The Snack Factor Diet

By Abby Rabinowitz | Special to amNewYork

July 16, 2007

I'd never been on a diet before, but since I was a little heavier than I wanted to be and my gym membership had expired, I decided to give the Snack Factor Diet a try.

Created by New York nutritionist Keri Glassman, the idea is simple: Instead of starving yourself and then overeating at meals, you should tame your appetite with a couple of healthy snacks a day.

Glassman claims the secret to "losing weight by eating more" is controlling your "HQ," or Hunger Quotient. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is stuffed and 10 is starved, you should keep yourself in the 4-6 range, from slightly full to slightly hungry.

And this is where I ran into trouble: On Snack Factor's recommended daily menus, my HQ ran sky high.

Like South Beach, for the first month of Snack Factor, you can only eat starch once a day (think a slice of whole wheat bread at breakfast). Fruit is forbidden, as is alcohol.

On Day 1, with my HQ near 9, I flipped through the book for help. If you're hungry, Glassman advised, just eat a vegetable.

Now, I love salad more than most people, but eating it three times a day felt excessive. Besides craving my roommates' fresh blueberries and figuring out how to avoid drinking beer on a date, Snack Factor posed other challenges.

Many of the snacks, like jicama salad, are hard to grab on the go, and other staples, like seafood and almond butter ($8 a jar) are pricy.

Starved on Day 2, I went out to eat, spotted salad on the menu, and promptly ordered pizza. Oops. I got back on track the next day, the 4th of July, with a high-fiber bowl of Kashi cereal. At Coney Island with some friends, I hoped that a ride on the Cyclone would turn my stomach and keep me from Nathan's hotdog stand: It did not.

I have no doubt that if you are a highly-motivated office worker in February with Christmas behind you and a skim yogurt tucked away in the communal fridge, you could lose ten pounds on Snack Factor. With the fruit and fun of July, I lasted two days.

Still, Glassman offers great ideas for healthy snacks (she shares Oprah's faith in raw almonds), and tips for visualizing healthy portion sizes (pasta should be the size of a half-a-baseball on your plate). Finally, it ensured that I will never, ever take blueberries for granted again.

What I ate on my one close-to-perfect diet day:

Breakfast:
-"Eggsadilla" (recipe by author Keri Glassman)
Three egg-whites, scrambled, wrapped in a low-fat whole-wheat tortilla and topped with no-fat cheese and a tablespoon of salsa. (I added scallions, for flavor)

Also, drank coffee with ½ cup skim milk.

Lunch:
-Green salad with 4 oz. smoked salmon on the side, plus two Scandinavian Bran Cripsbreads

A "Kick-start" Snack:
-Red and Green Peppers dipped lightly in vinagerette made with olive oil

A "Calcium" Snack:
-Iced coffee with skimmed milk and a dozen raw almonds on the side

Dinner:
-Two bun-less veggie burgers topped with grilled onions, salsa, fat-free cheese, and two slices tomato. On the side: Raw broccoli and one piece of whole-wheat bread (a cheat)