Member Reviews
This book claims to be an easy way to make lifestyle changes to eat what you want but still be healthy. It is not easy at all unless you want to just follow their meal plans. They go through how the body processes different types of food (protein, carbs, fats) and the ratios you should eat. They talk about some popular diet trends and why they don’t really work. They go through a gazillion vitamins and minerals you should be getting every day and the amounts, but there’s not really a helpful way to figure out how to ingest all of these. Many of their suggestions are things like buy grass fed meat and organic produce from CSAs, but that’s not accessible or affordable for a lot of people. And they have some of what I would consider pseudoscience (for instance, most people do t need to eliminate gluten in their diet unless there’s a health reason like Celiac disease, but that’s one of the steps in their plan for everyone).
There were a bunch of meal plans, grocery lists, and recipes which would be helpful if you plan to follow their plan to a T, but I didn’t find much direction besides those about how to change your mindset about eating to naturally eat healthier; just a lot of education without much application.
Thanks to NetGalley for the free ebook.
This was a very interesting book and it had a lot of information that I found useful information and tips.
Eat Fat, Get Fit was an insightful guide to healthy eating, but much of the information presented was found in other resources, but was presented in a slightly drier fashion. Lots of great information, but a bit dense. Other primers/books might be more accessible to readers, but this has loads of good details and healthy, sound advice.
This was a good diet book with some new information for me. Menus and shopping lists are provided to help you organize. There were a lot of recipes in the back of the book. This book was worth the read.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
I thought this book had some good information included, however it was nothing revolutionary. There have been other books with a similar take on what we are putting into our bodies. The Whole 30 comes to mind.
Karvadis main point is that diets should be individualised depending on your body type. Cutting out a good type is not ncesssarily going to help you loose weight. Diet myths are debunked and some excellent recipes suggested,
A nice , straighforward 'diet' book.
This book contained so much information that I had a difficult time processing it! With that in mind, I think that such a level of detail will be more than most readers anticipate when they open this book. "Eat fat, get fit" strikes me as a title intended for highly nutritionally minded individuals versus someone just getting started on their nutrition journey. It's insanely well written and highly researched and thought out. I just think that might be more than some readers anticipate.
Kusha believes that 80% of all our health and fitness is due to what we consume. He says that the quality of food is essential. He does not call this a diet but a way of life. He encourages you to change your eating and buying habits.
He encourages you to purchase your food from farmer markets and local sources. But for me there is a downside to his idea. People eat and buy what they can afford. If it is good for you or not, when people on low incomes can not afford what he is suggesting.
I admit he never calls his plan a diet. Never uses fit and fat in the same sentence. He promotes re educating yourself to the quality of food sourced locally. It is a great idea just not a reasonable one in my own opinion. Cost is essential for many people. Read and decide for yourself.
*ARC provided by publisher via NetGalley*
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2118991800
https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RXII2M9FR18S4/ref=pe_1572281_66412651_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv
I do love it when a title tells you everything you need to know, although the second half is optional.
Since I don’t read diet books, it’s hard to compare. This guy is straightforward and tells it like he thinks it is without frills, which might explain why this book is so short. Another reason is the long lists and plans and recipes and an exercise regimen at the end, which take up almost half of the book.
It is well written, with out-of-the-box thinking. But it’s definitely not for everyone—more of a general overview—as it doesn’t take into account most dietary restrictions and allergies like mine.
I rated this book three stars because much of the information was already available in other sources, some even free online. I admit that I have not tried the recipes, although some were appetizing. I will try some of them. Other recipes did not appeal to me and I will not try them. On a positive note, I enjoyed the detailed information about agave and carrageenan. It has become extremely challenging for the average person to walk into the grocery store and leave with a bag of healthy choices. One should not need a degree in chemistry in order to decipher the ingredients on a food label. The author lists some of the additives present in our food and explains why they should be avoided.
Kusha believes that 80% of health and fitness is about what you eat, and invites readers to focus on quality ingredients over counting calories, proteins, carbs, and fat. He advocates for the whole foods approach espoused by The Weston A. Price Foundation, and encourages shopping at farmers markets and buying into community supported agriculture. There’s a lengthy but not overwhelming section on basic nutrition and physiology, followed by his opinion on the Paleo diet,along with foods to add and foods to avoid. There’s a 28-day meal plan with recipes and shopping lists to get you started. After the recipe section there’s an explanation of his proprietary fitness regimen called Exerscribe, which you have to go to his website to find out more about.
