What is the egg diet and should you try it

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Not the most researched diet for those willing to make sacrifices.

What is the egg diet

The egg diet is not universally defined. There are many variations of it that coincide in basic principles. As a rule, in such diets there is a lot of protein and fat, mainly from eggs, a minimum of carbohydrates, a ban on sweet and starchy foods, starchy vegetables and alcohol.

In an article on the Greatist website The Egg Diet: Facts or Fad? state that the egg diet first appeared in the 70s of the 20th century in Vogue magazine, and is now back again due to the popularity of low-carb diets.

What are the most popular egg diet options?

There are several types of egg diet that are found on the Internet in different variations. Here's what we found.

Arielle Chandler's two-week egg diet

This diet option was described in the book by Arielle Chandler. Nothing is known about the author, so one can only guess if she has an education in dietetics. Here are the basics of the Chandler Egg Diet.

1. Three meals a day, one of which should include eggs.
2. Other meals should include lean protein sources (chicken, fish) and non-starchy vegetables.
3. Citrus fruits (grapefruit) are allowed. You can also add berries to the diet.
4. Sugary drinks and snacks are prohibited.
5. Water, black coffee and other non-nutritive drinks are allowed.

For example, you might have two eggs, a serving of vegetables, a grapefruit, or a handful of berries for breakfast. Lunch and dinner should also include protein sources like eggs, chicken or fish, and a serving of non-starchy vegetables.

Since Chandler's book is titled "The Boiled Egg Diet: The Easy, Fast Way to Weight Loss !: Lose up to 25 Pounds in 2 short weeks!" How much this coincides with reality is unknown.

Egg ketopost

This egg diet option was suggested by Keto Egg Fast: Rules, Risks, and Can It Help You Lose Weight? in 2010 - a keto blogger, author of books and podcasts about the keto diet. His ketopost is much stricter than the Chandler diet.

1. You need to use eggs as the main source of fat and protein and eat at least six pieces a day.
2. Each egg should have one tablespoon of butter (coconut, olive, avocado, MCT) or other fat source and about 30 g of hard cheese (113 g total cheese per day).
3. The first meal should be arranged 30 minutes after waking up.
4. The last meal should be three hours before bedtime.
5. Ideally, you should eat a protein meal every three hours and do not take breaks for more than five hours.
6. You need to eat even if you don't feel like eating.
7. You can drink water, tea, coffee.
8. Alcohol and sugary drinks should not be consumed, with the exception of diet soda. It is allowed to drink up to three cans of this drink a day, but strive for one (or even exclude it altogether).

Due to the severity of the ketopost, as a rule, it is maintained for no more than 3-5 days and is used to overcome the plateau on the keto diet.

In an interview with KETO-KICKSTART for Womensworld, Moore said that after switching to this diet, he lost 11.3 kg of weight. The same article cites stories of women who managed to overcome a plateau in weight loss on a keto diet and lose about 5 kg in 5 days.

Below is an example of a ketopost diet from The Keto Kickstart ‘Egg Fast’ Will Help You Finally Shed That Unwanted Weight Womensworld.

• Breakfast: two egg pancakes, 55 g cream cheese, fried in a tablespoon of butter.
• Dinner: egg salad with 1–2 chopped boiled eggs, 1–2 tablespoons of mayonnaise without carbohydrates. If desired, you can add "cloudy" bread made from eggs with mayonnaise.
• Snack: eggs with mayonnaise. To make them, you need to cut an egg in half, grind the yolk with one tablespoon of mayonnaise, salt, black pepper and cayenne pepper, and then put the mixture back into the halves of the egg white.
• Dinner: egg soup. For cooking, you need to add two tablespoons of butter, a little soy sauce and garlic powder to three cups of meat broth, break the eggs there and stir until they are cooked.

Egg Diet

A brief mention of such an egg diet is found in an article in the Italian issue of The celebs’oddest diets Vogue. They claim that during the preparation for filming in the film "Cold Mountain" Nicole Kidman ate exclusively eggs, moreover, in the amount of three pieces a day: one in the morning and two in the evening.

And that's all that is known about such a diet. It is not indicated how many days the actress kept this diet, how much she dropped, and whether she gained again later.

Eating only eggs anyway is an extremely unhealthy approach to nutrition and a surefire way to hate this product forever and ever.

How the egg diet can help you lose weight

There is not a single scientific study of the egg diet that would confirm its effectiveness and safety, and all the data is obtained only from human feedback.

One can only guess how the egg diet will affect weight in the short and long term. After evaluating the characteristics of the diet, we will make several assumptions.

Low Carbohydrates Promote Weight Loss

Popular egg diets strongly resemble ketogenic ones: they are low in carbohydrates (there are none at all in the ketopost), high in fat and protein.

On a ketogenic diet, people lose weight pretty quickly - up to 4.5 kg in two weeks. Given that the Chandler diet and ketoposta are also severely calorie deficient, you can lose more.

True, most of the lost kilograms will come from water. The keto diet has a diuretic effect: due to a lack of carbohydrates in the diet, glycogen stores decrease, and with it water also leaves.

A few, if not all, of the pounds you shed will return as soon as you quit your diet and replenish your glycogen stores.

The ketogenic diet also burns fat reserves, but quality weight loss requires a longer period, not two weeks, and even more so five days.

