The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle: The Simple Plan to Flatten Your Belly Fast! [Hardcover] Review

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 Irun 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.

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Product Description:
Why is it that even though we might maintain our high school weight, few of us maintain our high school belt size?

In your twenties and thirties, the layers of fat on top of your abs were the problem-but once you reach middle-age, the enemy shifts. The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle is the first book to deal specifically with the issues we face in the next stage of life, providing a plan for eliminating the unhealthy fat that accumulates around the organs-visceral fat-that is the true cause of the middle-aged bulge.

The good news is that with the right diet, visceral fat can be quickly reduced and eliminated, enhancing both your looks and your health. Even after twenty years researching and refining the science of weight loss and management, bestselling authors Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades fell victim to the middle-aged middle themselves. Although otherwise fit and healthy, both lost the flat belly that signals youth. In The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle, they share the simple dietary program they created to shed the weight.

Discover:
•How eating saturated fat can actively trim your middle
•Why the "eat less, exercise more" prescription fails-and what to do about it
•Why "inner" and "outer" tube fat measurements are important to your health
•How to fight the fat stored inside your liver that leads to hard-to-lose middle-body flab

With The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle the doctor duo that brought you to the low-carb lifestyle shows you how to regain in midlife the figure of sleek, flat-bellied youth.

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