Weight Loss Basics – Diet Books

By Ugra

Bookstores have giant sections for diet and weight loss; magazine and newspaper ads sell them mercilessly; there are probably thousands of websites devoted to the subject, each promoting some book or system or other. Attend a book fair, toss a tennis ball in any direction, and chances are it will hit a new diet book book representative, and bounce onto another.

The Shortest Book

The shortest (and truest) diet book would read (in its entirety):

Burn more calories than you consume. An expanded edition may carry this appendix:

The First Law of Thermodynamics

The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings.

Which in plain language says that you provide heat (calories) to your system (body) through food, you lose energy (calories) by work done. If your body uses more energy than it consume, you will burn these stores, and lose weight.

Fad Books

Knowing that the only law at work in weight loss is the First Law of Thermodynamics, and knowing that you can’t sell that over and over, and certainly not for $25 each time, there’s an army of devoted “diet specialists” of varying degrees of authenticity out there working very hard devising new angles and renditions of the same subject.

Hence the string of fads diets that seem to mushroom whenever you turn around: “Cabbage Soup Diet,” “The Lazy Zone Diet,” “The South Beach Diet,” “The Chocolate Diet,” “Atkins Diet,” “Scarsdale Diet Plan,” “Amputation Diet,” “The 3 Day Diet,” “7 Day All You Can Eat Diet,” “Lemonade Diet,” “The Hollywood Diet,” “Russian Air Force Diet,” “Grape Fruit Diet,” and on and on and on ad infinitum.

Fad books meet that demand by tending to make the simple subject of weight loss complicated.

Intention

With your BS antennae fully extended and finely tuned, read the sleeves and introduction of the book to get a sense of where the writer is coming from. Put the book back. Put the book back.

Honesty

Books that point out the first (and only) principle of weight loss: Burn more calories than you consume, are starting out right. Pudding Proof

If the book or system you have chosen leads toward your goal, week after week, month after month, and you feel better and better, lither and lither, happier and happier: well done, you have made a good choice.

The 4 Day Diet Book Review and Background

The 4 Day Diet is a weight loss book written by author Dr. Ian K. Smith whom you may recognize from the television show “Celebrity Fit Club.” He has also written other popular weight loss books titled “Fat Smash” and “Extreme Fat Smash”.

The premise of The 4 Day Diet is to give readers an alternative to the most common diet pitfalls such as boredom, repetition, hitting plateaus, and not being allowed to “cheat” by eating treats.

The diet is broken down into modules that last only 4 days. The modules include:

Induction (detox/cleansing)

Transition (to reintroduce all food groups)

Protein Stretch (to avoid plateaus)

The average rating on Amazon’s product page is an average of 4 out of 5 stars. Overall, The 4 Day Diet has received positive reviews and seems to be worth consideration.