Tag Archives: books

Don’t Tell Me What to Eat

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Why should I listen to you, anyway?

Since being interviewed for an NPR piece about diet books (read/listen to “Diet Books: Fat On Profits, Skinny On Results?“), I’ve received numerous e-mails and other contacts from folks offering me advice on my diet. Here’s one from today’s e-mail:

I caught the interview you gave on NPR about dieting books.

If you want to learn about health and nutrition read “The China Study”, by T. Colin Campbell, PhD.

All diet books are wrong, because they are about eating less of the same, unhealthy food. If we base our diet on whole, plant-foods, we will drastically reduce our risk of chronic diseases and as a side effect, lose weight. This book shows the huge amount of science available, and it’s really, really interesting!!

Ironically, he recommends a diet book and then says that “all diet books are wrong.” I guess he means all of them except the one he’s recommending. How many other people are saying the same thing with another book? All of them.

I can’t tell you how annoyed I am by this. I began to write the guy a response, but I figured it might be better to just post it here, so everyone can read it:

My friend Tom gave me a copy of The China Study. I gave it away. I am not interested in diet books at all. Period.

And frankly, I’m pretty sick of strangers telling me what I should and shouldn’t eat. You don’t know a damn thing about me. Why do you assume that I eat “unhealthy food”?

I eat fresh vegetables, both raw and cooked simply. I eat fresh fruit, plain yogurt, whole grains. I eat grilled meats and fish. I don’t fry, I don’t eat much processed food, I don’t eat ANY fast food. I don’t drink soda or energy drinks and I don’t use artificial sweeteners. I minimize salt usage and season with fresh herbs whenever I can.

I eat healthier than 90% of the people I know. The other 10% are either vegetarians or misguided fools who follow the advice of books like The China Study and give up the foods they love, hoping to extend their lives by a few years through that sacrifice. All you have to do is eat a nicely marbled grilled steak in front of them to see how they’re suffering.

Life is short. Why shouldn’t I eat what I want to eat — especially when there’s nothing really wrong with it? I don’t want to live forever and I want to enjoy my life. Eating is one of my simple pleasures.

My weight problem — which isn’t even serious, according to my doctor — is due to inactivity and midlife metabolism change. Simply said, I need to eat less and exercise more. But don’t most Americans?

Sorry if I seem angry, but I’m really bothered by strangers trying to advise me when they know absolutely nothing about me.

This is what I wrote, but I didn’t send it. In fact, I didn’t answer the e-mail at all. Maybe he’ll see the response here. Maybe he won’t. I don’t really care.

I guess my point is, you’re wasting your time if you try to advise me on issues relating to diet, weight loss, or eating habits. Enough said.

And Tom, if you’re reading this, do treat yourself to a good steak once in a while. It really won’t hurt you. I’m sure the person I gave the book to will get a lot more out of it than I would.

I Love Books

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You know — the old fashioned printed kind.

A while back, while reading through the previous night’s incoming Twitter tweets, I came upon a tweet by Miraz, my co-author on our WordPress 2 book, that linked to a blog post titled “I hate books.” I clicked the link to check it out. In the post, Miraz outlined what she hates about printed books and her frustrations about not being able to buy certain books as ebooks or MP3s.

At the risk of being stoned to death by the rest of you folks, I’m rather old fashioned and like traditional paper books. There’s something about a book that I find appealing. Maybe it’s the feel of the cover and pages, the ability to easily flip back and forth, the use of scrap paper or postcards as bookmarks.

When I read, my brain somehow records where on the page I read something interesting, so I can later flip back through the pages with the thought “lower left page” and zero in on the text I’m looking for.

Lord of the Rings

I have beautiful illustrated editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and wouldn’t give them up for anything — I’ve read each of them at least twice now (and their cheap paperback predecessors three times).

There’s always at least one book beside my bed, one under the seat in my helicopter, one in my camper, and one in our vacation cabin. My office is lined with bookshelves holding the books I need to consult to get my writing or computer or aviation work done. I simply get out of my chair, pull down a book, consult its index or TOC, and find the content I need. I also have an entire shelf unit dedicated to the books I’ve written; it gives me pleasure to look at it once in a while and remember that all those words came out of me.

And let’s face it: real books don’t need batteries or a special device — that could break when dropped — to operate.

When I’m finished with my books, I donate them to my local library, so they live on and on for others to enjoy. Since I tend to have more liberal reading tastes than the folks who buy for the library, I help round out their collections. Lately, I’ve been selling them on Amazon.com, just to generate some cash to help support my book-buying habit. I very rarely throw a book away — or recycle it as paper.

