'Flat Belly Diet': a review of the hot new diet book--will it be your ticket to weight loss in 2009?

December 31, 11:53 AMBook ExaminerMichelle Kerns

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Well, well, well; it's December 31st and people all across the fruited plain are engaging in a time-honored American tradition --making resolutions to lose weight.

Every year sees its own crop of hip new diet plans (remember Atkins? The South Beach Diet? The Zone?); this year's frontrunner looks Liz Vaccariello's Flat Belly Diet, delightfully subtitled A Flat Belly is About Food & Attitude. Period. (Not a Single Crunch Required). Now, if you're like me, you've got food and plenty of attitude and wouldn't know a crunch if came to your door selling Girl Scout cookies, so this one sounds like a fit. Let's take a look at what this diet, that scintillatingly promises to get you to lose up to 15 lbs in 32 days, entails. 

Here's the Flat Belly Diet at a glance:

1. The whole shebang begins with a Four-Day Anti-Bloat Jumpstart that consists of 96 hours of mental preparation (a sort of dipping-your-toe-in-the-Flat-Belly-Diet if you will) designed to get you into the dieting mindset and to spark your enthusiasm with a loss of up to 5 3/4 inches before the end of the four days. 5 3/4 inches?! you snort. According to Vaccariello,

We tested the entire Flat Belly Diet -- including the Jumpstart -- on women just like you, holding weigh-ins on a biweekly basis. You're reading their stories throughout this book, and you can find more by visiting flatbellydiet.com. More than half of your test panel lost at least 1 full inch from their bellies during the Jumpstart period.

2. Next, we get down to the nitty gritty -- the Four-Week Plan, 28 days of meals and recipes that can be mixed and matched to your heart's desire. You are allowed four meals of 400 calories per day; a MUFA is included at every meal.

What the hell is a MUFA? A MUFA is a monounsaturated fatty acid; foods containing these fatty acids have long been known to be beneficial to the body in a number of ways, including preventing heart disease, cancer, and decreasing the risk of dementia in old age. The Flat Belly Diet categorizes MUFAs into five categories: oils, olives, nuts and seeds, avocados, and dark chocolate. At least one of these is included in each recipe and meal plan in the diet.

                             Liz Vaccariello

3. The third, and optional, part of the diet is the Exercise Program, which includes instructions for fat-burning walks, and two sets of exercise instructions (complete with helpful pictures and diagrams) called the Metabolism Boost and the Belly Routine. There are weekly schedules for each of the exercise sets, a four-week walking plan, and a seven-day plan for people like me who want to do the whole thing but are too terminally lazy to keep track of what I'm supposed to be doing when.

Overall, the Flat Belly Diet has all the hallmarks of a diet fad getting ready to take off: it is simple to follow and provides enough detailed instructions to allow busy people to follow it without undue effort; it encourages eating healthy, low-fat foods; it includes inspirational true stories of real-looking people (not size 0 supermodels) who have succeeded on the plan; it emphasizes a positive attitude and includes journal sections for dieters to include their progress as well as their feelings about the whole thing.

In another lifetime, I took graduate courses at UC Davis in Nutrition, and, based on that knowlege, frankly, I'd be surprised if anyone following this diet faithfully did NOT lose weight since it incorporates all three of the Holy Trinity of Weight loss: Eat less, eat better, exercise.

The only part of the Flat Belly Diet that gives me pause is its assertion that eating monounsaturated fatty acids specifically targets belly fat; unfortunately, many people may purchase this book under the false impression that the exercises and meals in it are designed especially for decreasing their tummy girth. A good deal of research has gone into stomach-shrinking methods, and they universally find that, while eating less and exercising decreases the fat in your body OVERALL, you can't just target one area alone. You'll lose weight and inches from your stomach, in other words, but you'll lose it from everywhere else too, and possibly not quite in the proportions you had wished. And no amount of stomach crunches will burn fat only in your stomach. You'll develop some kicking stomach muscles and burn fat all over your body, but not just in your stomach.

That said, however, the Flat Belly Diet is definitely one to give a fling if you are so inclined. If you do, best of luck!