The cookie diet

So you ate a few more cookies over the holidays than you should have, and now you're weighing in at a few more pounds than you'd like. What to do?

Perhaps you should eat more cookies.

Purveyors of several all-the-rage "cookie diets" say you can lose as much as 15 pounds a month on their programs, and they boast of a sizable batch of already sized-down cookie dieters -- reportedly including Jennifer Hudson, Mandy Moore, Howard Stern, Kelly Clarkson and former Madonna husband Guy Ritchie.

But before visions of sugar cookies (or rum balls, pfeffernuesse, gingerbread men . . .) start dancing in your head, be warned: On a cookie diet, you can't eat just any cookies. You have to eat special cookie-diet cookies.

These cookies have been the toast of fan magazines and TV talk shows; on Friday, the granddaddy of them all -- Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet -- is opening its first full-fledged store in Beverly Hills.

"That's where all our customers are," says Dr. Sanford Siegal, who invented the original cookie diet more than 30 years ago. "That's why it's there, for their convenience."

The basic notion of these diets -- Smart for Life, Hollywood Cookie and Soypal, as well as Dr. Siegal's -- is to replace one or two meals a day with cookies that are much lower in calories than the meals would have been. Although the regimens vary, they are often very low-calorie diets designed to lead to rapid weight loss.

Because all the cookies are standardized in size and calorie content -- and dieters are usually told how many to eat and when -- the diets eliminate the problem of out-sized portions, generally considered a major culprit in weight gain.

James Pacella of Boston adhered to the Smart for Life diet for seven months, and the 23-year-old engineer for Procter & Gamble, lost about a third of himself -- scaling down to 225 pounds from 335.

He thought the cookie diet was as easy as pie. "It's hard to explain," he says, "because it just happened . . . I can't say enough about it. I really believe in it."

But others think the whole concept is nuttier than a fruitcake.

"It's a classic fad diet," says Judith Stern, a UC Davis nutrition professor and diet expert who co-directs the Collaborative Obesity Research Evaluation Team, an international board that reviews published obesity papers. "If it weren't serious, I would just laugh. But people spend money on these things."

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Diet's origins