Book Feature with Stan Spencer, author of The Diet Dropout’s Guide to Natural Weight Loss

Indie Book Promo is happy to welcome Stan Spencer to the blog. He is the author of The Diet Dropout’s Guide to Natural Weight Loss and is here to share some information about her book. If this sound like a book that you would be interested in reading, please pick up a copy using the buy links at the bottom of the post.

Blurb:

This book isn’t about the latest celebrity diet, wonder food, or miracle supplement. It’s about creating a personalized weight loss plan—your own easiest path to naturally thin. While you can lose weight with almost any diet, keeping the weight off is much more difficult, requiring permanent changes in eating and exercise habits. This book provides a science-based approach for making those changes in a way that works best for you, without wasting time, money, or effort.

Dr. Spencer explains why we gain weight and why the fat lost by dieting almost always comes back. He then presents an array of practical weight loss tools for controlling emotional eating, calming cravings, boosting metabolism, and improving nutrition and exercise. In the final chapter he has you create a natural weight loss plan based on your unique set of needs, abilities, and preferences. Simple recipes are provided for weight loss foods that reduce cravings and prolong satisfaction.

What this book offers is a solid approach to weight loss—self-directed, gradual, and lasting—in contrast to the quick but fleeting weight loss offered by most one-size-fits-all diet plans.

“A slim volume that has the basics of behavior change, and includes all the ones people really struggle with.”
—Madelyn Fernstrom, PHD, Diet and Nutrition editor for NBC’sTODAY show (1/18/2013)

“In order to make a permanent change in the obesity statistics in the United States, every dieter must read this book.”
—Cascia Talbert, The Healthy Moms Magazine

Excerpt:

Beat Temptation (with minimal willpower)

See the Food in a Different Light

Advertisers often use imagery to manipulate your perception of foods and induce cravings. You turn the page of a magazine and see a picture of a chocolate-glazed doughnut bathed in soft light, over a white tablecloth, poised next to a pair of luscious red lips. You can almost taste the glistening icing. You suddenly crave doughnuts.

You can use your own mental imagery to see the doughnut in a different, less flattering light, so it no longer seems so desirable. Try this. In your imagination, replace the red lips with a pair of doughnut-devouring maggots. (I’m making this up, and so can you.) Imagine a spot of green mold on the side of the doughnut. Replace the white tablecloth with a dirty sidewalk, the doughnut surrounded by flattened, blackened pieces of discarded chewing gum. Now imagine taking a bite of it. Taste the bitter mold. Keep this up for about a minute, or until the craving is gone.

Take a Brisk Walk

Scientists at the University of Exeter conducted a pair of experiments that demonstrated a brisk walk can make chocolate less tempting. In one experiment, they instructed a group of chocolate lovers to either take a brisk walk or rest for fifteen minutes before beginning work. The chocolate lovers were then allowed to snack on as much chocolate as they wanted while working. Those who had taken the walk ate only half as much chocolate as those who had rested instead.  In the other experiment, a fifteen-minute walk was found to significantly reduce chocolate cravings. If it works for chocolate, it should work for just about anything!

At the first sign of a craving, stand up and head for the door. If brisk walking isn’t convenient, try a different exercise. Be sure to exercise with enough intensity that your heart rate increases. If you can’t spare fifteen minutes for exercise, do ten minutes or even just five. When you finish, focus your mind on something else.

Also try this technique as a preventive measure. Take a brisk fifteen-minute walk before your usual craving time.

This technique not only calms your cravings, but also gives you the added benefit of burning calories and improving your emotional well-being. Using it four times a day would give you a well-spent hour of fat-burning, mood-enhancing, craving-reducing exercise. What tool can beat that?

The Diet Dropout’s Guide to Natural Weight Loss can be purchased on

Amazon US   *   Amazon UK   *   Barnes&Noble

Bio:

Stan Spencer, PhD, is a biological consultant and former research scientist. He has conducted laboratory studies in biochemistry at Brigham Young University, in botany and evolution at Claremont Graduate University, and in genetics at the Smithsonian Institution. Stan lives in southern California and blogs on natural weight loss techniques at http://fatlossscience.org.

Stan can be found on

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