The subway diet is a diet plan created by Jared Fogle, an Indiana University student who claims to have lost over 200 pounds by following the plan. This diet plan got a huge amount of exposure during early 2000 because of a extensively marketed promotion campaign done by the Subway restaurant chain. The subway diet requires users to substitute two daily meals with subs from the restaurant chain.
According to Jared Fogle, he weighted nearly 425 pounds or 193 kg when he was at his junior year at Indiana University. Since the physical exercise he received was inadequate Fogel ultimately started worrying over his health and wanted some professional medical advice. It is there he learned that unless he doesn’t do something to lose weight straight away, his physical condition was in grave danger. Therefore, this prompted him to try various methods and techniques to try to lose weight. After being unsuccessful time after time, he supposedly wanted to try out something different and decided to try a subway diet, eating sandwiches as alternatives for major meals of the day.
Thus, he decided to walk 1.5 miles or 2.4 km daily to a subway restaurant which was situated near his college apartment and substituted lunch and dinner with subs that were offered at the restaurant while skipping breakfast. In addition to subs, he also had baked potato chips and diet soda from the restaurant. Fogle apparently reduced his daily calorie intake to nearly 900 calories from an initial daily calorie consumption of 10,000 and this rapid decrease in turn helped him to lose 245 pounds or 111kg, in just one year. Therefore, a subway diet aided Fogle to effectively lose a significant amount of weight in a comparatively short time period.
Ryan Coleman who was a friend of Fogle wrote an article about Fogle and his subway diet to the Indiana Daily Student which was republished in the Men’s Health Magazine under the article “Crazy Diets that Work”. The story of the subway diet ultimately got to Bob Ocwieja, a Chicago Subway owner, Richard Croad ,the Subway’s Chicago advertisement agency’s creative director and Barry Krause,owner of that agency . Fogel’s story became a part of a regional advertising campaign after they found and contacted Fogel and made sure that his story was true. The advertisement about the subway diet initially aired regionally and after sometime Subway decided to air it nationally. The subway’s sales improved by 18% the year after and the advertising campaing was a phenomenal hit.
Jared Fogle or The Subway Guy, the inventor of the subway diet, now works for the restaurant chain. He travels the country promoting the positive effects of healthy diets.
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