Tag Archives: Diet Books

Become a Vegan, 95 Percent of the Time

Committing 100 percent to a new diet plan can be difficult, especially when the diet excludes or removes certain foods you are used to eating. Authors Dr. Jamie Noll and Caitlin Herndon recognize the challenge that full commitment can present, and have offered a solution. Their new book, The 95% Vegan Diet and its accompanying workbook, is designed to help readers follow a realistic vegan diet plan, mostly.

The 95 percent vegan diet

The co-authors believe that a major factor that prevents diet success is guilt. You may be following your diet plan just fine, but then give in to a craving. According to Dr. Noll and Herndon, that’s nothing to feel guilty over. “The number one reason I see people fail at weight loss/attempt to become healthier is what I call the ‘guilt factor’,” Dr. Noll said. “I’ve seen it time and time again in my practice. For example: I’m going to go on the Atkins diet because I don’t care about bread anyway. The problem is they are dying for that pasta – so they have some – but then they don’t forgive themselves.”

Dr. Noll added that the reason it is the 95% Vegan Diet, and not 100%, is to allow people some wiggle room and give them permission to forgive themselves for not sticking to the diet. “I want to show people that they don’t have to be perfect. They can forgive themselves and still have excellence in good health. Five percent is the margin in good science before we consider something statistically different.” (more…)

Posted on September 24, 2023 by Elizabeth

A Dietitian Reacts to “The Heavy: A Mother, A Daughter, A Diet”

Author Dara-Lynn Weiss’ airs her dirty linen in public in a controversial new memoir, “The Heavy: A Mother, A Daughter, A Diet.” She shines the light on a most important topic: How can we prevent our kids from becoming overweight? The Heavy chronicles the journey of a mother’s struggle to help her young daughter to get healthy. We first met Dara-Lynn and her daughter, Bea, last April in a Vogue essay from the overbearing mom’s point of view. Bea was deprived and publically shamed. It wasn’t pretty. The blogs condemned mom.

For sure, we need extensive interventions to curb the childhood obesity epidemic, but does the solution lie in a rescue by mom as the food police? The research does not agree. Dietitian Evelyn Tribole, co-author of the book Intuitive Eating, outlines the studies nicely in this video, Warning Dieting Causes Weight Gain.

She shows how the act of dieting, independent of genetics, is a cause of overweight. Deprivation diets can lead to food obsession, binge-eating, and more weight gain. Dieting is passed down from mothers to daughters. Dara-Lynn had strange practices of her own with frequent weigh-ins and juice cleanses to keep the numbers in line. Studies show that a mother’s over-concern about her own size is later expressed in her daughter’s negative body image and feelings of low self-worth. (more…)

Posted on January 18, 2024 by Natalie K

7 Questions About Denise Austin’s 7 Skinny Strategies

Fad diets or exercise products seem to come and go every year. However, there are a few names that have lasted the test of time. Denise Austin is one of those names. She has been in the fitness business for decades. This decade is no exception as she recently released a new book titled, “Side Effect: Skinny.”

Her new book deals with what she calls a “fat blast diet,” and seven “Skinny Strategies.” Since Austin provides seven strategies, we asked her seven questions about her new book.

Calorie Confusion

One step instructs dieters to change up their caloric intake on various days to create calorie confusion and trick the metabolism. While many diets refer to cycling or varying intake on certain days of the week, is this how Austin has seen such long-term success? She said she’s eaten this way for the last 20 years and her work with professionals has convinced her to promote it. As she says, “variety is key.”

Fat-Blast Workout

A second strategy is the “Fat-Blast Workout.” We were curious if it was necessary to follow Austin’s unique workout if one was already on an exercise routine. Would results still be felt without the “Fat-Blast Workout?”

“[It] is divided into two types of workouts: one is the fat-blast walk, which is an interval walking routine that can be very well integrated into any cardio workout that someone may already have established. Again, this interval program is all about changing up the routine and surprising your muscles,” said Austin. (more…)

Posted on January 11, 2024 by Lacy

50 Cent Releases a Fitness Book Without Any Fitness Credentials

‘Tis the season. Not that one, but the season where anyone and everyone stands a chance at making a buck if they’re selling a weight loss or fitness product. Some of the most amusing products surface in these first few weeks of the new year. This year, it’s a surprising new fitness book written by 50 Cent.

Wait? Isn’t he a rapper? What’s he doing selling a fitness book? That’s what we thought, too.

50 Cent, or Curtis Jackson III, just released his new book titled Formula 50: A 6-Week Total Body Transformation Plan. It is targeted to weight training enthusiasts and features the metabolic resistance training method and a nutrition guide. Furthermore, the book is supposed to give readers an “all-access pass to [50’s] premium plan for lifelong fitness.” If you’re picking up on a tone of skepticism, you’re reading this right.

