Drs. Mike and Mary Dan Eades have armed frustrated low-carbers with a plan!

For those of us who have been livin’ la vida low-carb for years, the temptation is always there to allow a few more carbs and/or calories slip into our diet than we did when we originally followed our chosen controlled-carbohydrate plan. It’s perfectly within human nature for this to happen for those who desire variety in their menu choices while still attempting to eating in a healthy high-fat, adequate protein, and low-carb way. Low-carb diet experts and bestselling authors Drs. Mike and Mary Dan Eades know about this all too well.

After shooting a pilot episode of their hit low-carb television cooking program called “Low-Carb Cookworx,” the producer of the show told the honest truth to Dr. Mike and Dr. Mary Dan about their major problem — you’re “too fat” for a health-related television show! Shocked by this revelation from an outsider of their condition at the time, this caused the well-known low-carb authors of the bestselling Protein Power books to reevaluate their own personal dietary habits, devise a plan for ridding their bodies of a little excess weight that had come on them, and make it happen as quickly as possible. Thus was born the concepts for what would become The 6-Week Cure For The Middle-Aged Middle: The Simple Plan to Flatten Your Belly Fast!.

While the Eades are abundantly aware of the long-term, lifestyle change approach to losing weight the low-carb way, they admit that sometimes there are compelling reasons to take the weight off a little faster as in the case of their TV show, an upcoming wedding, or some other significant life event that is coming. That’s exactly what this book offers in just a 6-week period. And the plan is PERFECT for both the people who have been low-carbing for years or for the newbie low-carber alike. This is a great way to kickstart your low-carb lifestyle into high gear.

So what do you have to do for 6 weeks, starve to death? Not hardly!

The first two weeks is a period where you release the toxins in your liver — the organ most responsible for helping you get rid of the visceral fat stores in your body. This is the fat that accumulates around your organs that can be dangerous if left unchecked. Using a proven 3 and 1 plan drinking a trio of specially-formulated protein shakes along with one meal (the delicious recipes are included in this book) along with certain restrictions on alcohol, caffeine, medications, and other interesting requirements (like donating blood?), you only have to stay in this phase for two weeks. Anybody can do this for a measly fourteen days!

The second two weeks when your liver is cleaned up and ready to help you burn off a ton of stored body fat, you get to enjoy what the Eades affectionately call the “Meat Weeks.” Your meals will consist primarily of meat, fish, poultry, game, and eggs consumed throughout the day in quantities enough to keep your hunger at bay. What most people will find is the fat and protein content of these foods will keep them PLENTY satisfied.

Lest you think you’ll need to opt for the “lean” cuts of meat like chicken or turkey — NOPE! In fact, fat is ENCOURAGED, including liberal amounts of butter, olive oil, avocado oil, and macadamia nut oil, just to name a few. This will allow your body to rev up your metabolism by switching from being a carb-burning machine to a high-octane fat-burning one instead by reducing the typical insulin rush seen by most carb-focused dieters. Vroom vroom!

Finally, the last two-week period of The 6-Week Cure For The Middle-Aged Middle should look very familiar to people who have read the Protein Power books or followed any number of low-carb plans like Atkins. After getting your body going with a month-long restoration and revitalization, the Eades turn your attention to establishing good long-term healthy eating patterns into your lifestyle so you can prevent the dreaded weight gain from happening to you again. That includes keeping total carbohydrates in check, limiting your consumption of starchy carbs as much as possible, and transitioning to a low-carb maintenance phase.

If trouble ever arises again, you just get right back on the plan again getting back to the basics of what it takes to lose the weight again. Don’t be discouraged because we’ve all been there before. NEVER GIVE UP!

We owe Drs. Mike and Mary Dan Eades a huge THANK YOU for the tireless efforts they invest in helping people who are livin’ la vida low-carb day in and day out with the work they are doing. I consider it an honor and a privilege to know them as friends, be continually educated by their nutritional wisdom, and to follow their example of humility and selflessness towards others in this journey to better health. You owe it to yourself to pick up several copies of The 6-Week Cure For The Middle-Aged Middle and give it to as many friends and family members that you can think of who feel frustrated by the failure of the low-fat dogma that has dominated American culture for decades.

