Book Review: The Prevention Get Young Get Thin Plan

A Fair Trade Book

Title: The Prevention Get Thin Get Young Plan

Author: Selene Yeager

Author's web site: https://seleneyeager.com/

Date: 2001

Publisher: Rodale

ISBN: 1-57954-217-4

Length: 472 pages plus index

Illustrations: lots of black-and-white photos of successful dieters

Quote: “Most diet plans focus exclusively on diet and exercise...This is the first plan that helps you boost your self-confidence and overcome stress...[and] learn how to play again.”

Yeager, co-author Bridget Doherty, and the fact-checking team at Prevention magazine claim that they recruited two men along with seven women to test this weight management book. (Each man was married to one of the women.) Once in a while their text surprises me by throwing in a reference to the male dieters' experience. Most of this book is definitely addressed to women, with detailed sections about clothes and hair styles to enhance a woman's look at whatever stage of weight loss she may be, an “activities quiz” including the question, “My favorite sport in school was: a. Basketball; b. Soccer; c. Softball; d. Gymnastics; e. Cheerleading” (Hello? What about tennis?), and some tastefully airbrushed discussions of the “women's health” concerns not directly related to childbirth (but including those related to menopause). So if you're a man, unless you're buying this book for a woman (who suggested you buy her a diet book!), you probably want to give The Prevention Get Thin Get Young Plan a miss.

If you're a woman...well...no, there's nothing scientific about Yeager's little quizzes. (I think they're meant to provide comic relief. Laughing out loud works the diaphragm and tones one of the spots where most women most need toning.) The short version of the insulin resistance, or pre-diabetic, test is the only quiz you really need to take seriously, and only if it shows that you might be pre-diabetic.

And then...there's no menu plan, no recipes. This book is for the woman who's been there and done that. You observe what you are eating and make mindful choices about what you ought to be eating, instead, to lose weight. This book does not activate any insulin reactions with long considerations of food.

What Yeager does, instead, is give her audience twelve weeks of short articles to read, including some articles about nutritional considerations, but more about exercise, sports, motivation, stress relief, and fashion. Her goal is to help steer the overweight woman away from the kitchen. For each week, there's one or two commonsense articles about food choices, with titles like “Double Up on Fruits and Vegetables” and “Fat-Fighting Fiber,” and one or two more about exercise, sports, and fashion. For some weeks there are those short, amusing quizzes with titles like “Are You a Cher or an Oprah?”

For any woman who's already memorized the calorie, fat gram, and carb counts for a couple hundred food items, who's already lost weight and even kept it off for five years but then after the last baby or broken ankle etc. etc., this book may be to the conventional diet books what Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos was to psychological self-help books in the 1980s...far from being the most complete, the most influential, or the most informative, but nevertheless quite possibly the one that may help readers pull together and use what they've learned from the others.

As regular readers know, "A Fair Trade Book" means that the author is still alive, so if you buy a gently used copy here we'll send 10% of the real-world total payment to the writer or a charity of the writer's choice. In this case (as in most cases) that means you send $5 per copy plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment to the appropriate address (see the very bottom of the screen), and we'll send Yeager or her charity $1. Note that salolianigodagewi is not the Paypal address; it's the address that sorts correspondence and delivers the right Paypal address for what you're buying here. If you don't want to wait for the e-mail, send a U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322. At least one more book, two if both are small, will fit into one $5 package along with this one.