The following are direct quotes from the book.
Krista Vernoff; Az Ferguson. The Game On! Diet: Kick Your Friend's Butt While Shrinking Your Own. HarperCollins.
The Rules: No alcohol is to be consumed while you are playing the game except on the day off. You may also have one portion during the meal off. The Penalty: If you consume alcohol at unsanctioned times, you lose 25 points per portion. A portion is up to 12 ounces of beer, 6 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of hard liquor. The Escalation: If you don’t make weight on any given week, you lose the privilege of alcohol on your day off for the duration of the game.
The Well-documented Detrimental Effects of Alcohol on Health and Weight Loss: Inhibits weight loss Increases appetite Decreases inhibitions/willpower Adds empty calories Increases cortisol (a muscle-destroying hormone) Decreases testosterone (a muscle-building hormone) Decreases vitamin and mineral absorption Causes dehydration Decreases quality of sleep Decreases energy Prompts indigestion/acid reflux Increases risk of depression, anxiety, and insomnia risk of liver disease, heart problems, strokes Increases risk of many cancers including liver, pancreatic, and breast Increases risk of waking up naked with an unattractive stranger Because your
The Rules: You can have your coffee. Stop crying. We are not going to take it away. You just can’t have your frothy coffee drinks.
The research on coffee and caffeine in general is really mixed. There are studies that swear it helps with weight loss and those that insist it hinders weight loss. Some say it acts as an appetite suppressant, others counter that it prompts carbohydrate cravings. We know it’s a diuretic, which means it makes you pee more, but peeing out all your water isn’t exactly a healthy method of weight loss. We also know it’s a stimulant, which means it can increase your heart rate and blood pressure, interrupt your sleep, and cause nervousness, irritability, and anxiety.
I’m going to reiterate that we are not going to take your coffee away from you! We are, however, going to ask you to look at how the coffee drinks you’re choosing are prepared. Why? Because a venti Caramel Frappuccino has 500 calories in it. To put that in perspective? In order to maintain a healthy weight loss, I’m supposed to be consuming about 1,500 calories a day. So one Frappuccino would be a third of my food for the entire day. Believe me, we’re not out to ruin your life. We really just want you to have all the information. And the sad truth is that what a lot of us order and think is coffee is really just a coffee-flavored milkshake. It’s a treat. A dessert. A delicious indulgence. But it should not be a part of our daily routine.
Rules: Soda and diet soda are not F.Y.T foods. Each soda or diet soda you consume carries a 10 point snacking penalty.
Soda and diet soda may be consumed without penalty on your day off and meal off. But we urge you to reconsider… Before I got my very cool job writing fake medicine, I was a waitress for a good, long time. I was a waitress in Boston, I was a waitress in New York, I was a waitress in Portland, Oregon. (Sometimes, I was even a singing waitress on harbor cruise ships, but that’s a whole other story.) I was a good waitress because I’m a good multitasker and I like people. Most people. I don’t like people who are cheap and don’t tip for good service. (And by the way? Cheap is 15 percent. For good service, please tip 20 percent. That’s my little public service announcement on behalf of servers everywhere.) But my story isn’t about tipping, it’s about Diet Coke. I loved Diet Coke. I was an actress back then and I used to sip my free Diet Coke at whatever restaurant I was working in and talk about how I loved it so much I would do a Diet Coke commercial for free. Of course, that was easy for me to say, because no one was paying me to do commercials, because mostly, I was a waitress.
The most acting I was doing in my New York days was to memorize the specials and recite them at your table, and then memorize your order without writing it down, which I considered good practice for my imaginary acting career. I was all young and carefree and I had all this room in my brain and I could just memorize the orders for a table of eight and head to the computer and get it all in, bam, bam, bam. Until one day when I couldn’t. My short-term memory just stopped working properly. I don’t know how to describe it except to say that I was twenty-two and I started having “senior moments.” I would take an order, head to the computer, and by the time I got there I would have no idea what the order was. It was very disturbing. I am grateful to this day that my bartender friend Corey had recently read an article about the unadvertised dangers of the artificial sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet) that I was guzzling in my Diet Coke every night. Dude. Seriously.
Go to your computer and Google the words “aspartame dangers.” There is just a stunning amount of evidence as to the dangers of that chemical and the damage it does to your brain. People have died from seizures prompted by aspartame. In scientific studies, aspartame causes holes in the brains of rats! Aspartame causes headaches, nausea, hypertension, mood swings, depression, insomnia, memory loss… Memory loss! Corey told me about the article. I quit the Diet Coke. And believe me, I was so, so, sooooo sad to quit the Diet Coke. I wanted so badly for it to not be causing my memory loss. But guess what? When I quit Diet Coke, my memory came back. Then, for good measure, and like a good junkie, I started drinking Diet Coke again, and my memory promptly went away again. So I quit for good. And I grieved. But I never went back. I don’t know why the FDA hasn’t pulled the license on aspartame.
So here’s the thing: Az and I were veeeeery tempted to outlaw artificial sweeteners altogether because this game is about optimizing your health, and putting chemicals into your body in place of food does not optimize your health! If you remain unconvinced, please simply look at this list: Acetone Acetic acid Acetyl alcohol Acetic anhydride Ammonium chloride Benzene Chlorinated sulfates Ethyl alcohol Isobutyl ketones Formaldehyde Hydrogen chloride Lithium chloride Methanol Sodium methoxide chloride Trityl chloride Toluene Thionyl chloride This is the list of chemicals used in the creation of Splenda. Y’know, the one they keep telling us is “made from sugar.” Seriously. Seeeeeeriously!!!
Whatever the FDA says, whatever your doctor says, I’m asking you to answer this one question: Can you look at this list, and in your heart of hearts believe that you should be eating or drinking anything made from this chemical crap? Or feeding it to your children? I hope you quit artificial sweeteners like a bad habit, ’cause that’s what they are. But even if you’re not ready to do that, we are asking you to give up sodas and diet sodas for the duration of the game, except on your meal and day off (and even then, we say, Just Say No!). Why soda? Why not? It fills you up without satisfying your need for food. It leaves you malnourished and craving carbohydrates and sweets. And soda, whether diet or not, has been linked to an increase in esophageal cancer, which happens to be the disease my dad died from at fifty-six, so I take that statistic personally.
