Publishers call January the month of “New Year, New You” with good reason — no less than 25 books on weight loss have been published since the holidays.
From celebrity ”love your body” manifestos, to doctor/talk show host approved meal plans, to a fat-turned-skinny chef’s guide to eating, the market is cluttered with new “miracle diets” touted by some of the world’s most recognizable faces.
Instead of wading through the books — many of which are padded out and could get to the point in a sentence (eat less!) — we’ve brought four of the recently released diet books down to their essentials.
We’ve ranked them in order of absurdity, from least to most:
The Doctor’s Diet
Dr. Travis Stork’s STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health
by Travis Stork (Bird Street Books)
Dr. Travis Stork, co-host of “The Doctors” and practising physician, presents a diet book that he says is based on scientific fact. “My program is not a gimmicky fad diet based on the latest pseudoscience. It is an evidence-based plan that is grounded in nutritional science,” he writes. Stork isn’t reinventing the wheel here, but instead simplifies his meal-plan based diet down to the basics: eat less sugar, carbs, unhealthy fats and sodium and stock up on lean protein, healthy fats, veggies, and fruits. A breakfast, for example, includes a “cup of blueberries, a scrambled egg, and a half cup of oatmeal sprinkled with chopped walnuts.” Follow his guide and he says you can lose up to 10 pounds in two weeks.
The Body Book
The Law of Hunger, the Science of Strength, and Other Ways to Love Your Amazing Body
by Cameron Diaz (HarperWave)
Surprisingly well-researched (though, really, I don’t think we need a refresher on what a “cell” is, do we?), actress Cameron Diaz’s “Body Book” discusses the ways she honed her stellar body into a lean, mean machine. Many of her tips are familiar to anyone who has tried dieting — avoid sugar, and keep a bottle of water in your bathroom to drink when you wake up to stay properly hydrated — though much of it (not to mention the scantily-clad pictures that accompany the text) is inspiring. “I’m not a scientist. I’m not a doctor. What I am is a woman who has spent the past 15 years learning about what my body is capable of, and it has been the most rewarding experience of my life,” she writes. She goes off the rails a bit, though, when she urges readers to check out their urine color to spot hydration issues and to examine our feces to make sure we’re eating right.
The Pound a Day Diet
Lose Up to 5 Pounds in 5 Days by Eating the Foods You Love
by Rocco DiSpirito (Grand Central)
Building on his own experience as a former fat guy, chef Rocco DiSpirito adds onto his successful “Eat This, Not That” series of books with “The Pound a Day Diet.” The book which has readers eating 850 calories a day five days a week and 1,200 calories the two remaining days for 28 days, promises that you could lose 20 pounds the first month. Once you hit the goal weight, he says, you can start following the Mediterranean style diet. But in the mean time DiSpirito, a chef, mind you, fills his recipes with fat-free Kraft American cheeses, light whole wheat hamburger buns from Sara Lee, and calorie-free pancake syrup. DiSpirito claims to have lost 30 pounds under the same program — but if we have to eat like that, is it even worth it?
Hypnotic Gastric Band
The New Surgery-Free Weight-Loss System
by Paul McKenna (Sterling)
By far the most preposterous diet book on the list is by noted smoking cessation guru and hypnotherapist Paul McKenna. The premise, based on “two years of research with the world’s leading scientific minds in weight loss” promises to deliver “the closest thing to real magic I have ever witnessed.” Magic is one word for it. First, you must read the book cover-to-cover at least once. Then you start on the hypnotherapy part of the journey. You watch a “pre-operative” CD and begin to taper off your eating habits about a week in — as if you were really getting gastric band surgery. Then, once you’re fully prepped, you begin on the “Gastric Band Installation Trance” which you must listen to at least once a month for six months. Basically, you’re hypnotized into believing you really have a gastric band and you can’t eat more because your stomach is too small. “You eat less, you leave food on your plate and you don’t feel like you’re missing out,” he writes. “The weight drops off. You feel an overwhelming sense of liberation and it almost seems to be too good to be true.” It most certainly does.