Allen Carr's Easyweigh to Lose Weight

Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking, helped me auit smoking after almost 10 years. It was an amazing book, and I expected the same of this one.

I like that Allen makes simple and truthful statements about eating fresh and healthy, and being a more natural version of yourself. His views aren't new, but he made me rethink my eating habits.

However, he makes statements that are not scientifically supported and sometimes goes against nutritionist advice. It's not a groundbreaking book, it's just his opinion.

The best advice in the book, follow Nature's Guide and disregard any advice that contradicts it!

This book is a steaming pile of shit.

This is the literal winner of "Worst book I have ever read."

Honestly, this book is full of falsehoods and lies. Mr. Carr has not only confused his opinions with fact about the biological processes of digestion, he is downright wrong on an embarrassing level. At one point he claims that you cannot eat protein and carbohydrates at the same time because your body uses an alkaline solution to dissolve one and an acidic solution to dissolve the other. A simple Google search and two spare brain cells to rub together prove that isn't true. Also, he fails to notice that vegetables are mostly carbohydrates.

Please, do yourself a favor and read ANY OTHER piece of writing on nutrition or diet. Literally anything else.

I am appalled at the publishing company for producing this dried cum covered stream of nonsense spewing from Allen Carr's keyboard. It is an embarrassment.

Just finished it and begun to put it in practice.
I have to say that, while reading it, it made couple of interesting points...I am curious to see if it'll actually work in the end but as Carr himself wrote, don't be impatient for results!

After stopping smoking very easily with his most famous book, this was always going to be a trickier curve for Allen Carr to negotiate. After all, we don't need to smoke but we certainly do need to eat. Still, the premise remains the same and very effective. It consists of recognising rubbish when you see it and training your brain to reject it. I don't have a weight problem by any stretch of the imagination but would sometimes find it difficult to stop eating if confronted with something I really fancied at that moment, always continuing after I was already full. That's what I wanted to stop. This book has enabled me to do it; I now feel better and I'm a lot happier for it. I'd have given the book five stars had honey not got such bad treatment…

**

Ok, first I need to say that I read Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking, and I rated it five stars. Is was amazing, and IT WORKED. I read it in 2007, and it is now 2019. I haven't smoked since I read that book, and I KNOW I never will.

Now, that had given me great hopes for this book.

Anyone reading this book is going to have to keep an open mind and keep reading regardless of some of the jarring content.

I found the regular reference to 'our creator' distracting, and lots of dubious comparisons were made between humans and machines, or humans and wild animals, etc. Some comparisons were valid, but others were shortsighted and disappointing; however, there was some really good stuff aswell. I just think that a lot of it could have been edited out to make the book speak to me better.

Despite claiming that we can lose weight while eating whatever we want, that's not really the case. I feel a little hoodwinked in that respect. The principal ideas in this book are to eat only when we are hungry - good so far - but also to eat primarily plant-based foods that are in their natural form, avoiding meat, dairy and processed/cooked foods. Carr uses his 'JUNK MARGIN' (an allowance for our bodies to tolerate a certain amount of abuse) to retain his claim that we can eat anything we want, but all the while, we are told that certain foods are bad for us; therefore we are back to having to restrict our diet, thus creating feelings of deprivation and guilt. Lots of what Carr says about nutrition is correct, but there is also error in some of it. I don't think he covers the topic of nutrition with a rigorous physioligically accurate approach that I would expect in a book designed to aid weight control.

There was a lot of repetition, which I don't mind if it's doing good (The stopping smoking book has the same repitition, but it worked as a kind of hypnosis or positive brainwashing, reinforcing the ideas). In this book, I felt that I was always waiting for some great moment when I would feel sure about it working for me, but I got to the end and was uncertain whether it would change my behaviour. I didn't need to wait with the stop smoking book; I knew straight away that I wouldn't smoke, and I was instantly a non-smoker from the moment I closed the book.

It's been a couple of weeks since I read the EASYWEIGH book - I wanted to see how I behaved before writing a review - and I am still continuing bad habits that I wanted to escape from (despite already being vegetarian) so it hasn't had the same impact on me as the stopping smoking book did. How could it? Stopping smoking is not the same as controlling eating habits.

I am going to go through the book again and highlight only the parts that I find relevant. Maybe through doing this, I will be less distracted by the stuff I didn't connect with.

I feel like I need a list of bullet points of the most important ideas/steps, because they got lost in the padding out of the book. The conclusion at the end summarised the plan, but it seemed too simple to me, and some of the important steps were missed out, for example, eating fruit for breakfast. That was one of the things that stuck in my mind and made sense from this book, and it wasn't in the conclusion. I think the book needed a more thorough recap/summary at the end.

This book could potentially work, but I need to go through it and extract the best bits, condense it down to maybe just 5 pages of strategy and motivation. I will revisit this review once I've done that...



REVISITED

I read the book again, highlighting with a pen the parts that I felt were meaningful to me. I then read the book a third time, only reading my highlighted lines. It took me around five minutes to read my condensed version, and I have to say that I now feel much better about the book. I just wish I hadn't had to read it three times in order to get my head around it.

I do think that the method can work, but I will need to keep revisiting the book on a regular basis in order to keep at it. It's just not working instantly for me like the stopping smoking book did, and I think that's because there are so many elements to think about and be disciplined around.

I'll give it a go

I think I understand the reasons to eat this kind of food I particularly love vegetables
I've just googled some examples of grains,so overall it doesn't look too bad
What would have really pleased me is either some recipes or examples of what Allen ate whilst losing his weight,just to give some ideas
I love curries,presumably I can have,say a butternut squash and spinach curry or a vegetable chilli....minus kidney beans,although I suppose they could be in my junk margin
I'd better have another read of it before I start on Sunday

Some good common sense advice in this book but also a lot of dated ideas and fairly dangerous claims and a fair bit of unnecessary pushing of his religious beliefs. Feels more like the rant of an old man than anything else.

This was very good motivation to embark on a healthier eating lifestyle without leaving me feeling deprived as diets do. Brainwashing? Maybe.... effective - so far so good!