For the full year, she ate all three meals, plus drinks and snacks, from the coffee giant's menu. That basically means she subsisted on wraps, sandwiches, salads, and anything she could find in the bottom of the Starbucks pastry case.
Ms. Existence (yes, it's her real name) says she did in fact lose weight across the course of the year.
I worked for many years at Starbucks, and frequently found myself buying lunch or dinner there if I forgot to bring food and/or was too tired to go out on my 30-minute break. So I have some points you should consider before trying the Starbucks diet:
The Starbucks packaged foods items are EXPENSIVE. According to Ms. Existence, she spent anywhere from $500 to $800 per month eating brown-bag basics like egg salad sandwiches and juices from Starbucks.
That's just for one person -- apparently the rest of her family was not participating in her culinary experiment. So that means the annual cost could be anywhere from $6000 to $9600 for one person to feed themselves! However, those uber-pricey items would clearly cost pennies on the dollar if you replicated them yourselves at home.
For example -- Starbucks sells a turkey sandwich with cheese, lettuce, and tomato on it for $5.95 each. That's only slightly less than what it would cost to buy all the ingredients for roughly 10 turkey sandwiches at home.
Starbucks also sells a single-serve bag of popcorn for around $2 -- and of course, you can buy a 3-count box of microwave popcorn for about that price. Or you could really save money by making your own homemade microwave popcorn!
You have to watch your sugar and sodium. Seriously check out the nutritional labels on your purchases at Starbucks -- even the ones that are marketed in 'healthy' packaging.
Starbucks doesn't use preservatives in most of their salads, sandwiches, and wraps -- instead, they extend those items' shelf lives with a heaping dose of salt. Seriously, one item could be 41% of your daily sodium intake!
And it goes without saying that many Starbucks drinks are overloaded with sugar, even ones that don't seem sweet on your tongue.
A grande Starbucks chai tea latte, for example, has a whopping 42 grams of sugar in it -- in comparison, you can eat a regular-size Snickers bar and only get 26.2 grams of sugar.
Starbucks food offerings REALLY vary from location to location. Ms. Existence lives in Seattle, where Starbucks is headquartered, so she has access to a much wider variety of food offerings than other areas of the country.
Someone trying the Starbucks diet here in San Antonio, for example, might get pretty tired of eating the same four or five rotating sandwiches or salads frequently available in the pastry case.
You can catch up on the full year of Ms. Existence's Starbucks diet at her blog, for1yearofmylife.com.
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