Dr Shapiro's Picture Perfect Weight Loss: The Visual Program for Permanent Weight Loss

Learn the Secret to Taking Off those Hated Pounds. It's all About Making the Right Choice! A Picture Can be Worth a Thousand Calories! In this provocative New York Times bestselling book, Dr. Howard M. Shapiro proves that great eating and weight loss can go hand in hand. Giving you graphic guidelines of the calorie content of your food options, Dr. Shapiro empowers you to take charge of your diet. After all, losing weight is all about calories. Whether you're eating out for pleasure or business, enjoying a snack or even a chocolate indulgence, his proven program of Food Awareness Training will show you how it can all be done-without gaining weight. So stop dieting, depriving yourself, and feeling guilty. Whether you want to lose 100 pounds or simply to maintain your ideal weight, here is an invaluable resource that will help you enjoy a healthy and happy balance in your life.

On the left is one small, fat-free, no-sugar-added muffin. On the right is a cornucopia of food--several pounds of fruit and a pair of whole-wheat rolls. The calorie counts are identical: 720.

There sits Dr. Howard Shapiro's point: dieters imagine that they're saving calories by eating the "virtuous" snack on the left, whereas in reality they're depriving themselves of the mountain of food on the right.

Dr. Shapiro believes that there are no bad foods, no right or wrong reasons to eat, no perfect number of meals in any given day. He doesn't believe in telling clients at his weight-loss clinic in Manhattan when they can or can't eat. Some of them are celebrities and corporate executives with such busy lives that mealtimes are often unpredictable. So Dr. Shapiro reassures them that a calorie is a calorie, whether you eat it before or after 9 p.m. He helps them lose weight by showing them different foods, set side by side, and how the seemingly healthier choice might actually be equal to or greater in calories than a bunch of foods that would seem to be off-limits to someone trying to lose weight.

In Picture Perfect Weight Loss, he uses photos of foods to demonstrate these choices. Thus, a "healthy" carob bar is shown to be equal in calories to 10 scoops of Italian ices. A 10-ounce loaf of crusty bread is shown to be equal to a tiny dish of Chex Mix. Two ounces of reduced-fat cheese are shown to be equal in calories and fat grams to two ounces of salami.

The photos pit all types of snacks and many meal choices against each other, and account for sugar, salt, and starch cravings. The text--easy to read even when discussing scientific principles that scientists don't fully understand yet--covers everything from exercise to nutrition labels to menus from some of the world's top restaurants, with the healthiest food choices highlighted.

Regular dieters, though, might want to skip all that until they've read the appendix explaining why the most popular fad diets--from the Atkins diet to Suzanne Somers's--are unhealthy, overly restrictive, or just based on misunderstood science. That alone might be worth the price of Picture Perfect Weight Loss. --Lou Schuler