Gareth’s verdict
This was bleak. I’m not usually one for breakfast. I usually power my way through the morning with three or four coffees and then have an early lunch around midday. But with coffee off the menu, I was reaching for a can of Diet Coke at 8am, and a handful of Doritos if I was getting hungry mid-morning. It felt, and looked, obscene. On an empty stomach, and with only a Diet Coke to wash the supplements down, nausea rushed over me every morning. On day three I had to take myself for a walk outside as the saliva in my mouth got extra runny and I thought I was going to vomit. Apart from making me feel disgusting, I didn’t feel any benefits from my pills.

Snacks: Coke and crisps

Extraordinarily, Trump gets through 12 cans of Diet Coke a day. His hydration is reliant solely on Diet Cokes, with water off the menu. RFK Jr recalled Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, telling him that he had “never seen Trump drink a glass of water”.

And his snack of choice? Doritos. (A big bag contains 2100 calories, and it’s recommended that men eat 2500 in a day.)

Gareth’s verdict
Usually, I’ll try not to snack during the day, and just stick to water and coffee. A chocolate bar may or may not slide into the mix every now and again. I managed to creep up my intake of Diet Coke day by day from three on day one to nine on day five. But how anyone manages 12 cans a day is a mystery, partly because they are disgusting and taste like sand.

Doritos are fine, but it feels incredibly odd these days to eat a dry crisp out of a share bag.

Where’s the dip? Also, my colleagues can’t have found it easy having to deal with me relentlessly busting open cans and chomping crisps. It’s no more acceptable in the US than it is in the UK. But I do have gravy granules on my desk in London, so it’s pretty much par for the course.

Lunch: Doritos by the handful

As with breakfast, Trump tends to not eat anything. If he does, it’s a meatloaf sandwich. The last time he was in the White House as president, meatloaf was his favourite dish. During his last stint as commander-in-chief, he made a point of making all his friends eat his favourite comfort food on their first visit. Then New Jersey governor Chris Christie recalls: “This is what it’s like to be with Trump. He says, ‘there’s the menu, you guys order whatever you want,’ and then he says, ‘Chris, you and I are going to have the meatloaf.’”

Gareth’s verdict
Usually my lunch is leftovers of the previous night’s tea. My go-to at the moment is some batch-cooked pasta, veg-laden and heavy on the meat (pork loin). If I’m trying to be a bit healthier, I’ll just have veg and meat and cut out the carbs entirely. I didn’t have lunch at any stage during the week. But going without anything other than crisps during the day wasn’t ideal. By 3pm I was really hungry, probably because there are so few nutrients in what became my triangular nemeses (Doritos).

Dinner: fast food or well-done steak

This is where the 78-year-old gets the bulk of his eating done. A long fast, and then a huge intake of calories. His meals – McDonald’s, KFC, pizza or steak. Seemingly on rotation.

Gareth’s verdict
McDonald’s: the first meal of the experiment at McDonald’s was actually quite nice. The big man’s go-to order is two Big Macs and two Filet-O-Fish. He washes it down with a small chocolate milkshake. Perhaps my judgment is clouded, it being day one. The Big Mac isn’t my usual order (I’m a double cheeseburger, mayo chicken, fries and a flat white man… maybe a McFlurry, maybe another mayo chicken), but it hits the spot. I lost my Filet-O-Fish virginity too on day one, and it was a surprisingly light and refreshing palate cleanser. It was the chocolate milkshake letting the team down, really. Far too thick to rinse away the burger stodge. Now, it could’ve been that I’d only had an hour and a half’s sleep on an overnight bus from Boston to Washington, DC the night before, but the second I finished eating, I put my head on my pillow and fell asleep. I woke up 11 hours later.

KFC: on KFC night, I followed in Trump’s footsteps and kept it simple. A bucket of chicken. No sides. The pits. KFC is the most overrated of all the fast food chains anyway, but this was bleak. It arrived late, at 8pm. The label on the bag said it had been bagged at 7pm. So it had spent an hour sweating in the boot of some bloke’s battered Toyota Corolla. It arrived cold. I had to microwave it. And it was just piece after underwhelming piece of repulsion. I don’t mind a KFC snack wrap or a Supercharger burger, but this was dreadful. The calories I’d burnt on the Peloton completely went to waste. Still, pro that I am, I made it through the bucket and went to sleep unsatisfied.

