Are You Finally Interested in Losing Weight? The Resolution That Will Work!

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Lose It! The Personalize Weight Loss Revolution [Softcover]

by Charles Teague and Anahad O'Connor

206 pages, $21.99

ISBN-13: 978-1605290942

Nonfiction

In the era of the smart phone, it seems that new applications are released nearly every day. Some applications, such as Rovio's wildly popular Angry Birds, promise to steal countless hours of your life with very little offered in return. Slinging birds via slingshot into the skeletons of buildings is alluring to many-but will not do anything for you health. In 2008, Charles Teague sought to change that.

He released an iPhone application which would help people manage their weight. Hugely successful, the LoseIt application has been downloaded by over 6,000,000 people. Today, the Lose It platform can be downloaded for use on the iPhone, iPad, Android, or used online. If you own one of these devices, or have access to the World Wide Web, you have the ability to lose weight and keep it off for good. The Lose It solution works because it is based upon a time-honored principle: you must burn more calories than you ingest to actually lose weight. You enter the weight you want to weigh and you are provided with a calorie maximum for each day (and are even told when you'll reach your goal based upon your plan for losing weight.)

In the book Lose It! The Personalized Weight Loss Revolution, Charles Teague and Anahad O'Connor explain why the LoseIt application has been so successful. The LoseIt philosophy is based upon five pillars:
Embrace mindful empowermentTrack your caloriesTrack your habitsTrack your exercise as negative caloriesBenefit from peer support

The novelty of the program is the fourth pillar: Track your exercise as negative calories. When you use Lose It, you keep track of all calories ingested. The caveat is that any calories you burn while doing exercise are automatically deducted from your daily log as negative calories. It doesn't take the user long to figure out that losing calories from your log has a dual benefit: not only are you exercising-you're also able to ingest those negative calories and remain under your maximum for the day.

The Lose It! book helps dieters understand caloric intake and gives visual clues to help you understand how many calories you might be ingesting. For example, three ounces of cooked fish is about equal to the size of one's palm. Additionally, the book helps the novice by providing an exercise guide with plenty suggestions on how to burn more calories. Remember, calories burned can be eaten.

The most compelling chapter of the LoseIt book would have to be the one entitled, What's Your Type: Identify the habits that are holding you back. In this chapter, the authors illustrate why a one-size-fits-all diet will not work for everyone. In this chapter, this writer discovered he is the consummate weekender - logging calories fastidiously until the weekend, and then letting the logging go. LoseIt reminds you: a calorie is a calorie. Want to burn off a pound? Burn 3500 more calories than you've eaten and, yes, you will lose a pound.

Written in an easily read, narrative style, the Lose It! book is commended to anyone trying to lose weight. In the book, you will find the philosophy behind the LoseIt application; plenty of dietary information to help you; and a variety of personal testimonies of individuals who have lost over 100 pounds and have kept it off. If you like online forums, you will not be disappointed, either-there are numerous individuals who log on to LoseIt's virtual forums to discuss exercise strategy, swap recipes, and give each other motivation.

Slinging virtual birds into the meager structures to watch them cascade to the ground will not help you reach your fitness goals. LoseIt will: buy the book and download the program. After all what do you have to lose...

...except maybe the weight you've been wanting to lose all your life?

Review by Steven King, MBA, MEd

The Most Bloody Romp of All

It is hard to find something truly glorious in war, hard, but not impossible. This man was glorious, and it took a terrible war to make him so.

Once in a while you bump into something a bit special that has somehow not gathered the spotlight it should, and this WW1 autobiography fits the bill with bells. Massive loud bells. GUNNER SUBALTERN 1914-18 (published by Leo Cooper of London) by Julian Tyndale-Biscoe consists mainly of letters to his father, not published until 1966 and details a romp through apocalypse. This artillery officer's remorseless cheerfullness while his friends are cut down around him can only be admired, though at times it surely went a long way to placate his father's fear. His survival is a miracle, and there are, in my print anyway, a succession of poignant photographs of his friends who did not. A.C. Cooper is a case in point, gradually shot to bits through the war, photographed by the author in a Dublin fete, armless sleeve pinned to his Sam Browne belt, smiling in the sunshine and already itching to get back. He 'died as a result of being gassed'.

Most people the author describes are 'wonderful fellows', though he targets the fools and maniacs with cutting wit. They all live in the 'lap of luxury'. The experience of spending a night waist deep in freezing water under fire hardly fazes him...though he and the trooper with him had to keep lifting one foot at a time out to keep some feeling going...actually it is hard to know where to start with his experiences. He blithely describes crawling over smashed body parts, wading through gore and the remains of his dear friends, watching German trenches being obliterated by his guns five yards at a time, their occupants flung up as each salvo erupted, then an encounter with an fellow officer left enthroned after a shell hit the officers' latrine, who told him 'It's lucky that shell arrived when it did as I was feeling a bit constipated'. The sheer bravado of it all is breath-taking.

In the Ypres Salient (Toms Dog they called it) during one action they lost a third of their officers. His reaction was that it could have been a 'lot worse'.

He got shot, blown up repeatedly, suffered terrible ailements including dysentry, and still found the energy to set up spoof targets so that HQ would have to get up early (he narrowly escaped courts martial for that little jape) and fills at least a tenth of the book with descriptions of who he met at mess and where he managed to scrounge a meal. His attitude to rank was fabulously blase, and his descriptions of private soldiers and NCO's contains the same respect and honour as anyone from his own 'very middle class'.

It is undoubtedly a book about war, but gradually you realise it is a brilliant and vibrant snapshot into a world that by 1918, largely ceased to exist. Of finding ways round orders that officers should not hunt their chargers in Ireland, of knocking on a general's door simply because someone else sent a letter of introduction, and expecting to be asked to tea. Of laughing in the face of endless danger and violence because that was what your country and your companions expected. Eventually, the sheer bloody minded determination to remain of good cheer in the face of a great and terrible (and endless) experience is in itself the most moving element. I am not ashamed to admit I came close to tears during his description of The Somme, how a very near shell burst became so common-place they 'merely inclined our heads towards the burst, so our tin hats would take the odd bullet'. The officer he was talking to said calmly 'I'm hit', and duly expired. As did the battery clerk. That evening he could find no casualty return forms so instead used an equipment list form: "It seemed cold-blooded, indenting for a subaltern and battery clerk, to replace those 'destroyed by shell fire'."

My copy is inscribed by JTB himself, and he has added in pencil 'MC' after his name. The inscription is to 'George', Jan 1972. He died in December the next year, aged 77. What a character. What a story he tells.

It is, with the exception of 'Good-bye to All That', the most powerful account of that dreadful war I have ever encountered, and I came to it by sheer chance. I recommend this wonderful bloody romp to all those interested in things military and the men who carried (or directed) the guns...recommend it most highly, energetically and with due enthusiasm, as JTB would have said.