Product Description

Why is it that even though we might maintain our high school weight, few of us maintain our high school belt size?

In your twenties and thirties, the layers of fat on top of your abs were the problem–but once you reach middle-age, the enemy shifts. The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle is the first book to deal specifically with the issues we face in the next stage of life, providing a plan for eliminating the unhealthy fat that accumulates around the organs–visceral fat–that is the true cause of the middle-aged bulge.

The good news is that with the right diet, visceral fat can be quickly reduced and eliminated, enhancing both your looks and your health. Even after twenty years researching and refining the science of weight loss and management, bestselling authors Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades fell victim to the middle-aged middle themselves. Although otherwise fit and healthy, both lost the flat belly that signals youth. In The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle, they share the simple dietary program they created to shed the weight.

Discover:
• How eating saturated fat can actively trim your middle
• Why the “eat less, exercise more” prescription fails–and what to do about it
• Why “inner” and “outer” tube fat measurements are important to your health
• How to fight the fat stored inside your liver that leads to hard-to-lose middle-body flab

With The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle the doctor duo that brought you to the low-carb lifestyle shows you how to regain in midlife the figure of sleek, flat-bellied youth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18663 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-08
• Released on: 2009-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307450715
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Acknowledged as experts in the science of low-carb nutrition, MICHAEL R. EADES and MARY DAN EADES are the authors of Protein Power, the sixty-three-week New York Times bestseller, as well as twelve other books in the fields of health, diet, and exercise.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1

Profiles in History

“Our brains are hardwired. The cortex in the back of our brains scans the environment looking for fertile mates.”

—Louann Brizendine, M.D., author, The Female Brain

If you believe the attractiveness of a slender body and especially a flat abdomen are a recent Western, industrialized-countries phenomenon, history will prove you wrong. In cultures around the world and across the millennia, a slender middle as the hallmark of health, vigor, and beauty has nearly always headed the list of desirable physical attributes in a mate.

Take, for example, Queen Hatshepsut, fifth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt and the most powerful woman in her world. She died at age 50 from a ruptured tooth abscess, an ignominious end to be sure. That notwithstanding, as she was borne to her grave a hoary, desiccated corpse, swaddled in folds of her own fat, her funeral procession passed myriad statuary and glyphs representing her, not as she was but as she wished to be: young, sleek, and of slender silhouette. Modern analysis of her mummified remains, however, tells us such was not the case. Middle age had caught up to the queen. It appears that along with being quite obese, she had wretched teeth, bones riddled with tumors, and may have suffered from diabetes as well. Yet during her lifetime and for all the many centuries since her death, her svelte form in statues and paintings belied the middle-aged sprawl of the real Hatshepsut.

In 1991, feminist Naomi Wolf opined, “Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.” In other words, Ms. Wolf views our opinion of beauty as being based not on any innate or inborn sense of what is attractive, but as a product of our cultural indoctrination. We think a pretty face is pretty or a flat belly is attractive for no other reason than that’s the way we’ve been programmed to think by the society in which we live. The covers of Playboy, Playgirl, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, she claims, set our standards for attractiveness, not the reverse. According to Wolf and others of her opinion, there is no universal standard for human beauty. Were we not programmed by advertisers and the entertainment industry, we would find a fat man or woman just as attractive and desirable as a thin one.

We disagree.

Years of serious scientific study, across numerous disciplines, prove otherwise. Our attraction to a pretty face and a flat belly is in our genes and is an atavistic throwback to a time when such features represented health and the ability to reproduce—important requirements in the selection of a mate. As Harvard Professor Deirdre Barrett puts it, these deep-seated universal standards of beauty “reflect our evolutionary need to estimate the health of others from their physical characteristics.”

It’s not our cultural programming that sets our standards for beauty; it is our instinct.

