Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

I bought Stop Stuffing Yourself when I felt helpless about my bingeing. I had stagnated at 180 pounds for over two years and I knew that I couldn’t lose any more weight and still binge. I knew I needed to get past the bingeing, but I had no idea how to do it, so I got this book.

What’s Good About This Book:

Like all Weight Watchers books, they sprinkle many case studies from people who have lost weight. In some books, they even show the before and after pictures. This book has profiles such as these, but no pictures. I always love to see other people who have succeeded because it gives me hope. Even though I know that those people might have gained all that weight back (or might not even exist), I get inspired by those “true to life” stories and advice. It’s the same reason I like Weight Watchers Magazine every month.

What’s Not So Good About This Book:

Chapter 2: Discovering Your Eating Style really turned me off to the whole book. It was a large chapter of quizzes to determine your eating style. I find quizzes like that to be a simplistic condensation of the real issues behind overeating. I started out answering the questions, but by the second page, I stopped to see how long this quiz was going to be. When I realized that it was a full chapter of questions, I stopped right there.

This book has a lot of good advice about not eating when you’re bored or angry, but it wasn’t what I needed to conquer my bingeing.

Should I Buy This Book?

If you have a serious problem with bingeing, this book will not help you get to the bottom of it. If you tend to eat when you’re bored or lonely, then this book might help you, but only if you can get past the neverending quiz in Chapter 2.

I found Helping Your Child Lose Weight the Healthy Way at the library. I was looking for a book by this author on a completely different subject (Not Buying It : My Year Without Shopping). The library didn’t have the book I was looking for, but DID have this one. I thought I should check it out and see how it relates to my experience as an overweight child.

What’s Good About The Book:

I knew I would like this book when I read the first page:

“A variety of factors can influence your child’s body self-image, but probably the most important is what family members do and say. Certainly, if siblings tease him about being fat or his grandmother offers suggestions for losing weight, the message will be that something is wrong with him. This likely to have a negative impact on the way he sees himself. And what family members do is as powerful as what they say.”

Judith suggests monitoring your child’s current eating and exercise habits in order to assess the situation, but she also suggests monitoring the family activity levels and the eating environment of your home.

“There is no generic eating plan that is appropriate for every child, or every chubby child – one side does not fit all. A cookie-cutter approach just doesn’t cut it.”

The beginning of chapter 8 says it all:

“Don’t put your child on a diet. We’ll say it again, for emphasis, ‘Don’t put your child on a diet.’ The truth is, diets don’t work for children any better than they do for adults. And worse, they can cause considerable harm to a child’s growth, health, psychological development and ability to learn.”

This book is down to earth in its approach to helping your children lose weight.

What’s Not So Good About The Book:

I’m uncomfortable with secretly monitoring what your child is eating. As an overweight child, I used to wish that my grandmother would just leave me alone. I always knew when she was tallying up what I had eaten. It’s not like you can hide something like that.

I think the best option is to provide healthy food and a good example. It’s your child’s body and if he or she wants to eat cookies all day, there is NOTHING you can do to stop them. The best thing to do is make sure there are healthy alternatives at home and have your child notice how you eat.

Should I Buy The Book?

Even though I agree with the nutrition and activity recommendations in this book, I’m reluctant to recommend it to a parent. There is no way you can hide a book like this from your child unless you only read it at work and it never goes home. Once your child sees the title of the book, an emotional blow will hit him or her in the gut. “Mom (or Dad) thinks I’m fat…” Do you really want to do that to your kid?

I’ve heard lots of rave reviews about Curves. When I saw this book at the library, I picked it up, hoping that the book would tell me a little more about their program.

What’s Good About This Book:

The Calorie Sensitive Plan will help you lose weight. It restricts your calories to 1200 a day in Phase 1 and ups them to 1600 in Phase 2. It doesn’t take into account different body sizes, unfortunately, so if you are 5’11” and weight 250 pounds, they are going to recommend the same amount of calories as someone who is 5’2″ and 150 pounds. That seems a little short-sighted, but at those calorie amounts, you WILL lose weight.

What’s Not So Good About This Book:

Unfortunately, they still believe in the high protein diet, so they have an option that recommends allowing you to eat as much protein as you want and limiting your carbs to 20 grams in Phase 1. This program has shown to lose weight only when the calorie consumption is low enough to cause weight loss. If you overeat protein, you WILL gain weight.

Additionally, they seem to have “magical” workout machines at their facilities that adjust the resistance based on how swiftly you use them. They didn’t explain the physics of it, but I have a hard time believing that the hydraulic resistance is better than free weights. They gave me nothing in this book to persuade me otherwise or convince me that their machines actually do what they say they do.

