First thing you have to know is there is only one true Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet - More than 500,000 people have used his cookies to lose weight. Now it’s your turn!. The secret formula to suppress hunger was developed by Dr. Sanford Siegal of Miami, and he and his wife still are the only ones to know the recipe.

Dr. Sanford Siegal of Miami is the inventor of the Cookie Diet, which has gotten a lot of publicity lately.

And the cookies come in five flavors — oatmeal raisin, chocolate, banana, coconut and blueberry, but oatmeal raisin is the favorite.

That said, what else is there to know about the Cookie Diet except Josie Raper made the cover of People magazine when she lost 120 pounds — half her body weight — in eight months on this diet. Eating cookies.

“I go for faster weight loss,” Dr. Siegal told me. “I have been treating obesity since the late 1950s. In more than 500,000 patients, none have had any problems with rapid weight loss. Actually, it enhances the motivation. It gets them to stick to the diet.”

Dr. Siegal developed his Cookie Diet in 1975 when he was writing a book about hunger-suppressing foods. He baked them for his patients and shared them with some other physicians, but he says he did not commercialize the cookies until two years ago when his son, Matthew, “convinced me otherwise.”