Balance Your Body, Balance Your Life

Discusses the roots of obesity and the role of nutrition in wellness, and outlines a program of diet, exercise, and nutritional supplements to retain desired weights

The director of the California Wellness Medicine Institute and the Wellness Medical Doctor for the QVC home shopping channel, Taub is a proponent of "integrative medicine," an approach that encourages readers to work with their doctors and assume personal responsibility for overall well-being. For Taub, the road to wellness begins with nutrition. The book addresses the physical, emotional and cultural issues underlining poor nutrition and eating behaviors and refutes popular ideas about nutrition (e.g., the USDA's four basic food groups). Readers explore their underlying attitudes about food by completing a series of questionnaires on body image, physical wellness and stress resilience. In lieu of a rigid, calorie-counting diet, Taub's 28-day plan ambitiously aims for "cognitive restructuring," a process that trains readers to overcome habitual food cravings and to eat healthier, more nutritious foods. Advocating a largely vegetarian and carbohydrate-based diet,Taub offers a 12-step "Food Energy Ladder"; its first five rings emphasize fruits, vegetables, pasta-rice-potatoes, whole-grain breads and cereals, and olive oil and nuts, respectively. Recipes, exercises?such as walking and yoga stretches?and a discussion on nutritional supplements appear in the latter half of the book. Seasoned with medical statistics and nutritional facts, the prose alternately cajoles and instructs followers in achieving a permanent lifestyle change.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Balance is achieved here with a sound diet, a doable exercise program, and stress reduction strategiesall sensible and clearly presented. Taub (a pediatrician and family doctor, currently the ``Wellness Medical Doctor'' for QVC) isn't presenting anything astonishing here, and he isn't immune to bouts of diet-book-ese: ``recent statistics prove . . . six of the ten most common deadly diseases in the United States are known to be influenced by food.'' However, his advice is absolutely sound, and Taub isn't afraid to stand firm on unpopular positions or take on the misleading food marketing giants. Nothing on the market, he rightly asserts, ``can match the nutritional power and nurturing force of breast milknothing.'' Start children out right, plan meals using a nutritional ``ladder'' with fruits, vegetables, starches, and grains on the top rungs (abandon the four basic food groupseven the newer food pyramid is still slightly off base), and examine nutritional studies and advice for marketing and other biases before accepting their results and recommendations. Taub helps readers develop, first, an individual health profile, then a four-week plan for remedial action as needed; this is complete and clearly organized with all the necessary nutritional and exercise information and recipes. Yes, another diet/exercise/lifestyle planbut a sensible, well-based one. ($500,000 ad/promo; TV and radio satellit tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.