Review: The $500 Diet: Weight Loss for People Who Are Committed to Change
The $500 Diet: Weight Loss for People Who Are Committed to Change by Ian Ayres
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Such a disappointment!
I was referred to this book from the list of other personal development-oriented books and expected it to be at least OK, if not great, but it was an utter disappointment.
Most of the time when I read personal development book nowadays I’m a little bit bored, since most of the time ideas aren’t new and my interest is mostly fueled by either author’s talent to tell good stories or author’s personal and (hopefully) original angle on the familiar problem. And you know, that’s OK with me. Personal development is an area where applying just a handful of common sense rules will get you 90% of the goal. I actually recently become interested in the art of finding such short, but deep formulas that cover pretty much the entire problem. Good examples are:
- “Eat food, not too much, mostly greens” which covers proper food consumption and dieting
- “One thing at the time, most important thing first, start now” which pretty much covers task management
etc etc
So, from that point of view this book won’t be awful, since its main idea is to use serious financial penalty as a motivational tool for behavior change, specifically for the weight loss. Meh, a little bit boring and probably shallow to fill even a small book, but still nothing really wrong about it.
There are two problems however:
First, this is like an extended ad for author’s web app (StickK) that allows you to put money where your mouth is and risk losing them if you don’t reach your goal. I’m not a huge fan of such method of motivation, but it will work for some people and while I didn’t use the service, my friend (and current employer) Buster Benson is playing with similar approach in his HealthMonth service, so I expected that author will mention his app here and there. But the book is actually choke full filled with it. You can’t read a single page (or at least it feels like that) without noticing the StickK. It just so overboard that it drives me nuts.
Second and much bigger problem is that while author is mostly concentrating on the topic of money bets as a motivator for the behavior change, he always uses only one example – losing weight. Yes, that’s almost everyone’s New Year resolution #1 and most of the time author doesn’t attempt to suggest what is the right way, but he implies that it’s just eating less calories and exercising more. Which on its own is a “kind of” right advice. “Kind of” because while it’s important to eat less calories and exercise more, you also need to eat right food. And not eating right food is that secret enemy that makes majority of dieters to regain their weight and that’s what author is trying to fight with a $500 money bets. Hilarious example of that is his quote of some poor dieter who tweets everything he eats and it reads like “waffles with a maple syrup, cheerios, etc”. No wonder that even some iron-willed people regain their weight if they continue to eat that crap and sending their bodies daily on the insulin roller-coaster.
How about changing what you’re eating instead of using huge piles of money to force yourself into the artificial extended hunger which inevitably will defeat you and you regain that weight back? Don’t expect answer to that question in this book.
So, while the book was only $2 or $3 on Amazon, I actually regret paying my money for it. There are other much-much better books both on motivation and dieting. Don’t waste your time.
