Books |
Thinner This Year
Chris Crowley & Jen Sacheck
By
Published: Feb 17, 2014
Category:
Health and Fitness
Like millions and millions of people on the East Coast, I’ve been inside for months now. If anxiety burned calories, I’d be a stick. It doesn’t. The result: status as an International Sex Symbol is further away than ever. So when I looked at the pile of books to review, this jumped out at me.
The last time I thought about Chris Crowley, it was months after reading “Younger Next Year,” the book he co-authored with Dr. Henry Lodge — and I was still in shock. In that book, Crowley shares a strategy to live long and die healthy. It is very simple. It is also inflexible. Four days a week, 45 minutes of aerobics. Two days a week, lift weights. Forever. Loved the book. Did not adopt the regimen.
My probable loss, for as Crowley and Lodge wrote, their way promised considerable rewards. No lingering disease. No chronic conditions. You run the machine at a fairly high speed for eight or nine decades and then make a quick trip to the junk heap. I don’t know how many of you accepted this gospel, but Amazon tells me that many of you have at least lifted the book. [To read my review of “Younger Next Year” and buy the versions of the book for men and women. click here.]
“Have you stopped eating crap?” That’s one of the questions Crowley and Lodge ask in “Younger Next Year.” And I guess they wrote about food in their first book, but you’ll forgive me if I was too stunned to notice. I’m sure I wasn’t alone.
So now Crowley’s back, partnered this time with Jen Sacheck, a nutritionist and fitness expert from Tufts University. And this time, your reward is not a year away — you can be “Thinner This Year.” Or, more correctly, “Scared Thin.”
“Being a hair or two overweight at our age is not OK,” they write. “Stored fat makes you ugly and sick.” What is “our age?” 40- to 60-somethings — smart, accomplished people whose greatest flaw is that they’re accepting a slide into a sedentary lifestyle and an extra 20 or 30 pounds. What’s the solution? Same as it ever was: “Stop eating crap.” That is: fast food, dead animals and processed junk. Or what they call “a mountain of slop and despair.”
Want to lose 25 pounds in the next 6 months?
Here’s the Crowley-Sacheck diet: “Exercise like crazy, eat right, eat less.” Half of what you put on your plate — by volume, not calories — should be vegetables and fruit. 25% can be whole grains. (Take that, Grain Brain.) Fish. A little meat. Very little dairy. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. For a free month of Crowley’s newsletter, click here. Note: Like most offers of this kind, you need to provide credit card information; if you want to cancel, make sure you do it before month two begins.]
Crowley is the carnival barker, the guy who lures you into the tent: “It is not a diet, it is not a way to lose weight. It is just how we eat now.” Sacheck is the science teacher who tells you why. This is very welcome. If your education was like mine, you saw a chart of a food pyramid and were told about eating all the food groups. And that was it. You are what you eat? As the doctors in the audience know, nutrition is taught for no more than half a day in most medical schools.
One small complaint. Regular readers know I often complain about the length of novels. I never thought I’d complain about the length of a diet book. But “Thinner” is 350 pages. Inside this thick book, a thinner book is crying to get out. Word to the wise: Read it on the Stairmaster. Lose as you learn. That’s my plan, anyway. As soon as the weather changes.
