Raised on the standard American diet, I’ve been overweight for most of my life. Around 1995, I decided to read up on nutrition and health, and devise an eating strategy. My goal was to eat myself into a six-pack and achieve optimal nutrition. Unfortunately, it didn't quite happen like that.
The first book I read on health and nutrition was John Robbins’ Diet for a New America, and it shocked the hell out of me. I had no idea how cruelly animals were treated in our industrial agricultural system, or that meat it produces contains pesticides, hormones, growth and appetite stimulants, tranquilizers and antibiotics. It was enough to make a person sick—or vegetarian in my case.
Vegetarianism jibed with my personal ethics, and I assumed that what I was doing was healthy—until my health started to decline. Although I looked thinner, the ring of fat around my midsection had actually grown, and my body became much frailer. Lethargic and weak, I would often catch colds, and in October of 2001 I suddenly came down with debilitating, year-round allergies, or chronic rhinitis. Undaunted though, I kept at it, delving deeper into vegetarian and vegan literature. I even started running. Yet despite all of this, I was still fat. Fat and frail.
When I would talk with people about weightloss, they would invariably say the same thing. It's a numbers game: calories in, calories out. If you expend more calories than you eat, then you are guaranteed to lose weight. If you eat more than you expend, then you are guaranteed to get fat. It’s that simple. However, as I would later find out, it’s not that simple at all. It’s actually quite complex.
My foray into this realm of complexity began about a year and a half ago, in 2010, when a friend recommended reading Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth. Always up for some controversy, I picked up a copy, and was inspired by her environmental message, but found the book lacking in two crucial aspects: Keith completely misrepresented vegetarians, the group her book targets, and she seemed to know nearly nothing about nutritional health. Yet this didn’t stop her from making a bunch of random and often times vague nutritional recommendations that including eating more animal protein, saturated fat and cholesterol.
Unpersuaded by Keith’s claims, I nevertheless wanted to understand how she came to have such unorthodox nutritional views in the first place, and scoured her index for clues. Two sources kept appearing over and over: Protein Power by Drs. Michael and Mary Eades and Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. Although written by two respected doctors, Protein Power sounded like an Atkins-type fad diet, so I shelved it and opted to read Good Calories, Bad Calories. As it turned out, this one source was a much richer vein than the book itself.
Taubes was a revelation. His book totally obliterated the old “calories in, calories out” model, and I finally understood why—vegetarian, vegan or carnivore—I could not lose weight. Unfortunately, Taubes’ book did not contain any specific dietary information, so I was at a loss about how to put this information to work.
Enter Jonathan Bailor and the New Science of Slim. The first thing I noticed about Bailor’s book was how well it was written. He has a very casual writing style that I found inviting. The next thing I noticed was how superbly the book was researched. Not only is Bailor easy to understand, but every fact he presents is backed by a host of credible sources—a rarity in science writing of any kind.
Much like Taubes, Bailor spends a good portion of the book showing how and why the calorie in-calorie out theory is false, but he takes the discussion much farther by giving specific dietary recommendations based on four factors: satiety, aggression, nutrition and efficiency. (Sorry, but you'll have to read the book for a detailed explanation of these factors.) Similar to the Paleo Diet, which I have had much success with recently, Bailor recommends cutting out simple carbohydrates, like rice, wheat, corn, potatoes and sugar, and upping the intake of nutrient- and protein-rich seafood, lean meats, non-starchy vegetables, nuts, seeds and fruits.
Bailor does not stop with diet, though. He also devotes a hefty chunk of the book to the subject of exercise, and the benefits of short, infrequent, high-intensity resistance training. Although I’m not a bodybuilder by any means, I’ve been lifting weights on and off for over a decade, and recently started dabbling with Cross Fit, yet in all these years I have never encountered anything similar to Bailor’s hormone-triggering eccentric lifting techniques—a way of maximizing muscle fiber use while minimizing actual lifting time. These are simple, easy, effective lifting techniques that anyone can do, anywhere. You won’t need to go to a gym or purchase any special equipment. A huge bonus.
Perhaps the most refreshing thing about Bailor’s book is that he is not pushing any product, industry or ideology above and beyond the book itself. He has merely collated the results of hundreds of current scientific findings into a compact, easy-to-understand guide for the nutritionally perplexed. The Smarter Science of Slim will help you discover that losing weight and feeling great do not involving eating less and hauling your butt into the gym five nights a week. It’s about eating and exercising more intelligently.
If you want to learn how to eat right, exercise more effectively and shed fat, I can’t think of a better book.
