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

~ Mehmet C. Oz (Author), (Author)
Key Phrases: gut check, dressing ingredients, chicken ingredients, Fat Chance, Fat Figure, Activity Plan (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Book Description
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.

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Amazon.com Exclusive
"Fat Chances: The Secret Story of What's in Your Belly" by Michael F. Roizen, MD, and Mehmet C. Oz, MD
Whether you're carrying a few extra pounds of fat on your thighs or a suitcase's worth in your belly, it's hard not to think about fat. You feel it when you walk, you roll on it when you sleep, and you curse it when you try to slide into last year's jeans. But while most of us are intimately familiar with how fat looks on the outside, we're not quite as familiar with how it works on the inside.

As we explain in YOU: On a Diet, we believe that to change your body, you need to know your body.

In the simplest form, everyone knows the formula for gaining weight. Daily buckets of ranch dip plus photo-album-sized hunks of cheesecake plus a life of couch-dwelling equals a very unfortunate conclusion: too-frequent popped buttons.

But many of us really don't know how fat works and how it works against us. Here's the inside story on the story of your insides.

Continue reading this exclusive essay

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Amazon.com Exclusive
YOU: On a Diet--The Shopping List
Print out this exclusive shopping list, created by Michael F. Roizen, MD, Mehmet C. Oz, MD, and UnitedHealthcare, to get a jumpstart on the waist-reducing, health-boosting plan you'll find in YOU: On a Diet.

Check out the exclusive Shopping List

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Getting to Know YOU

YOU: On a Diet Workout DVD

YOU: On a Diet [Audio CD]

YOU: The Owner's Manual

YOU: The Smart Patient

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Back for another highly entertaining round of Biology 101, the team behind YOU: The Owner's Manual applies its signature wit and wisdom to food metabolism and nutrition. According to Roizen and Oz, waist measurement, not weight, is the most important factor in mortality related to obesity, and understanding the relationship between chemicals and hormones influencing hunger and those signaling satiety is the key to ending yo-yo dieting. Most diets fail, Roizen and Oz conclude, because body chemistry overrules the best plans and intentions. To restore the body's natural ability to balance hunger and satiety and offset the effects of stress on food choices, they list foods and supplements that fight fat, decrease appetite and combat inflammation that causes disease. Roizen and Oz pack in a lot of material—quizzes, "factoids" and "myth busters" along with diet and exercise plans, recipes and a two-week "rebooting" program—in bite-sized portions, giving readers a chance to absorb and apply what they learn. For those considering medical intervention, they discuss current options for drugs and surgery. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1 edition (October 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743292545
• ISBN-13: 978-0743292542
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (737 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #206 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

139 of 145 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yo-Yo Dieters Dream!, November 12, 2006

By	Gadget Girl (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: You: On a Diet: The Owners Manual for Waist Management (Book and DVD) (Hardcover)

This book taught me that you aren't really eating "normally" on most diets. Your body confuses a diet with a time of famine and is trying to keep you alive. Your body doesn't know that you can afford to lose the weight, and that the "famine" is self-imposed. It explains the role that chronic low-grade stress (work, relationships, etc.) plays on weight gain.

The book explains how to eat well for your body so that you are satisfied, not hungry, and in a way that your body knows it is OK to shed pounds. Your goal is to remain satisfied or pleasantly full throughout the day. The other part of the book that resonated with me is that variety is what is killing us. The authors suggest that you automate your breakfast and lunch, eating the same thing or from a small group of things every day. This takes the guesswork out of things. Then you should eat a handful of nuts before dinner, so that you do not overeat. It also explains the effect that "bad foods" have on your hormones and brain chemistry vs. the effect that "good foods" have - other than just the extra calories that you are intaking. This was most interesting, and what sets it apart from other diet books or plans.

