I've been following the diet in this book for almost 4 weeks and am absolutely amazed at the results. Just to clarify where I started at 129 lb. but with a 31.5 inch waist I'm 5'4" and 59 years old (female). I was not interested in losing any weight particularly, just the 'spare tire'/'muffin top' or whatever else you want to call the unappealing impenetrable flesh that seems to gather around the middle. Within the first 10 days I had dropped down to 124 lb. but more importantly lost 2.5" off my waist that I've been trying to lose for about 10 years. My own plan will be to go back and do the plan again from the beginning as they recommend at this point and to continue on this program until I have lost the next few inches. There are many negative comments about the technical aspects of the book written by many people that have been studying this type of nutrition intensively as have I. And I must disagree with all the complaints. This book tells you what to do, what to eat and why. There is sufficient explanation to work the plan and get yourself on track to the body you remember. Best of health to all of you!
I truly wanted to like this book more than I did. I've been a fan of the Eadeses since I first read Protein Power back in 1997, and I currently follow their blogs regularly. I'm a proponent of low carb dieting for health reasons and have followed a low carb diet for a while now. But I also am no longer losing any weight on it (though still have a long way to go), so keep looking for things to get the scale moving again.
So I had a lot of expectations from this book. Admittedly I am only on my 5th day of following their plan (at least as best as I can, more about later...) and so far have not lost any weight, and am hungry constantly, yet perhaps suddenly something will kick in and I'll start to see something miraculous....
But the book itself was just a disappointment in so many ways. The actual information contained in the book is quite slight, and very lacking in detail. Perhaps this is a channeling of my inner geek, but what I loved about Protein Power was the detailed science of why it works. But there is little of that here. As an example, one of the things they tell you to use is something called DAG oil. The advantage of DAG oil, they say, is that it is 80% diglycerides rather than triglycerides as most oils have, and this gives it an ability to help reduce the fat in the body. But they give no details at all about this or why it works. And thus I'm very hesitant to use an oil that is extensively processed from the already heavily processed soy and canola oils, both of which have extremely unfavorable omega 6/omega 3 ratios (as does DAG oil) and neither of which I would ever touch.
But the Eadeses blithely say to replace a daily tablespoon of the oil you usually use with DAG oil... Hmm how about us folks who don't use oil at all because we feel that animals fats and butter are better choices?
However my biggest gripe with this book is that it does not give any real guidelines to follow for what to eat. The first two weeks is the 3-and-1 plan, three protein shakes a day plus a low carb meal. The recipe for the shakes is pretty conclusive and easy to follow. But what about the meal?
Instead of giving you guidelines they give you pages and pages and pages of menus, followed by all the recipes. At least half this book is a cookbook, and I didn't pay good money to pre-order this book from Amazon in order to get a cookbook. Cookbooks, menus and recipes I *don't* need. I just want a good simple guideline of what the meals should consist of but the menus are so all over the place it's not that easy to figure out what to eat on your own.
They recommend that if you don't care for something in a menu to consult the substitution lists at the back of the book. Okay, I have some spinach at home, and I noted spinach used in some of their recipes, so I consulted the substitution lists to see how much spinach was considered a "serving". But spinach was not even on the list despite showing up in recipes!
They also stress the importance of saturated fat, yet the amount in the recipes seems pretty low. One meal menu, for example, just says "hard boiled eggs, smoked salmon, 3-4 tomato slices". And that's it? No mayo, butter, oil or anything? Just dry eggs, and dry salmon and dry tomato? Maybe you are allowed to use oils and fats, but I can't find anywhere that says so. When I run the compoments of the daily diet through nutritional software it comes out far lower in fat than I am used to, and far lower than is typical on a low carb diet, which may be why I am so hungry all the time.
Then in weeks 3-4 you go into a more Atkins-induction type diet, but even here it's sometimes difficult to know what is allowed. The rules for weeks 3-4 list foods that can now be added as well as subtracted, but nuts are nowhere mentioned in the rules. Yet many of the recipes use almond flour, pine nuts, macadamia nuts. So what is the status of nuts?
Not to mention that nuts and nut flours don't show up in any of the substitution menus at the back of the book which have only simple lists of veggies and fruits, so there is no way to know how or when nuts and nut flours can be used, or what they may or may not be substituted for.
This almost gives me a feel of a book that was rushed to publication, and yet I know its publication date was held up for months, so was not really a rush job. I don't want to give it only 1 or 2 stars as the Eadeses are among my nutritional heroes. But neither can I give it 5 starts, dearly as I had wanted to before receiving the book...which also arrived 4 days after the people who preordered from Barnes and Noble got theirs!
