Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #200709 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-22
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Kathy Lette
'Eat this book!'

Synopsis
Literary agents are famous for lunching, and there is no more famous agent than Ed Victor. If Ed can lose weight without changing his lifestyle, so can anyone.The Obvious Diet recognises that the rules we make ourselves are the rules we are most likely to stick to. It shows how to devise an eating regime that is based on avoiding your own particular weaknesses, whether that is carbohydrates, animal fats or sugar. It works because, rather than imposing a rigid plan from on high, it allows you to mix and match elements from different diets to suit your own lifestyle. And with ideas, tips and plenty of recipes from Ed's celebrity friends and clients, including a foreword from Nigella Lawson, the book also provides lots of glamorous anecdotes and inspiration to help you stick to your plan. Dieting has never been this interesting!

Excerpted from The Obvious Diet by Ed Victor. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One of the advantages of The Obvious Diet is that you can mix and match elements from any other diet regime. For example, I use the Cabbage Soup Recipe from the Sacred Heart Memorial Hospital 7 Day Fat Burning Plan for my 'Cleansing Day' - about which more later. Diet veterans know which diets are hideous and intolerable torture; conversely, anybody who has dieted has personal experience of what principles have worked in the past at not too much cost in terms of physical and mental well-being. The Obvious Diet provides you with a list of the best-known diets on the market, each with their salient points succinctly outlined. The idea is for you to choose - and use - what you like about each eating plan, adapt and incorporate information from your nutritional detective work, and then raid your store of cookbooks and recipes to find delicious meals that fit the diet you have devised for yourself.
No scales, please! An important precept of The Obvious Diet for me is the banishing of all scales from the procedure. It is simply too disheartening to watch the numbers nudge down ever so slowly on a dial calibrated in pounds, kilos or stones as the weeks go by. For me, the greatest reinforcement factor is in having your partner recognise, through a hug, how much less of you there seems to be. Not having to suck your gut in when a photograph is about to be taken is a great pleasure! And, day after day, people I haven't seen for a while comment on how slim I look. Believe me, these are far better rewards than watching a dial move a couple of notches downwards. (Although the no-scales rule is one I strongly recommend, if scale-gazing is an imperative part of how you monitor your eating habits, then there's no reason not to peek once in a while.)
There is another, immensely satisfying, tangible reward: the vast pleasure you can take in being able to button easily clothes that had been previously impossible to wear. Last New Year's Eve, unable to wear the suit I had laid out for the fashionable New York party I was attending, I made plans to go to my tailors Anderson & Sheppard in defeat to have the trousers let out. Now I have scheduled a visit to Savile Row in order to have them taken in!
Incidentally, at that New Year's Eve party, one of the guests was Mike Wallace, the 80+-year-old star of the 60 Minutes Show, looking twenty years younger and wonderfully slim and fit. My wife whispered in the ear of his wife: 'What's his secret?' The answer was to the point: 'He eats very, very little and exercises every day'.
Exercise is another important factor in The Obvious Diet. This means getting into a programme of exercise to complement your eating programme, establishing a routine - your routine - for matching your dietary efforts with a minimum regimen of exercise. It can be a mixture of anything: a round of golf, a couple of sets of tennis, a brisk walk in the park, yoga, whatever physical activity you enjoy and can do - but you must do it at least three times each week. My personal exercise regime is a one hour mixture of stretching, aerobics and weight training every Monday, Wednesday and Friday before breakfast.
Exercise helps in so many ways: expending energy makes you feel better, it helps you tone up, it provides you with a concrete measure of how much fitter you are becoming - far more reaffirming than those banished scales; it helps keep your weight in check and it makes you feel better about yourself. But, as with everything in The Obvious Diet, your exercise programme can be exactly what you want it to be, tailored to fit in with your life, as long as you put in the minimum requirement of three times a week.
A word of warning is due at this point. People who tend to lead sedentary lives and are not used to taking exercise are always advised to seek advice from their GP or a trainer before beginning an exercise programme, as sudden furious physical activity after a long period of inactivity is an almost sure-fire path to injury.
The Obvious Diet will show you how to establish your own individual eating plan, and inspire you to keep to it. It will provide many sample recipes, drawn from the recipes I use for my own Obvious Dieting - you are welcome to borrow them, but you may well be better off finding your own! There will also be advice about how not to cheat on yourself - as well as advice on when, how, and how often to cheat! One of the best things about The Obvious Diet, in my view, is that absolutely no foods are permanently banned. I will show you how to get ready to launch yourself into Obvious Dieting, how to deal with the 'Cleansing Day' each week, and how to keep the weight off over the long run. My hope is to help you break free of the start-stop tyranny of ordinary diet regimens.
The Obvious Diet will help you listen to your body, search your soul, do some basic research to gather together the nutritional information you need, and then mix these ingredients into a coherent and systematic form - your own recipe for eating healthily, feeling good about your eating, and losing weight in the most long-term and effective way possible: YOUR OWN WAY!

