May 5, 2011 18:51 GMT  ·  By

One of the most successful, popular and time-enduring diets – and not just in Hollywood – is Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet. It may sound like a silly little fad, but it’s actually a healthy eating regime based on actual fact and sound research – and it just got revamped for better results and increased satisfaction.

As we also noted in June 2009, when we had the pleasure to talk with Dr. Sanford Siegal about the much-mediated diet, it works because of strict calorie control, which, in turn, returns just the results promised at the beginning of the diet.

The Cookie Diet consists of a given number low-calorie cookies and an adult-sized meal in the evening on a daily basis. Now, the new and improved diet, called Dr. Siegal’s Plan 10X, will offer the same excellent results with a boost in terms of dieter’s satisfaction.

Until now, slimmers ate a bag of six cookies a day (plus the evening meal). Each cookie had about 90 calories, while the dinner could be anywhere between 300 and 800 calories, but not more.

Plan 10X marks an improvement in that the cookies have now less calories, which means the dieter will be able to eat more of them in a single day.

This means that they will actually get to eat one every two hours, even before they begin to feel hunger pangs – and this is a very important step in losing weight, Dr. Siegal notes.

“Forget everything you think you know about losing weight. The conventional wisdom on weight loss has helped make obesity our most serious health concern,” the developer of the diet says.

The old saying that one must eat three meals a day for weight control is a wrong approach because it doesn’t prevent overeating: the meals are too wide apart and hunger has more than plenty of time to set in.

Snacking on something (such as a Cookie) every two hours will do just that, because it fights hunger even before it’s felt by the dieter.

“When you were a child, your mother warned, ‘Don’t eat that or you’ll spoil your appetite!’ and she was right. It takes a surprisingly small amount of certain food substances to take the edge off your hunger,” Dr. Siegal explains.

“The eating schedule I propose breaks the habit of devoting a total of perhaps two hours a day to eating three large meals, then trying to starve yourself for the other 14 or so waking hours,” he says.

“As I’ve said for 36 years, the key to losing weight and keeping it off is to avoid hunger. When you eat something every two hours, when is there time to get hungry?” Dr. Siegal asks.

Given that he created the Cookie Diet in 1975, and it’s been helping countless people shift the extra weight ever since, Dr. Siegal definitely knows what he’s talking about.