As recently as seventy-five years ago there were no reliable antibiotics available to fight bacterial infections and absolutely nothing to deal with myriad other infectious agents to which we humans fall prey. Many diseases common to our great-grandparents’ generation and before are virtually never seen now. And many of these diseases left disfiguring marks on their victims. For instance, it was common in those days to see people with terrible scarring from smallpox, along with ringworms and running sores from other skin infections. The peaches-and-cream complexions of persons of the opposite sex advertised their health. Who wouldn’t be more attracted to someone with smooth, unblemished skin? Rickets and other diseases struck their marks on the bones, leaving their victims with obvious physical deformities. Who in choosing a mate wouldn’t be more attracted to someone with a symmetrical physique and straight posture? And women who were youthful and flat of belly were more fertile and therefore more attractive as mates. This all sounds cruel, but unfortunately biology is cruel. Our ideas of beauty are not driven by Madison Avenue, but by the microchip in our DNA, placed there by Mother Nature using her most indispensable tool: natural selection.

But is Mother Nature’s handiwork accurate? Does it apply today? Or is it an artifact of evolution like the vestigial tails on some apes? We would argue that it is accurate. At least the part that makes us perceive a thin waist as more desirable than a thick one.

Our hard-wiring compels us to be drawn to potential mates with slender midsections because we are drawn to health. Although we may not perceive it at a conscious level, at the DNA level we want to mix our genes with those of someone who is healthy. That innate desire translates to our brains’ singling out those with narrow waists and deeming them attractive. And with good reason. As it turns out, those flat abdomens usually reside on healthy people.

For over a century scientists have known that the forces of natural selection have molded our bones, muscles, organs, biochemistry, and physiology to provide optimal health under our evolutionary circumstances. Those who didn’t adapt died off. Those who made the cut are the ancestors of we who are alive today. About forty years ago researchers started applying the laws of natural selection, not just to physical adaptations, but to mental adaptations as well. Evolutionary psychologists realized that animals born with instinctive fears—for example, fear of falling or fear of snakes or fear of the dark—had a greater likelihood of surviving and passing on those inbred fears to their progeny. In the same way, desires were genetically hardwired. Those who developed the instinct to search for mates using looks and/or body size and shape as indicators of good reproductive health were more likely to populate the world with their offspring who carried these same genes.

Dr. Donald Symons, one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, opines that “the tendencies to find healthy people and young women attractive are relatively ‘innate’ because they are universally associated with reproductive value.” And he notes “males should be attracted most strongly by females of 23–28 years, since they are most likely to produce a viable infant.” It so happens that healthy women between the ages of 23 and 28 years old have flat abdomens and waist-to-hip ratios (WHR, or the waist circumference divided by the hip circumference) of about 0.7. A survey looking back at all the Miss Americas for the past nine decades shows their waist-to-hip ratios have been pretty much the same from the 1920s to the 2000s, averaging about 0.7. Although these young women have varied in weight and height over the years, the WHR has remained constant.

But it’s not just young American pageant contestants who are idealized as the paragons of youthful good looks and health. Across the world and across multiple cultures, the small waist and the low WHR are associated with beauty. (In fact, the WHRs of Playboy centerfolds and Miss Hong Kong have each tracked precisely in that range since 1987.) A number of researchers throughout the world have investigated numerous societies, contemporary and ancient, and found that a small WHR is desirable to members of the opposite sex across both time and culture. According to one of the leading investigators in the field “waist size is the only scientifically documented visible body part that conveys reliable information about reproductive age, sex hormone profile and risk for major diseases.”

Some physical characteristics or manifestations of disease are pretty obvious. Take the sixteenth-century reformer and author Ulrich von Hutten’s description of the signs and symptoms of syphilis, a disease called the “Great Pox” and common to his age: “Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as shocking as the pain itself, which yet was as if the Sick had Laid upon a fire.” This gruesome picture was nature’s not so subtle way of alerting the dating population that one so afflicted probably wasn’t the best mate material. Other signs are not so obvious. At least not on a conscious level.

The WHR is a subtle sign consciously, maybe, but a strong sign at the subconscious or innate level. Why? Probably because there is a link forged by eons of natural selection between our subconscious sense of another’s health and that person’s WHR. The correlation between WHR and reproductive health and overall healthiness is so precise that even tiny variations in this measurement herald significant changes in multiple components of fitness.

