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</head>For most people, the word "cleanse" evokes images of green juice and cayenne pepper-spiked lemonade. But writer Jeff Wilser had a different experience in mind when he embarked on a cleanse this summer. He vowed to eat nothing but junk food (think processed, packaged snacks that tempt you from the vending machine) for an entire month. His intention was to take a hard look at the quality vs. quantity of what he consumed and test the hypothesis: If you limit your caloric intake to a moderate amount, but hit up the Cheez-Its on the regular, can you still be healthy, feel great, and lose weight? The following is a condensed excerpt of his food diary from The Good News About What's Bad for You… The Bad News About What's Good for You.
Calories: 2,088
It didn’t take long to feel the fatal flaw of this plan: the “serving size” of junk food is profoundly disappointing, and since I cap my portions to their official guidelines, I’m doomed to a month of 27 Cheez-Its and 3 Oreos. I counted every pretzel. I poured M&M’s into measuring cups. I used a spreadsheet to allocate my junky calories throughout the day—150 calories of Oreos at 7:00 a.m., 200 calories of donuts at 9:00 a.m., etc. The math is ugly but it works. I was never exactly hungry, but I was never fully sated. One eye is always on the clock. This is starting to feel like an awful idea.
Calories: 1,690
Grocery shopping time. I ignore my decade-long impulse to seek out “reduced fat,” loading up the cart with full-fat Oreos, full- fat Chips Ahoy, and full-fat Doritos. I throw it all in the basket. The great thing about a junk cleanse is that there’s no need to worry about buying too much, as nothing expires. (It’s the Apocalypse Diet, as I could do it after civilization crumbles.) A woman sees my cart and chuckles. “It looks amazing,” she says. “That’s all I’m craving, too.” I look up, see that she’s pregnant. She has an excuse. What’s mine?
Calories: 1,972
For breakfast, frozen Peanut M&M’s. My body is adjusting. I’ve already made it longer than most “cleanses,” which typically go just five days. In fact, the junk cleanse feels a lot like a juice cleanse. You’re basically doing the same thing. Juicers tend to misdiagnose the reason they feel “lighter” or “cleansed”; they chalk it up to the magical power of “honey and cayenne pepper,” but honey has nothing to do with it: you’re starving your body of calories. You can do this with cayenne pepper or M&M’s. I prefer candy.
Calories: 2,195
A breakthrough day. Up until this point, I had been injecting calories linearly throughout the day, in even amounts, every hour or two. Starting today, I begin to clump these snacks in sad little meals, roughly corresponding to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I have a supper of Chex mix, corn nuts, and Cracker Jack, anchored by a donut and sprinkled with Nerds, as a garnish.
Today I hit the U.S. Open. Muhammad Ali’s daughter, Laila Ali, is a spokeswoman for USTA’s tennis kids program, and I interview her for a potential story. She’s teaming up with the USTA to battle obesity, and somehow my junk cleanse comes up.
“How do you feel?” she asks me.
“I feel fine.”
“Hmmmmmm.”
She clearly doesn’t believe me. “Health is about more than skinny or fat,” she says.
This is 100 percent true. My junk cleanse looks at the impact of junk food on weight, but of course it fails to measure all the intangible benefits of health, and there’s no way for it to gauge the long-term impact. Yes, I feel surprisingly good after twelve days of eating garbage, but what’s it doing to my cholesterol? My bones? My heart?
Calories: 4,179
I decided to try a little experiment within the experiment. When you’re on the “slow-carb” diet, Tim Ferriss recommends a weekly cheat day, where you go absolutely bat-shit crazy. This supposedly resets the metabolism. So I do this, gorging myself on Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, a king-size bag of corn chips, a king- size box of Hot Tamales, a dozen chocolate chip cookies, powdered donuts, and Little Debbie chocolate cupcakes. A total of 4,179 calories for the day. I feel bloated, nauseous, sapped of energy. This is how people assumed I would feel. It’s the junk cleanse without the portion control. Shitty quality and too much quantity. If I did this for 30 days, now we’re talking "Super Size Me." The scary thing is that it happened so naturally. It’s easy to overeat. It’s even easier to overeat with junk food. And it depressed me to realize that for a large portion of America, this binge is just an average day.
Calories: 2,270 Exercise: 480
I wolf down an early dinner of corn chips, Cheez-Its, beef jerky, and Fig Newtons before I head to a restaurant for a date. She orders the fish; I order whiskey.
“You’re not eating?” asks the waitress.
“I’m on a cleanse.”
“But you can drink whiskey?”
‘It’s a new kind of cleanse.”
(My date isn’t quite sure what to think of this experiment. Or more to the point, she knows exactly what to think of it. A few weeks later she calls things off. But we can’t be sure if this is correlation or causation.)
Calories: 1,827
I discover the joy of sugar-free Jell-O. It’s like cheating! You can devour an entire tub and it only costs 40 calories. (For the moment, I’ll ignore the recent evidence saying artificial sweeteners are bad for you.)
I’m close to the end. People are asking me what I crave. Salad? A burger? I crave more junk food. I have something like Stockholm syndrome, as the sugary snacks have kidnapped me. I have become afraid of real food. For this we can thank the brilliant engineers at Nabisco, Kraft, General Mills, et al., who, after spending millions on R&D, carefully calibrate the sugars in their food to the optimal “bliss point” to make it addictive. For a month I’ve been eating nothing but the Bliss Point. And I want more. Although, when I confess to my mom that I’m not craving salad, she brings up a good point. “Jeff, no one has ever craved salad.”
Calories: 2,994 I’ve done it. Mission accomplished. I head to the doctor’s office for my blood work and official weigh-in. I step on the scale.
“You lost eleven pounds,” the doctor says, double-checking his notes.
Wait. What?
“Eleven pounds in a month,” he says. “That’s not healthy. No one should lose that much weight so quickly.”
My bad cholesterol: went down. My good cholesterol: went up. My body fat dipped by about two percentage points. Everything else stayed the same or had a mild improvement.
How is this possible? Calories in, calories out. This is no longer a fashionable maxim, as we’re obsessed with parsing “good fats” from “bad fats” and “good carbs” from “bad carbs.” Which isn’t wrong. But it tends to make dietary guidelines confusing as hell. At the end of the day, to lose weight, it’s still about consuming less than you burn—no matter what you eat. And not all calories have the same impact on our bodies: 50 calories of almonds will be digested differently than 50 calories of sugar. Yet from a big picture, the laws of thermodynamics still hold true.
Even though cheap carbs made up a dizzying percentage of my diet, my overall intake of food was lower than usual, so my carb intake was still reduced. I didn’t lose weight because I ate more carbs; I lost weight because I consumed less food. The results would almost assuredly have been better if, instead of allocating these 2,000 calories willy-nilly among cheap junk food, I instead consumed 2,000 calories of plants, protein, and fat. (Another takeaway: tracking is helpful. It keeps you honest.)
The point isn’t that junk food is good. It’s not. And if I had eaten all this garbage on top of my normal diet, as opposed to a replacement of my normal diet, I would have ballooned. The point is that moderation is such a powerful force that it works even when you’re eating crap.
The crap isn’t the enemy.
Excess is the enemy.
Excerpted from The Good News About What's Bad for You… The Bad News About What's Good for You. Copyright © 2015 by Jeff Wilser. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.