Jenice Armstrong: Weighing the Cookie Diet

M

ADONNA

'S latest video featuring Justin Timberlake is proof that at 49, the Material Girl can still heat things up.

And that's encouraging, considering that she hasn't exactly been getting her just deserts in the bedroom. Thanks to a popular weight-loss plan known as the Cookie Diet, the songstress known for gyrating suggestively with crucifixes and for locking lips onstage with Britney Spears, was settling for mere crumbs.

"My husband was on that Cookie Diet. It was such a turnoff because he didn't want to have sex," she told a Phoenix radio station recently. "He's not on it anymore, thank God.

"He didn't really need to lose that much weight," Madonna pointed out. "I think he just did it because his friends were doing it and he wanted to find out if he could do it."

Glad to know things have gotten better for you in the nookie department, Madge, but what about that Cookie Diet? Did Guy Ritchie really lose weight by eating, of all things, cookies? It all sounded too good to be true.

I have to confess, I'm one of those folks who secretly enjoys reading about how celebrities manage to stay buff. So, I e-mailed the publicist of the weight-loss specialist behind the so-called Cookie Diet, ignoring what Daily News fitness columnist Kimberly Garrison would say if I even broached such a wacky-sounding idea to her.

"Today, the phones are ringing off the hook. I've had nothing but phone calls about Madonna's husband. It has been all over the tabloids," Dr. Sanford Siegal told me when I called him. "People are driving me nuts with this story."

Siegal, a Miami-based physician who formulated the weight-loss plan back in 1975 after researching how various amino acid combinations help curb appetite, is quick to point out that the side effect Madge's husband allegedly experienced was strange.

"Our cookies are really good, but it's not that good that someone would prefer it to sex," said Siegal, author of "Hunger Control Without Drugs" (MacMillan, 1975). "A cookie has no effect on sex drive, either positive or negative."

Here's how the Cookie Diet works. Instead of eating food, dieters eat one of Siegal's special cookies whenever they get hungry. According to the plan, dieters can consume up to six cookies a day. Then, for dinner, they eat six ounces of a protein such as fish or chicken along with a green vegetable.

The goal is to consume no more than 800 calories a day. I'm no expert at this, but that sounds as if it doesn't offer you much wiggle room in terms of nutritional variety. Besides, how could you stay on it? One thing I've learned over the years is that successful long-term weight loss is a lifetime commitment - a combination of eating healthy plus regular exercise.

"We favor very fast weight loss. It keeps the patient or the client or the subject motivated," Siegal explained. "When anyone eats 800 calories a day, they lose weight at a fast rate."

"You stay on it as long as necessary to get to your goal weight," he pointed out. "[Afterward] you maintain by eating the number of calories that you require and more importantly by exercising."

Aw, there are the operative words, the ones Kimberly is always writing about in her column - exercise and calories. There's just no getting around those two key weight-loss elements. Even if you're rich and famous like Madonna's guy and have all the dough - cookie dough or otherwise - in the world. *

Dr. Sanford Siegal's Cookie Diet is available online (cookiediet.com) and at seven mall kiosks, including New Jersey's Moorestown Mall. In May, his Jersey stand will move to the Cherry Hill Mall, where he'll make an appearance from 1-3 p.m. May 3.