Is the Twinkie Diet a Success?

Health is so much more than just plain calories. Twinkies have a bunch of chemicals that weren’t meant to be digested by the human body, and if anything that’ll put a load on your digestive system.
Thanks for nice post.

Twinkie Diet was a fun eye opener but one could take any food, juice, or brand name and see weight loss in the short term. Also slightly sad that a diet with twinkies, a protein shake, and a handful of veggies can give someone 'above average' health in America.

What is the twinkie diet?

This is the reason why so many people are confused when it comes to dieting. Now they think they can get away with eating twinkies.

actually, most skinny people are usually unhealthy, but i don't think most people, specially girls, even bother about the health aspect, the mind set is targeted to looks and nothing beyond that.
this is one of the biggest reason why such unhealthy diet gets promoted. It is time we put the healthy diet in the front, not the skinny one...

The Twinkie diet debate has certainly stirred things up. I'm reading about it all over the place.
I think it is important to keep in mind that because this was a calorie controlled experiment - he would not have been getting that much to eat. So it would become yet another diet that is impossible to keep up in the long term.
And that is before focusing on how very unhealthy this diet had to be.

Look, ANY diet -- IF ONE CAREFULLY FOLLOWS IT for the short-term-- that either restricts overall kcalories/day (especially relative to a person who habitually was consuming excessive kcalories/day) or is fashioned to enable the body to achieve a state of ketosis, CAN help mobilize and catabolize fat stores and diurese/excrete copious body fluid content and works to result in dramatic total weight loss, proabsbly fat loss, and, thus, move all the bio-markers favorably. But, often these quick results too-good-to-be-true diets result in muscle loss, especially, if they are too low in high-quality complete protein, bowel and gastrointestinal irregularities, especially if they are too low in fiber, and vitamin/mineral deficiencies. In a relatively healthy person, it is unusual to see vit/min deficiencies, but trace element, electrolyte, muscle wasting, untoward hormonal imbalances, and gi irregularities can occur fairly soon in the 'dieting' phase and is counterproductive to improving total health at the expense of shifting a few bio-markers favorably. In addition, SUSTAINING these unbalanced, unpalatable regimes is very difficult, if next to impossible, for the long-term. In my experience, even a 'Twinkie/Debbie Cakes/Doritos' diet becomes sickeningly untenable for patients. I once had a team of volunteers follow a 'Milky Way' diet -- 5 bars a day for 2 weeks with only water, black coffee, and tea allowed. They all lost weight, lowered their bp, ldl and vldl cholesterol, but were ravenous for 'normal' food.

That is the silliest thing I've ever heard of!

I agree completely - health is so much more than just plain calories. I'm sure Twinkies have a bunch of chemicals that weren't meant to be digested by the human body, and if anything that'll put a load on your digestive system. Telling ppl that health = skinny is very dangerous.

I'm not sure why the ambivelant results here are a surprise. Isn't this precisely what weight watchers is based on? Eat what you want within a caloric limit? The pre-packaged foods that weight watchers hawks, like smart ones and lean cuisines are also full of sugar, artificial sweeteners, freakey pseudo meats, added vitamin supplements, and the like. Those diets don't seem so different to me and have exactly the same results in both their positive and negative effects.
I think that sometimes folks who are experts in fitness get religious about certain habits, and a word like Twinkie sparks a furious preachiness, when plenty of other folks are eating equally as gross foods that are not equally under fire (as in the aforementioned lean cuisine, which is perhaps sicker bc of its healthy food disguise). As someone who has truly journeyed through weight loss, getting 10 tweets from 10 bloggers/doctors in a day about this Twinkie diet does not make me hate little Debbie snacks. Three years ago, it would have made me want to eat a Twinkie, but today it simply makes me consider if this level of anger from the fitness world is a way of misplacing some other emotion, such as fear that our Twinkie eater may be on to something. Perhaps in treating the obesity epidemic, a novel and easy approach such as a variation of this diet (a Twinkie for breakfast?) can benefit people more than something super strict that few people will stick with? If this is true, lots of fitness coaches may be looking at a loss of income soon, hence the fury? I don't know-- I just speculate.

I'm actually quite surprised at the results but over the long-term the body is bound to breakdown. These refined foods must be wrecking havoc on his body's hormones.

It's very important to understand the full effects of the Twinkie Diet and to have an intelligent conversation related to its merits. A more objective assessment of the fad diet is available on Holosfitness.com: http://www.holosfitness.com/blog/view/1/322/The-Twinkie-Diet---Proof-Calorie-Counting-Works?/