Preface
“The biggest seller is cookbooks and the second is diet books – how not to eat what you’ve just learned how to cook.”
~Andy Rooney
I began writing this guide for myself, a simple reminder to help me stay focused and committed to losing weight. It started with a simple food diary and spread sheet with some inspirational quotes, weight loss facts, and my general thoughts on losing weight.
Through my education and experience as a Chiropractor I knew exactly what I needed to do to lose weight and how to do it, but even with my extensive education I needed to be reminded and kept motivated. This book is intended to help successfully guide you to your weight loss goals. It is not so much a prose on what to eat or what exercises to do, but a guide on the tools and skills needed to become your own weight loss doctor.
I spend some time talking about other diet plans and weight loss programs and a lot of time discussing the obesity epidemic and why diets are not working for most people. This is not intended to discourage or depress you, but rather should be an eye opening revelation that perhaps the way we think about losing weight is wrong. It is socially acceptable to critical of other peoples unhealthy habits, such as smoking, but mentioning being overweight, fat, or obese is taboo. Even between husband and wife, father and son addressing weight and the adverse health effects can be an awkward conversation, but obesity related disease is killing our loved ones and our selfs in epidemic proportions.
The information provided in these pages comes from the accumulation of my education and experience losing weight. The basic scientific principles should be common knowledge as it is often taught to us in middle school health classes and is readily available from many sources such as the FDA, WHO, FTC, ACA, AMA, and many other colleges and research centers. The difficulty in researching this book presented with the same difficulty many of us find when trying to lose weight by ourselves, and that is weeding out the real scientific research from the cleaver and deceitful marketing many weight loss companies put out.
As I write this I am still on my weight loss journey and worry what sort of credibility someone that is still overweight has on writing a weight loss book. I’ve convinced myself that going through the physical and emotional struggles of being over weight and fighting the weight loss process should allow me to relate to other dieters in a way someone that has been fit their entire lives can not. I have decided that losing a significant amount of weight is not a prerequisite for being an authority on weight loss, and going through the process only equips you with empathy not any more knowledge. This is particularly good for you, because it means that you can become an expert on weight loss before you even start to lose weight. This is the ultimate goal of my book, to educate you about weight loss and make you an expert so your health is completely in your hands.
