Eat This, Not That! is Here to Help You Lose Weight the Old Fashioned Way

Americans have problems with overeating and most every person in the land is either on a diet at present or was dieting at some point in the recent past. Dieting is a huge, multi- billion dollar business and there are many specific diet plans that promise or even guarantee results provided the plan is followed to a tee.

Special plans sometimes work but many people find them too restrictive and they drop the plan only a few weeks after they started. Is there any other way to lose weight? Well, one method that is tried and true is the old fashioned idea that you need to cut calories and exercise, with the goal being enough exercise to burn more calories than you consume. One book that promotes this historic approach to weight loss is Eat This, Not That!: The No Diet Weight Loss Solution, a book by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding.

Basic Facts About This Book:

This 304- page reference guide is divided into the following sections:

Introduction
1. 8 Foods You Should Eat Every Day, Plus 20 to Avoid at All Costs
2. At Your Favorite Restaurants
3. Eat This, Not That! Menu Decoder
4. On Holidays and Special Occasions
5. At the Supermarket
6. Drink This, not That
7. What to Eat When….You’re Tired, Stressed, or in the Mood
8. Eat This, Not That! For Kids
Index

Eat This, Not That! starts off with some general guidelines on good and bad eating. Starting with eight items you should eat every day (yogurt, carrots, tomatoes, spinach, etc.) and proceeding to twenty specific foods you should avoid (Pepperidge Farm Roasted Chicken Pot Pie, Chipotle Mexican Grilled Chicken Burrito, Burger King Triple Whopper with Cheese, Fries and Coke; etc.), this book then gets into the second and longest chapter: An alphabetical listing of many popular fast food and full service restaurants, complete with foods that make good substitutes for their high calorie, high fat, and high sodium cousins. Chapter 3 then continues with the restaurant theme by including samples of menus commonly found at different types of restaurants like breakfast diners, Mexican Cantinas, Sports Bars, etc. Key items- both good and bad- are highlighted in the menus along with some notes that help consumers decipher what certain restaurant lingo really means in terms of calories and fat.

Chapter 4 then begins the sections that focus on what you eat at home. In this chapter, holiday food selections and special occasion food selections are listed with recommended meals that are friendlier to the waistline along with meals that are higher in calories and fat. Chapter 5 then moves to specific sections of a supermarket (like the cereal aisle, snacks, cookies, dips & spreads, deli meats, pasta) with food selections that are better for you on the left side of each set of pages and the foods that are inferior on the right side. Chapter 6 is the same, except this time its drinks, including soft drinks, juices, coffee, iced coffee, beer, children’s drinks, and more.

Chapter seven switches gears slightly by recommending things to eat for certain specific reasons. If you’re low on energy, feeling stressed, or want to increase your metabolism, there are certain foods that help eliminate these problems. There are also foods that are counter- productive to these special needs, and they are listed under the Not That! heading. Chapter 8 then ends the book with some Eat This, Not That! recommendations for children.

Final Thoughts:

Hardee’s two- thirds pound Monster Thickburger contains 1,420 calories, 108 grams of fat, and 2,770 mg of sodium. Select a one- third pound Low Carb Thickburger and the numbers are reduced to 420 calories, 32 grams of fat, and 1,010 mg of sodium.

Quiznos Small Honey Mustard Chicken Sub contains 550 calories, 30 grams of fat, and 1,140 mg of sodium. Switch to a Small Honey Bourbon Chicken on Wheat Bread and the numbers are cut to 310 calories, 4 grams of fat, and 920 mg of sodium.

A one cup serving of Post Banana Nut Crunch contains 240 calories, 6 grams of fat, 12 grams of sugars, and 4 grams of fiber. Purcahse Kashi Golean cereal instead and the numbers improve to 140 calories, 1 gram of fat, 6 grams of sugars, and 10 grams of fiber, all for the same single cup of cereal.


These and other nutritional weight loss facts await the reader in this amazing little book titled Eat This, Not That!: The No Diet Weight Loss Solution. This book offers a new concept in losing weigh that is actually an old concept that many have forgotten. Most people who want to lose weight go for the quick fix by taking special dieting drugs or by joining a specific weight loss program like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. These diet plans are good, provided you can stick with the plan. Most people cannot, and they end up not only dropping the plan but also regaining all of the weigh they lost.

