Recommended Books for Permanent Weight Loss Empowerment

Have you ever stepped on a scale and wondered why you haven’t lost weight, why you haven’t lost much weight, or (more importantly) why you lost the weight you did? Do you want to throw away diet pills and gimmick diets for good?

Being able to lose weight (and lose thigh fat) is all about being empowered with knowledge. When you have complete knowledge about why and how a diet works, it’s a lot easier to stay motivated. Here are three of the best selling, best reviewed, most results-oriented weight loss books around. I personally chose the ones that are the most helpful for not just learning how to lose thigh fat, but how to live a more healthy, weight-balanced life, without the strain of constant diets. If the power to motivate yourself from within and take charge of your weight loss is something you’re interested in, consider the following books. They will change your life:

This first book is one of the only books I’ve ever seen to have nearly purely 5 star ratings, and for good reason:

This is likely the best reviewed diet book on Amazon.com, the world’s largest online book retailer, if that says anything. The flawless reviews are for good reason — this is one of the most compelling diet books in existence. The Full Plate Diet by Teresa Sherard, Stuart A. Seale, and Diana Fleming, is truly amazing, and worshipped by doctors and dieters alike.

Slim Down, Look Great, Be Healthy–The Full Plate Diet (TM) is based on eating foods our Moms said we should eat– fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans & peas, and nuts & seeds. You can eat meat–just follow Mom’s advice. No yo-yo–you can stay on this diet because you won’t feel deprived–won’t have to eat tiny portions. You get started by making small changes, not big ones. No hassle–you don’t have to count calories, you can shop at your regular grocery store, and spend less on food. Big health payoffs include heart health, cancer fighting, diabetes friendly, more energy, and long life. Lots of medical research backing The Full Plate Diet (TM).

Two actual customer reviews:

I was a really huge guy. Nearly 300 pounds. In the first 3 months I lost 45 lbs just following the concepts you can find in the book. I was so glad to see the recipes and concepts laid out for everyone to follow. I ended up coming down to 192 lbs. I really didn’t exercise at all. My weight has not gone back up. This IS the real deal.

ps
If it’s been more than 3 months since I visited with friends, they actually don’t recognize me until I actually tell them who I am.

This is an outstanding diet book because it is based on sound nutritional principles. I’m a retired family physician who has studied nutritional principles all my professional life. I’m usually skeptical of books with “Diet” in the title, because they usually promote some kind of fad diet, and I’ve seen dozens of such diets come and go. This book is different.

This next book suits “diet smarter, not harder” to a T – You can eat the same foods you love while losing dramatic amounts of weight. It’s especially great for people with busy, fast-paced lifestyles. This is one of the best reviewed diet books in existence, getting praise from people like Oprah, Ellen Degeneres, Dr. Oz, and much much more:

“Eat This, Not That” by David Zinczenko clears up tons of food misconceptions that you may have never considered. This book will help you out tons when out to eat, whether it be at a fast food place or a sit-down restaurant. The object of it is to let you know which menu items work and which don’t for losing weight. Here’s an example:
Did you know:

· Choosing Prime Rib over Baby Back Ribs at Outback will save you more than 2,000 calories?
· You can save nearly 500 calories and more than 20 grams of fat just by ordering your banana split at Dairy Queen instead of Baskin-Robbins?
· A Stouffer’s White Meat Chicken Pot Pie has as much saturated fat as 6 scoops of ice cream? (Choose our alternative and save more than 900 calories!)

Not everyone has the time and money to buy fancy diet foods and cook every meal from scratch. If you have busy lifestyle that requires you to eat out, this book is a treasure-trove of waist-saving secrets and substitutions to help you shed pounds without dramatically turning your eating habits upside down. It also has some great tips for the grocery store.

“Eat This, Not That! is an intriguing approach to thinking about how to educate America about making smart food choices.”
– Dr Mehmet Oz, on Oprah Radio

“Eat This, Not That! is gonna freak the weight right off of you.”
– Ellen DeGeneres

“These books are a great guide to carry around and have with you whenever you’re not sure what to choose.”
– Oprah Winfrey on Oprah

One of the best selling diet books ever, the updated 2010 edition is out in paperback. When was the last time 10 dollars changed your life? With how easy it is to integrate the advice and knowledge in this book into even the most busy lifestyles, it’s a total no-brainer.

