Weight Loss for Dummies: A Review of The Ultimate Weight Loss Book by Rob Brinkman

Reviewed by Magdalena Ball

If you have read a lot of diet books, and are looking for the magic cure, don’t waste your money. You already know how to lose weight. Eat less, exercise more, and don’t go on fad diets. There. Hundreds of dollars of totally free advice, all in the space of one sentence! The promotional materials for this book are a little over the top. Big red letters proclaiming that “I lost TONS of PURE FAT! AND SO CAN YOU!” followed by a number of enthusiastic testimonials , and more hype like “THIS PROGRAM IS PACKED WITH WEIGHT LOSS SECRETS” Of course you won’t lose pure fat. No one does. When you lose weight you lose a combination of fat and muscle. There are also no weight loss secrets. If there were, they would probably be published in a prestigious journal, since there are very few, if any, secrets to weight loss. Still, the book isn’t particularly expensive, it is kind of fun to work through, and does have a few nifty tools. So what do you get for your $15.05? Well the e-book is really more of an executable presentation than a book. Each “page” is like a slide, with a paragraph or so of information. Since you enter your name into it at the beginning, it does customise the text to your name (a little cheesy), and it also plays some department store type piano music in the background if you want. However, there is nothing in this book which is new or revolutionary in any sense, nor should there be. As The Ultimate Weight Loss Book very succinctly points out, fad diets are doomed to failure, and the only thing which will help you lose fat and keep it off is to make a lifestyle change which is healthy and workable for the long term.

To do that, you work out how many calories you need to eat each day to achieve the weight loss you want, exercise more, drink lots of water, and make sure that you eat reasonable quantities of healthy and satisfying food, avoiding empty calories. The book does contain some things like a tool for calculating your body mass index, and the risk associated with that, along with a body fat % calculator, a calculator for working out the amount of calories you need to consume each day to reach or maintain your ideal weight, and some information on food groups, the FDA food pyramid, some low fat recipes, sample daily menus, some Internet links, a printable calorie and fat tabulator, and a number of pages of tips and tricks. The Ultimate Weight Loss book is about 55 pages long (although each page has only about a paragraph on it), and could easily be distilled into a single page report.

On the other hand, all of the advice is perfectly reasonable, and will most certainly work if you take it. The book is easy to follow; easy to memorise (if you haven’t already memorised these basic points of nutrition), and has been designed in a very simple, fun, and lightly interactive way. There are worse things to waste your money on such as expensive pre-prepared food plans (I tried one very well known and still in existence program a very long time ago, and it was awful – the food was bad, unsatisfying, and I ended up pretty ill), fad diet books which can wreck your health and body, and worst of all, diet pills. So if you want a little nudge in the right direction, and don’t mind re-reading the sensible advice you know you have to follow to lose weight already, The Ultimate Weight Loss Book is for you. You can even get your money back by sending in a photo and testimonial for their promo page. Just don’t expect any secrets, and don’t swallow the hype. This is just another sensible guide in a pretty package.