For example, multiple autopsy studies on young women who died from nonnatural causes show a significant increase in latent disease when WHR increases above 0.8. The victims were unaware they were so afflicted because the disease processes weren’t far enough along to cause symptoms, but they were present in the early stages. To show just how subtle this change is, a slender young woman with a 22.5-inch waist and a 32-inch hip circumference and a 0.7 WHR would have to increase her waist circumference to only 25 inches, a mere 2.5 inch increase (which represents in increase of only 3?4 inch from front to back) to increase her WHR to 0.8 and increase her chances of disease.

Sex hormones drive the distribution of fat to and from various anatomical areas. Prior to puberty women have WHRs that are about the same as young males, and as they reach menopause, they once again approach the male WHR range (around 0.9). During their fertile years estrogen inhibits the deposition of fat in the abdominal area and shifts it to the hips and t...

Customer Reviews

Was hoping for better.
I truly wanted to like this book more than I did. I've been a fan of the Eadeses since I first read Protein Power back in 1997, and I currently follow their blogs regularly. I'm a proponent of low carb dieting for health reasons and have followed a low carb diet for a while now. But I also am no longer losing any weight on it (though still have a long way to go), so keep looking for things to get the scale moving again.

So I had a lot of expectations from this book. Admittedly I am only on my 5th day of following their plan (at least as best as I can, more about later...) and so far have not lost any weight, and am hungry constantly, yet perhaps suddenly something will kick in and I'll start to see something miraculous....

But the book itself was just a disappointment in so many ways. The actual information contained in the book is quite slight, and very lacking in detail. Perhaps this is a channeling of my inner geek, but what I loved about Protein Power was the detailed science of why it works. But there is little of that here. As an example, one of the things they tell you to use is something called DAG oil. The advantage of DAG oil, they say, is that it is 80% diglycerides rather than triglycerides as most oils have, and this gives it an ability to help reduce the fat in the body. But they give no details at all about this or why it works. And thus I'm very hesitant to use an oil that is extensively processed from the already heavily processed soy and canola oils, both of which have extremely unfavorable omega 6/omega 3 ratios (as does DAG oil) and neither of which I would ever touch.

But the Eadeses blithely say to replace a daily tablespoon of the oil you usually use with DAG oil... Hmm how about us folks who don't use oil at all because we feel that animals fats and butter are better choices?

However my biggest gripe with this book is that it does not give any real guidelines to follow for what to eat. The first two weeks is the 3-and-1 plan, three protein shakes a day plus a low carb meal. The recipe for the shakes is pretty conclusive and easy to follow. But what about the meal?

Instead of giving you guidelines they give you pages and pages and pages of menus, followed by all the recipes. At least half this book is a cookbook, and I didn't pay good money to pre-order this book from Amazon in order to get a cookbook. Cookbooks, menus and recipes I *don't* need. I just want a good simple guideline of what the meals should consist of - but the menus are so all over the place it's not that easy to figure out what to eat on your own.

They recommend that if you don't care for something in a menu to consult the substitution lists at the back of the book. Okay, I have some spinach at home, and I noted spinach used in some of their recipes, so I consulted the substitution lists to see how much spinach was considered a "serving". But spinach was not even on the list despite showing up in recipes!

They also stress the importance of saturated fat, yet the amount in the recipes seems pretty low. One meal menu, for example, just says "hard boiled eggs, smoked salmon, 3-4 tomato slices". And that's it? No mayo, butter, oil or anything? Just dry eggs, and dry salmon and dry tomato? Maybe you are allowed to use oils and fats, but I can't find anywhere that says so. When I run the compoments of the daily diet through nutritional software it comes out far lower in fat than I am used to, and far lower than is typical on a low carb diet, which may be why I am so hungry all the time.

Then in weeks 3-4 you go into a more Atkins-induction type diet, but even here it's sometimes difficult to know what is allowed. The rules for weeks 3-4 list foods that can now be added as well as subtracted, but nuts are nowhere mentioned in the rules. Yet many of the recipes use almond flour, pine nuts, macadamia nuts. So what is the status of nuts?

