Book Review: Grand Theft Weight Loss
Book: “Grand Theft Weight Loss — How Stealing Scientific Discoveries Outside The Diet Industry Helps You Lose Weight,” Michael Alvear, BooksGoSocial, 2021
Book Review by Mary Mikawoz
Henry Ford revolutionized the auto but he did so by borrowing from other industries. He looked at sewing machines and watch industries where they used interchangeable parts. He looked at continuous flow processes in flour and in canning industries. “He mimicked assembly line techniques from meat-packing plants and breweries.”
In a similar fashion, Michael Alvear has borrowed ideas, information and developments from other industries that have been around, in some cases for decades, and applied them to the diet industry.
First and foremost, Mr. Alvear says the very most important thing to determine is the right question to any problem. Once you have the question, you can look at the information and process it appropriately. For example, in the billion dollar industry of dieting, the only message seems to be a variety of diets but they all say, “eat less and move more.” If that worked, there would be one diet and it would work for all of us. We would all be skinny or fit but in actuality, it does not work.
Dieting is an illusion that says some foods are good and others are bad. Depending upon the particular diet, it gets confusing because they contradict each other from pro-protein to anti-carbohydrate and anti-fat diets.
Research shows that the harder you try to lose weight, the harder the body tries to fight back. Further research shows that your metabolism can slow by 15% which explains the constant lose weight quickly and then gain it back even though you are sticking to a diet.
Michael Alvear uses a number of techniques from other industries to help a person lose weight. I know a lot of people with eating disorders around the issue of food intake so although a lot of the techniques are interesting, I wonder if they will work.
We can control what we put in our mouth but what our body does in the process of metabolizing it is another issue. We have genetics and we have the environment. How much does each serve to affect us?
There are bigger issues involved. Why can’t we just accept ourselves as we are and believe in HAES which stands for “Health at Every Size.” When will society just accept that people come in different heights, weights, shapes, colours and features. We would never expect a Chihuahua or Poodle to act and look like a Great Dane or a Husky and yet when it comes to people, we need to somehow fit some magical mould of what it means to be “perfect” including people going to extremes with getting surgeries and starving themselves to death.
I give this book a 4 out of 5 for stepping out of the diet industry box in an effort to bring in some other angles to look at.
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