The False Fat Diet: The Revolutionary 21-Day Program for Losing the Weight You Think Is Fat

If you know you swell up after bee stings, you avoid bees. If you know a close encounter with poison ivy will leave you itching and scratching for a week, you keep your eyes open for three-leafed plants. But, according to The False Fat Diet, many of us spend our entire lives eating foods that "don't agree with us," and as a result carry around extra pounds, put up with allergies, and go through life looking older and feeling less energetic than we should. Of course, the hook here is weight loss. If you eliminate the foods that make you gassy and bloated, you can probably drop pounds instantly--up to 10 pounds of "false fat" in a week, Elson Haas says--and then keep dropping weight in subsequent weeks and months, the real fat, all without feeling hungry or deprived.

Haas offers two ways to figure out if you've got food sensitivities: a medical blood test or an elimination diet, in which you cut out certain foods for a while, then gradually reintroduce them to see if they're the ones causing the problems. (The usual suspects: dairy, wheat, corn, sugar, eggs, soy, peanuts.) The False Fat Diet offers detailed instructions on how to eliminate each of these foods, and also offers ideas about supplements to take and other strategies to deal with the strangeness of not eating what are probably your favorite foods.

Although the basic idea behind The False Fat Diet is counterintuitive--that the foods you like and crave the most are causing you the most severe physical problems--the potential benefits are enormous. Haas and Cameron Stauth tell numerous stories of patients (including Stauth and his sister) who lost weight instantly, looked younger, and felt better by following the diet that makes the most sense for them. --Lou Schuler