Over 100 pages are forms: dining out diaries, exercise diaries and daily calorie logs. The book is only 206 pages long, so almost half the book is EMPTY, waiting for you to fill it out. There are also several pages dedicated to calorie lists of foods. All in all there is very little “meat” in this book unless you count the Carbohydrate Sensitive Plan.

Should I Buy This Book?

No. Don’t bother with it. You could buy the Runner’s World Training Journal and get a better log to write down your exercise and food intake.

I have been reading raw food diet books in an effort to find some proof that this might actually be a better way of living. I am scouring all these books in an effort to find some (any) medical data or scientific proof that supports the claims of the raw food proponents.

Unfortunately, this sentence is on the first page of the preface for Living Cuisine: The Art and Spirit of Raw Foods:

“Empirical knowledge is not absolute. My theory is that change is the only constant; take what you know and go with your gut (especially with food where your guts are at stake). The intelligence of imperical explanation is only a part of the union of life.”

That didn’t leave me with a lot of hope for scientific data in this book. Living Cuisine goes on to say that enzymes are killed when food is heated above 110° F and that “many studies suggest that a predominantly raw foods diet is the optimal diet and promotes health” without providing any reference to said studies. There’s not even a footnote. If there are so many, why aren’t they referring to them?

What’s Good About This Book:

Under Chapter 4: Transitioning to Health, there is a list of recommendations. Some of them will help you eat healthier, such as drinking plenty of fresh water, reducing fried foods, eating healthy oils and reducing your sugar intake.

Other ideas are harmless like being mindful of emotions and sensations surrounding eating. They have some really good things to say about analyzing the reasons we eat:

“Peace with food is possible. Eating should be a satisfying and joyful experience that nourishes the body.”

Instead of living in shame because of bingeing, they suggest looking at our emotions and feeling peaceful about food.

What’s Not So Good About This Book:

There is no documented evidence that cooking food kills enzymes or even that these enzymes are beneficial to our digestion and health. I was hoping this book might provide some, but it is sorely lacking in this department.

There are over 200 pages dedicated to recipes for eating raw foods, which just seems like a way to bulk up the book. This book is almost half recipes. Instead of listing study after study of research, they skip right to the non-cooking of food. If that wasn’t enough, Section 2: The Raw Foods Pantry is a huge list of foods that are considered healthy. I’m not talking about a simple list of fruits, veggies and grains, they list EVERY fruit, vegetable and grain from White Onions to Umeboshi Plums. If you need a primer on food, then this book might be helpful, but I’m sure there are cooking books that will give you a better introduction.

Should I Buy This Book?

If you are unsure whether eating solely raw foods is right for you, don’t bother with this book. It will not give you any evidence to convince you to eat the way they suggest.

The whole reason I started eating healthy is because the doctor said that the reason my stomach hurt was because I was fat and eating poorly. I knew he was wrong because I had systematically removed various foods from my diet (only for one week at a time), so I thought it wasn’t what I was eating that was hurting me. Somehow Eating for IBS came up on a search that I did on my library’s website, so I put it on hold.

If my problem was just IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), then this book would be great for me. Heather Van Vorous gives a specific list of foods that tend to trigger attacks and foods that are safe to eat. She then provides a large list of hints to prevent attacks and over half the book is stomach friendly recipes.

Unfortunately, I have a problem with bingeing in addition to the stomach problems. The surest way to spur a binge is to tell me that I CAN’T eat something. Give me a list of BAD foods and I will think about those foods all day long. I borrowed this book from the library and realized that I would not be able to follow the Eating for IBS plan, no matter how healthy it was and how much peace it offered me.

Why did I buy the book anyway?

I bought Eating for IBS from Amazon a couple of weeks ago so I could let the library have their book back without panicking. I’m not ready to limit my diet the way Heather Van Vorous recommends, but that doesn’t mean I won’t ever be able to do it. I’m not ready to go nearly vegetarian right now, but I can forsee a future where I am able to eat just as this book suggests. I’m just not there yet.

Additionally, the hints for eating healthy with IBS were really helpful to me. She suggested acidophilus supplements in an effort to establish a colony of healthy bacteria in my system. This whole IBS thing got worse when I had to go on a series of antibiotics several years ago. The doctor never suggested to me that I might solve my problems by re-establishing the healthy bacteria in my body.

Finding the acidophilus in the health food store was a little difficult. If it’s the good stuff, it’s not stored with the other health supplements. It should be stored in the refrigerator section, so look for it there. After three weeks of taking the acidophilus, my IBS attacks have been much less severe. They feel like a little bit of gas now instead of feeling like someone shivved me in the gut.

