“A diet that would let you have two martinis before lunch, and a thick steak generously spread with Sauce Bearnaise, so that you could make your sale in a relaxed atmosphere and go back to the office without worrying about having gained so much as an ounce?”
Wrote Cameron, in his book The Drinking Man’s Diet.
How interesting does that look? In a world where everyone is grazing on greens and trying desperately to say no to all the unhealthy and tasty stuff, here comes Cameron offering beer and champagne and a thick steak with the claim that you will lose weight by consuming all this.
This happened in 1962, early in a decade that later flooded with fad diets. Cameron was undoubtedly the pioneer who introduced the carbo-craze, a trend that categorizes carbs as evils.
However, we feel that because he was a noob he failed to actually do justice to what he claimed. So here is a detailed analysis of this complete flop of a diet, called The drinking man’s diet.
How does it work?
The Drinking Man’s Diet basically works by restricting carb intake and living on alcohol instead. The founder of the diet, Cameron claimed in 1962 that weight watchers watch out for carbs and not calories.
So he proposed the idea that eating more protein or greens and less i.e, only approx 60 grams of carbs a day and washing it all down with as much alcohol as you like can help you shed pounds. The question that how is this diet supposed to help with weight loss is still a question because our research suggests completely otherwise.
The point to remember here is that Cameron was not a doctor or a nutritionist, instead, he was an aerial photographer and a cosmetics executive. However, in his book, he claims he did consult some nutritionists before he introduced this ridiculous idea of a diet.
And not surprisingly, it was rejected and even considered wild and hostile by many nutritionists. In fact, the statement from a Harvard nutritionist made it to the headlines of the newspaper where he called “The Drinking Man’s Diet” a mass murder.
Side Effects of the Drinking Man’s Diet:
The first side effect you need to be aware of is that this diet may work exactly the opposite of what it claims and you may gain weight instead of losing it. Keep reading and you’ll understand how.
Alcohol is considered the second most dense nutrient, fat is the first. Every gram of alcohol is packed with 7 calories, so consuming even a single serving of alcohol will add up 100s of calories to your body, making you fat.
This is also because alcohol cannot be stored in your body and hence needs to be metabolized. Now you can well imagine that instead of burning fat your body starts working to metabolize this alcohol hence resulting in slowing down the overall metabolic function of your body.
In addition to that when your body metabolizes alcohol instead of the other nutrients, fat, protein and carbs in your diet then all these components get stored as fat, adding pounds on the scale and inches to your waistline.
Scary, isn’t it?
But the worst is yet to come, better brace yourselves.
Alcohol is rich in calories and all of these are empty calories which means they have 0 nutritional value. So you are consuming calories with no minerals and vitamins or any other nutritional value.
This clearly means that by the end of this diet you’ll be severely malnourished and would be at risk of so many different health problems. The slowed fat metabolism will lead to an increase in the synthesis of fatty acids which will result in triglyceride accumulation in the liver hence resulting in fatty liver disease.
Here is what Web MD has to state about the potential threats of excessive alcohol consumption.
“Drinking alcohol leads to a loss of coordination, poor judgement, slowed reflexes, distorted vision, memory lapses, and even lapses. Drinking alcohol could cause your blood pressure to rise, increase your heart rate, cause your heart to beat abnormally, and it could increase the size of your heart”
So, this quote is very clear about how dangerous it can be to limit the regular food intake and start living on alcohol.
Conclusion:
Well, here is what we have to say about The Drinking Man’s Diet.
Cameron was most probably drunk when he came up with this idea because his logic makes zero sense, whatsoever. But given the choice between drinking bear with steak or eating cabbage with diluted apple cider vinegar, as in those times. Who would choose the latter?
Not Americans at least, and so they didn’t. Which led to all the fame that Cameron enjoyed for about a decade until Atkins released Diet Revolution.