Entries tagged with 'diets'
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The Cookie Diet: Plain Kooky or Just Kooky Enough?

Dr. Sanford Siegal's diet consists of eating cookies. Ed Levine, time to switch up your game. From the New York Times: "I thought, 'That diet looks so incredibly easy,'" said Ms. Kane, 43, a legal secretary in Washington, who started paying $56 a week for the prepackaged cookies in June, when she weighed 255 pounds. Three months later, she was 40 pounds lighter. "If you can make it through the first week you're in the clear," she said The special cookies, now available at Walgreen's and GNC, contain milk-, egg-, and meat-derived proteins along with microcrystalline cellulose, "a plant fiber that acts as a bulking agent, emulsifier and thickener." Siegal created the diet in 1975 but it's only recently...

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Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 75: Can (and Should) I Give Up the Flavored Liquid Habit?

I've read all the literature on how important drinking plain water is to any meaningful weight loss effort, but I must admit I am having trouble giving up flavored liquids cold turkey. I have managed to kick the Diet Coke habit. But I certainly haven't given up on diet sodas or soft drinks as a whole. Last night I posted about the joys of Fresca. I drink Snapple Diet Cranberry Raspberry Drink because it doesn't have any caffeine. When I'm up on Cape Cod, I drink Cape Cod Cranberry Dry. It's a local soda made with 5% cranberry juice concentrate. I know I shouldn't, but I drink a bottle a day of the stuff. At least I did last week....

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Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 74: Can My All-Pie Fourth of July Diet Work?

I am on Martha's Vineyard, where pies seem to be baked on every corner. I can get my pie fix from Mrs. Blake's, The Black Dog Bakery, Little Rock Farms, The Scottish Bakehouse, Fiddlehead Farm, The Old Stone Bakery, Just Pie, Morning Glory Farms, Garcia's, and literally too many other places to mention. I happen to be partial to Mrs. Blake's, because of her flaky crusts and her fruity, not goopy, fillings, but I am not slavishly devoted to her 8-inch round beauties. So faced with this plethora of pies this July 4th weekend I am going to embark on an admittedly gimmicky, some would say radical, others would say ridiculous and silly, one-day diet of just pie. Stay with...

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Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 71: Do You Eat Only When You're Hungry? What A Concept!

As I write this I am in a hotel room in Palo Alto awaiting the start of the The Great American Food & Music Fest. Thanks to the remarkable efforts of fest partners Jim Lewi, Steve Martin, and everyone at the Agency Group, our collective, nearly 20 year-old dream is going to be realized. But just because I have been thinking about a fest like this for twenty years doesn't mean I have to eat twenty years' worth of food there. That, serious eaters, represents real progress. In fact, I realized today that It's not all that pleasant to force-feed myself like a foie gras-producing goose at the fest, that it's okay, even desirable to stop eating when you're full....

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Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 70: The Diet Blues, or 'Can One Bad Day Screw Up 70 Weeks of Progress?'

I should have seen it coming. There I was, standing around kibitzing and hanging out in the San Francisco Chronicle food section's amazing kitchen Wednesday at lunch time, surrounded by some of the foods we are going to be serving serious eaters at the Great American Food & Music Fest: Pink's Chili Dogs, Southside Market barbecue, Anchor Bar Buffalo wings, Junior's Cheesecake, Tony Luke's sandwiches, Katz's pastrami, Graeter's ice cream, and Barney Greengrass's bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese. How could I possibly resist eating a lot of the food arrayed before me standing up, thereby violating every diet rule known to man and woman-kind. Well, I didn't. I had more than a few bites of many of the...

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Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 69: Eating With Devils and Angels

"I think I'm going to get myself a locket with a photo of Julia Child." Two nights ago, the Serious Eats crew met up for beer and burgers at a tugboat that's been converted to a bar on the Hudson River. As I am the Serious Eats overlord (at least that's what Mr. Kuban has named me) I thought it was only right to buy the beer and food. As is my wont, I ordered what I thought was the right amount of food for ten people: eight burgers, four hot dogs, and four orders of fries, in addition to the beer. The burgers were big and not particularly juicy, the kosher hot dogs were grilled and split, and the...

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Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 68: Coming Up on the Big 5-0

Though I've been stuck at 219 pounds for the last month (damn these cursed weight-loss plateaus), it's occurred to me that if I continue to lose weight, I will shortly pass the 50-pound weight-loss threshold. I guess this really is a serious diet I've been on. When I decided to do something about my weight a little more than a year and a half ago, I weighed in at an all-time high of 265 pounds. Small for an NFL offensive lineman, but way, way too much for me, a pretty good, fast-on-my-feet-considering-I-weighed- 250-pounds, scrambling flag football quarterback in college (my teams did win the intramural flag-football championship at Grinnell four years in a row). So being stuck on 219 means...

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Large Movie Popcorn with Butter: 1,220 Calories

©iStockphoto.com/thebroker A large "buttered" popcorn at the typical movie theater contains about 1,220 calories, San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer reminds us, quoting a decade-old survey: "You would have to swim 162 minutes to burn off that popcorn—longer than your average motion picture." Not exactly what I want to read before a weekend in which I plan on finally seeing Star Trek (the IMAX version was sold out last week). That reminds me, though, that it's cheaper and healthier to just sneak in a snack of my own. What snack(s) do you sneak in to the movies—and how?...

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Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 67: How Could Anyone Finish That?

This exchange between Mr. Kuban (serving as acting food photographer) and me graphically illustrates how far this serious eater has come in 67 weeks. We were sitting at the bar at Kefi eating our final meal before I had to write the review. Our server brought over a beautiful bubbling casserole dish filled with tangy, creamy, wonderful macaroni and cheese (above). I ate a couple of forkfuls. Damn, it was good. I turned to Señor Kuban and said without a touch of irony or self-awareness, "How could anyone eat all that?" Kuban smiled that devilish half-grin of his and replied, "That's not what the old Ed Levine would have said. The old Ed Levine would have finished that sucker...

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Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 66: Am I Too Skinny? Can Pigs Fly?

I would have bet any and all comers that pigs would start flying before anyone called me out in the blogosphere for being too thin. But that's just what happened this week. Let me set the scene for you, my merry band of serious eaters. I was at our Hot Dog Hootenanny last Sunday, enjoying the festivities enormously, desperately trying not to eat a whole Chicago hot dog or an entire Papaya King frank or all six inches of a mighty delicious Bulgogi dog, or the full length of a Crif Chihuahua dog with bacon, avocado, and jalapeños. I think I succeeded, but as there is no such thing as a hot-doggometer that reliably measures such things, I had to...

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