The Mayo Clinic Diet: Eat well. Enjoy Life. Lose weight. Paperback – January 1, 2013

This is the first time I bought a diet book (or actually went on a "diet"). FYI: I'm a male. What drew me to this book was that it was published by the Mayo Clinic and is not a fad diet. The concepts in the book work. I actually lost about 8 pounds in the first 2.5 weeks on the diet and about another 2 pounds in the following week (my goal is to lose 15 pounds). The book motivated me to start to eat right and exercise (which I do for about 1 hour every day; burning between 300 and 500 calories on the oliptical + some light weight exercise). I became somewhat obsessed with eating the right foods as suggested in the book and got into an "exercise rut" (no matter how tired I was I exercised). The book is laid out fairly well and easily readable; although I find that it jumps around a bit - I would suggest reading Part 3 first (like I did) to get a basic understanding of eating and exercise and then go full bore into Lose It (Part 1). And read Part 2 and Part 3 (again). I saw results and that motivates me to continue to eat healthier and exercise. Good Luck!

I have had the privilege of being treated at the Mayo Clinic, and as part of that evaluation I had a consultation with a registered dietitian on their staff. This book contains nearly all the information and guidance she gave me (without the personalized dietary prescription, of course), as well as a lot of helpful advice on coping with the behavioral issues associated with weight control.I have followed this plan fairly closely for three weeks and have lost more weight than I really expected to. Other reviews describe the two stage approach taken by the book, so I won't repeat that here.Good things about the book: it's beautifully produced, with well designed pages, all in full color, and for once some of the people shots actually show overweight people. The tables given for calorie intake at various weight levels and especially the "calories burned" tables for activity recognize that some people are quite overweight and go up to high weight levels. The book quite straghtforwardly recognizes that the way to lose weight, permanently, is to consume fewer calories than your body uses - ultimately that is the only way. And by focusing on eating healthy foods, especially fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, the book tries to help you change your habits. Despite the criticism of another reviewer, I did not find that the book recommended highly processed foods. They are included in the book's tables for helping you determine how many servings of each food category you eat each day, but they are not "starred" foods, which means they are not recommended foods. Instead the recommendation is for fresh foods whenever possible, and for minimally processed foods otherwise. In the real world I live in, organic, locally grown produce, meat, and dairy is not obtainable within a 50 mile drive of home - so any diet that doesn't recognize that reality won't work for me. I also don't mind the word "diet" in the title. Diet in its larger sense simply refers to the food we consume. We can have a healthy diet or an unhealthy one. This one is healthy. Finally, this book is unequivocal that physical activity is essential to weight management, and it offers many suggestions for how to incorporate physical activity into your daily life.Bad things about the book (why it didn't get 5 stars): The few recipes included make a ridiculously large number of servings - usually 8. They are useless for me and I suspect for most households. Might as well have left them out, really. The opening "Lose It!" section, though intended to simplify your food decisions for two weeks, was surprisingly hard to comprehend - I found myself going back on a daily basis to re-read sections to make sure I understood what I was supposed to be doing. Some of the guidelines proved impossible for me to follow. For instance, given the work I do, the requirement that no more time be spent in front of a TV or computer screen than is spent exercising would have meant that I spent every waking moment away from my job exercising. The overall reading difficulty level was a little high, but perhaps not unreasonably so - someone who is willing and able to buy and read a book can probably read this one.As other reviewers have noted, this is not a book with "breakthrough" new information. Most "breakthrough" weight loss information comes attached to diet scams and money making schemes, anyway. This takes what you probably already know, adds some things you should know, and packages it into a workable plan for managing your weight. With few reservations I recommend the book

