The False Fat Diet: The Revolutionary 21-Day Program for Losing the Weight You Think Is Fat

New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 2001. Near Fine. If you know you swell up after bee stings, you avoid bees. If you know a cl ose encounter with poison ivy will leave you itching and scratching for a w eek, you keep your eyes open for three-leafed plants. But, according to The False Fat Diet, many of us spend our entire lives eating foods that "don't agree with us," and as a result carry around extra pounds, put up with all ergies, and go through life looking older and feeling less energetic than w e should. Of course, the hook here is weight loss. If you eliminate the foo ds that make you gassy and bloated, you can probably drop pounds instantly- -up to 10 pounds of "false fat" in a week, Elson Haas says--and then keep d ropping weight in subsequent weeks and months, the real fat, all without fe eling hungry or deprived. Haas offers two ways to figure out if you've got food sensitivities: a medi cal blood test or an elimination diet, in which you cut out certain foods f or a while, then gradually reintroduce them to see if they're the ones caus ing the problems. (The usual suspects: dairy, wheat, corn, sugar, eggs, soy , peanuts.) The False Fat Diet offers detailed instructions on how to elimi nate each of these foods, and also offers ideas about supplements to take a nd other strategies to deal with the strangeness of not eating what are pro bably your favorite foods. Although the basic idea behind The False Fat Diet is counterintuitive--that the foods you like and crave the most are causing you the most severe physical problems--the potential benefits are enormous. Haas and Cameron Stauth tell numerous stories of patients (including Stauth and his sister) who lost weight instantly,