Book Review

by SUZANNE SCHREINER & r & You: One a Diet by Mehmet Oz


and Michael Roizen & r & & r & & lt;span class= "dropcap " & & lt;span class= "dropcap " & M & lt;/span & ost diets have it all wrong, say doctors Mehmet Oz and Michael Roizen. The reason? "It's you versus food in a lifetime heavyweight fight." But the fight is always fixed -- and not in your favor.





So how to avoid a knockout? According to the doctors, with elegance and smarts, and a big slug of science -- chapters on how the body is designed to work, on the physiology of appetite and the biology of fat, and on how brain hormones and emotions influence your eating. Words like ghrelin (the hunger hormone) and leptin (the satiety hormone) and omentum (an organ near the stomach that stores fat) will insinuate themselves into your vocabulary as you read. You'll study labels like a Talmudic scholar and steer away from high-fructose corn syrup (because it doesn't turn off the hunger signals in your brain, so you keep eating).





The pages of YOU are strewn with YOU Tips, Factoids and Myth Busters. Mary Poppins may have sung about a spoonful of sugar, but the doctors suggest a handful of nuts to placate your growling stomach. Privation is no friend to weight loss. And sex, you'll be delighted hear, may help keep you satisfied -- sex and hunger are regulated through the same brain chemical.





The 14-Day YOU Diet gives the reader a day-by-day exercise and eating plan, complete with a shopping list of staples and menus that actually sound good. But if you think all the elegance and smarts will somehow make the gym unnecessary, think again. At least 30 minutes of walking every day, along with some resistance training to build muscle and burn fat more efficiently, are built into the plan.





Roizen and Oz know most of us will make wrong turns from time to time, at the pizza parlor or over the box of Krispy Kremes some thoughtless co-worker toted into the office. So they advise you to lose the guilt and adopt the nonjudgmental YOU Diet Mantra: "At the next available moment, make an authorized YOU-turn and steer yourself back onto the road to Persistence."