Pizza: then, pizza. In one of the president-elect’s more peculiar eating habits, he leaves the crusts from his pepperoni pizza. Got to watch that waistline. Mind you, without anything to dip them in, what’s the point? After being let down by Domino’s more times than I care to remember, I cased out a local joint. Whenever I cycled past it, Kouzina Angelina’s looked buzzing. I grabbed myself an 18-inch pepperoni and sausage pizza and took it up to the rooftop of my apartment building. After a tough rugby session, I dipped my feet in the pool and got stuck in. It looked stunning, it tasted great, but she was a big old girl. And halfway through (having ventured indoors) chewing was becoming a chore. I needed water to push the pizza bung southwards, but I only had Diet Coke (my eighth of the day) to help me. Have mercy. At least I didn’t have to eat the crusts, but I could’ve definitely done with a tub of garlic dip to help me through the final two slices. After a short time-out, I managed to force them down. The following day, I could still smell pizza. It was seeping out of my pores. And making me feel quite sick.

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Steak and chips: The only non-fast-food meal is a steak and chips. But Trump even manages to desecrate this slam dunk of a dinner. He has his steak cooked well done, and his former butler said it was cooked for so long “it would rock on the plate”. And as if that weren’t bad enough, there would be no peppercorn, bearnaise, Diane or chimichurri to wet it up. No. It’s ketchup. Just ketchup. Sigh. Come on, Mr President-elect. Do better. You can’t be the leader of the free world and have this as your steak order. A complete waste of a cow. It was seasoned perfectly by the pros at The Queen Vic in Washington, DC (a British pub in which Trump would probably not be given the most hospitable welcome) and looked for all the money to be lining up to be an almost-perfect meal in a week of dreck. Alas, it was a case of what could’ve been. Because it was so well done, it was tough to get through, and not the melt-in-the-mouth rare I’m used to. The ketchup was needed, in truth, to wet it up a bit. It was comfortably the best thing I ate all week, but that very much falls into the world’s fastest tortoise territory. Weirdly, I was still hungry after it too. Maybe my stomach had expanded?

Gareth’s final verdict

When the idea for this feature – to eat like Trump for a week – was initially floated by me, I couldn’t have been more keen. Eat fast food and Doritos for a week and not have to feel guilty about it? Bring it on! It took less than an hour to make me realise I’d made a horrible mistake.

I was ravenous on day one, but after that, the entire week just passed me by in a blur of dissatisfaction. Nothing filled me up, though I was never particularly hungry.

That’s probably because Donald Trump’s diet is that of a child. Just a bland bonanza of beige. “Mum! Dad! Can I have chips for tea? And can I have loads of ketchup? And pizza? And a burger?” There’s no spice, there’s no depth, there’s no … anything. And it properly affected my body.

My hands, for the entire week, were always cold. And that’s not something I ever suffer with. They also started peeling quite horrifically. I was quickly becoming a fast-food leper. Rice explains: “Most likely it’s linked to your digestion and could be early signs that your gut is not happy with your new diet. Imbalances in the gut microbiome can quite quickly lead to skin issues; in fact so strong is the relationship between the gut and the skin it is often called the ‘gut-skin axis’.”

I was also barely going to the toilet, and when I was, I really had to try. Exercising was a real chore, too. I carried on using the Peloton every day, with a bit of weight training and rugby. But my numbers were way down.

Usually on a Peloton I get through between 16.4 and 17.7 kilometres in a half-hour blast. This week, my best was 13.8 kilometres, and I had nothing in my legs to give. Rugby was much more difficult than usual, but I did feel lighter on my feet.

I was forced to skip the weekly post-training trip to the pub as well because Trump is teetotal, and I wasn’t going to sit with the boys and drink another Diet Coke.

My sweat, oddly, felt much thicker too. And it took a lot longer for me to actually start perspiring this syrupy sweat. Almost as if my body was trying to cling onto any water it could possibly retain.

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Possibly the most vile thing about the week was going to sleep with a can of Diet Coke next to my bedside instead of a glass of water. When I woke up in the middle of the night with a dry mouth – which happened a lot given my salty intake – the only thing that I had to combat this was a glug of fizzy cola. It was horrendous.

Equally bad was any sort of exercise. My water bottle was redundant for the week as I relied on Diet Cokes to rehydrate myself in the gym or at rugby training.There I was, a 36-year-old man, drinking a can of Diet Coke as my teammates chatted during a water break. “What are you doing?” I don’t know, friends. I don’t know.

That was the one thing I longed for the most – a simple swig of water. So when my sentence was served, I set my alarm for midnight and poured water down my throat. It was magnificent. Pure bliss.

Here comes the plot twist – I actually lost 2.6 kilograms in five days. But please, please don’t think that this is a good way to lose weight. Rice explains: “The weight loss is probably just dehydration caused by the poor diet and lack of water intake. Even with a very strict calorie deficit, you would be hard-pushed to lose a couple of kilograms in a week. On just one meal a day, it may be that you have been eating less than you usually do, but this diet is certainly not restrictive enough for there to be any significant fat loss over five days. So, the only plausible explanation is dehydration.”

I’ve never felt more unhealthy, and I’ve never wanted a glass of water more in my entire life. Frankly, I don’t quite understand how Donald Trump is still alive.

The Telegraph, London

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