Customer Reviews

Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds--Be Part of the Global Warming Solution!

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My reaction to global warming has been a mixture of guilt about my consumption patterns, anxiety and fear about approaching planetary changes, and a huge amount of anger and frustration about our nation's apparent inability to recognize the problem and deal with it.

FINALLY... the the Low Carbon Diet (LCD) program gave me a way to convert my guilt, anger and fear into constructive action! I joined a team organized by friends and did the program. Though we took a bit more than 30 days to complete it (people's schedules), it was easy and fun!!

I made some new friends, was encouraged that others feel as passionately about safeguarding our planet as I do, and was supported by my LCD Team in taking really significant actions that have made my household carbon-neutral! And that was amazing!!

The program is intelligently and imaginatively built to be very user-friendly. Being math-phobic, I was dreading the process of calculating my carbon footprint, but with team encouragement, a few preparations and the program's on-line calculator, it only took an easy, stress-free half-hour.

Now I'm working with new and old friends to bring the LCD program to my community, and now feeling a sense of hope for our future and the future of our Earth.

This is an essential book for everyone -- laying out in simple but effective terms the multitude of easy and straightforward ways we can lower our carbon footprint and do our part to lower the impact of carbon emmissions. My family did this workbook over the course of four meetings with neighbors where we not only lost 25,000 pounds !! but we also made friends and enjoyed some great food.

And anyway, you'll make back the costs of this book in fuel and electricity savings within the first week that you start doing the program.

The carbon diet program provided our household a way to learn what
our carbon footprint was (shockingly massive) and a way to reduce our
impact on the earth in a fun, inspiring and practical manner.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to do more than just read
about global warming. The Low Carbon Diet is the book you need
to learn how to make a real difference.

This book is about more than reducing the carbon foot-print of your home, it is tailor made for creating a good neighborhood by giving busy neighbors distanced by suburban sprawl or urban anonymnity a really fun and rewarding focal point for coming together.

There are twenty-two specific things that one can do in their home or in relation to their local school or community (most have to do with the home).

I see a real opportunity for a third party developer at Amazon to create a niche business--what I really need as a busy professional is a single Amazon URL where I can go and select all of the low-cost products needed to implement this book's recommendations (e.g. the water-saver showerhead with the instant off-on lever), have them charged to my Amazon account, and delivered to my front door.

I'd also like to see a way for people to register their homes the way we register Wildlife Habitats--completing this check-list should allow registry of the home and count toward the appraisal value.

I recommend the book be bought in lots of 10, used to bring together the other 9 houses nearest you, and then passed on down the neighborhood.

The resource section at the end is helpful, and I was especially struck by the disaster resilience recommendations. I know a lot of otherwise mainstream folks that are starting to sign up for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Red Cross courses on disaster relief, earning the green hard-hat and body covering. Something is happening at the grass roots level--a combination of innate fear that the federal and state governments will fail us as they did with Katrina, and a more constructive sense of responsibility, with more people realizing that resilience starts at the local level with specific individuals planning and preparing so as to prevent local disasters from becoming catastrophes.

For related reading on the psychology of what prevents people from preparing and reacting, see my review of "Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster." Disasters do NOT have to become catastrophes, we make them so through denial before, during, and after.

This new program to help people move beyond hand-wringing over global warming and onto concrete things they can do to address the problem is accessible, approachable, something many people and families should be able to pick up and use. The book is short, only 72 pages, and only the first few pages are spent on describing the problem: global warming. The rest of the book takes you by the hand and leads you through some straightforward actions you, anyone, can take. There are 22 actions in all, divided into three sections. The first describes "cool lifestyle practices," habits or behaviors you can change immediately (reducing garbage, taking shorter showers, driving less). Each action is quantified, in terms of how much carbon will be reduced as a result. The second section describes "cool household systems," making more significant changes or purchases to your car, appliances, or household systems (sealing air leaks, buying a hybrid car, tuning up your furnace). The third describes spreading the word: to your workplace, friends, community, kids' schools, etc. The idea is to commit to "losing" 5,000 pounds/yr (a roughly 10% cut in the average US household's energy usage). But you can choose which actions you want to take, and which you don't, to reach your goal, making it a flexible tool.

The program can be undertaken by an individual or a family alone, but the recommended process is organize a group of 5-8 households to do it together, over the course of four meetings, supporting each other through the process.

The program grows out of years of research by the Empowerment Institute on what it takes to make social change happen. This differentiates the book from others aimed solely at getting people to understand the problem of global warming. The book's strength lies here: in giving people a user-friendly tool to help move beyond rhetoric and into action.

Many books move people. This book is starting a movement across the nation at a time that it is very badly needed. So buy the book! Start a Carbon Shredding club like we did in Vermont(www.carbonshredders.org). And get to work saving money, the planet, and our children's future. It is easy and fun.

Bob Ferris
Executive Director
Yestermorrow Design/Build School

I read many environmental books, most of which scare you with the doom and gloom before attempting to give you solutions. This book gives you the tools you need to make a difference on a worldwide problem. I highly recommend reading it and unlike most diet books - practice these tips the rest of your life.

A group from our church has used this workbook and found it to be very accessible, giving good information and encouragement. The suggestions are concrete enough for us to follow and make behavorial changes and laid out well enough to make sense even to the most resistent of us. We met our goals and lost the 5,000 pounds by following the book's instruction and are holding the course so far.

You can reduce your carbon footprint and save money at the same time. I now shower just once a month and wear the same clothes for a week. Only kidding, of course, but this book does offer ways to help both yourself and the planet.

In our town, Yorktown, NY, we formed a group to go through the Low Carbon Diet. Over a period of six weeks or so, we met four times. We cataloged our energy usage, discussed what steps we were taking, and at the end calculated the total savings. For our group of seven households we were able to save enough energy to reduce our carbon emissions by 60,000 pounds per year. This is about equal to the total for a single household.

You can do this by yourself with the help of the book. However, the group dynamic works very well. Some of the steps to take were obvious, e.g., replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, CFLs. Other steps were not so obvious but equally effective. I have found that I can wash my clothes in cold water. All it took was to push the cold button on the washing machine. The results are good. The clothes are clean. Another step was to put my TV, cable box, cable modem and wireless router on a power strip. Turn it off at the end of the day; turn it on to watch TV or use the Internet. This saves three-quarters of the standby electricity for those devices.

Eventually, I am sure that our elected representatives will enact legislation to reduce our national carbon emissions. However, we do not have to wait for them to act. A few easy steps, documented in the Low Carbon Diet, will enable each one of us to achieve a fifteen percent reduction. We did it. The money savings are immediate and real, but in the end if we can convince our neighbors to do the same we will have taken a real step towards slowing climate change.