You: On A Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management (Hardcover)

You: On A Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management (Hardcover)

Editorial Reviews
For the first time in our history, scientists are uncovering astounding medical evidence about dieting--and why so many of us struggle with our weight and the size of our waists. Now researchers are unraveling biological secrets about such things as why you crave chocolate or gorge at buffets or store so much fat.

Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz, America's most trusted doctor team and authors of the bestselling YOU series, are now translating this cutting-edge information to help you shave inches off your waist. They're going to do it by giving you the best weapon against fat: knowledge. By understanding how your body's fat-storing and fat-burning systems work, you're going to learn how to crack the code on true and lifelong waist management.

Roizen and Oz will invigorate you with equal parts information, motivation, and change-your-life action to show you how your brain, stomach, hormones, muscles, heart, genetics, and stress levels all interact biologically to determine if your body is the size of a baseball bat or of a baseball stadium. In YOU: On a Diet, Roizen and Oz will redefine what a healthy figure is, then take you through an under-the skin tour of the organs that influence your body's size and its health. You'll even be convinced that the key number to fixate on is not your weight, but your waist size, which best indicates the medical risks of storing too much fat.

Because the world has almost as many diet plans as it has e-mail spammers, you'd think that just about all of us would know everything there is to know about dieting, about fat, and about the reasons why our bellies have grown so large. YOU: On a Diet is much more than a diet plan or a series of instructions and guidelines or a faddish berries-only eating plan. It's a complete manual for waist management. It will show you how to achieve and maintain an ideal and healthy body size by providing a lexicon according to which any weight-loss system can be explained. YOU: On a Diet will serve as the operating system that facilitates future evolution in our dieting software. After you learn about the biology of your body and the biology and psychology of fat, you'll be given the YOU Diet and YOU Workout. Both are easy to learn, follow, and maintain. Following a two-week rebooting program will help you lose up to two inches from your waist right from the start.

With Roizen and Oz's signature accessibility, wit, and humor, YOU: On a Diet--The Owner's Manual for Waist Management will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the food you consume, so that you'll diet smart, not hard. Welcome to your body on a diet.

Customer Reviews
Loading a book with humorous caricatures, myths, and factoids is a risky undertaking, when readers expect doctors to remain "formal". But, the authors have opted to present hard science in simple artistic format and succeeded in rendering it palatable, at least for the segment of readers interested in the mechanics of disease. The gamble with caricatures added a legendary aura to the book that will endure for future generations.

The main contribution in the book, beside its educational style, is emphasizing the "waist size" as a reliable index for healthy living. The authors advanced their argument through physiological reasoning. They focused on the omental and skin fats and intestinal infection and inflammation in relation to waist size. Thus, the smaller is the waist size, the lesser the inflammation and the depot of fat that hinders health.

The book falls into an introduction, 12 chapters, and three appendices that could be summarized as follows.

Introduction: "You: On a Diet. Work Smarter, Not Harder" introduces the reader to the main idea of the book. That is management of waist size through understanding the biology of eating. It tests the reader's common knowledge through a multiple choice test that targets the various aspects of the history and science of eating

Chapter 1:" The Ideal Body: What Your body Is supposed to Look Like" discusses the interplay of genetics and environment in shaping our physique.

Chapter 2: "Can't Get No satisfaction: the Science of Appetite" describes the rule of the central nervous system in controlling satiety through hormonal feedback from the stomach, intestine, and fat. It simplifies matters through two hormones: Leptin for satisfaction and Ghrelin for hunger.

Chapter 3: "Eater's Digest: How Food travels through Your Body" describes, in an educational style, the journey of food from mouth, tongue, stomach, intestine, colon, to liver, heart, muscles. Its humorous caricatures make it invaluable and entertaining.

Chapter 4: "Gut Check: The Dangerous Battles of Inflammation in Your Belly" describes the first battle of digestion between the body and food intake within the intestine. The outcome of digestion affects the liver, skin, and general health. Its main hostile participants are inflammation and infection. Omental, skin, and liver fat replete from the ingested food. It considers the intestine as the second brain by virtue of its millions of neurons and 95% of whole body serotonin.

Chapter 5: "Taking a fat Chance: How Fat Ruins Your Health" dwells on the omentum fat, described in chapter 4, and extends its effects to arterial narrowing and mechanical hindrance of breathing and mobility. Arterial narrowing deprives the whole body of its health causing cancer, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Omental fat is claimed to be more ominous than subcutaneous fat because the omentum lies on the solid vital organs while the subcutaneous fat is peripheral and remote.

Chapter 6: "Metabolic Motors: Your Body's Hormonal fat Burners" describes how metabolism is managed by hormonal signals from the adrenals, thyroids, and gonads.

Chapter 7: "Make the Move: How You Can Burn Fat Faster" discusses the effect of exercise, weight lifting (strength) and aerobics (stamina) on developing the energy management system by: increasing metabolism, burn energy, release endorphins (pleasure stimulants), and unclog blood vessels.

Chapter 8: "The Chemistry of Emotions: The Connection between Feelings and Food" discusses the relationship between behavior and neurotransmitters: norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, gamma aminobutyric acid, and nitric oxide. It thus relates eating to emotions such as anger, depression, anxiety, stress, jealousy, and loneliness.

Chapter 9: "Shame on Who? The Psychology of failed Diet" deals with the thought process of dieting versus the action process. It describes three areas of personality tests: eating pattern, exercise pattern, and coping pattern.

Chapter 10: "Make a You-Turn" describes strategies for accomplishing healthy body through eating, exercising, and coping with failure and recovery. It makes the waist size its critical index for success. Here where academic reasoning addresses the universal suffering from distended bellies in contemporary subjects.

Chapter 11: "The You activity Plan: Physical Strategies for Waist Management" is where the authors default. They suggest three-20-minute sessions per week of strengthening and stretching exercises. Those range from shoulder rolling, crossing, clapping, forward bend, push up, yoga poses, crunches, to dumbbell squats, lunges, and rowing. Here, the reader senses the detachment of academics from real advancement in workout experience.

Chapter 12: "The You Diet; The Waist-Management Eating Plan" recommends three meals plus snacks daily and dessert every other day. It prohibits sugars, simple carbohydrates, fructose, trans fat, saturated fat, and flour. It also has extensive menu and advices on how to choose among fast food if you have to. The forty pages of menu is a total waste, as people do not trust medical books in preparing their meals (personal opinion).

The three appendices deal with drugs, plastic surgery, and digestive surgery for overweight people.

The major drawback in the book is the exercise recommendation and meals menu. Those show the aloofness of the authors from modern America. The web is rich in better ideas on exercise and nutrition that work and get results. The book should have limited its scope to what the authors know best: applied physiology.

Mohamed F. El-Hewie
Author of
Essentials of Weightlifting and Strength Training