You the Diet

As people who know me know for the past couple of months I have been on something of a diet. So far I have lost 17lbs in 49 days and at my current rate of progress I will reach my target weight at 8:28am on the 27th August this year.

The rather clever authors of You the Owners manual have figured out that getting a diet book on the shelves of Costco in time for the New Year would be good for business. I only bought the book after loosing the first 15 lbs so at most 2 lbs of the loss are attributable to the book at most.

The good part about the book is that it provides a lot of useful information in a non faddish way. The bad part is that it is written in what Mrs dotFuture calls 'Attention Defficit Disorder style'. Every key point made has a 'You-reka' icon, the diagrams are cartoonish. This is fun at first but after a short time it is like watching a 24 hour South Park marathon from start to finish without a break.

The part of the book worth reading is the first part where they explain the biology of dieting. You probably know why starvation diets don't work (our bodies sense a famine and shut down the metabolic furnace as much as possible). The bits that I have not seen in other books is the schemes to trick the body into thinking its full when it isn't by eating foods which cause the right saitiety hormones to be released at the right time.

There are also the obligatory pages with exercises and diet recipies. I skipped these, they are done better elsewhere. The recipies themselves tend to be of the nut cutlet, tofu and humus variety. If you can eat that stuff you don't need the book.