There’s no denying that 50 Cent is in incredible shape. Clearly he follows a plan that puts him in better shape than most athletes, let alone rappers. However, the book (and common knowledge) indicate that he has no formal training or credentials to back his fitness advice. Is being fit and a celebrity enough to safely offer fitness, weight training and nutrition plans?

“I highly doubt that 50 Cent has any fitness training credentials or a degree in exercise science,” John Spencer Ellis, the founder of the National Exercise & Sports Trainers Association (NESTA), told us. “However, he has probably consulted several trainers along the way with his own fitness program.” (more…)

Posted on January 4, 2024 by Lacy

Al Roker’s Diet Revealed on Today Show With Debut of His Book “Never Goin’ Back”

Ten years ago, Today Show weather anchor Al Roker decided he needed a drastic change in his lifestyle when he tipped the scale at 340 pounds. He decided to have a gastric bypass surgery in 2002 and lost 100 pounds in eight months, eventually reaching 190 pounds lost. Then, five years ago, he received the devastating news that his mother had cancer, and his weight crept back up as he dealt with her terminal illness. After regaining and losing another 40 pounds through a 28-day cleanse and strict diet and exercise regimen, Roker writes about it all in his memoir “Never Goin’ Back,” released Dec. 31, 2024.

He talked about shedding the “fat guy image” and his new book this morning on Today.

Roker relates in his book that he chose to have bariatric surgery after losing his father to lung cancer in 2001. He had yo-yo dieted for years with no lasting results. He describes his aha! moment in an interview with PARADE magazine:

“[My father] was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and I would go in every day. We’d talk and joke, and then one day he got serious and said, ‘Look, we both know I’m not going to be here to help you with my grandkids, so you gotta promise you’re ­going to lose weight.” Seven days later he was gone. A few weeks afterward, [Deborah and I] found out we were pregnant with our son Nicky. I said, “Okay, I’m going to have to do something.”

Roker found success with a gastric bypass, but admits it is not for everyone, calling it just another tool for losing weight that was a very difficult choice for him. When his mother got sick, his healthy living routine went to the wayside as he balanced spending as much time as he could with her with the normal pressures of his work and family life. He thought he could handle a few slip-ups with his diet, eventually reverting back to old habits and secret binge eating, and used food as a form of self-medication. (more…)

Posted on January 3, 2024 by SarahS

Carla ‘MizFit’ Birnberg Debuts Weight Loss eBook, Saying Healthy Living is Simple

The popular fitness blogger with a large online following, MizFit, brings her expertise to the realm of ebooks with the release of her first digital copy, “MizFit: How to Build Weight and Lose Muscle Without Losing Your Mind,” available on Nook, Kindle, iPad, and as a PDF file.

MizFit, whose name is Carla Birnberg, candidly writes about how to start and maintain a fitness and eating routine that embraces the idea of living fulfilled and in the moment. Her story includes gaining 35 pounds in college, learning how to lose it permanently, becoming a bodybuilder, personal trainer, and then embracing a gluten-free lifestyle long before it became popular. Her ebook combines the knowledge she’s gleaned over the years into a comprehensive handbook for healthy living.

“I wrote, pulled together, added to and enhanced all of the information I wish I’d have had when I first started my healthy living journey. It’s the same information I still need today, close to two decades and a thirty five pound loss maintained later, to remain on my path,” said Birnberg. (more…)

Posted on December 27, 2023 by SarahS

Jessica Smith’s Thin in 10 Plan Sheds Pounds with Ten Minutes a Day

Losing weight is not easy. Jessica Smith agrees because, although she now appears toned and beautiful, she admits it wasn’t always this way. So she and Liz Neporent, a best selling health author, wrote a book about losing weight to help others on their paths to success. It’s called The Thin in 10 Weight-Loss Plan, and she truly believes it can help those who need to shed pounds but have not been able to take that crucial first step to a healthier lifestyle.

Smith tells about her journey in the introduction of the book: “Jessica once tipped the scales at 170 pounds. She tried various diets, exercise plans, motivational programs—you name it, she tried it—but nothing worked. While some plans seemed to work at first, the success was always short-lived. She’d always gain the weight back and then some.”

Any of that sound familiar? One day, Smith had enough and decided to do something about it. Instead of grabbing for another candy bar to soothe her frustrations, she hopped on a stationary bike, telling herself she could have the candy bar after ten minutes. “While those 10 minutes were pretty rough, she felt great afterward—and she had lost the urge to dig into the chocolate,” the book says.  (more…)

Posted on October 18, 2023 by SarahS

Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue by Writing a Diet and Fitness Book

As her political career has seemingly fizzled, Sarah Palin is taking her complete lack of professional diet and fitness experience and putting it in a book, so she says. In an announcement the former vice presidential candidate made to People, she said, “Our family is writing a book on fitness and self-discipline focusing on where we get our energy and balance as we still eat our beloved homemade comfort foods.”