The tide is turning because the truth about low-carb living is finally penetrating the minds of health-conscious people. Will you become the next to join the low-carb revolution that is taking America by storm?

LISTEN TO MY PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH THE EADES ABOUT THIS BOOK!

Finding a book about diet and health these days isn’t difficult at all. Just go to Barnes & Noble or Amazon and you’ll see title after title after title of people trying to tell you what you need to do to lose the pounds and get the body you’ve always dreamed of! Lemme tell you, no such book exists that can deliver on that, so you better not expect it from any book you ever read. You’ll be in for a great disappointment.

But one thing books can help you do is look at your own personal weight problem and overall health to see if there are principles that can help you along in your own journey. I honestly believe most authors of these diet and health books truly feel they have some kind of positive message to share with their readers or they wouldn’t have bothered spending months or even years of their life writing them.

When I wrote my debut book Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb: My Journey From Flabby Fat To Sensationally Skinny In One Year in 2005, my intention wasn’t to try to come up with some grand new diet that nobody had ever heard of yet to bring earth-shattering revelations to the public. As if! Nope, I simply wanted to share my low-carb success story in a fun, engaging, and entertaining as well as educating way that would give people the hope they needed to have so that they too could change their life forever like I did.

For the nearly 10,000 people who have purchased my first book so far, my goal was to leave them with a clear uplifting and encouraging message. It will ALWAYS be my aim when I write a book (and I’m working on one right now with a couple of more ideas for future books germinating in my head!) to motivate, encourage, educate and inspire all those who read it. That’s what a GOOD diet and health book SHOULD be all about.

I’ve blogged about new diet and health books that I’ve read before and now I’ve got a collection of 25 more invigorating ones to share with you today. I thought you’d like to see what I thought about each of these books that have something to do with food, diet, health, low-carb, or cooking in some form or fashion. I liked most of these books and I think you should take a second look at them for yourself!

Click here to access these 25 new diet and health books, including several that are explicitly low-carb in nature even if the title doesn’t suggest it. ENJOY!

I don’t know about you, but ever since I started livin’ la vida low-carb I’ve had such an unprecedented hunger and thirst for information about nutrition, fitness, diet and health like never before in my life with any other subject. Even when I was studying government and politics in college and graduate school, I never felt THIS excited about reading so many books and resources. It’s an educational awakening that I think most low-carbers go through because of the enlightenment we see happening to our own weight and health.

To that end, I’m always happy to share with you some of the most current and not-so-current books I have come across and read while studying this fascinating subject. But, as will often be the case, the books do tend to pile up on me a bit, so today I’m gonna highlight 15 new and essential books about diet and health that I’ve been reading lately along with a few comments about each one.

Keep in mind that not all of these “diet” books are explicitly low-carb friendly, but that’s okay since I think we can still find merit in the experiences shared by the authors of those books (even if we have to hold our noses with some of their “expert” opinions). Likewise, several of these books will have you stand up and cheer because they quite clearly espouse the basic tenets of a healthy low-carb lifestyle.

Click here to see my reviews of these 15 new and popular diet and health books.

Dietitian Tanya Zuckerbrot says eat your fiber, but don’t cut out foods

There’s not a doubt in my mind how healthy consuming fiber is as part of my healthy low-carb lifestyle. When I lost 180 pounds on the Atkins diet in 2004, my adequate consumption of delicious sources of fiber was a major part of my success. For people who complain about constipation on low-carb, there’s no better cure than big gulps of water and enough fiber to allow your bowel to shake, rattle and roll!

With high-fiber low-carb foods such as coconut flour, ChocoPerfection chocolate bars, NexGen low-carb muffins, Konjac brand shirataki noodles, GoLower nut bars, and Atkins Advantage bars, there’s no reason why anyone who is livin’ la vida low-carb can’t get PLENTY of fiber in their diet.

