Introduction

The Special K Diet is easily one of the most publicized diets in the entire country.  This is because Special K’s makers do have the dough to throw behind an intense marketing campaign and it is that campaign that has brought this particular challenge to the eyes of many people.  The claim is essentially that you can easily lose six pounds within two weeks by going with the Special K Diet, a claim that needs to be vigorously analyzed in order to discover exactly how much of it is truth and how much of it is gross exaggeration.

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The Special K Diet Explained

The basic Special K diet plan is the same as the Special K diet challenge that has been working its way around television ads for a long time now.  According to Kellogg’s, all a person has to do in order to lose weight is to devote two of their meals a day to eating one of the Special K products.  One serving from one of those products, 2/3 of a cup of skim milk and some fruit added in for good measure should consist of the entire meal.  If you do that twice a day, eat a third meal as per normal, choose healthy fruits and vegetables for your snacks and make no changes whatsoever in your drinking habits, losing weight through this diet program should really work.  At least, that is what the people behind the diet claim.  Our job here is to answer the question, Does the Special K diet really work?

Does Special K Diet Work?

Like so many other things within the field of weight loss, the answer to this question is that it depends.  The makers of the Special K diet have essentially made a very shrewd marketing wager and the wager is that your diet is terrible enough that making a change such as the one described above will be enough to significantly affect your calorie intake and in the process allow you to see some early results along the lines of the six pounds that they claim.  There are a few bits of research that have been done in order to back up the assertion, but reading between the lines of those research pieces shows that only the people with really terrible diets at the start were able to see those kinds of changes through the use of the Special K diet plan.  People with diets that were only marginally unhealthy saw weight loss statistics between 2-4 pounds, which is well short of the claim made by Kellogg’s if you look at it in percentage terms (4 pounds versus 6 pounds is less than 70% fulfillment of the claim).

What this means for you

Essentially, this means that the Special K diet will only work at its promised level of result if you have a terrible diet. Consider your diet carefully and think about what you eat on a daily basis (if you have not already done so, keeping a journal with this information is often a good idea to pursue).  If what you eat is terrible in terms of extra fats and extra oils, you might find that the Special K diet challenge will get you the results that have been promised.  If you already have a reasonable to slightly unhealthy diet however, you might not be able to gain anything from this and indeed if you were to look at it objectively you might find that you stand to lose a lot from following the Special K diet plan.

Potential Pitfalls

The first potential pitfall to consider when evaluating the Special K diet is that the cereal itself is not the greatest food that you could eat.  Even a single serving of Special K cereal will contain significant amounts of sugars (in particular high fructose corn syrup), making it less than ideal for this particular challenge.  Forgetting for the moment that Special K is the cereal that is utilized with this challenge, what if you tried the same principle with a much healthier source of carbohydrates?  Consider something like oatmeal which has much lower sugar content, much higher potassium and is one of the best sources of fibre we know about and you might see how taking this challenge with oatmeal instead of Special K might give you far better results.  In other words, it is not the Special K that makes this challenge work, but rather the fact that most people have such terrible diets that even something loaded with high fructose corn syrup might be an improvement.

Another potential pitfall to keep in mind when considering the Special K diet challenge is the satiety issue.  Simply put, satiety is defined as how full you “feel” and it is an important thing to consider when limiting your caloric intake because eating fewer numbers of foods, but choosing foods that make you feel fuller is a great strategy to employ when you are trying to cut down the amount of food that you take in.  Cereals are not good satiety promoters and for that reason if you decide to devote two of your entire meals to just Special K with a few fixings on top, you will be very hungry by the time your third meal rolls around.  People that have enough discipline might be able to survive with just Special K, fruits and vegetables, but if most people had that particular discipline level then there would be no need for fad diets such as this one.  Keep that in mind when you are considering following this diet, as it is a very serious potential pitfall that you could easily fall into partway through your Special K diet plan.

Final Thoughts

Like most of the diets you hear about on television, the Special K diet is nothing special.  It is just one more in a long line of fad diets that try to hard sell you into accepting them.  They make a deal with the devil and bet on the fact that your diet is so bad that Special K is an improvement, while at the same time neglecting to mention that cereal is not really the best way to go for this type of strategic approach.

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