Calorie Queens

September 19, 2005
The mother-daughter team behind this diet book immediately get readers' attention by purporting to know why other diets fail: gimmicks aside, they boil down to one thing—a low-calorie diet. But the authors confuse and disappoint as they explain that their diet works precisely because it captures the essence of all the other failed ones: it's based on a concept they call "Eucalorics," which focuses on the age-old concept of counting calories and exerting portion control. To the book's credit, the writing is friendly, folksy and fun. The work supplies helpful nutritional information and mathematical equations that make counting calories easier. But in its attempts to reduce weight loss to a matter of "doing the math," it oversimplifies, failing to acknowledge, for example, fundamental behavioral reasons linked to overeating. The authors claim to have lost 300 pounds between them and to have tested their plan on their church group, though they don't say how many people were involved or how much weight they lost. Nearly two-thirds of the text features sensible but unoriginal recipes (e.g., Glazed Carrots, Vegetable Frittata, Traditional Chicken Salad) that do nothing to encourage readers to adopt this plan.