Not to mention that nuts and nut flours don't show up in any of the substitution menus at the back of the book - which have only simple lists of veggies and fruits, so there is no way to know how or when nuts and nut flours can be used, or what they may or may not be substituted for.

This almost gives me a feel of a book that was rushed to publication, and yet I know its publication date was held up for months, so was not really a rush job. I don't want to give it only 1 or 2 stars as the Eadeses are among my nutritional heroes. But neither can I give it 5 starts, dearly as I had wanted to before receiving the book...which also arrived 4 days after the people who preordered from Barnes and Noble got theirs!

NOTE: I am just editing my review to add that I may well not be the intended audience for this book. I am not your casual middle-aged person who knows nothing about diet but would like to flatten my waistline a bit. I have an extensive diet library and have been studying low carb since I was first blown away by "Protein Power" in 1997. I really wanted this book to be of the caliber of "Protein Power" and I don't feel it comes close.

But for someone who is totally new to low carb, who doesn't much care about what gets them a flatter middle, and just wants to be told what to do and what to eat to get there, then perhaps this book will fill that need.

Disappointing Quick-Buck Hack Work
If you enjoyed and got healthier from earlier books by the Eadeses, as so many people have, then don't buy this one. You'll be bitterly disappointed.

Somehow, all their earlier principles have been repudiated. Instead of natural foods, they are now recommending blender-shakes of protein powder. Instead of scientific explanations, they now suggest a laundry list of supplements without providing much explanation at all. Instead of a lifetime program of healthy balanced eating, they have now swung to pitching "overnight" miracles--drink protein shakes for two weeks, then eat nothing but meat for two weeks, and by week five you're on "maintenance". It's like several fad diets stitched together. The exercise advice in this book is a few pages of generalities, and the only specific exercise recommended can be done sitting at a desk (tightening the abdominal muscles).

Half the book is recipes, and these are not all very good recipes. If you want inspiring low-carb recipes, look at Fran McCullough's books The Low-Carb Cookbook and Living Low-Carb: The Complete Guide to Long Term Low-Carb Dieting, or Dana Carpender's 500 Low-Carb Recipes: 500 Recipes from Snacks to Dessert, That the Whole Family Will Love.

Even the title shows the Eadeses's downward spiral: from "Protein Power Lifeplan" to "The 6-Week Cure ...". It's true that a low-carb diet (as in the Eadeses's earlier books) can cause fat loss, and often abdominal fat is lost relatively early in the process. But honestly, if there were a six-week "cure" for fat bellies, is it likely that we would see fat bellies all around us? Or that the Eadeses would have just figured out that the secret is protein powder drinks and then nothing but meat? You'll do better to go back to their "Lifeplan" idea, and figure out a better way of eating and living that you can adopt for the long haul. This latest book appears to be just a quick-buck effort to get back on the best-seller lists by promising magic.

Good Supplemental Information
I've previously read the Protein Power Life Plan (PPLP) by the same authors and would recommend this book (CURE) as a follow up to that one. The first part of this book is chock full of useful information for people already familiar with the principles of restricted-carbohydrate dieting. That being said, there were a few times where I thought "If I didn't already know a lot about this topic, I wouldn't know what that scientific term meant."

By the time the book reached Part 2, it felt like I was being rushed to the end. There's a page that lists supplements to take, but the book barely touches on why they are important. I know the first time I saw the price of CoQ10, I winced. I wouldn't have purchased it if I hadn't been armed with the crucial information that the Eades presented in PPLP. Sadly, none of that explanation is in this book.

Also in Part 2, we learn that the plan involves two weeks of drinking three shakes a day with one sensible meal. Apparently, this is the Eades answer to wanting to suggest an all meat diet in a culture that won't accept such a thing. Last time I checked, most people spout off about meal replacements as much as they do low carb diets. If the right answer to the middle-aged middle is indeed all meat, I wish the book would have just stuck to that philosophy.

The last third of the book is dedicated to recipes. I personally dislike diet books that do this, but if you want recipes, then you're in luck. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who has previously read PPLP or Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. The new scientific information in Part 1 will supplement your existing knowledge and is worth the price.