400 Calorie Fix:

400 Calorie Fix By: Liz Vaccariello
Non-fiction: Food, 414 pages
Book Count: 19

I read this book as a friend recommended it as a book that was helpful for eyeballing the size of food and the number of calories in it.  They did not recommend the diet itself.  After reading the book I can see why.  The book does have a number of useful guides to how big a serving size of different things are and it does help you see the number of calories in different things.  But the diet itself is something I can not believe would make it past the ask your doctor first stage.  For starters the author suggests that you eat 400 calories at a time (hence the book title). This works fine if you are having 4-6 meals a day, but for when you are dieting they have a 2 week plan where you eat 3 meals a day, or 1200 calories. Even they point out that you need to take a vitamin with this, as it is impossible to eat all the nutrients you need with so few calories.  And the recipes that they have in the book, for the most part do not use the swap outs and changes that most diet books use.  For example the meal salads will be 2 cups of lettuce and then a couple of tablespoons of cheese and nuts, using up all your calories on small amounts of high calorie foods instead of large amounts of different low calorie veggies.  A meal might be a couple of deep fried chicken wings and a beer or it could have 2 peaches for a side, because that's how many calories are left, and the fact that most people wouldn't eat two whole peaches at one time is irrelevant.  They also make the outrageous claim that you won't feel hungry on this plan even though you are on a starvation diet and their preset 2 week meals has days where both your lunch and dinner are a salad or a sandwich so it isn't even varied foods.