Customer Reviews

Dieter's Dilemma: Eating Less and Weighing More

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This is an excellent book. It is the very first book I have ever found that actually describes the scientific research on weight loss and gain. Other books about dieting simply promote the author's diet and carefully avoid discussing the biology of dieting. This book tells you what you really need to know.

Although this book is beginning to become dated, it remains in line with what scientific research keeps stating: We cannnot sustain a reduction in food intake any more than we can impose a sustained change in our breathing patterns. We need science to invent an appetite-suppressing treatment that affects ghrelin, leptin, adiponectin and other hormones--the dictators of our appetite and metabolism. Until then, all we can do is choose quality foods, eat until we are satiated, and enjoy whatever physical activity suits us best. This book will not help you lose weight, but it may keep you from losing mind when all the popular diets fail you.

this book is a little dated. Much more scientific research has been done since its publication. A few good points

Bennett and Gurin's book remains the best treatise on the intersection of fat politics and the surrounding science. Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" has some newer science, and some of the same older information, and he updates the topic nicely. The title is awful, and the bias is intact. Bennett and Gurin remain the most fat-positive of authors in this science-based genre.

Taubes lets his anti-fat bias show in the following ways: he accepts unconditionally that fatness is medically problematic, correlated with disease, whereas if stigma is removed, so is the correlation (Roseto, PA study, for one), and he accepts that there is, in fact, a current "obesity epidemic" though Paul Campos and J. Eric Oliver dispute this nicely.

The author of 'The Dieter's Dilemma' let the cat out of the bag: if you eat a monotonous diet, you will lose weight. Yep, there it is. Taubes is not going to tell you this. No diet doctor or 'pseudo-scientist' of weight loss is going to tell you this. So just do it: pick your poison. If it's the Cabbage Soup diet, stick to that. Forever! If it's 'meat only,' stick to that. Forever! If it's organic veggies, stick to that. Forever!

Taubes has nothing new to offer: just eat only certain kinds of foods and never other kinds.

William Bennet says it flat out: just eat a monotonous diet. As long as you don't deviate: from meat, from cabbage soup, from organic tangerines - and lately, potatoes or Twinkies (take your pick of THOSE diets), you will lose a ton of weight. Because you'll be so sick of whatever you have to restrict yourself to, you'll refuse to eat much of it. And as long as you eat only that and don't deviate, you won't be eating much, period.

It's called 'low-calorie.' Low-carb, high-carb, soup, nuts, salad, baked Alaskas - eat only that and it ends up being LOW-CALORIE. duh.