Now Eat This! Diet

February 7, 2011
A follow-up to the author's popular Now Eat This! cookbook, this volume offers an uncomplicated plan for cutting calories and losing weight, in two sections. The first explains how the diet works and how it's possible to eat tasty foods made from healthier ingredients, offers basic advice about exercise, and delineates a "14 Day Fast Track Plan" for kick-starting weight loss by eating 1,400 calories per day (1,200 for women). The second section delivers 75 recipes designed to fit into that low-cal meal plan. They're color-coded by calorie counts so it's easy to pick recipes to fit into a day's overall total. Breakfast choices include a sunrise sandwich with eggs—egg substitute, actually—and Canadian bacon on a whole-wheat English muffin for 279 calories. Bacon appears again in DiSpiritio's version of the BLT, a bacon, lettuce, and tomato roll with 245 calories, thanks to the use of fat-free mayo and a touch of crumbled bacon instead of several bacon strips per sandwich. Spicy-sweet linguine alla vodka gets its creaminess from 2% Greek yogurt and clocks in at 307 calories per serving. There are desserts, too, like red velvet chocolate squares in which beets lend moisture, and agave nectar instead of sugar serves as sweetener. The recipes are mostly super (more like assembling ingredients than cooking) and the prose is straightforward (if a little choppy and repetitive)—meaning just about anyone who wants to should be able to follow this plan and lighten up mealtimes.

May 1, 2011
TV celebrity and New York cook DiSpirito takes this opportunity to trumpet his own more than 20-pound slim down and to promote the art of healthy cooking. No, theres truly nothing new under this particular sun, though the author does champion the use of such unusual sugar- and fat-free ingredients as agave nectar, espresso powder, and matcha (natural green-tea powder), among others. What will drive sales and library loans of his 75-dish collection is the care he lavishes on re-creating popular favorites, albeit in lower-guilt versions: pizza egg bake, chicken and mushroom quesadilla, crispy-on-the-top tuna and green-pea casserole, fried cheese balls, and decadent lemon bars. Standard, though, are DiSpiritos prescriptions for losing weight: eat less, exercise more, and do your own cooking whenever possible. A series of regimens14-day fast-track and long-term lifestyle plansgive wavering dieters a great routine to follow. Expect no small demand.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)