Review of Stop The Diet by Don Sloan
Stop The Diet by Lisa Tillinger Johansen
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.
You’ve tried diet after diet, including the ones found in books, magazines, on the Internet — they are more prolific than ever. And you’ll always find someone to heartily endorse the latest one. Thankfully, this book brings clinical, informative insight into the issues surrounding dieting — why we need to diet and, when we do, how to go about it — safely and effectively.
Dr. Lisa Tillinger Johansen brings years of solid experience as a dietitian and nutritional counselor to thousands of people, and, in her book Stop the Diet, I Want to Get Off shares her wit and wisdom — in terms an ordinary person struggling to maintain a safe weight can understand.
In her foreword, she sums up the problem with the plethora of crazy diets out there now:
“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. It’s classic information overload.
“They just plain don’t work,” she adds, “particularly over the long term.”
She adds that three in ten Americans are trying to lose weight. Fifty-five percent of men have tried to lose weight at least four times, and a whopping 73 percent of women have tried dieting seven times in their lives.
It’s a big, big industry, and an even bigger problem for the average American.
Dr. Johansen goes on to debunk the long-term benefits of switching to glutin-free products (if you’re not clinically allergic to glutins), the so-called Scarsdale Diet, and something called the Paleolithic Diet — so named because it takes the dieter back to eating the way our ancestors did — lots of meat, fish, poultry, eggs and other staples. Of the Paleolithic Diet, she observes ascerbically:
“While cavemen didn’t have a lot of the lifestyle diseases we have today, they didn’t live as long, either.”
So, what’s the bottom line in this fact-filled guide to a thinner you? KISS. “Keep It Simple, Smarty!”
She advocates dividing your plate into imaginary quarters, placing fish, poultry, and eggs in the first quarter. The second quarter is for foods such as pasta, rice, corn and peas. Size of the portions matter, too, and you’ll want to watch the amount of fat you take into your body.
There’s so much more in this fact-packed book that can’t be summed up here, but suffice to say this is a guide that everyone who’s serious about maintaining their weight should own. No, it’s not a “Get-Thin-Now” miracle diet. But it does educate you properly on what foods are best to consume, and in what quantity — all in clear, layman’s English.
I give this book five stars and call upon everyone with a weight problem to give it a read.