This next book is about real food to live a healthy, well balanced life. It’s one of the best selling food-related books of all time, and goes well with any diet book for someone interested in living a slim and healthy lifestyle.

There’s a great chance you’ve already heard of In Defense Of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan. This book is a must-read for anyone concerned about how unhealthy food in America has become. It shows you how to go back to eating “real” food in order to prevent obesity, disease, aging, and overall, live a longer more energetic life.

Here’s a great customer-written description that includes a few shocking facts of the book

What’s better for you — whole milk, 2% milk or skim?

Is a chicken labeled “free range” good enough to reassure you of its purity? How about “grass fed” beef?

What form of soy is best for you — soy milk or tofu?

About milk: I’ll bet most of you voted for reduced or non-fat. But if you’ll turn to page 153 of “In Defense of Food,” you’ll read that processors don’t make low-fat dairy products just by removing the fat. To restore the texture — to make the drink “milky” — they must add stuff, usually powdered milk. Did you know powdered milk contains oxidized cholesterol, said to be worse for your arteries than plain old cholesterol? And that removing the fat makes it harder for your body to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins that make milk a valuable food in the first place?

About chicken and beef: Readers of Pollan’s previous book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, know that “free range” refers to the chicken’s access to grass, not whether it actually ventures out of its coop. And all cattle are “grass fed” until they get to the feedlot. The magic words for delightful beef are “grass finished” or “100% grass fed”.

And about soy…but I dare to hope I have your attention by now. And that you don’t want to be among the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight and the third of our citizens who are likely to develop type 2 diabetes before 2050. And maybe, while I have your eyes, you might be mightily agitated to learn that America spends $250 billion — that’s a quarter of the costs of the Iraq war — each year in diet-related health care costs. And that our health care professionals seem far more interested in building an industry to treat diet-related diseases than they do in preventing them. And that the punch line of this story is as sick as it is simple: preventing diet-related disease is easy.

In just 200 pages (and 22 pages of notes and sources), “In Defense of Food” gives you a guided tour of 20th century food science, a history of “nutritionism” in America and a snapshot of the marriage of government and the food industry. And then it steps up to the reason most readers will buy it — and if you care for your health and the health of your loved ones, this is a no-brainer one-click — and presents a commonsense shopping-and-eating guide.

If you are up on your Pollan and your Nina Planck and your Barbara Kingsolver, you know the major points of the “real food” movement. But if you’re new to this information or are disinclined to buy or read this book, let me lay Pollan’s argument out for you:

– High-fructose corn syrup is the devil’s brew. Do yourself a favor and remove it from your diet. (If you have kids, here’s a place to start: Heinz smartly offers an “organic” ketchup, made with sugar.)

– Avoid any food product that makes health claims — they mean it’s probably not really food.

– In a supermarket, don’t shop in the center aisles. Avoid anything that can’t rot, anything with an ingredient you can’t pronounce.

– “Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.”

– “You are what you eat eats too.” Most cows end their days on a diet of corn, unsold candy, their pulverized brothers and sisters — yeah, you read that right — and a pharmacy’s worth of antibiotics. And they bestow that to you. Consider that the next time there’s a sale on sirloin.

– “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” By which Pollan means: Eat natural food, the kind your grandmother served (and not because she was so wise, but because the food industry had not yet learned that the big money was in processing, not harvesting). Use meat sparingly. Eat your greens, the leafier and more varied the better.

In short: Kiss the Western diet as we know it goodbye. Look to the cultures where people eat well and live long. Ignore the faddists and experts. Trust your gut. Literally.

In all this, Pollan insists that you have to save yourself. And he makes a good case why. Our government, he says, is so overwhelmed by the lobbying and marketing power of our processed food industry that the American diet is now 50% sugar in one form or another — calories that provide “virtually nothing but energy.” Our representatives are almost uniformly terrified to take on the food industry. And as for the medical profession, the key moment, Pollan writes, is when “doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospital” — don’t hold your breath.

“You want to live, follow me.” I loved it when Schwarzenegger said that in “Terminator.” It matters much more when, in so many words, Michael Pollan delivers that same message in “In Defense of Food.”