LISA TILLINGER JOHANSEN is a Registered Dietitian who counsels clients on a wide range of health issues. Her debut nutrition book, Fast Food Vindication, received the Discovery Award (sponsored by USA Today, Kirkus and The Huffington Post). She lives in Southern California.
The Paleo. The Zone. The Gluten-free. Another day, another diet. We’re caught in a never-ending merry-go-round of weight loss plans, fueled by celebrity endorsers, TV doctors and companies angling for a piece of a $60 billion industry. But do these diets really work? And how healthy are they?
Registered Dietitian Lisa Tillinger Johansen examines dozens of the most wildly popular diets based on medical facts, not hype. And along the way, she reveals tried-and-true weight loss strategies, relying on her years of hospital experience, weight-loss seminars and community outreach efforts. With insight and humor, Stop The Diet, I Want To Get Off shows that the best answer is often not a trendy celebrity-endorsed diet, but easy-to-follow guidelines that are best for our health and our waistlines.
The idea for this book began at a wedding.
Who doesn’t love a good wedding? The clothes, the flowers, the
romance, the food…
Ah, the food. As we moved into the banquet hall for the reception,
the culinary feast was on everyone’s minds. It was all anyone seemed talk
about. But for some reason, guests weren’t conversing about the dishes being
served; they were swapping stories of diets they had heard about from friends,
magazine articles, even celebrities on talk shows.
I’m a registered dietitian with a master’s degree in nutritional
science and years of clinical and health education experience. I’ve counseled
thousands of patients and clients on all of these diets. But hearing the guests
only momentarily distracted me from my horrible faux pas of wearing white
(gasp!) to a friend’s wedding.
“I’m on the Blood Type Diet,” said a woman with an impossibly high
bouffant hairdo. “You’ve heard of that, haven’t you? It’s the one where you
choose your foods based on your blood type. I’m an AB, so I’ll be having the fish.”
“Really?” her friend replied. “I swear by the gluten-free diet.
I’m on it, my daughter’s on it, and my granddaughter’s on it.” I happened
to know her granddaughter was six and didn’t have a gluten sensitivity or
celiac disease.
Then there was the stocky guy who was trying to impress one of the
bridesmaids. “I’m a paleo man myself,” he said, piling his plate high with beef
kebabs. “It gives me more stamina, know what I mean? It puts me in touch with
my inner caveman. There’s a restaurant near my apartment that’s paleo friendly.
Maybe we can grab a bite there sometime, or… Hey wait, where are you going?”
And there were three Weight Watchers sisters who typed furiously
on their phones and argued over their meals’ point values. Apparently there was
some discrepancy between their various apps, and the sisters’ discussion was
becoming more heated by the moment.
I’m past the point of being surprised by the wide range of
weight-loss strategies—some worthless, some crazy, some quite reasonable—being
tossed around. In the last few years, there has been a tidal wave of diets
washing up on the shores of our nutritional consciousness. Celebrities prance
across our screens, promoting a variety of weight-loss schemes on talk shows
and infomercials. Medical doctors star in their own syndicated television
programs, exposing millions to weight-management techniques, often unsupported
by medical research. Other diets get traction on the Internet, racing all over
the globe in social media posts, YouTube videos, and often unwanted spam
e-mails. And it’s hard to walk past a shopping center vitamin store without
being approached by salespeople trying to pitch the latest weight-loss
supplements. It seems that everyone wants a piece of the pie; the American diet
industry tops $60 billion annually.
It’s classic information overload. You can’t blame people for
being confused by all the diets out there, even as crazy as some of them may
sound. I didn’t speak up to my fellow wedding guests that day, but it occurred
to me they would benefit from science-based facts about the diets they so
ardently follow.
So during the toasts, I thought to myself, I should write a book.
I counsel clients on these matters each week, giving them
information they need to make the best choices for their health and waistlines.
I find that all too often there are issues with the diets presented to me in my
counseling sessions and classes. They just plain don’t work, particularly over
the long term. And some of them are harmful, even potentially lethal. But it’s
also unhealthy to carry extra weight on our frames. So how do we separate good
diets from the bad?
In the chapters to come, we’ll take a good, hard look at the
various weight-loss plans out there. I’ll pull no punches in my professional
evaluation of some of the most wildly popular diets, both bad and good, of the
past few years. And along the way, I’ll explore tried-and-true strategies for
losing weight, based on my years of hospital experience, weight-loss seminars,
and community outreach efforts. More often than not, the best answer is not a
trendy celebrity-endorsed diet, but instead a few easy-to-follow guidelines
that I’ve seen work in literally thousands of cases.
Enough is enough. It’s time for the madness—and the diets—to stop.
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