Got into shooting the breeze with a guy I work with and we were swapping stories about mischief we got up to when we were kids and he told me about how he’d been in a bike race with a couple friends of his when he was 16 or 17, bombing down a hill on their BMXs, when he’d wiped out and broken his jaw. According to him, the worst part of the experience was that his teeth were wired shut for about six weeks and he couldn’t eat solid food. In his own words, he ate nothing but chocolate milk and chicken noodle soup and dropped roughly 40lbs (he was and still is a pretty big guy, he went from 230ish to around 190).
Didn’t go into any details but assuming he’s not exaggerating, what would a diet of nothing but chicken noodle soup and chocolate milk (and water) do to your body if you kept at it for, say, a month? I know there’s all kinds of ‘liquid diets’ out there but never really having any weight problems myself I’ve never bothered to read much about them, but if something like that can eat the pounds off you so fast (especially when you’re eating a LOT of it, like this guy was, as well as being hardly able to move), why isn’t that a type of diet more people try? Presumably once you were off it you’d put back on a few pounds, but if you lost 30 and gained 15 back you’re still 15 pounds up on the house.
So the questions are: what would a month of chicken noodle soup and chocolate milk as your only intakes besides water do for your body? How healthy or unhealthy would this be? And, for the sake of argument, suppose someone didn’t give the tiniest shit about their own health, they just wanted to look good in their own eyes. Is a liquid diet (or whatever the proper term is) a good way to achieve that goal (rememember, you’re completely disregarding your own health) or is the old eat-healthy-and-exercise route going to work better for you?
Nothing to worry about, where did this modern idea come from that if you don’t eat arugula greens and organic mangoes daily you will DIE!
Is the diet optimal? Nope, but that is a long way to being dangerous and one month is not really that long. You should read up on the diets people ate centuries ago, people would live for longer than a month on moldy biscuits.
In the short term, the problem with not eating is the lack of Calories. Both chicken soup and chocolate milk have Calories, so that’s not a problem as long as you’re getting enough of them (though the monotonous diet might well lead to a decreased appetite). In the longer term, you can suffer from lack of various vitamins, but even with no vitamin intake at all, that takes a while. And if the soup has vegetables in it, it’ll have at least some vitamins, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had enough.
I don’t want to speak from authority on something that could put people at risk, but in general just about any diet over a month’s period won’t kill you and if you’re in normal health probably won’t cause long term health problems.
That assumes what you’re eating isn’t something that is intrinsically poisonous or something like that. If you were consuming a vast calorie deficit it isn’t the ideal way to lose weight, but as long as you’re consuming some amount of calories there’s no reason to think a month of eating that way would actually cause long term harm.
The reason such a diet isn’t a popular weight loss technique is because it’s eating the exact same thing 100% of the time. Most people do not have the desire/discipline to do that. Additionally, people that do go on diets like that and lose weight very rapidly are much more likely to suffer a “rebound” weight gain once they go off the diet.
As someone who lost a lot of weight, what worked for me was eating healthy, moderate amounts of food with strict discipline and planning of meals to insure I was always eating at deficit but at a healthy deficit (I aimed for around 2 lb / week of loss.) Once I finished losing, I kept the same structure in place (pre-planned, healthy meals) but just increased the calories to a rough “maintenance” level. Unfortunately once you lose the weight you cannot just go back to eating however you want, or the weight will come right back.
I know personally I “feel” like even years later my body “wants” to eat itself back up to that large weight, and I think there is even some evidence medically that the body naturally tries to go back to its heaviest weight out of some drive to maintain excess food stores. While I won’t talk about how reliable those studies are, it does make some sense. Humans evolved without a guaranteed steady food supply so you normally it wouldn’t really be bad to eat as much as humanly possible whenever food was present, because you never knew what would be there next week or next month (and in primitive times long term food preservation was not uniformly available or effective.)
I broke my jaw about 9 years ago and essentially survived on chocolate milk as well (Ensure, to be precise). It is amazing how little I needed to feel sated when there was very little that tasted good with a broken jaw. Trying to maintain that kind of diet without the physical restriction of a wired jaw would probably end up in failure for most people.
A liquid diet, or more precisely a very restricted calorie diet, will cause people to lose weight very quickly. Like the person you were talking to, I dropped 30+ pounds in just a few weeks. I didn’t notice any short term effects on my health. Not having the extra weight made exercising easier, so if you combine that with a very strong motivation to keep the weight off and better eating habits, the results can almost certainly be permanent with no rebound. But in the end it isn’t any different than any other sensible weight loss program: eat better, eat less and exercise more.
Chicken noodle soup, even so-called reduced sodium kinds, has so much sodium (660 mg per 60 calories; that would be 11,000 mg(!) for 1000 calories) in it that eating enough to sustain yourself would probably cause problems, even if you aren’t sodium-sensitive. Certainly at the least you’d probably drink and urinate a lot. You’d also want to take a chewable multivitamin to provide vitamins that aren’t found in soup or milk (e.g Vitamin C); if you can’t chew, you can grind it up and mix it with liquid.
Try grinding up a vitamin and then sucking it through a clenched jaw. It won’t be easy. Ensure has 50% RDA for vitamin C. My experience was that most of the pleasure of eating was gone when having to suck it through clenched teeth. Even ice cream wasn’t appealing anymore, so I stuck with the easiest thing I could find that gave me most of my nutritional requirements.
As to whether this is the best way to looking good, I can’t really say. There is the long term answer, which means whatever gets you moving, eating right and fit, and there is the short term answer, which is whatever will drop those pounds quickest. Sometimes they are complimentary.