Like penicillin and other great scientific discoveries, this one was an accident.

My buddy Sameem is a fitness trainer in West Hollywood with muscles in all the places and fat in none of them. On a recent trip I took to L.A., he casually mentioned his latest guilty pleasure: eating a pint of ice cream every night.

But it’s healthy ice cream, he insisted.

Obviously, I figured, at 10% body fat and veins in weird spots, Sameem was either full of shit, or his ice cream tasted like it. I had him drive me to some crunchy organic grocery store to prove otherwise.

The ice cream was called Halo Top. It’s made by a little-known L.A. creamery with a staff of ten and distributed in health-food joints around the country. Cartons boast “240 calories per pint” in large letters on the front. For context, that’s ¼ of what’s in Ben & Jerry’s and ⅕ of Häagen-Dazs. Halo Top also claims ⅙ the fat and carbs and 25% more protein than typical ice cream.

And it tasted…like ice cream. Not simply like a frozen protein shake or like Arctic Zero brand “frozen dessert,” which is about as satisfying as eating snow. No, this stuff was real.

I ate a whole pint of chocolate in the parking lot.

For most health-conscious types, that would probably be the end of this story. But as a data geek with an incredible sweet tooth, I quickly did some math: By eating five pints of Halo Top a day, one would get a whopping 120 grams of protein, only 80 grams of carbohydrates, and a respectable 60 grams of fat—at only 1,200 calories. That’s pretty much a supermodel diet, but with enough protein to support my 3-times-a-week weight-training regimen.

Which is why I soon found myself staring at a styrofoam crate in my living room from IceCreamSource.com. Contents: 50 pints of Halo Top ice cream. Flavors: Chocolate, Vanilla, Mocha Chip, Mint, Strawberry, and Birthday Cake.

For ten days, I would do what surely a number of homo sapiens (primarily World of Warcraft addicts) had done before—but never in the name of research. (And certainly never with hopes of getting skinnier.) I’d be eating nothing but ice cream.

This would not be the first time I’d donated my body to personal scientific exploration. Three years ago, I lived off of a tasteless chemical sludge drink called Soylent in order to fact-check its founder’s health claims. Last year, I ate at 11 pizza places in one day to contrast the “best of the best pizza in New York.” When I became vegetarian eight years back, it was for experiment's sake first, ethics second. I’ve had my brain electrocuted and body frozen, and now I would embark on a ten-day brain freeze. A delicious, delicious brain freeze.

Would the Halo Top math truly add up in my favor? Or would the fact that it’s, you know, ice cream fatten me up despite the low calories? Would I get pimples from all that dairy? Would I shart during a work meeting?

DAY 1

It was 10:30 A.M. on my first day—Sunday—and already The Great Ice Cream Diet was going poorly. I was working on my second pint of chocolate when I broke my second plastic spoon.

Healthy ice cream apparently freezes hard. There’s a message on the side of every Halo Top carton about this that says something about how it's worth the wait for the natural ingredients to thaw, blah blah...I didn’t read it.

Anyway, I would need to steal a spoon from the office or something, because what 30-year-old guy owns real silverware? I ended up putting the pint in front of a space heater for a few minutes and making out all right. (I do not have a microwave or a legitimate heater.)