Customer Reviews

It may be obvious but how come we haven't managed it?
Bought this after reading a review in the Daily Telegraph. I found that the style is working really well for me as I have tried every diet known to man with mixed success, and really I just need a regular kick up the ****. We all know what makes us put on weight and this book gets us to face facts. I like the coaching/notebook approach and found that I have gone further in my dietary analysis than the book recommends. I am in week 4 of giving up bread - never thought I'd be able to say that!

Dropping pounds and names!
I have given this book 2 stars because if you follow the author's joyless eating proposals you may indeed lose weight - but will it be worth it?

Victor gives short shrift to new ideas behind the current low-carbohydrate diets, and ignores the weight of evidence suggesting that very low-fat diets only work temporarily. Indeed, his diet is low-fat, low-carbohydrate, low-protein and VERY low-taste, in the gastronomic sense!

However, the worst aspect of the book is the author's irritating inability to write a single page without mentioning "My good friend, celebrity so-and-so". Victor is a literary agent and no doubt his celebrity clients owe him some favours, but what a sensible woman like Nigella Lawson is doing writing the foreword, I can't think. Indeed, from her somewhat ambiguous tone I don't think she could, either!

You will learn nothing new from this book. It's attractively produced and easy to read with the odd good recipe. Ed Victor calls it the "way to lose weight without changing your lifestyle" but don't believe it unless your lifestyle includes Summer in the Hamptons and star-studded literary bashes at the River Cafe!

Straight talking advice for obvious results!
I bought this book after seeing the author on a TV show, and being intrigued as to how a man who was voted No 2 by Tatler magazine as 'the most invited person in London...'was able to lose over 40 pounds whilst still eating out almost daily at fine restaurants. As a lover of fine food, and having had an on-off battle with my waistline for several years, here indeed is a man after my own heart.

The book is called 'The Obvious Diet' because the guidelines he espouses are, quite frankly, plainly obvious! The book tells you absolutely nothing new about how to lose weight - most people actually already know what foods to eat and what not to in order to lose weight. What it does is guide you through a process of designing and tailoring your own plan, based on what you know your personal weaknesses are - and let's face it, you are the world's best expert on you! He summarises the features of many of the popular diets on the market at the moment - whether they be the high protein-low carb or vice versa - and encourages you to select the elements that work best for you and incorprate them into your diet.

For long term success he suggests having a weekly 'Treat Meal', as well as a weekly 'Cleansing Day', which as well as helping weight loss also acts as a detox. An added bonus is that if you are a celebrity gossip junkie like myself you will love 'The Secrets of Famous People' section, with hints and tips from the author's celebrity friends, including Nigella Lawson, Anne Robinson and Michael Winner.

An excellent book that I would highly recommend to anyone needing weight loss motivation, and fed up with all the fad diet books currently on the market.