The subject of fiber is somewhat controversial within the low-carb community, but I am convinced fiber is an excellent addition to your diet especially during weight loss. That’s why I was attracted to and intrigued by a new diet book centered around fiber consumption. It’s called The F-Factor Diet: Discover the Secret to Permanent Weight Loss.

Oooh, the “secret to permanent weight loss” is certainly a compelling a bold claim to make. But nutritionist Tanya Zuckerbrot is convinced she can confidently back up that claim made by her book with the principles she shares in it. And I must say, some of what she writes about is right in line with what I personally believe regarding a healthy weight loss diet. Unfortunately, some is not.

Click here to read the rest of my review of The F-Factor Diet by Tanya Zuckerbrot.

Basing a diet on the glycemic index sounds good, but is it?

It’s interesting to see how many diet books have come out in recent years taking portions of the wildly popular Atkins diet and tried to transform them into nicely packaged “new” diets. Sadly, most of these so-called diets greatly miss the mark of the masterpiece of the original.

Such is the case with Rick Gallop and his series of books on The G.I.Diet. It’s an interesting concept that Gallop has capitalized on selling millions of his little books. But is the information he provides useful to people who are livin’ la vida low-carb? Let’s examine his latest book to find out.

It’s called The G.I. Diet Express: For Busy People and is aimed to reach the active dieter. Isn’t that ALL of us who are attempting to lose weight? Yep and Gallop knows that, too!

Looking at the “diet in a nutshell” outlined in this book, Gallop explains what the glycemic index is since most Americans haven’t really caught on to it yet. It’s all about the impact of foods on blood sugar and to choose foods that will slowly digest to prevent your body from making too much insulin which can lead to diabetes.

Here’s a key point to remember: All low-carb foods are also low-G.I. foods, but not all low-G.I. foods are low-carb. This is too important to be overlooked as you delve deeper into this new diet. The ratio of carbohydrates/protein/fat is 50/40/10. Yikes!

Click here to see why this G.I. Diet is nothing more than a high-carb food lovin’, saturated fat hatin’, low-fat and low-cal diet that closely resembles the failed Food Pyramid that we’ve been forced to endure for decades!

New York Times journalist asks Americans to begin “Rethinking Thin”

We all want it so badly, crave it deeper than even a big slice of the most decadent dessert you could ever imagine, and millions would quite literally do anything to attain it. After all, there’s a steady streamline of positive images associated with this thrown in front of us day after day after day that it has become a national obsession.

What is it? The insatiable and desirable quest to be thin.

Just take a quick look at all the magazine ads, television commercials, and billboards used in marketing nowadays. Have you ever noticed how nearly ALL of them are unreasonably, even abnormally thin? When did our society make this the model for what bodily perfection looks like? Have we artificially raised the expectations of what is healthy, beautiful, and normal?

These are just a few of the questions that New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata sought to answer in her book entitled Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss–and the Myths and Realities of Dieting. With our culture seemingly mesmerized by the latest diet fads and weight loss gimmicks that keep coming out, Kolata wanted to bring a touch of reality and common sense to this issue that encompasses so many physical and emotional ties to the lives of overweight and obese people.

As a former 400-pounder who was able to overcome morbid obesity through the use of the Atkins low-carb diet, I was personally excited about reading this book that charges people to begin Rethinking Thin. There are so many good overall themes that Kolata makes in this book, but there were also some recurrent and glaring omissions that made me just shake my head in disgust because people who read the book will not get the whole picture.

Click here to read the rest of my review of Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin and why I believe this book is sending a dangerous message to the overweight and obese.

Wanna lean body? Lee Labrada says he can get you there in 3 months!

We’ve all heard the saying that if you commit to doing something long enough, then it will very quickly become a habit and a regular part of your routine. And that is the secret behind former Mr. Universe Lee Labrada’s book entitled The Lean Body Promise: Burn Away Fat and Release the Leaner, Stronger Body Inside You.

