When a book is written by the editor in chief and food-and-nutrition editor of Men’s Health Magazine, you know what to expect!
David Zinczencko and Matt Goulding have created a slim, useful book that can easily become the best friend of any person who likes to eat a lot and do most of their eating outside their home.
This slim book is Eat This Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide: The No-Diet Weight Loss Solution which has become a highly popular nutrition and lifestyle book. This book was made to help people who want to avoid getting fat (or wish to lose weight) in today’s problematic food culture.
Eat This Not That: Overview
In recognition of the continuous uphill battle that is involved in losing weight and staying slim, the authors have created this book to make you aware of calorie landmines that all of us step on every day, particularly when we eat out or order takeaways.
Whether you are an avid dieter or just the regular guy or gal around town, eating out is an inescapable necessity. We think we are eating good food, misled by terms such as ‘fresh’, ‘organic’, ‘fat free’ and so on. But, how many calories are we actually packing in?
That is what this book tells us.
When you know foods that are in the red calorie-wise, you can easily avoid them and choose something healthier instead. For instance, at Dunkin’ Donuts, a ham, egg, cheese sandwich has fewer calories than a multigrain bagel with ‘lite’ cheese. You’d have thought the opposite, right? It’s little nuggets like these that you get throughout the book.
After reading this book, a perceptive reader will see how easily food chains and fast food moguls manipulate popular perception to sell pre-packaged foods. Their liberal use of ‘fat-free’, ‘cholesterol-free’ and ‘multi-grain’ needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
Eat This Not that Review
The book blasts many of America’s popular myths about readymade foods. The secretive world of restaurants is finally laid bare and the reader can expect to be shocked and angered by many of the revelations in here. There are some pleasant surprises on the way too. The book also shares a lot of helpful information on healthy food choices.
The information is presented in a very attractive manner, with pictures on the left showing foods you can eat and those on the right showing foods you cannot eat.
The authors have not forgotten to add many helpful suggestions on how to eat fewer calories when people eat out. A fine example is to eat half an entrée and packing the other half for home, or having a bowl of healthy soup before the main course. Along with the useful information on calories, tips like these make this book a no-diet weight loss solution.
If you love eating out and have been on the lookout for a guide to America’s most popular eateries and menus, this is a book worth going over.
Pros:
- Easy to carry and read
- Lots of pictures
- Neatly tabulated information
- An effective dining-out guide
- Has calorie, sodium and fat count of all foods
- Helpful tips and suggestions
- Educative
Cons
- Features only American brands and restaurants and therefore has limited usability
- Does not include carbohydrate count of foods
- Does not give enough importance to nutrition
- Pairing of certain foods may be difficult to understand
- Some suggestions are misleading (for example, the book says that its diet recommendations will help people lose belly fat and reshape their body)
Click here to read more about Eat This Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide: The No-Diet Weight Loss Solution
In Conclusion:
Great pictures and loads of useful information for people who eat out frequently. It reveals heretofore unknown information about restaurant food. To that extent, it is helpful in losing weight. However, it cannot be considered as a serious weight loss book because there is no emphasis on healthy food, healthy eating or exercising.
Just remember to skim through before you step out on a Sunday night for that large family dinner!
