then the movie would have flopped.

Back to me!  I’ve been back on the Weight Watcher’s diet now for about a week, and during that week I’ve enjoyed cheesecake, white rice, peanut butter pretzels, polvoron (a type of Filipino cookie), and even fried chicken.  The variety of foods I eat in a given week did not change all that much, and yet in this past week I’ve lost about 6 pounds.  Why?  The Weight Watcher’s diet, while it takes in values such as protein, dietary fiber, carbohydrates, and fat, is basically a calorie watching diet.  You eat what you want, but you are forced to make trade-offs so that your overall calorie consumption does not rise.  For example, The day I ate the cheesecake, and man, that was one delicious slice of cheesecake, I skipped out on two meals of rice to make up for it.  When I had fried chicken, I only had a couple of pieces instead of the three or four I usually eat.

This brought me to the question of what it really means to eat healthy.  Is it true that you need to eat a certain balance of foods and ignore certain foods altogether in order to be healthy?  For example, Lindsey is looking at slowly omitting certain foods from her diet, and she has already nixed dairy!  No sour cream?  Bummer!  Or, can healthy eating be achieved with any combination of foods so long as certain minimums are reached and certain maximums aren’t exceeded?  If you have high cholesterol, maybe the cheeseburger diet isn’t for you.  If you suffer from low potassium, maybe you should eat a banana or two.  Calcium?  Drink a glass of milk. 

But should you omit foods entirely from your diet?  No, I don’t think so.  At least, I know I couldn’t do it.  The other night I turned down In-N-Out, and I love In-N-Out.  I had already reached my point maximum for the day, so I made the conscious choice to skip it, because I knew I could simply plan it into another day.  If I were never allowed to eat a Double Double again, well, I’d likely cheat, a lot.