The difference between the You Diet and any other that I have tried is that there was no 2-3 day period of feeling terrible or having to adjust. Just a clean-out of highly processed foods from our kitchen and a trip to Trader Joes for some healthy foods and lots of label reading. Now I just feel better and better the longer I do it. It is amazing how tasty whole grain foods can be and how much more they fill you up than processed carbohydrates. My husband is even enjoying the foods I am making!

54 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, Great information, Really makes you think, December 29, 2006

By	Jolene M. Nickerson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I get tired of people saying this is the same old information. It is not. When has any other diet book gone into such detail about digestion and how our bodies store and use fat? When have you ever heard the word Omentum before? This book really makes you realize what you are doing to your body with fat and sugar. It makes you WANT to eat better. It tells you WHY you should eat certain foods and what happens when you eat food. It's great. I have been following this plan, and it really works. You can eat, be satisfied, and not starve yourself. It has recipes, tells you what to order when you eat out, and puts you in control. I can't even consider eating a cookie after reading this book. If I look at one, I get images in my head of what my body will do with that cookie, and it's not pretty. This book has a scared straight appeal, and it really made me change my life.

101 of 109 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Elisa Zied, registered dietitian, freelance writer, and author, November 5, 2006

By	Elisa Zied "Registered Dietitian, Spokesperso... (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: You: On a Diet: The Owners Manual for Waist Management (Book and DVD) (Hardcover)

As a registered dietitian, I often approach diet books with some skepticism, as I have found many popular ones to be too gimmicky, too extreme, nutritionally imbalanced, or too unrealistic to be followed over the long-haul. Imagine my surprise when I read You on a Diet. As Drs. Roizen and Oz have done in the past, here they have managed to simplify science and draw attention to the health perils of having too much body fat (especially in the abdominal region) in a witty, warm, encouraging, positive, and entertaining way. They explain in simple, easy to understand language how to reprogram your body to support healthful weight loss. Along the way, they encourage people to consume more protein, fiber, and healthful unsaturated fats, and less saturated fats, trans fats, and sugar, all of which can certainly support weight management efforts and have heart-health and other benefits as well.

Too many diet books preach quick fixes and ask you to forego too many foods in pursuit of a thinner physique; instead, this book takes a very positive approach, shows people what to consume more of, supports regular physical activity, and encourages people to set realistic goals--instead of striving for model-thinness, it asks people to aim simply to lose some inches from their guts which can improve not only their physical appearance but their health as well. Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is its light and encouraging tone, not to mention the illustrations which make it an easy and enjoyable read.

Having lost more than 25 pounds myself, and having maintained a healthy body weight for more than 10 years, I know first hand how tough it is to lose weight. For me it was a slow, gradual process that took years. I would have found this book quite useful about 15 years ago (before I became a registered dietitian) when I started to change my eating and fitness habits, and now am happy to have a popular diet book to recommend to clients and the lay public.

Although calorie counting is not emphasized in the book, my experience shows that when you embark on weight loss, you need to first know where you're starting from in terms of calories; also, knowing something about the calorie content of the foods and beverages you consume can help you when you hit a plateau and your weight seems to stall at a certain level despite your continued efforts to lose weight. And while the menu plans and recipes in this book seem sound and do-able, they include few low-fat dairy foods and other non-dairy sources of calcium which may make it tough for many to meet their calcium and/or vitamin D needs without supplementation. Also, because the menu plans do not include many of the foods people in America commonly consume, such as refined foods including pizza and pasta, and snack/dessert type foods (many of which are admittedly low in nutrients and high in calories), following these plans to the letter may make people feel that they are in fact on a "diet" and that they have to eat very differently than they normally do to lose weight. This can make following the program a challenge over the long-term.

Overall, You on a Diet can be a useful resource and motivator, and can be quite helpful resource for those who are tired of extreme dieting and want to start living as they pursue a healthier weight. This book makes a great bookshelf addition for anyone who is willing to take the time to learn how the body works to improve their overall eating habits, get more fit, and lose weight for life.