Three weeks of less pain. I was willing to buy the book in gratitude for those three weeks. Maybe someday I’ll be able to limit my diet the way Eating for IBS suggests, but until then, I’m just happy for the one piece of knowledge that helped make my days less painful. Acidophilus, it would have been so easy for that incompetent doctor to mention the word…

Unlike the glossy pages of The Biggest Loser, Jillian Michaels’ book, Winning By Losing, is simple and down to earth. There are no color before and after photos or an unhealthy obsession with the contestants of The Biggest Loser. Instead, Jillian has focused on what she did to help her team lose as much weight as they did while they were on the show.

What’s Good About The Book:

She has designed her eating and exercise plan around the calories in – calories out philosophy, but she takes it a few levels further by adding information about zig-zagging your diet and addressing carbohydrate sensitivity.

She has great advice for people who might have a hard time following the program:

“One setback is one setback – it is not the end of the world, nor is it the end of your journey toward a better you.”

Instead of dedicating half her book to recipes, she dedicates about 10 pages to healthy recipes. I have found that books that don’t have anything important to say tend to fill their pages with recipes, but Jillian just gives you a few and moves right on to exercise.

She does dedicate much of her book to portraying proper form for the weight training that is required to lose the amount of weight that the contestants on the Biggest Loser lost. I’m all for that. I found a few variations of exercises that were new to me and I think this book is an excellent introduction to the concepts of weight training.

What’s Not So Good About The Book:

Jillian was VERY thorough about the diet and exercise needs of people who want to see the same dramatic results as the contestants on The Biggest Loser. That is great to me, but it might be a little daunting to a beginner. If you follow this program to the letter, you WILL lose weight. I’m just wondering if everyone could follow this program to the letter without someone to help them through the process.

Some of the concepts she introduces are pretty detailed. These concepts will keep you from falling into a weight loss plateau and keep you feeling satisfied while you are losing, but they might overload you at first.

Should I Buy This Book?

YES. There’s no question in my mind about this one. I got this book from the library, read it from cover to cover and decided that I needed to own it. It’s an excellent reference for weight training exercises and a intricate look into weight loss science at its best.

I wanted to hate The Biggest Loser. The first few episodes that I watched just made me mad at the show and the sponsors because I was under the impression that this television show was created to make fun of fat people. The more I watched it, however, the more I realized that NBC is trying to create a show that proves that dramatic weight loss can be attained through only diet and exercise. No plastic surgery or diet pills, just inexpensive food and lots of movement.

The problem with a simple program like healthy eating and lots of exercise is that you can map it out in about ten pages. What do you do with the rest of the book?

The Biggest Loser is the companion book to the television show. If you want to lose weight like the contestants did on television, the program is all mapped out for you here. How many calories you should eat and which exercises you should do. It’s a total of 184 pages, which is mostly inspirational talk and glossy before and after pictures of the contestants of the two seasons of the Biggest Loser.

What’s good about this book:

I really like the diet plan. It’s a little low on the calories, but if you want to lose weight as dramatically as the contestants did on the show, that’s how low you’ll have to go. The exercises are demonstrated with big pictures explaining the movement in detail. I love Chapter 5: Winning Strategies. It’s a whole chapter of encouraging words and ideas formatted in a visually appealing manner. I would have loved Chapter 5 to be on a poster that I could hang on my wall instead of in the book. It’s that inspiring and packed full of ideas.

What’s not so good about the book:

Chapter 2: Getting Started concentrates on your motivation for losing weight. That is a really important factor in weight loss. Most people don’t succeed unless they have a clear motivation and goal in mind. They start the chapter off with scare tactics, though, mentioning all the diseases that being overweight aggravates. They are very clear to say that excess weight is ASSOCIATED with these diseases instead of saying that it causes them, but still I was disappointed that they started off with the scare tactics.

They were very good about clarifying that you shouldn’t put your life on hold until you lose weight. If your goal is to have better relationships, that involves a lot more than slimming down. Their advice:

“Becoming socially more active or improving intimacy with your spouse should not be delayed until your goal weight is reached. Work on these things now.”

Should I buy this book?

There is nothing here that you won’t find on the Internet. If you are looking for a diet plan, there are enough out there for free. If you were inspired by the television show, however, this book will be a way to keep up the inspiration between seasons. With lots of before and after pictures and scenes from the challenges on the show, it’s very motivating and could be a good addition to your bookshelf.

