He could've eaten 1800 calories of steak, grains, and fruits each day and lost weight, too. It's just a lot easier to count calories for junk food, as the amounts are right there on the package.

This diet was by no means healthy. It was simply a weight losing diet. Long-term, it'd be hell on your body, but it's an interesting approach to quickly bringing weight down (after which one'd hope he'd switch to a nice healthy diet).

Instead, he both cut calories and massively altered his diet, so there's no telling why he lost weight. I mentioned cutting meat as confounding his results, but the other alterations count just as much, too.

Both the article and the diet are sloppy. Yes, he lost weight but even the nutritionist can't explain why, or even if it's a good idea to eat Twinkies for meals.

Fat has about 3500 kCal/lb. If you consume fewer calories than you use, you will lose weight based on that ratio and your calorie deficit. Doing it wrong just means that your body tries to work against you (makes you hungry, makes you tired, makes you want to put on a sweater, etc) and you feel like shit, but for as long as you manage to stick to it you will lose weight.

I agree that this is probably why mrj got downvoted. However, mrj's comments are valuable and further the discussion, so I really wish people didn't downvote.

Furthermore, mrj could be right and the article's point--that cutting calories is all you need to focus on--could be wrong. That's the point of science: to form a hypothesis and then test it with multiple trials and multiple studies. If he got back up to 201 lbs and then did the same diet again but with fruits and vegetables instead of junk food, maybe he would've lost weight faster? Who knows until you do it?

Still, he's eating a lot of refined sugar, so I'm pretty surprised. Then again, so am I (thanks Halloween!).

His cholesterol dropped because he went from a consuming more calories than he burned to a diet where he was burning more calories than he ate. The excess calories were converted into fat and transported in LDL-labeled packets to the adipocytes. Once he started losing weight, adipocytes started releasing fat in smaller HDL-labeled packets for the liver to convert to glucose to meet his energy needs.

You may also be interested to read the impressive critique of the China Study, which is based on Colin Campbell's own data:

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal...

which is what convinced me that my diet, which contains a fair amount of meat, poultry, eggs and seafood is the way to go.

My last cholesterol test was 113 total.

There is nothing inherently more healthy about a vegetarian diet than a non-vegetarian diet.

How do you think they fatten up animals before slaughter? By feeding them meat? No, by feeding them grain.

Can you provide a reference for this totally unsupported assertion? There is a wealth of evidence that contradicts this statement. Here is a link to one highly respected and large study - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study

> How do you think they fatten up animals before slaughter? By feeding them meat? No, by feeding them grain.

What? This comment is stupid on so many levels I don't know where to start. Here's a short list

- These animals are 'by definition' different to humans. You can't extend results beyond species.

- The animals are mostly dedicated herbivores. Feeding them meat would make them sick and very unhealthy to consume.

- Meat is a lot more expensive to produce than grain. It takes about 10 calories of plant material to produce 1 calorie of meat. Using meat to produce meat would be uneconomical and ultimately unsustainable.

- I'm not sure about the 'species BMI' they aim for but I would have thought that meat from 'obese' cows wouldn't be all the popular. I thought consumers generally tried to avoid the obvious fat.