A book that effectively presents a realistic, flexible diet.
A Los Angeles physician and nutrition specialist offers customized eating plans based on individual goals and insulin status.
Refreshingly, Jampolis (The Calendar Diet, 2012) acknowledges that “there is not a single ‘best’ way to lose weight.” Instead, she argues, diets should be customized to suit criteria like age, gender, and specific health requirements. Luckily, the author’s diet, which is in three phases, has built-in flexibility. Phase 1, the 10-day “CleanStart Plan,” aims to curb hunger by having you eat protein-rich foods and cutting dry carbohydrates like pasta and cereal. Jampolis recommends three smaller meals and one or two snacks. Phase 2, the “Customize Your Carbs Plan,” is higher-calorie and has more variety. Based on a self-diagnosis of insulin resistance or responsiveness, readers are directed to separate tracks; the insulin-resistant consume slightly more fat and fewer dense carbohydrates and fruit servings. Phase 3, the “Cycle for Success Plan,” is all about “structured flexibility.” Patients alternate between adapted versions of one or both of the previous plans in a 5:2 pattern, again based on insulin status. Interspersed quizzes, questionnaires, work sheets, and sample meal plans within the text ensure that the book is not overloaded with information. The varied layout includes bullet-pointed lists, charts indicating serving sizes of suggested foods, and inset boxes with tips labeled “Clinical Pearls.” Recipes cover all the bases, from smoothies to entrees. The case studies are particularly helpful, although the heading “SOAP Notes”—with SOAP standing for the physician’s subjective and objective responses, followed by an assessment and plan—is opaque. Indeed, the book’s unenlightening title, gimmicky naming, and acronyms—quibbles common to diet books in general—may well be its only off-putting elements. For instance, NEAT, “non-exercise activity thermogenesis,” is a fancy term for adding minutes of calorie burning here and there, while HIIT, “high-intensity interval training,” is about burning more calories in less time. A chapter on changing one’s frame of mind delivers a useful reminder that food is never without emotional connotations, while another, about maintaining health gains, targets erstwhile yo-yo dieters.
A book that effectively presents a realistic, flexible diet.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-939457-46-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ghost Mountain Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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