Subway Diet
Everyone is familiar with the Subway Diet featuring Jared, the guy who lost 245 pounds in a year by walking and replacing two meals a day with Subway sandwiches. If you ever wanted to know how this whole thing got started, keep reading.
Jared Fogle was a student at Indiana University who worked at an adult video store in order to pay his way through college. His weight reached 425 pounds thanks to sitting around all day – in class and at work – munching on snacks. Finally Jared understood that he was in trouble unless he could lose some weight.
He tried various diets, but they didn’t work because he still had all those hours behind a counter during which to cheat. One day he noticed a Subway sandwich store about a mile and a half from his apartment. The seed of the Subway diet was planted. He immediately stopped eating breakfast while walking the 1 ½ miles to Subway for lunch and dinner – a sandwich, baked chips and a diet soda. Now instead of a 10,000 calorie per day with no exercise lifestyle, he was eating only about 900 calories while walking 6 miles every day. For Jared the yet named Subway diet made 245 pounds disappear in the span of a single year.
OK, but how did it become a commercial success? One day Jared bumped into a buddy who was a reporter for the school paper. After Jared told him how he had lost so much weight, this guy turned it into a feature for the paper. Men’s Health magazine picked up the story as part of an article about weird diets that work. A subway franchisee in Chicago brought the story to the attention of his advertising people who talked to Jared to make certain it was legit. They took the ad idea to Subway’s national ad agency who disliked the idea, so they created a local campaign for Chicago featuring the Subway diet.
The campaign around the Subway diet became huge. Soon Jared and the Subway diet were in all the national media, including a guest stint on Oprah. The national ad agency came back, egg firmly on face, to ask if the ads could be run nationally.
Many people have had success with the Subway diet. Be careful about extreme diet changes or extreme weight loss, as were practiced by Jared. A little more moderation is needed, but exercise and cutting calories are a proven one two punch combination in the fight against obesity.
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