The Pritikin Weight Loss Breakthrough: 5 Easy Steps to Outsmart Your Fat Instinct

Rating:
Summary: By far the most informative book on this subject.
Review: This book reads like a fast paced novel, and you just can't wait to get through it and begin implementing the many life-altering changes recommended and proven by the Pritikin Longevity Center's program. I experienced it firsthand recently, and reading the book made it possible for me to continue the program on the 'outside' at home. It truly saved my life!

Rating:
Summary: Finally, someone has some simple answers.
Review: This book sheds a lot of light on the reasons why we as human animals crave and gorge on fats and gives simple, easy answers to how to overcome them. Easy exercise, easy food choices that are healthy and not fad.

Rating:
Summary: Probably the best book of its kind
Review: This is probably the best book of its kind because it is the one of the only books I've seen out there that is scientific, practical and non-gimmicky. In an industry where there are more weight loss gimmicks coming out everyday this book rises to the top.
Here are just some of the great ideas Pritikin proposes:
-Don't just cut back on calories, the metabolism slows down and our willpower gives out eventually when we feel deprived, better to eat in a high fiber/low fat filling manner that satisifies you completely without any starving
-Once we cut back on alot of fatty foods and excessive meat and substitute it with high fiber and complex carb eating we lose the craving for those bad foods
-Excercise helps keep up our desire for these healthy foods
Those are the main ideas of his system. They are very practical and don't mislead people into some silly way of eating. For example Pritikin explains some of the low-carb myths in this book.
One other great thing about this "diet" is that it's very economical. You can eat a healthy meal for .70 cents if you wanted to. Weigh that up against these low carb diets that have you spending $2.50 just for a low carb bar that you practically need to keep those diets going. Not to mention all these otherlow carb products out now (has anyone wondered how absurd it is to think that the low carb people think man can create better foods than nature has provided for us!) and meat etc. It's about 3-4X the cost of eating the Pritikin way.
This system works and you can maintain it for life.
One tip I would add: Even though as Pritikin proposes in his book you will lose weight, if you really want to see quicker results in weight loss I would suggest doing more exercise than this system recommends. 3-5 days of vigorous exercise will make a HUGE difference in your results.

Rating:
Summary: We Oughta Know Better!
Review: We are in the midst of an obesity epidemic which more than coincides with all of this strangely American puritanical advice about food-which boils down to low fat/high carb politically correct eating. (Interestingly enough too, it also coincides w/the fitness/gymn crazes of the '70s and beyond.) In fact, the Pritikin benighted second half of this century, along with the relentless advertising of the easily profitable cereal and bread companies, has been shadowed by a relentless, misleading fear of saturated fat and cholesterol-coupled with an insatiable, obssessive drive to consume bran. In the fifties-before diet gurus like Pritikin cursed us with fat phobia, Americans downing cheeseburgers and real butter had a stable minority obesity rate!! Just as much of the rest of the world today-which finds our self-punishing need to cut fat an utter aberration.
WE HAVE A RECORD OBESITY RATE (See many related health problems as well.)CAUSED BY PRITIKIN AND THOSE BRAINWASHED BY PRITIKIN-BEING ADDRESSED BY SUCH RECOMMENDATIONS THAT CAUSED (AND INSIDIOUSLY WORSEN AND SPIRAL OUT OF CONTROL) THESE PROBLEMS IN THE FIRST PLACE. Nathan Pritikin died young (for a man in the 1st world) of cancer and suicide. Those working with Pritikin (SEE Lillian Gillman's works if you really are interested in saving your health, well-being and joy.) are starting to link his extreme carbohydrate and joyless diet to the rampant rate of these symptoms in his followers (and then some! WE'RE TALKING ABOUT UNPRECEDENTED DIABESITY RATES AND NOT TO MENTION MYSTERIOUS SUDDEN NEW AND SUPPOSEDLY INCURABLE DISEASES LIKE CFS, IBS AND ADD! [Hello designer drug industry of the 90s and new Millenium.] THERE'S NOT EVEN TIME TO MENTION THE TRANS FATS [New frontier for cheap food and its profits] WE WERE TOLD TO SUBSTITUTE FOR REAL FAT AND THEIR LINK TO NEW CANCERS!)
MY POINT IS THIS, IN THIS DAY AND AGE (for all the factors I've mentioned) it is morally reprehensible to recommend more high carb (CUT the ESSENTIAL fats which prevent cancer and depression.) dieting in the name of politics and politically correctness. (Consider the food pyramid I witnessed drilled into my daughter's kindergarten brain back in the seventies).
If this were my family member, I'd wanna know why his sacrifice to live as a monk in a prison labor camp didn't actually pay off in "longevity"-not to mention at least freedom from something so relentlessly unbearable as depression! I'd wanna challenge conventional wisdom-because I would not want the guilt for others people's health and well being on my hands. Does anyone care about the harm this insidiuos ignorance is doing?