Imagine eating just one meal for 3 months! Anthony Howard-Crow, a 32-year-old stunt dieter and YouTuber from
Loveland, Colorado, recently underwent an unusual diet in order to prove
that you can eat pretty much anything and still lose weight as long as
you keep an eye on your calorie intake. For 100 days straight, he ate
only ice cream, drank a small protein shake and some alcohol, and still
managed to drop 32 pounds.
“The whole point of these
demonstrations,” Anthony says in one of his videos, “is to show
you—basically prove, in the best way I can—that you can eat anything you
want and still lose weight.”
According to Oddity, his first stunt
dieting experience was a 30-day diet in which he got 50 percent of his
daily calories from ice cream. Work forced him to end the experiment
sooner than he anticipated, but he still managed to lose 2 pounds a week
and get some ripped abs in the short time he stuck to the extreme
eating regimen. Later, he tried a 30-day diet where he only ate
fast-food products and again ended up losing 2 pounds per week and with
some shredded abs.
However, Anthony still felt that he wanted to
finish the ice-cream experiment that he had opened his YouTube channel
for, so in January of this year, he came up with an even more extreme
version of it – 100 days of eating only ice cream and drinking protein
shakes and alcohol.
You’re probably wondering why he included
alcohol in his diet. According to a dieting myth, a person can’t lose
weight if they drink alcohol, which the Colorado stunt dieter says is
completely untrue. So, in order to prove that it is only a myth, he
decided to include the occasional glass of liquor to his already strange
diet.
Anthony’s 100-day diet began in January, and ended last
month, with some interesting results. During that period, he kept a
close eye on his calorie intake – 2,000 calories a day of ice cream,
combined with 500 calories from protein powder and/or alcohol. At the
end, he was 32 pounds lighter than when he started, and despite the
seemingly unhealthy diet, his medical tests showed that he was
healthier.
After eating 2,000 calories-worth of ice cream every
day, for 100 days, Anthony’s blood lipids all improved, his HDL
cholesterol (the good one) was higher, the LDL cholesterol was lower,
and he had dramatically lowered the level of his triglycerides. Most
surprisingly, despite all the sugar he put in his body, his glucose
level slightly declined too.
Weigh loss and obesity specialist
Spencer Nadolski says that although the improvements may seem
surprising, they are actually quite normal. “With weight loss, a lot of
these things improve regardless of the underlying issue,” he told Men’s
Health.
This ice cream diet sounds like a blast, but Anthony
Howard-Crow swears that it was the worst diet he has ever tried. He
wasn’t even halfway through the 100 days when he started losing interest
in everything and feeling tired all the time. The dieter told Men’s
Health that he used to spend 4 to 7 hours every day working on his
YouTube channel, but could only manage to put in a few minutes a day,
during this period. He even stopped going to the gym during the last
month, because he didn’t have the energy or ambition for it.
“This
diet was, hands down, without a doubt, the most miserable dieting
adventure I have ever embarked upon,” Anthony said. “I was moody, and
just generally unenjoyable to be around.”
Also, despite losing an impressive 32 pounds, Howard-Crow reports that a lot of it was muscle, not fat.
“I
was still not extremely lean,” he says, and you can see that by looking
at the before and after photos he posted on his Instagram account. He
attributes the muscle loss to several factors, including eating below
his maintenance level, quitting his gym routine in the last month, and
consuming very few proteins.
“The message here is not that this is
an ideal diet to permanently sustain, the message is specifically to
show how an energy deficit overrides specific food sources when it comes
to weight/fat loss,” Anthony said, adding that despite feeling
miserable through more than half the ice-cream diet, this was definitely
not his last stunt diet. So expect to see even more crazy experiments
from him.