The Palin family is known well for their love of comfort foods, relying on the culinary favorites of their native Alaska, like seafood, moose chili, caribou, and some fruit. Like most Americans they aren’t above indulging in heavier treats like cream or pecan pies. Even Palin has admitted that a skinny white chocolate mocha is a morning staple for her.

The announcement suggests the family has found a healthy balance of food that works for sustenance that you can simply enjoy. “We promise you what we do works,” she said. We’re not sure of what they do exactly, but pictures posted this week show a slimmer Sarah Palin than we’ve ever seen before. An avid runner for years, she’s always appeared to be fit and trim, but what’s surfacing this week has people questioning a starvation diet. A celebrity news contributor for The Examiner said she “looks downright scary.”

The book at this time seems to be a personal project, as there is no word on whether an actual book deal exists or if a publisher has agreed to take it. Although possible titles are already circulating.

(more…)

Posted on October 11, 2023 by Natalie K

Elizabeth Taylor’s Retro Diet Book Included Steak and Peanut Butter Sandwiches

Elizabeth Taylor, one of Hollywood’s most glamorous actresses, has many credits to her name. Over the course of her lifetime, she won three Oscars, two Golden Globe Awards, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Screen Actors Guild and American Film Institute. Her well-publicized personal life included a whopping eight marriages (two to the same person), a vast $150 million jewelry collection, and championing charity causes such as AIDS research. What’s lesser known, or remembered, is the diet book she wrote in 1988 entitled Elizabeth Takes Off: On Weight Gain, Weight Loss, Self-Image, and Self-Esteem.

Taylor’s diet book, brought back to the limelight by NY Mag, is a mishmash of diet tips, recipes, and a personal memoir. She told interviewers at the time that she wanted to write it because she was used to extremes, black and white, and that then she wanted to cultivate the gray in her life. At mid-life, she wanted stability, and to pass this thinking on to others.

A good practice, for sure, but her diet food choices? Not so much. Many of Taylor’s food choices in the book are questionable. She eats things like cottage-cheese-sour-cream dip over fruit for breakfast and steak and peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. Dry toast, minted new potatoes, fillet of sole, and swordfish with lime are some other foods in the book. She advocates eating a lot of fish and not a lot of red meat or bread. Her diet also stresses eating fresh fruits and vegetables regularly. (more…)

Posted on August 24, 2023 by SarahS

Timothy Caulfield Loses 30 Pounds While Writing ‘The Cure for Everything’

For Timothy Caulfield, it wasn’t about vanity. It was about cutting through the twisted messages the diet and fitness industries sell our health-crazed society, and finally finding the best way to be truly healthy. And this is why instead of just writing about diet and fitness, he became a human guinea pig to test the theories and health advice he would propose in his book.

Caulfield, 48, is the research director of Health Law and Science Policy Group at the University of Alberta. And he’s now the author of “Finding the Cure to Everything: Untangling Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness and Happiness.” Unlike most authors who go the traditional route of research, deliberation and then writing, Caulfield became a walking experiment before he ever put pen to paper.

The project started as an academic book. “It wasn’t going to be for the popular press,” Caulfield told Diets in Review in a recent interview.” But then I started getting into it and thought, ‘I’m going to live every one of these chapters’ because I thought it would be a great story.” (more…)

Posted on June 18, 2023 by Dana

SELF Editor’s New Book Claims Superfoods Will Cause Weight Loss

Superfoods are indeed super, but they aren’t a magic weight loss tool. A new diet book should be more clear before it becomes the next fad.

Lucy Danziger is the editor-in-chief of SELF magazine. She recently published a book about her experiences with eating superfoods and ditching dieting. The book is titled “The Drop 10 Diet. Add to Your Plate to Lose the Weight.”  The book describes how Danziger turned to foods like nuts, berries and whole grains and found herself 25 pounds lighter in just six months. She also focused on what she could eat verses what she couldn’t as she began her diet.

The foods Danziger sticks to are called superfoods. The superfood title was coined in 2004 by Dr. Steven Pratt. He compiled 20 foods that met the criteria for being “super.” These 20 foods are readily available to the public, contain nutrients that are known to enhance longevity, and the health benefits of the food has to be backed by peer-reviewed scientific studies.

The twenty foods that meet Dr. Pratt’s requirements are apples, avocado, beans, blueberries, broccoli, cinnamon, dark chocolate, dried superfruits, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, honey, kiwi, low-fat yogurt, oats, onions, oranges, pomegranates, pumpkin, soy, spinach, tea, tomatoes, turkey, walnuts, and wild salmon.

(more…)

Posted on April 16, 2024 by Lacy