I’ve tried to cut back on my book buying, but can’t always turn down a good book I want to read.

I should mention here that I do carry ebook editions of several classics in my Palm Treo smartphone. After all, I can’t carry a paper book everywhere I go and I absolutely hate being stuck somewhere without something to do or read. I’ve recently read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Doctor Dolittle on my Treo and am currently working through The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (again).

But when I sit down to read, I want to read words printed on paper. I guess I’m just old fashioned. Or maybe I’m just not satisfied with the ebook solutions that have come out of publishers and device makers.

What do you think?

Visual QuickStart Motor Skills

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It’s all coming back to me.

It’s no secret that Apple will soon — well, hopefully sometime in 2009, anyway — release an update to Mac OS X. It should be numbered 10.6 and it’s definitely called Snow Leopard. But that’s all I can say about it. I’m under nondisclosure and I take this stuff very seriously.

I’m working on a revision to my Mac OS X Visual QuickStart Guide. I just rather belatedly realized that this is the first VQS I’ve worked on in over a year and a half. The last was Leopard (10.5), which was released the same day Leopard hit the Apple stores. I think it was late October 2007. I clearly remember working on it while I traveled. I even blogged about it here, here, here, and here.

I don’t just write VQSes. I also do layout. I write and lay out in InDesign. This year, it’s a real breeze. Not only do I have all the real estate on my 24″ iMac monitor, but I also have another 24″ of real estate on the Samsung sitting next to it.

As I work, I find myself repeating the same keystrokes and mouse drags I performed all those months ago. The shortcuts and techniques have all come back to me — my hands fly over the keyboard and mouse without consulting my brain — and miraculously, they get it right. I even reprogrammed Photoshop actions using the same keystrokes I used for the last VQS project.

Is it any wonder I can completely revise typical page, with new screenshots and added page references, in less than 30 minutes?

The page reference addition is something I’m pretty excited about. Because InDesign has always lacked a good cross-referencing feature, I had to manually reference everything. As a result, I kept it simple and stuck to chapter references. For example, “I tell you more about disks and volumes in Chapter 6.” But when InDesign CS4 was released, it had one feature that made it worth the upgrade for me: cross-referencing. I think that by referencing exact pages in the book, rather than making vague references to chapter numbers, I’m making the book far more valuable as a reference tool than ever before.

At this point, two chapters are done. I’ve got 24 more to go. I’m sure you’ll read more about my progress here.

You’ll have to wait until Snow Leopard hits the shelves to read more about it.

The Flat Belly Diet

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Don’t waste your money.

I am an idiot. Throughout the past ten years or so, I’ve been conned by at least a half dozen “best-selling” diet books. I thought I’d learned my lesson. But when I picked up The Flat Belly Diet book at a Borders bookstore last week, I said “this is the last diet book I’ll ever buy.”

I should have quit with the previous one.

Another “Breakthrough Diet Plan”

The Flat Belly Diet is yet another attempt — apparently successful — to sell America’s overweight women on an easy way to lose weight. Trouble is, there’s there’s not much that’s either easy or effective about it.

Every “breakthrough” diet has a gimmick. This one has three:

  • The Four-Day Anti-Bloat Jumpstart. This is a mind game, pure and simple. You follow a strict and not exactly convenient diet plan and keep a journal of your thoughts, feelings, and challenges for four days. The goal? Lose your water weight. Up to 7 pounds of it! Well, that’s what one person on the plan lost, anyway. I’m not stupid enough to confuse water weight and bloating gas with fat.
  • MUFAs. This is the biggie. MUFA (pronounced MOO-fah) stands for monounsaturated fat. It’s the “good” fat and The Flat Belly Diet presents one example after another to prove why MUFAs are healthful foods. (Okay, I get it already.) But this is a gimmick with real punch for women — after all, dark chocolate is a MUFA! Yes, ladies, this diet lets you eat chocolate. How can you resist?
  • Get a flat belly without doing “crunches.” Yes, like most diet books, this one promises again and again that you can flatten your belly without exercise. But then it includes an exercise program — if you want better results. Better results than a 6-pound loss in 32 days? What the hell do you think?

Of course, the book is only part of a huge marketing machine. There are already add-on pocket guides and cookbooks. There’s also a Web site, which is offered on a free “trial” basis to book readers. After that, you have to pay. And pay, and pay. After all, isn’t that what “breakthrough diet plans” are all about? Creating a money-making machine to separate desperately overweight people from their money?

When will we see MUFA-fortified “snack packs” on supermarket shelves in yellow in pink packaging? Give them a month or so — they’re probably in production now.