On a well-balanced keto diet with a variety of fatty foods, it is quite possible to hold out for six months or two years, but it is unlikely on an egg diet. Just imagine on what day you start to feel sick from one kind of eggs with mayonnaise.

If you are already on a ketogenic diet and just want to push up your dead weight, ketopost can help. But how long-term the result will be and how it will affect health is unknown.

Eating Eggs Helps Maintain Muscle Diet

When you lose weight, not only fat is burned, but muscle as well. And that's bad. Their loss slows down the metabolism, which is already not up to par with low-calorie diets. Going forward, eggs can protect against muscle loss.

In one experiment, obese elderly people were either on a diet of 1.4 g protein per kg of body weight and three eggs per day for three months, or on a regular diet with 0.8 g of protein per kg of body weight and no eggs. As a result, participants in both groups lost the same weight, but those on the egg diet retained more muscle mass.

Protein from eggs is better absorbed than the same macronutrient from chicken breast, peas, soy or rice. But still it is impossible to say for sure whether it was the eggs that helped the participants in the experiment, or the whole thing was in a large amount of protein.

Another study has confirmed the benefits of egg yolk. In this experiment, 10 young, well-trained men ate either whole eggs with yolk or only egg whites, similar in protein and the amino acid leucine, after strength training.

Whole eggs with yolk increased muscle protein synthesis significantly more than proteins alone.

Scientists have suggested that the matter is in the nutritional value of the egg yolk. It contains,, choline, vitamins B7, B2, B9, A, B12 and D, antioxidants zeaxanthin and lutein, fatty acids, including Omega-3 (docosahexaenoic, DHA). In the long term, some of this diversity could push the body to more active muscle protein synthesis.

Thus, the egg diet can actually have a positive effect on maintaining muscle mass, especially if you are doing strength training.

Eggs can reduce appetite

In one small study, 30 overweight women were divided into two groups. Some had breakfast with eggs, others with yeast dough. In the egg breakfast group, the women felt more full and ate 160 calories less for lunch without any restrictions on food choices.

Similar results were obtained in another study, this time involving children. An egg breakfast made them eat 70 calories less for lunch than a similarly calorie breakfast cereal meal in the morning.

Another study of 50 young people found that eating two eggs for breakfast for four weeks resulted in less hunger hormone ghrelin than eating oatmeal for breakfast. But this will not affect your total calories and weight in any way.

You may be less hungry on an egg diet than if you were consuming the same amount of calories from other foods. But it is not exactly.

Why the egg diet can be harmful to your health

Such a diet can be harmful for several reasons.

Deficiency of vitamins and fiber

Egg diets exclude many healthy foods: cereals and whole grain breads, legumes, nuts and seeds, most fruits and some vegetables, and dairy products.

These foods are important sources of fiber, magnesium, calcium, and bioactive components such as polyphenols.

Eating an egg diet for two weeks is unlikely to harm your body, but if such a poor diet stretches over several months, you may be deficient in vitamins and fiber.

Risk of diseases of the cardiovascular system

Perhaps the most contentious issue related to egg consumption concerns cardiovascular risks.

One yolk of a large chicken egg contains about 200 mg of cholesterol.

Since high blood cholesterol is associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), there is still debate over whether it is possible to harm health by going too far with eggs in the diet.

An old cohort study of nearly 40,000 men and 80,000 women found that consuming one egg per day did not increase the risk of CVD in healthy people. This scientific work was published in 1999, but the question is still not closed.

In a 2013 review, 14 studies concluded that high egg consumption increased the risk of CVD, and in 2016 a meta-analysis was released that found one egg per day to be safe and even beneficial for reducing the risk of stroke.

A 2019 30-year observational study concluded that total cholesterol and eggs eaten were associated with risk of CVD and death. This conclusion was confirmed by an analysis of six cohort studies involving nearly 30,000 adults.

In the same year, a study was published with the opposite conclusion: if you eat an egg every day, you run the risk of earning CVD no more than those who consume less than one per week.

Probably the largest review on the topic, published in 2020, included data from 173,000 women and 90,000 men from three cohort studies from previous years. In addition, scientists analyzed 28 scientific papers with 1.7 million participants and concluded that the consumption of one egg per day is not associated with the risk of CVD.

Thus, today, one egg a day is justified. But what happens if you eat six pieces every day is a mystery. If you already have high cholesterol levels, be sure to ask your doctor this question.

Potential harm to the kidneys

High amounts of protein from animal sources, including eggs and meat, increase uric acid levels and can lead to kidney stones.

A high-protein diet also lowers levels of urine citrate, a chemical that protects against stone formation.

If you have an increased risk of stone formation, you should be careful to increase the amount of protein in your diet, or even better, consult a urologist first.

Should you try the egg diet

It makes sense to try this diet if you need to lose a few pounds as quickly as possible, and at the same time you do not care if you can keep the weight in the future. And yet you have no high cholesterol and no tendency to form kidney stones. And you love eggs.

Those who want to not only lose weight, but also maintain a new weight, as well as not stress the body and increase the risk of eating disorders and health problems, should choose milder and more varied dietary regimes.

If you are impressed by the success stories of losing weight and you are determined to try the egg diet, first, at least consult with a dietitian and find out if you have any contraindications for cholesterol and kidney health.