I picked up The Flavor Point Diet at the health food store. Somehow I thought it might have a grain of truth in it. The diet is based on the premise that if you limit the amount of flavors in a meal, you’ll feel full faster. The flavors in question are sweet, sour, salty and savory.

What I know for sure:

When I used to binge, I would eat for hours on end. I would constantly eat. How could I do that? Most people get full when they eat for five minutes straight, yet I could eat without stopping for hours. How did I do it?

I would start with whatever I was in the mood for, like potato chips. Once I started getting full of potato chips, I would move on to something sweet, like Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. After I felt full enough of Reeses, then I would change to something salty again like french fries. Sometimes I would even combine them by dipping my Wendy’s french fries into my chocolate Frosty.

I would keep switching from salty to sweet and back to salty and back to sweet until I couldn’t eat another bite. I used to do this on a regular basis and I even had an episode of this over the last Christmas holiday. The only way I could consume a ton of food like that was to switch between flavors.

How does this translate to a diet?

I don’t know. The method that David L. Katz, the author, uses is to limit flavors by day (such as a lemon day) in the first phase. The second phase limits flavors by the meal (Lemon Lunch, Pineapple Dinner) and finally in the third phase, you should be able to limit your flavors as you see fit.

I am really uncomfortable with diets that map out what I should eat for the next six weeks. I prefer the freedom of choosing what I want to eat at the time of the meal. There is no way for me to follow this diet to see if it would work for me because the mere idea of limiting my food to a six week plan sends me heading for a binge. Dr. Katz had a lot of people following this diet, raving about its efficacy and ease, but I can’t be one of those people. I know in theory, it would be good for me to limit the various flavors in my meals, but there is no way I could possibly follow his plan.

What’s good about the diet?

It seems to be nutritionally very sound and the recipes will bring a variety to your diet that you might be missing right now. We tend to fall into ruts when we are eating healthy, and this diet has enough interesting recipes to really shake up your diet plan. If you consider this book just a recipe book, it’s worth the cost all by itself.

What’s wrong with the diet?

I find the paranoid insistence that the food industry is purposely trying to make you fat a little far-fetched. Sure, there is salt in sweet foods. What probably happened is they tested various recipes and the taste tests came back, puzzling the food chemists. I can just imagine them talking to each other, “Can you believe the one they all chose? They like the one with salt in it. Why would they want so much salt in their cookies? It doesn’t make sense.” The other scientist says, “It doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to taste good.”

The food industry isn’t trying to make people eat more food by adding more flavors. They are trying to make food that tastes good to the largest number of people. That’s their job, to make the tastiest food. The paranoia is an unnecessary scare tactic.

Should I buy this book and follow this diet?

This diet seems nutritionally very sound with plenty of whole grains, lean protein and interesting recipes. If you’re the kind of person who can follow a regimented diet, this one will work for you. Otherwise, this book has some great ideas for new healthy recipes and some ideas to keep bingeing in check.

This week we are reviewing many of the diet books that have shown up on the market recently. There is a lot of hype about all these diets, so I’m here to sift through all those chapters, recipes and pictures of exercise to tell you the nitty gritty about each diet book. Will they be helpful to you? Are they healthy or do they recommend some quacky ideas? All of this will be revealed this week.

Books to be reviewed:

• The Flavor Point Diet
• The Biggest Loser with Bob Harper
• Winng By Losing by Jillian Michaels
• Eating for IBS
• Living Cuisine: The Art and Spirit of Raw Foods
• Curves On The Go
• Helping Your Child Lose Weight the Healthy Way
• Weight Watchers: Stop Stuffing Yourself
• Weight Watchers: Weight Loss That Lasts

If you have been thinking of buying any of these books, wait until this week’s review.

The Olympics provided us with a lot of inspiration for physical activity, here is an inspirational story about a competitor who turned to skiing instead of other ways of dealing with hard times.

• Happy News – Skiing was getaway through tough childhood – by Bob Baum with Associated Press

United States Olympic skiier, Julia Mancuso, had a childhood that was difficult. Her father was accused of crimes and even spent time in jail. Skiing was Julia’s way of coping with it.

From 1989 until his guilty plea six years later, the family lived under a legal cloud. For Julia, who was on skis by age 2, the sport was her passion and perhaps an escape. She was racing by age 8.

”Looking back now, it’s just times when maybe skiing was the only thing for me to do,” she said. ”I just spent most of my time on the hill with my two sisters, chasing them around.”

Next time you’re tempted to turn to food when you’re having an emotional time, think about Julia Mancuso. Instead of turning to food, she relied on skiing to keep her healthy and help her beyond the stressful times in her life. Find something athletic that you can do to keep you healthy in times of stress.