The Metabolic Typing Diet: Customize Your Diet To: Free Yourself from Food Cravings: Achieve Your Ideal Weight; Enjoy High Energy and Robust Health; Prevent and Reverse Disease

People are unique in more ways than we can see. Stomachs and other internal organs come in many different shapes and sizes. Digestive juices, too, can vary dramatically from one person to another. Thus, according to author William Linz Wolcott, founder of Healthexcel, a company that provides metabolic typing for individuals, it stands to reason that different foods have very different effects on different people.

Wolcott believes that tailoring your diet to your body's particular quirks--metabolic typing--will improve digestion, circulation, immunity, energy, and mood. To determine your type, he has you take a 65-question test (the questions range from nose moisture to how you feel about potatoes), then place yourself in one of three categories: protein type, carbo type, or mixed type.

The protein type is instructed to eat a diet that's 40 percent protein, 30 percent fat, and 30 percent carbs. The carbo type gets 60 percent carbs, 25 percent protein, and 15 percent fat. And the mixed type should consume 50 percent carbs, 30 percent protein, and 20 percent fat, although this type has to play with the ratios a little more to find the optimal mix.

Although The Metabolic Typing Diet is based on information from researchers the majority of the public will never have heard of, Wolcott makes a strong case that it's all based on common sense: most of the dietary problems we have come from ignoring the foods that make us feel satisfied and energetic in favor of ones that we feel we're supposed to eat, or foods that we eat in desperation because our last meal left us hungry or lethargic. If we just eat the foods that make us feel right, Wolcott argues, we'll never feel like things have gone horribly wrong. --Lou Schuler