Eat This, Not That! brings back the often forgotten method for weight loss: The simple concept that you can lose weight without any special formulated plan by burning more calories than you consume. It is the most tested, best proven, and safest way to lose weight. It doesn’t involve starvation or taking potentially dangerous drugs. You can eat what you like, provided you choose wisely, and you need to exercise to make sure the calories are burned off each day.

This book is quite visual, and when I first noticed it on the best- seller lists, I assumed it was going to be a book full of lists and lists of different restaurant foods, grocery foods, and the like with the calorie counts for each. But Eat This, Not That! is a completely different type of book. Yes, it does list some foods, but it doesn’t try to cover every item you would ever encounter on a trip to McDonald’s or the breakfast cereal aisle. Instead, it picks out a few different foods in restaurants and grocery stores, showing the calories, fat, and sometimes sodium and/or sugar level of different foods; with a substitute food item that is comparable in size and taste that has reduced levels of these and other negative qualities. The idea with Eat This, Not That! is that a person doesn’t have to give up everything they love to eat in order to lose weight. We can still eat things we like, we just have to find substitutes that are similar in taste and that offer reduced levels of calories, fat, and sodium.

Some of the substitute items suggested in Eat This, Not That! will save the weight- conscious individual quite a few calories and fat and I was astonished when I read this book and noticed some of the extreme differences between different foods. For example, most people know that thin crust pizza is healthier than deep- dish due to the processing of the dough used to make the crust. But what I didn’t realize until I read this book is how great the differences are. Take Uno Chicago Grill, for instance. Uno’s Chicago Classic Deep Dish Pizza, individual size, contains an incredible 2,310 calories, 162 grams of fat (48 grams saturated fat), and 4,200 grams of sodium! Wow! And this is just a small, personal size pizza. This number can be cut by roughly two- thirds by substituting Uno’s Cheese and Tomato Flatbread Pizza, individual size. The nutritional facts for this pizza show only 755 calories, 30 grams of fat, and 1,815 mg of sodium. I always knew deep dish pizzas were bad, but I didn’t know the difference could be this great. A simple substitution like this one can save a person substantially, helping lead to weight loss over time.

Not all of the suggestions for food substitutions are equally dramatic in Eat This, Not That! Pizzas are one of the more extreme, but some of the differences are not that great and there is little justification for choosing the “better” food item. Take breakfast bars, for example. General Mills Honey Nut Cheerios Milk and Cereal Bar contains 160 calories, 4 grams of fat, and 14 grams of sugars per bar. Cascadian Farm Organic Multi- Grain Chewy Granola Bar includes 130 calories, 2 grams of far, and 9 grams of sugar per bar. These differences are small enough that a consumer won’t experience too much expansion of their mid section by choosing from the Not That! side of the pages.

What I like best about Eat This, Not That! is its visual component. Like I said before, this is not a simple listing of foods and their calories, fat, and sodium. This book is much more visual than that. For most of the books pages, there are actual photographs of the food items as they appear in a restaurant or as they appear on the store shelves. This is much better than simply listing the food items and the reason is because a person is far more likely to remember a food item if they can see a picture. To give another example, one of the recommended drinks is Odwalla Blueberry B Monster Smoothie. If I had to try to remember this product by name, I doubt I would be able to recall its title and find it at the grocery store. But now that I have seen the actual bottle in the picture on page 266, I know exactly what to look for. In fact, I know I have seen this product before. This visual component is one of my favorite parts of Eat This, Not That! and it is one of several reasons why I endorse this book to the extent that I do. I also like the added tips in the restaurant section. If there is an exceptionally bad food, it will be highlighted off to the side of the page under the heading “Weapon of Mass Destruction”. If there is some other important nutritional fact that needs to be pointed out, it will be listed off to the side also, under the heading “Hidden Danger”.

Overall, Eat This, Not That!: The No Diet Weight Loss Solution is an excellent book for those who want to watch what they eat and lose weight slowly, over time. I have never had any real need to watch my weight, but I must admit that Eat This, Not That! has had an effect on the way I eat and what I purchase in the store. I have actually taken many of the book’s suggestions to heart (except for the beer- all of the good beer is listed on the Not That! side of the pages. There are still some things I will not compromise!) and I have noticed a difference in my energy level and overall feeling of well- being. Eat This, Not That! doesn’t include a complete list of nutritional facts for each food item and some might wish it was more comprehensive with more restaurant food substitutions and more grocery store swap suggestions. But Eat This, Not That! is still a very handy little guide and it makes a good choice for someone who wants to lose weight slowly and doesn’t want the strictness and limitations imposed by many of the more popular diet plans.