I have been reading diet books since fifth grade. Diets have changed a lot since then along with cookbooks and food trends. We now have the food pyramid to replace the 5 food groups diagram. I remember a key ingredient of my first diet was the Ritz cracker topped by cottage cheese and a little bit of corn relish on top. I’d have this when I came home from school so I wouldn’t get too hungry and eat a lot at dinner. It doesn’t seem like a diet staple to me now though I still buy non-fat cottage cheese from time to time and eat it on Ak-Mak crackers. Weight Loss Clinic turned me on to Ak-Maks. Five of these pretty tasty crackers are only 116 calories with 2 grams of fat. In the last decade, we’ve gone from a raging Atkins revival to the even more popular South Beach diet to Fat Smash, dieting according to blood type and outsmarting your metabolism. My cousin dropped a lot of weight on Alkins and he managed to keep it off as did the mother of a man who I talked to in the deli department of the grocery store. Neither ever had a problem with weight ever again! So, of course I tried it but the 6 pounds I lost came back. Then I read that Atkins could be very bad for your system and that was after buying the special pills and snack bars, etc. The promise of going on a diet and then never having a weight problem again would be a dream come true. But diets and going on diets has gotten a bad name of late, what with yo-yo dieting putting your body into starvation mode and exercising being the best way to take off pounds. Just browsing the stacks in the 613’s puts me in the frame of mind to try yet another diet.

Diet books are cataloged under “Personal health and safety” in the Dewey Decimal System which is 613. But some of my favorites are in 613.2, dietetics, like this new one,
The Blue Zone : lessons for living longer from the people who’ve lived the longest. by Dan Buettner. Weight losing books are shelved under “613.25”. “613.26” is used for specific dietary regimens and “613.28” and numbers that start with “613.28” are especially for diets emphasizing certain nutritive elements.
Some of the best diet books I have read and enjoyed, not just for the information contained there-in, are:
613.2 P –
Super Foods Rx by Steven Pratt, M.D. and Kathy Matthews. William Morrow, 2004.
613.2 R –
Healthy at 100 by John Robbins. Random House, 2006.
And here are some of our newer titles:
Crack the fat-loss code
By Wendy Chant.
Flat belly diet!
By Liz Vaccariello
The ultrasimple diet
By Mark Hyman
The South Beach diet supercharged
By Arthur Agatston
Good calories, bad calories
By Gary Taubes
The rice diet cookbook
By Kitty Gurkin Rosati