NOTE: I am just editing my review to add that I may well not be the intended audience for this book. I am not your casual middle-aged person who knows nothing about diet but would like to flatten my waistline a bit. I have an extensive diet library and have been studying low carb since I was first blown away by "Protein Power" in 1997. I really wanted this book to be of the caliber of "Protein Power" and I don't feel it comes close.
But for someone who is totally new to low carb, who doesn't much care about what gets them a flatter middle, and just wants to be told what to do and what to eat to get there, then perhaps this book will fill that need.
Buy The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle: The Simple Plan to Flatten Your Belly Fast! Now
My husband and I went on this diet; we are both in our 50s. He's in good shape, but wanted the flat belly of his twenties. I wanted to lose the 10-20 pounds I'd gained over the decades. He likes protein; I love carbs. Yet both of us succeeded, and amazingly it came right off our waists.
Around day five, both of us were finding it really difficult to handle the restrictions. But we hung in there together, turned the corner a day or so later, and found our cravings had subsided. Once that happens, it is really easy to stay on because your weight drops and you look great. We both lost 8 lbs in the first 2-3 weeks. You don't just lose weight; you lose it in places that are all too visible. Three months later, we are both enjoying eating this way. For the first time in decades I weigh less than I weighed when I became pregnant with my son 19 years ago. This is a great diet -we are both committed for the long term.
Like many of the other reviewers, I have followed the Eades' work for years. I've appreciated their scientific explanations of how things work in the body and their recommendations of supplements and other guidance on how to eat healthfully and lose weight. But sometimes you just feel, "tell me what to do and I will do it." All those reviewers quibbling over the book and saying they expected more avoided trying the diet. My advice is to try it yourself -because it works!
Read Best Reviews of The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle: The Simple Plan to Flatten Your Belly Fast! Here
This book provides a helpful and effective diet plan, but I felt it was somewhat marred by inconsistencies, by the not fully explained requirement for three shakes and one meal a day in the first two weeks, and by the inclusion of one or two 'magic practices' that seemed like the earmarks of a fad diet.
But I figured "What the hey, I've never done one of those weird fad diets where you lose 15 pounds, why not give it a try once in your life?"
I already knew from reading "Rethinking Thin" by NY Times reporter Gina Kolata, that low carb and low calorie diets have been found to be equally effective, with the low carb producing results more quickly.
So I tried this one and for me it really worked. In six weeks.
Like most Americans, over the years I have been interested in diets and diet books and, also like most Americans, over the years I have maintained my overweight status -that is, until I found the Eades website, got this book, and tried to follow their diet plan.
I say I "tried" to follow it, because there was no way I could have one meal and 3 protein shake meals a day. I thought I would be able to do it, but no dice. The diet is just too hard. I think it is a flaw of the book that the reasoning of exactly why the protein has to be liquid is not given. I just was not ok eliminating so much solid food. It gave me kind of an odd feeling in the head, I can't really describe it exactly. I didn't like it much, but I tolerated it ok.
By the time I was ready to start my six week stint, I had actually been on board already for a month with no sugar, no caffeine, no wine and not many carbs. So that part was ok. And, like the Eades earlier Low Carb book, which I recommend you obtain, the 6 Weeks Cure has really good recipes. I just didn't understand why the protein for all except 1 meal has to come from shakes (in the first two weeks) and it's basically up to them to provide a compelling explanation, which I felt they did not do.
I took a practice run before the book arrived using one of Eades's older books that has a one-shake-a-day plan, which I found I could do. After I fried my blender by putting the Leucine powder in before the water, I mixed protein powder with yogurt until I noticed that the yogurt had a bunch of lactose, in other words sugar. Oops! Still, I lost weight. And ordered a new blender blade via Amazon.
I had other cavils. The Eades recommend DAG oil, which supposedly can be obtained as Enova oil, as something that may contribute to fat loss. However, Enova has been off the market for so long that no one at the supermarkets even remembers hearing of it anymore, and I was not convinced by the authors' account of the studies supporting its use. Maybe they will eliminate this non-helpful section on DAG oil from the second edition.
The suggested idea to donate blood to cleanse yourself of your toxins I found strange, even though the authors say not to worry about passing your toxin-laden blood on to someone else. Well, then those toxins must not be all that bad in the first place, right? The reasoning seemed confused. Similarly they talk about quitting all alcohol for the first two weeks, and are completely convincing about why. But then they say in the 3rd and 4th week, you can drink a little bit of wine. I guess the human animal is fundamentally inconsistent, at least when it comes to reasoning about dieting.
