It sounds great, but maybe don’t try this all chicken nugget diet

According to The Daily Meal, it all began with a cheeky interpretation of a health tip on a Chick-fil-A bag. Customer Rodger Sherman tweeted a picture of the back of the bag, which featured a panel of “Great Ideas for Healthier Living.” The first of these suggestions reads, “Kick off the New Year by adding one healthy habit to your routine. Here’s a good one: Eat smaller meals (like an 8-count pack of grilled nuggets) every three to four hours.”

While the health tip doesn’t explicitly say a person should eat the nuggets every few hours, it’s rather suggesting a person eats smaller, more frequent meals. But Sherman’s interpretation is decidedly more fun — and way more delicious as well.

Eater decided to take Sherman’s interpretation and run with it, inventing some guidelines for this new, grilled nugget diet. They suggest adhering to these guidelines in order to get the “best results,” i.e. weight loss, cautioning readers to stay away from “those sweet, sweet waffle fries.”

These tips include only buying the grilled nuggets at Chick-fil-A (duh), buying twice the amount of nuggets on Saturday (since the fast food chain is closed on Sundays), and our personal favorite: “This is no time for Polynesian sauce: Dipping sauces are strictly prohibited, lest you obtain any sort of pleasure from this decidedly monastic way of eating.”

This sounds amazing. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, Consumerist has taken Sherman’s idea, and Eater’s  tips, and thrown a wet-blanket over it all. They’ve spelled out the ramifications of this grilled nugget diet from a nutritional standpoint. Assuming a person sleeps 8 hours a day, a person would eat 4-5 nugget meals per day, only consuming 560 to 700 calories Even with a disregard to the “monastic” way of life by adding in dipping sauces, the meals would come to about 800-1,000 calories, well below the 1,500-2,000 recommended for most adults. So far, so good, right?

Actually, beyond the fact that that’s probably not enough to actually power your body through the day, and ignoring the lack of fiber and other nutrients that this lean protein wouldn’t supply, there’s also the enormous amount of sodium: each serving is about 530 mg. That means every day a person would consume about 2,300 mg a day, which is just about the most you can safely consume per day.  Using the term, “safely” loosely, of course.

Alas, a diet filled with chicken nuggets is only a dream. But it’s a delicious one, nonetheless.

(Image via Shutterstock)