Diet Success Strategies

A guidebook to healthy strategies offers more than just advice on diet and nutrition. Aronoff offers a workbook with principles, examples and exercises that ask the reader to tailor ideas to his or her own life. He takes a balanced, bottom-up approach to the issue of diet and offers strategies for a lifestyle change that involves renovating relationships, perspective, work/life balance and many other life categories. Though the book is designed as a series of chapters that ultimately offer 67 separate strategies, its main chapters are organized by daily, weekly and monthly strategies. Short- and long-term goals as well as major and minor changes are situated in appropriate chapters as a part of a greater action-plan. For instance, a monthly strategy might entail developing a personal relationship with a friend or family member so that the relationship does not drag the reader back into familiar habits. A daily strategy, on the other hand, might consist of proper planning to avoid off-diet foods or bouts of hunger.

Perhaps what makes the book so strong is its focus on action rather than ideas or information. Aronoff encourages the reader to toss out those strategies that do not mesh well with his or her lifestyle and to adopt the ones that do. The book works with the reader to find highly personalized solutions to individual challenges. The voice rings clear, objectively and empathetically handling concrete struggles as well as more abstract mental challenges such as the search for greater needs through food. While most of the strategies do not deviate from the larger principles delivered at the beginning of the book, the voice keeps the chapters fresh, engaging and never preachy.

A solid, helpful book full of solutions rather than gimmicks, and a voice that sticks long after the last page.