Professionally, I think ebooks are a great way to build your audience and get customers, but I don’t think he did a strong enough job promoting his app. If he meant for this book to be the nutrition companion to his fitness app, I can’t tell.The chapter where he talks about his approach to exercise is really small compared to the rest of the book which focuses on food and nutrition. He doesn’t offer a sample fitness routine nor does he direct you to his website to review testimonials. If he were trying to increase sales of the app and the fitness band, it would have been helpful to see how his eating plan combined with the band exercises helped his customers achieve or surpass their fitness goals.
I think this will help a lot of people change their eating habits for the better, but as an integrative nutrition health coach who has studied several dietary theories, including all the ones he mentioned in the book, I have some problems. First, I want to start off by saying I requested this book because of the title. As a health coach, I’ve watched a lot of diet trends and philosophies come and go over the years and they pretty much say the same thing: low-fat diets are the key to long-term weight loss and weight management. But that has turned out to not be true. Fat has health benefits, satiety being one of them, and diets too low in fat can trigger cravings and push people to eat more, believing that those foods won't negatively affect their weight.
So when I see that someone actually says it’s okay to eat fat, I want to see what they’re doing. The author is a strength coach, and you don’t often hear the words fat and fit in the same sentence. If you google fat and fit, you’ll find a number of articles arguing against the idea that fat bodies can also be fit bodies, and it's refreshing to read someone else saying fat is important part of healthy eating.
I have some conflicts with Karvandi’s take on his program not being a diet along with some of the ingredients used in the recipes. Throughout the book, he reminds the reader that what he's sharing is not a diet, it’s just a change in perspective. You can play with semantics all you want, but when you take the time to talk about which foods to eat, which foods to avoid, and then tell map out which foods to eat on which days for a certain period of time, that’s a diet! The title is Eat Fat, Get Fit and the bulk of the book is focused on food, not fitness. There’s a description of Exerscribe and a call to action to buy BFR bands, but there are no fitness routines. That makes this a DIET book.
Because we frame diets as temporary solutions, maybe Karvandi believes that his dietary philosophy is the only one you’ll need for the rest of your life. But let’s not fool ourselves, his eating plan is a diet.
Also, it feels as though he skimmed through the Weston Price Foundation’s dietary guidelines. If you’re not familiar with Weston Price, here’s a short history. Weston Price was a dentist who traveled throughout the world during the 1930s visiting communities whose foodways had not been industrialized. He discovered that people who ate nutrient-dense whole foods, especially raw milk and grass-fed animal fats, had fewer dental problems and overall health problems. He called it traditional foods. Fast forward to today and thousands of people are integrating his research and writings into their versions of modern whole foods nutrition. The traditional foods diet includes whole grains which are soaked, sprouted, and/or fermented, whole vegetables that are predominantly cooked or lacto-fermented if eaten raw, meat and whole fat and raw dairy from pastured and grass-fed animals, which means no lean meats and no skinless poultry, and traditional oils such as olive and coconut oils.
While he does include raw milk, I’m confused by the skim milk in the lists and I’m not sure why there’s quinoa in the recipes or gluten-free flour options. That actually sounds like Paleo, which he thinks is flawed. There are also smoothies listed and I feel like Sally Fallon, who’s the president of the foundation made a big deal about smoothies not being good for you over the long-term. I have to look for that. I could be wrong though. You can eat whatever you want, but if you dedicate a section to a dietary philosophy you should really try and stick with it, otherwise you’ll confuse the newbies and annoy the veterans.
Oh, one thing about raw milk: If you did not grow up drinking raw milk you need to be very careful about consuming it and only buy it from reputable sources. You’ll also need to find out if purchasing raw milk is legal in your state. The Weston A. Price Foundation has chapters you can join to purchase raw milk and they have additional resources to help you identify safe sources.
While I don’t think a lot of the recipes are Traditional Foods-based, they look like they will taste good. There’s some good information here, but with all nutrition and health advice, I encourage you to exercise your own personal wisdom and discretion. Trained professionals can help you clarify and meet your wellness goals, but ultimately you are the expert on you.
We've had a lot of different diets popping up in the last years, and most of them insist on not eating one type of food.I very much enjoyed this book. It makes a good point. Diets need to be individualized. Cutting out a type of food from your diet is not going to necessarly make you loose weight and eating fat is not a problem if done reasonably. This book contains a lot of nutritional advice and it is all explaned well.
