The Egg Diet — Weird, Wonderful and Smelly

Fad diets come and go, and over the years I’ve tried a few.

One of the strangest was the egg diet.

Now eggs are actually pretty nutrient-dense. They’re a good source of protein and contain things like B12, vitamin D, iodine and selenium.^[1]

And that was basically my thinking at the time.

Eggs are good for you. Eggs have protein. Eggs have nutrients. So eating loads of them must be even better, right?

Not quite.

A food can be nutritious without it being a good idea to build almost your entire diet around it. If you want the less ridiculous version of that discussion, I’ve also written about what a healthy diet actually looks like.

I can’t even remember where I first heard about this diet. Maybe online, maybe through somebody at the gym, but somehow it got into my head and I gave it a go.

The version I followed was basically low carb, short term and very egg heavy.

And when I say egg heavy, I mean egg heavy.

What I Ate

My morning started with six scrambled eggs.

Full eggs. No milk, no butter.

Just six eggs and a cup of water.

Then I went to the gym.

After the gym I had three boiled eggs.

Then dinner came around and I’d have another five eggs with three blocks of boiled spinach.

ASDA used to sell these little frozen spinach blocks, so I’d just throw three in a pan, boil them and add some salt.

That took me to 14 eggs.

Then came the afternoon snack.

Another three boiled eggs.

Seventeen eggs.

Then for tea I’d have one full avocado with two boiled eggs sliced over it, plus another five scrambled eggs on the side.

By that point I’d normally throw a bit of cheese into the scrambled eggs just to make life slightly less depressing.

That took me to 24.

Then before bed:

Two more boiled eggs.

So most days I was getting through roughly 26 whole eggs.

Did It Work?

I honestly couldn’t tell you how much weight I lost.

I wasn’t tracking things properly back then and I’m not going to make up numbers now.

These days I’m actually much less obsessive about tracking every number. I’ve written about what I do instead of tracking my macros, but back then I wasn’t even thinking about the bigger picture.

What I can tell you is how it felt.

First of all:

I was fucking hungry.

I was a lot bigger back then and I was used to eating a lot more food.

This diet felt brutal.

I was constantly thinking about food.

Then came the gym sessions.

Some days I’d walk in and just feel completely flat.

No aggression.

No energy.

No interest in pushing anything hard.

I’d do a quick pump and stroll back out.

Now I’m not going to sit here and say low carbs were definitely the reason, because the research is more complicated than that.^[2]

My whole diet had changed.

All I know is this:

My training felt worse.

The One Thing I Liked

My stomach felt unbelievably flat.

Not lean.

Not magically fat-free.

Just flat.

Less bloated.

Part of that could have been the lower carbohydrate intake, because glycogen is stored with water in the body.^[3]

Part of it could simply have been eating less food overall.

Either way, I remember loving that flat feeling.

The Egg Burps

Nobody warns you about the fucking egg burps.

When you’ve eaten 26 eggs in a day and you burp, you know about it.

All you can taste is egg.

Old egg.

Egg from hours ago.

It was absolutely disgusting.

The Night-Time Hunger

The worst part for me was probably the nights.

I remember waking up with proper hunger pangs.

I’d walk downstairs, open the fridge and just stare at all the good stuff.

Snacks.

Normal food.

Anything that wasn’t an egg.

And I’d have that real urge to just eat everything.

Then somehow I’d convince myself not to.

I’d shut the fridge, go into the fridge door and pull out...

Another boiled egg.

In the middle of the night.

After already eating 26 of them.

Looking back, that probably tells you everything you need to know.

Would I Do It Again?

No.

I don’t recommend it.

I don’t condone it.

I’m not telling anybody to go and eat 26 eggs a day.

I’m just telling you what I did.

And I understand why I did it.

When you’ve spent long enough not feeling confident in your body, you’ll try almost anything if you think it’ll finally change things.

You want fast results.

You want to look different.

You want something to work.

And sometimes that sends you down some pretty stupid roads.

Maybe I lost weight on it.

I honestly can’t remember.

What I do remember is that when I started eating normally again, whatever I’d lost seemed to come straight back.

And that was basically the cycle I was stuck in.

Go extreme.

Lose weight.

Get fed up.

Eat normally again.

Gain it back.

Start looking for the next diet.

The British Dietetic Association warns about exactly this with fad diets — fast, restrictive approaches can be hard to stick to and can feed a cycle of weight loss and regain.^[4]

It took me a while to realise the boring answer is usually the better one.

Slow changes. Slow progress. Something you can actually stick to.

That’s what I believe now.

The egg diet gave me a flat stomach, terrible gym sessions, disgusting burps and a funny story.

Would I do it again?

Not a chance.

Research & Sources

1. British Heart Foundation — Are eggs high in cholesterol? Used for egg nutrition and key vitamins and minerals.
2. Henselmans M, et al. — The Effect of Carbohydrate Intake on Strength and Resistance Training Performance: A Systematic Review. Nutrients, 2022.
3. Shiose K, et al. — research on muscle glycogen and body water. Journal of Applied Physiology, 2016.
4. British Dietetic Association — Fad Diets. Used for guidance on restrictive fad diets and weight regain.