Starbucks diet credited for woman’s 75-pound weight loss

A Virginia woman is going on the news circuit to announce that she lost 75 pounds on the Starbucks diet. Christine Hall, a librarian from Arlington, went from 190 pounds to 114 pounds in just a few years, MSN reported. And the diet was easy: all she had to do was eat at Starbucks for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Actually, that sounds horrifying.

But Hall stresses that she wasn't on the classic anorexic diet of coffee and cigarettes. Instead, she ate the "real food" that the coffee chain now sells in most of its stores. For example, Hall told Fox News that she ate Starbucks oatmeal with a black coffee everyday for breakfast. For lunch and dinner, she would eat one of Starbucks packaged sandwiches or boxed meals.

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She found that eating packaged food was easier than cooking at home because the store-bought food comes with calorie counts listed on all of the packages, the New York Daily News reported. The credit for her weight loss though probably doesn't really belong to Starbucks. Rather, it just further proves that counting calories is an effective way to lose weight. According to the Daily News, a new study published in Agricultural Economics also found that women who read labels on food packaging are about 9 lbs lighter than women who don't. 

Nonetheless, MSN seems to exaggerate the benefits of the Starbucks diet, writing: "Christine Hall didn’t join an expensive weight-loss program or sign up for a meal-delivery service to help her lose nearly 80 pounds. In fact, she never even goes to the grocery store." Actually, with some Starbucks sandwiches costing as much as $5.75, that still would be significantly more expensive than cooking at home.