Your Fat is Not Your Fault

Complemented by easy gourmet recipes, a guide by a noted nutritionist seeks to remove guilt from the weight-loss process and explains how to become healthy and change personal lifestyles. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

"You aren't a weak-willed ninny" if you're fat, says clinical nutritionist Carol Simontacchi in Your Fat Is Not Your Fault. "It may be that an obese person's body works differently." Simontacchi sees obesity as a physical disability that can be resolved by following her plan, influenced by Barry Sears (author of The Zone).

About half the book outlines reasons for weight gain: you may lack brown adipose tissue, which stimulates heat production through calorie burning; you may have food allergies; your childhood eating habits or adult dieting may have set you up for weight challenges; you have extra fat cells and your body is predisposed to obesity; your hormones may be out of balance. Your strategy is not to diet--she explains why various diets don't work--but to fix the way your body processes calories. That means avoiding high-glycemic foods (grains, processed foods, starches, high-sugar fruit) and balancing protein (30 percent), carbohydrates (40 percent), and fat (30 percent).

Many of the 61 recipes by Margaret West are higher in fat (mostly olive oil, but also butter and half-and-half) than most dieticians would recommend for weight loss. (A recipe inexplicably titled Baked Potato Without Fat contains two tablespoons of butter.) --Joan Price