They suggest a Leucine supplement to make sure of fat loss rather than muscle loss, so I did this, but I would have liked to know whether you can cook with Leucine (probably not), and also specifically whether they themselves continue it as a supplement (as they do all the vitamins) after the 6 weeks are over. It's nasty stuff, so I would recommend the pill form, since the powdered form is bitter and does not mix well, making Splenda and an additional mixer (protein powder of a different flavor that the usual chocolate, perhaps) essential.
Getting Leucine and (optionally if you're working out) D-Ribose from Amazon made me feel like I was patronizing one of those dubious Canadian internet pharmacies, once I inspected the shipping labels, and also noticed that I was unable to buy these substances at the over-the-top health aisle of any of my local Whole Foods markets. It was really worth getting D-Ribose tablets, though, rather than the powdered form.
One thing I didn't expect was to be losing fat off the soles of my feet. Did this really happen to me? I had to go out and get better-padded trail shoes in order to keep hiking the same amount. Who the heck wants thinner soles of their feet?
The "suck-in-your-stomach" exercise is actually a fairly complex and difficult exercise. I think you have to practice it a lot in order to do correctly. I ended up substituting the "vacuums" exercise from page 162 of Kurt Brunhardt's Complete Book of Abs, and probably got the same effect.
I really appreciated the phrasing on making sure you take your 400mg potassium supplements with magnesium to help make the potassium effective ("We implore you to heed our advice"). It has been a long time, if ever, since anyone has implored me.
Starting the regimen in late November, I found Thanksgiving the ideal lo-carb holiday. There is plenty of turkey, and no one cares if you don't take huge portions of all the carbs, which you can still enjoy tasting in minuscule portions. I lost a little weight over the long weekend. Christmas and New Years weekends were a different matter entirely but by then I was nearly in the last two weeks, so my spirits went up, as did the downward curve of my weight loss graph. I found myself able to say "I can celebrate; after all, I'm not overweight anymore," and caught up with the downward curve of the weight graph after the first of the year.
Even though I found some of the authors' reasoning inconsistent & incomplete, and the diet impossible to stick to strictly -I found I was always going for an extra snack, and I'm a person who does not believe there is any such thing as "one quarter of a grapefruit" - I still lost about ten pounds, and see how I could probably lose 5 more without too much trouble.
On the other hand, I don't know how well this book will work for people find that they need to repeat the 6-week cycle a couple of times to reach their goal.
I'll wrap this up with dessert. Using the recipe in the book for vanilla ice cream, I made just about the best vanilla ice cream EVER. (The recipe doesn't use sugar, but you would never guess it by the taste.) If this entire book were as good as their vanilla ice cream recipe, it would definitely get five stars. Or maybe eleven.
I hope you found these comments helpful.
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I've previously read the Protein Power Life Plan (PPLP) by the same authors and would recommend this book (CURE) as a follow up to that one. The first part of this book is chock full of useful information for people already familiar with the principles of restricted-carbohydrate dieting. That being said, there were a few times where I thought "If I didn't already know a lot about this topic, I wouldn't know what that scientific term meant."
By the time the book reached Part 2, it felt like I was being rushed to the end. There's a page that lists supplements to take, but the book barely touches on why they are important. I know the first time I saw the price of CoQ10, I winced. I wouldn't have purchased it if I hadn't been armed with the crucial information that the Eades presented in PPLP. Sadly, none of that explanation is in this book.
Also in Part 2, we learn that the plan involves two weeks of drinking three shakes a day with one sensible meal. Apparently, this is the Eades answer to wanting to suggest an all meat diet in a culture that won't accept such a thing. Last time I checked, most people spout off about meal replacements as much as they do low carb diets. If the right answer to the middle-aged middle is indeed all meat, I wish the book would have just stuck to that philosophy.
The last third of the book is dedicated to recipes. I personally dislike diet books that do this, but if you want recipes, then you're in luck. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who has previously read PPLP or Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. The new scientific information in Part 1 will supplement your existing knowledge and is worth the price.
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i have known the author since 1993, and he has changed my life as he has changed countless other health enthusiasts. he has coached world champion athletes like triathletes mark allen and mike pigg, he has been called by velonews, "one of the most sought after endurance coaches in the world," but if there is one book an athlete, or someone contemplating getting into shape, needs to read, this is that book. nutrition, fitness, stress, training, it's all in here; phil is usually light years ahead of the health industry pundits. i have given this book to dozens of friends, so far no complaints.
