How to keep to a diet

Press, 21 November 1981, Page 15

How to keep to a diet

The Dieter’s Guide to Success. By Audrey Eyton and Dr Henry Jordan. Fontana, 1981. 126 pp. $3.95 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Lorna Buchanan)

For the price of a takeaway meal, or of an elaborate dessert in a restaurant, this book can be bought and digested instead. It takes about as long to read as it takes to eat a leisurely meal. The subtitle — “100 ways to beat temptation and get slim” — 'indicates the contents. This is not a book of diets. Diets, it proclaims, are only half the story. The other half is how to keep to a diet, and this book offers ideas on how to be strong when temptation lurks. Unlike most accounts of how to lose weight, this book manages to be light and frothy, as well as informative. No subject is laboured. Indeed, the opposite is true as the sections jump from topic to topic. Each subject appears in an alphabetical listing. No tedium can occur when “mindless eating” and “Mother” are sandwiched in between “leftovers” and "office celebrations.” This is a book which encourages “skipping” meals, and which tells how to resist those would-be helpers who insist that a dieter “must eat something.” The authors assure their readers that a healthy person can survive for nearly a month without food without disastrous illeffects — not that they recommend quite such a savage system for losing weight. However, they say that hunger and its associated pangs soon pass; the secret is to find a diversion when one wants food; and when eating, to eat slowly. Fast eating produces more hunger. Among their other useful hints, they remind women that the desire for an eating binge is not unusual a few days

before menstruation, and that those who are trying to lose weight should prepare for this by increased activity and by avoiding easy access to food. The authors suggest that slimmers should make the most of loss of appetite during a mild illness. And food should not be used as a comforter because one has suffered, or is suffering, an untypical day. There is no such thing as a typical day. Such is the content of this most useful and encouraging little book.