Reality Check

Here’s the reality of dieting and weight control for middle-aged women. You put on fat when you consume more calories — the energy in your food — than you burn in your daily life. As you age and your hormone situation changes, your metabolism slows down and you burn fewer calories. You start fattening up.

If you want to lose weight, you need to take in fewer calories than you burn. You can do this three ways:

  • Eat less of the same stuff. Let’s face it: portion control in this country is a joke. We often choose restaurants based on portion size for the money spent rather than quality or flavor. It’s the American Way of eating. Next time you sit down at a restaurant with a typical portion in front of you, cut it in half and take half home for tomorrow. At home, simply make less food. Use smaller plates. There are many things you can do to eat less. Stop making excuses and just do it.
  • Eat smarter food. Yes, a bag of potato chips is a wonderful-tasting snack. And yes, it seems to “satisfy” your hunger better than a handful of carrot sticks. But guess which one has fewer calories? Duh. Read the damn labels on the food you eat — choose foods with fewer calories per serving. Eat more unprocessed foods, like salads and fresh vegetables and fruits.
  • Get more exercise. Take a walk around the block at lunchtime. Walk to do your errands. Walk your dog. Take a hike with your spouse or kids or grandkids. Take the stairs at the mall. Park on the far end of the parking lot rather than in the closest space. These little bits of exercise can make a huge change in your metabolism if you simply keep moving.

The thing that got me to buy The Flat Belly Diet was the fact that it mentioned calories. (So many diet plans don’t — they lead you to believe that you can eat as much as you like of certain types of food — the hell with balanced diets!) Its diet plan is pretty simple (after the first four days): four meals a day, 400 calories per meal, 1 MUFA per meal. Do you really need a book to tell you that? Of course not. I just did.

But I’ll tell you this, too: 1600-calories a day might not be the right number for you. I know it’s not the right number for me. I don’t lose weight until I drop down to 1000-1200 calories a day. This is probably why so many people on The Flat Belly Diet only lost 5 or 6 pounds after 32 days of dieting. I can lose 5 or 6 pounds in a week and not even feel it — that’s normal body weight fluctuation for me.

In defense of The Flat Belly Diet, they’re trying to convince you that following their plan helps you make a lifestyle change. 1600 calories a day is doable, they argue. It won’t hurt. Is that true for you? I know it’s not for me. When I want to lose weight, I quickly get frustrated when I hit a plateau and stop losing. I know 1600 calories a day won’t do it for me — not unless I take up jogging.

And here’s another thing: I’ve looked at the book’s recipes and menus and portion sizes and guess what? They cover the first two points of my Reality Check list above. This is common sense stuff, ladies! This is the same thing you’d learn in Weight Watchers or by consulting a dietician. Eat less, eat smarter. Toss in one or two good, brisk walks a day and you’ll be able to lose weight without yet another fad diet guiding your meal plans.

What will I be doing with my copy of The Flat Belly Diet? Donating it to my local library. Hopefully, I can save some of my neighbors a few bucks.

Writing Tips

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Some wisdom from the trenches.

My meeting the other day with a wannabe writer made me realize that there are a lot of people out there who want to write but simply don’t have a clue about many of the basics. So I thought I’d start a new series of articles here. The idea is to share some of my insight with the folks who understand that they don’t know everything and that they can learn from other writers.

I realize that this sounds sarcastic, but I think it’s pretty close to the mark. So many wannabe writers simply don’t understand the basics of writing — or writing for a living. They have this glamorized idea of what it’s like to be a writer. They think it’s easy. And while it may be easy for them to write, it isn’t easy for most folks to make a living as a writer.

And that’s what it all comes down to. As a commenter here said, writers write. But if you can’t get paid for your writing, you’ll probably have to work a “real” job to earn a living. And that might not have enough time to write. So the goal of anyone who wants to be a writer should be to get paid for writing. Then they’ll have plenty of time to write.

My goal in this series is to not only provide tips to help you be a better writer, but to help wannabe writers or new writers understand how they can make a living as a writer and what that living might be like.

I’ve already written a number of posts that you might find helpful if you’re interested in learning more about being a writer. I’ve listed the ones that I think are best here:

I learned two things in the hour it took me to compile this list:

  • The list is a lot longer than I expected it to be. I wrote a lot about writing since I began blogging nearly 5 years ago. This list doesn’t include all the posts in the Writing category, either.
  • Before writing Saturday’s post, I hadn’t written anything worthwhile about writing since February 2008.

I urge you to read any of the posts listed above that you think you might find interesting. Comment on them, too. Your comments will help me develop ideas for new posts about related topics.

In the meantime, I’ll use the “Writing Tips” title for a bunch of short new posts that cover some of the basics. I promise not to be too chatty.