Dr. Shapiro's Picture Perfect Weight Loss: The Visual Program for Permanent Weight Loss by Dr. Howard M. Shapiro

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The secret to taking off those hated pounds?
“I lost 25 pounds living up to Dr. Shapiro's simple plan for reducing my waistline. What worked for me were the visual aids– a picture can be worth 1,000 calories! They don't call him the Prince of Pounds for nothing!”–Dennis Duggan, Pulitzer prize-winning columnist, Newsday

Dr. Shapiro proves that great eating and weight loss can go hand in hand if you make the right choices.

Starting the day right, eating out for pleasure or business, enjoying a snack or even a chocolate indulgence– it can all be done without gaining weight, if you follow the “picture perfect” guidelines in this book.

Dr. Shapiro's proven program of Food Awareness Training empowers you to take charge of your eating. You can stop depriving yourself, stop feeling guilty– and stop dieting. Whether you want to lose 100 pounds or want to maintain the healthy weight you have now, here are the images that will instantly change your habits for life.

Editorial Review

On the left is one small, fat-free, no-sugar-added muffin. On the right is a cornucopia of food–several pounds of fruit and a pair of whole-wheat rolls. The calorie counts are identical: 720.

There sits Dr. Howard Shapiro's point: dieters imagine that they're saving calories by eating the “virtuous” snack on the left, whereas in reality they're depriving themselves of the mountain of food on the right.

Dr. Shapiro believes that there are no bad foods, no right or wrong reasons to eat, no perfect number of meals in any given day. He doesn't believe in telling clients at his weight-loss clinic in Manhattan when they can or can't eat. Some of them are celebrities and corporate executives with such busy lives that mealtimes are often unpredictable. So Dr. Shapiro reassures them that a calorie is a calorie, whether you eat it before or after 9 p.m. He helps them lose weight by showing them different foods, set side by side, and how the seemingly healthier choice might actually be equal to or greater in calories than a bunch of foods that would seem to be off-limits to someone trying to lose weight.

In Picture Perfect Weight Loss, he uses photos of foods to demonstrate these choices. Thus, a “healthy” carob bar is shown to be equal in calories to 10 scoops of Italian ices. A 10-ounce loaf of crusty bread is shown to be equal to a tiny dish of Chex Mix. Two ounces of reduced-fat cheese are shown to be equal in calories and fat grams to two ounces of salami.

The photos pit all types of snacks and many meal choices against each other, and account for sugar, salt, and starch cravings. The text–easy to read even when discussing scientific principles that scientists don't fully understand yet–covers everything from exercise to nutrition labels to menus from some of the world's top restaurants, with the healthiest food choices highlighted.

Regular dieters, though, might want to skip all that until they've read the appendix explaining why the most popular fad diets–from the Atkins diet to Suzanne Somers's–are unhealthy, overly restrictive, or just based on misunderstood science. That alone might be worth the price of Picture Perfect Weight Loss. –Lou Schuler