A Counterpoint to the Low Fat Diet
Diet fads come and go. We’ve had the low fat diet, the low carb diet, the South Beach Diet, the Atkins Diet and others. From current research it seems clear that any diet that insists on not eating one type of food is not going to work for all people. I enjoyed this book. It makes the point that diets need to be individualized and that eating fat is not the real problem.
The book contains a great deal of information on current research. Karvandi, a fitness coach, explains the current finding in language easy to understand by anyone interested in nutrition. He explains fat metabolism and goes into detail about how it keeps the body function in a healthy way.
If you read a lot of nutrition advice, the book doesn’t present anything new, but it is explained well. I recommend this book for beginners or people who are interested in nutrition and don’t have much time to study it.
In addition to the description of body function and recommendations for foods to eat and those to avoid, the author includes a number of recipes and a diet plan for those who want to try his method.
This book is short, easy to read and even if you don’t plan to take on all his recommendations, you’ll learn a lot about food and exercise.
I received this book from Net Galley for this review.
This book is loaded with very detailed information. I believe this book would be helpful to anyone who wants to improve their eating habits and health, it's not just about losing weight, it's about good health. The author has done a lot of research and was very thorough the writing of this book and attempt at educating people.
Much praise for "Eat Fat, Get Fit" by Kusha Karvandi. I have started hearing about how the healthy fats are making a comeback into our diets and it is helping us to gain back our health (and lose a few...or more in my case...needed pounds). Bring on the healthy fats, B*tches!!! Karvandi offers a 28 Day Meal Plan, mouth-watering recipes enough to where I wanted to lick my computer screen, but I digress. Fats, people!!! Get your fats!!! I know, that sounds weird, but it works. And, it makes your body feel good inside and out.
Instead of another fat diet or gimmick, this book offers readers an insight into how certain processes in the body work - such as your metabolism - and also dispels many of the most common food and diet myths. It covers a whole wealth of topics related to food (fats, sugars, minerals and vitamins), pulls apart various diets to allow you to see the pros and cons for yourself. The emphasis of this book is on understanding how your body works and what it requires, and then developing a diet based on eating healthily, and putting out more calories than you take in - simple!
My main criticism of this book however is how crammed full of text it is. It makes it very difficult to read with so many paragraphs so close together, pages and pages of text without any illustrations or diagrams, or different colours - in fact anything at all to break up the lengthy paragraphs of text would be helpful. For instance, there is a meal plan and a lot of great recipe ideas, but many of us are visual people and need to be able to see the result of the recipes and imagine what we are going to be cooking. A few photographs would have made a great difference.
I was very disappointed in this book. While there is a growing amount of evidence of the importance of fats in our diet, and the book cites some of this, the book is disorganized and, I'm afraid, recommends a diet that is based on ingredients that can be expensive, difficult to find, or, i'm afraid, illegal.
The first third or so of the book provides information about the importance of fats in our diet and about the different ways or bodies process and use food.
The next large section goes over "supplements." You might think this would mean vitamins, minerals, and such, whether they come from food or not. But no, mixed up in this section is information about specific foods. It's just one example of the disorganization.
Then we come to the diet itself, which has even more problems. One major part of the diet is drinking raw (i.e. unpasteurized) milk. This kind of milk is illegal to be sold in more than half the states. If I live in those states what am I supposed to do? It also insists on pesticide-free produce. They do not like organic foods as bought in markets, but advocate farmer's markets and CSA boxes. Once again what do I do in those parts of the country that have winter and long stretches where nothing grows? Oh and then there is the grass-fed beef and free-range chicken suggested. While these meats are growing in popularity they are, like the other recommendations more expensive.
So while many of these suggestions are good, they just are not practical. I'm still waiting for books to take on this important issue in a way that makes sense for regular people. This book is not that.
I am really glad I picked up this book! I am always interested in health and wellness and like to stay on top of new information. It is evident that a ton of research went into this book and I learned a lot of new information, especially about Amino Acids and supplements. As an added bonus, there were many great recipes in the back of the book that I cannot wait to try. I highly recommend this book! It is full of great information.
Many have attempted weight control plans before that didn't work. Eat Fat Get Fit doesn't focus on odd eating routines. The author focuses on mindset. With the correct point of view and resources, readers will have the capacity see the outcomes they desire.
There are some great recipes in this book but I am not sure about whether I would follow this plan.
It talks about the use of an app but if you don't have this then it does not seem that you can follow it fully.
An interesting new idea though.