I think I love this guy (in a brotherly kind of way, of course!) because he just makes sense. And he should know what he’s talking about since he has appeared on magazine covers, on television shows, and headed up an anti-obesity campaign in Houston, Texas. As a world-class bodybuilder, Labrada has seen all the good and the bad when it comes to health and he shares it in this engaging book.

With a natural wit and ability to connect with his reader, Labrada goes through step-by-step what YOU need to do to overcome the mental obstacles that stand in the way of your eventual success, provides examples of people who have been successful to serve as inspiration for your new journey, arm you with ample motivation for getting the job done, providing specifics about the kind of diet you should be eating to attain optimal results, and, of course, give you specific direction about how to workout your body to look and feel better than you ever imagined.

Sounds awesome, doesn’t it?

Click here to read the rest of my review of The Lean Body Promise by Lee Labrada.

Dr. Richard Bernstein doesn’t just teach, but lives the low-carb way

Diabetes is a disease that used to only afflict young children when Type 1 was so dominant. But now it’s the 21st Century and Type 2 diabetes hasn’t just risen, but exploded into a full-fledged epidemic as one of the biggest health threats of our day. What’s really scary is the fact that the problem is expected to get that much worse over the next few decades. Yikes!

In 1997, Dr. Richard K. Bernstein first introduced what would become the pinnacle diabetes bible to the world when he published the first edition of The Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars. Controversial, against the grain, but extremely effective, the low-carbohydrate dietary approach to treating diabetes has never been more clearly explained.

Now, Dr. Bernstein has revised and expanded his classic bestselling book to make it even better than it was when it released a decade ago. As a man who has lived with Type 1 diabetes since childhood, he knows from whence he speaks and now wants to help others find the “solution” that he discovered a long time ago.

Read the rest of my review of Dr. Bernstein’s revised and updated version of The Diabetes Solution by clicking here.

Dr. Don Colbert applies his Biblical worldview to health

While God most certainly played a role in my nearly 200-pound weight loss on the Atkins diet in 2004, you are not necessarily required to be a Christian in order for the diet (or ANY diet!) to work. I’ve been asked questions like “Do you have to be religious to do your diet?” by well-meaning members of the secular media when I bring up the role of my faith in my journey towards better health.

The short answer is “no,” but it certainly helps to have the power of the Almighty Creator on your side for those times when you need His divine strength to carry you through the valleys that most certainly come when you try to lose weight. If you’ve ever gone through a weight loss experience without support, then you know exactly how hard it can be. You need a friend that sticks closer than a brother to be there for you when you need Him the most.

What if you could invest a mere 10-15 minutes a day for less than two months of you life and learn practical Biblical advice about improving your health? Would you be interested in learning more about it? If you are a Christian or desire to do something positive and productive about your weight and health, then of course you would.

That’s precisely why prolific Christian author Dr. Don Colbert wrote his bestselling book entitled The Seven Pillars Of Health: The Natural Way To Better Health For Life. This 50-day all-inclusive health manual will empower you with tons of information that can be absorbed and immediately applied into your life to bring about big changes in a short period of time. This could be the miracle you have been praying for.

Read the rest of my review of Don Colbert’s The Seven Pillars Of Health by clicking here.

The wonderful, popular website, DietChannel.com — which bills itself as “An Authoritative Resource for Diet and Fitness Information” — is now running a review of my book SUGAR SHOCK! from nutritionist Allison Stevens, R.D.

(Allison — a charming dietitian who I admire and respect — interviewed me recently for a Q & A that the site is running with me soon in this interviews section. In fact, we had a fun time talking.)

Anyhow, while her review on DietChannel.com is positive in totality — Allison does ultimately recommend that you buy the book — she made some remarks that I find at least partly unfair, if not inaccurate. But I welcome her criticisms and comments even if I disagree with some of her thoughts and conclusions.

See for yourself if you agree with this review by clicking here.