Eat This Not That! Review

Dieting is a popular pastime in the USA and most every person in the land is either on a diet at present or was dieting at some point in the recent past. Many businesses have come forward with what they feel is the perfect diet plan: One that promises results in only a matter of weeks while requiring little effort on the part of the dieter. Most of these fad diets and instant result diets don't do what they say and many people gain the weight back in a short time. But one weight loss method that has been proven to work is the simple concept that you need to burn more calories than you consume. One book that promotes this traditional approach to weight loss is Eat This, Not That!: The No Diet Weight Loss Solution, a book by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding.

Book Commentary:

Eat This, Not That! Is an amazing little reference guide that brings back the often forgotten method for weight loss: The simple concept that you can lose weight without any special formulated plan and without any special drugs if you just burn more calories than you consume. It is the most tested, best proven, and safest way to lose weight. It doesn't involve starvation or taking potentially dangerous substances. You can eat what you like, provided you choose wisely, and you need to exercise to make sure the calories are burned off each day. Eat This, Not That! encourages people to make simple substitutions; trading one food item for another that tastes similar but has fewer grams of fat, less sodium, and fewer calories.  

This book has been a top seller for many months and when I first noticed it on the best- seller lists, I assumed it was going to be a book full of lists and lists of different restaurant foods, grocery foods, and the like with the calorie counts for each. But Eat This, Not That! is a completely different type of book. Yes, it does list some foods, but it doesn't try to cover all or even a very large percentage of items you would encounter on a trip to Burger King or during a stroll down the frozen food aisle in the grocery store. Instead, it picks out a few different foods in restaurants and grocery stores, showing the calories, fat, and sometimes sodium and/or sugar level of different foods along with a substitute food item that is comparable in size and taste that has reduced levels of these and other negative nutritional qualities.

Some of the substitute items suggested in Eat This, Not That! will save the weight- conscious individual quite a few calories and fat and I was astonished when I read this book and noticed some of the extreme differences between different foods. For example, I always knew that thin crust pizza was healthier than deep- dish, but I did not realize how much worse deep dish really was until I read the facts in this book. Take Uno Chicago Grill's Classic Deep Dish Pizza, individual size. This gut- wrenching meal contains an incredible 2,310 calories, 162 grams of fat (48 grams saturated fat), and 4,200 grams of sodium! Wow! And this is just a small, personal size pizza. This number can be cut by roughly two- thirds by substituting Uno's Cheese and Tomato Flatbread Pizza, individual size. The nutritional facts for this pizza show only 755 calories, 30 grams of fat, and 1,815 mg of sodium. A simple substitution like this one can save a person substantially, helping lead to weight loss over time.

What I like best about Eat This, Not That! is its visual component. Like I said before, this is not a simple listing of foods and their calories, fat, and sodium. This book is much more visual than that. For most of the books pages, there are actual photographs of the food items as they appear in a restaurant or as they appear on the store shelves. This is much better than simply listing the food items and the reason is because a person is far more likely to remember a picture than a title. To give an example, one of the recommended drinks is Odwalla Blueberry B Monster Smoothie. If I had to try to remember this product by name, I doubt I would be able to recall its title and find it at the grocery store. But now that I have seen the actual bottle in the picture on page 266, I know exactly what to look for. In fact, I know I have seen this product on the grocery shelves before. This visual component is one of my favorite parts of Eat This, Not That! and it is one of several reasons why I endorse this book to the extent that I do. I also like the added tips in the restaurant section. If there is an exceptionally bad food, it will be highlighted off to the side of the page under the heading "Weapon of Mass Destruction". If there is some other important nutritional fact that needs to be pointed out, it will be listed off to the side also, under the heading "Hidden Danger".

Bottom Line Viewpoint:

Eat This, Not That!: The No Diet Weight Loss Solution is an excellent book for those who want to watch what they eat, exercise, and lose weight slowly and safely over a period of time. It doesn't offer a complete listing of vitamins, minerals, and other nutritional data, so it is not a complete guide to overall nutrition. But it does include the most important facts for people who want to lose weight- calories, fat, sodium- and it makes a good choice for someone who wants to lose weight gradually and doesn't want the strictness, excessive limitations, and health hazards often imposed by many of the more popular diet plans.