Before I buy anything, I like to visit amazon for customer reviews. Several reviewers stated that this book didn't give them any new information, and I worried that I would be disappointed. Well, I wasn't disappointed. I like the compact, concise layout. I like all of the visuals, and even if some of it is "review" it is helpful. I found the plan so simple to follow too. I don't like counting calories or points. I like this plan because it's not about "dieting" but developing a healty way of life. I intend to stay on this plan after I reach my weight loss goal to maintain my loss. I started the Mayo Diet on April 1st and I'm half way to goal! I follow the plan and keep it simple. Also, I bought the journal and I use it daily. You don't have to get the journal though, you could use a composition notebook to track food and exercise. It's sticking to the plan that works. Good Luck!Update 12/31/12Following this plan opened my eyes to the importance of nutrition to maintain health (as well as weight). I have since eliminated meat from my diet and am now following a vegan diet. I highly recommend reading Dr. Joel Fuhrman's book, Eat to Live. He discusses research (2003) that I recently read in an issue of Reader's Digest (Nov. or Dec.). I also recommend watching Vegucated as it too helped me to make a conscious decision about what I eat. This is of course, a personal decision. I just felt compelled to share this information because I think that my review of the Mayo plan would be incomplete without this.

I'm still using & reviewing this book, since it divides the process into parts, including a follow up section & I've found it to be good, solid advice. It tends to be written for those who have NO CLUE about general health & fitness matters however, so it's written in a very simplistic manner, like what a calorie is, what good fats vs. bad fats are, why sugar is not healthy etc. I personally found the writing very elementary, since I'm already a foodie who's worked out for years & in very good health. It also kinda' floored me that the authors don't use any references to helpful tools on the web or smart phones! One of the very basic pieces of advice is to journal & track daily calorie intake, only they suggest to write everything down. WHY? There are some great tools out there that do almost all of the work for us such as the "MyFitnessPal" app. This book is not very old, so I'm not sure why they don't offer readers modern solutions to the edious work that few of us really like to do when trying to lose weight.Overall, this is a fine recommendation for someone who's a total & complete novice about how the human body works, what food is made of, what exercises to use to impact what etc or some simple, healthy habits to add into their lifestyle, but for those of us who are already past this level, it's a bit of a yawn...

Excelente visão de uma dieta e motivação para seguir em frente. Unica dificuldade é a marcação do follow up das refeições. Vale a pena ler.

I must say this is the most helpful book I've had so far to help me lose weight and start to actually keep it off.It goes through steps to help you lose bad habits and gain new ones all the way through to living healthier long term.I'm still on my journey with this book but it is helping me a great deal and in turn helping me to keep my children healthy. It really opened my eyes to where I was going wrong from portion control all the way to realising some of the 'habits' I had, that I thought weren't too bad were worse than I thought.I actually bought the kindle version of this book, the spiral bound physical journal and later the physical book. I really do recommend getting the actual journal and the actual book, not the kindle version of the book unless your 100% digital addicted. I am a computer person, don't get me wrong, but I found having the book I could easily put markers and post-it notes in, generally making it mine - personal to me and easily accessible to me. This helped me to connect to what I was doing. Very clear, well written book and has given me a positive boost in the right direction.Arrived well within time given and in new condition.Recommend.

Was amazed that within the first 2 weeks, my core habits actually changed.No more sugar cravings, in fact I find cakes and cookies a bit too sweet to handle.Was a life changer.I highly recommend that anyone trying this get the workbook too... it is essential, particularly for the first month.After that, I found it gets repetitive and rates the fact that you ARE journalling your progress as an equally important as keeping to the diet guidelines, which I find OCD'ish.The main benefit I found of their entire approach was --1) Modest, incremental changes.2) Focus on changing your basic eating habits, gradually.3) Excellent guidelines in the pyramid structure.In particular, I found that the freedom to eat fruit on par with vegetables instead of calorie counting them to free up my eating options. In berry season, I went wild on berries... and found I started to feel a lot better in general. Maybe all those antioxidants, maybe just placebo...but it's a good feeling.So far, I keep losing the pounds, about 1.5 every week... lets see how I do in six months.

This is a very good book for health and weight conscious people. Mayo Clinic books are always very well researched!

I bought this rather by mistake, but didn't bother to send it back. This diet is for obese people, the calorie intake chart starts with people weighing 250 (!!) pounds or less. Nothing really new in it, change your habits, move more, eat less, but eat more fruit before, if you didn't.