The 14-Day Egg Diet
Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s former Prime Minster, used a version of the 14-day egg diet to lose weight before the 1979 election, according to the UK’s “The Telegraph” newspaper. The origin of this diet is quite the mystery, but with the help of the Internet, it has morphed into multiple versions. In 2010, Hillary Michaels published an updated version. Her book “The Super Skinny Grapefruit and Egg Diet Plus” breathed new life into a fad diet that has no sustainable weight loss strategy. Consult your physician before you attempt to lose weight using this diet.
The Promise
Michaels’ version of the 14-day egg diet promises weight loss of up to 28 pounds in two weeks. It requires alternate juice fasting days, starting on day four. Michaels provides the juice recipes to clean and detoxify vital organs such as your liver and kidneys. Weight loss on this diet is possible because of the calorie restrictions of the diet, rather than any special properties of the eggs.
Foods
This modified Atkins diet takes a low-carbohydrate approach to each meal and starts your day with eggs as the protein source at breakfast, according to Every Diet. You also eat half a grapefruit at breakfast. The diet features eggs and salads for lunch and dinner, along with with low-carbohydrate vegetables or grapefruit. Michaels’ version also includes lean protein after the first seven days. The diet allows you to add limited amounts of grains, yogurt and approved vegetables from a list that she provides. Adding fat to the eggs during preparation is likely to slow your weight loss. Michaels’ suggested fat-free preparation methods are boiling and poaching.
Egg Diet Restrictions
The beverages that Michaels’ version of the egg diet allows are plain water and grapefruit juice, along with unsweetened black coffee or tea. Along with the eggs, the only allowed proteins are lean sources, such as fish and skinless chicken. The egg diet used by Thatcher did not restrict protein intake to eggs alone. She included lean proteins, red meat and an occasional sip of whiskey in the egg diet regimen that she used to lose 20 pounds.
Nutrition
This diet severely restricts your calorie and carbohydrate intake. A single large egg contains 70 calories, according to the American Egg Board. It provides 6 grams of protein, or 12 percent of the daily value. One egg has 185 milligrams of cholesterol, which equals 62 percent of the recommended daily value. A breakfast of two eggs exceeds your cholesterol daily value. Eating two eggs with the grapefruit for breakfast drops your calorie intake for that meal to less than 250. With lunch and dinner also providing less than 250 calories each, your daily calorie total would be less than 1,000. Without medical supervision, consuming less than 1,200 calories for women and 1,500 for men is unsafe, according to Harvard University Medical School.
Source: Livestrong.com
