The Great American Detox Diet: Feel Better, Look Better, and Lose Weight by Cleaning Up Your Diet Reviews

Review by Michael Stack for The Great American Detox Diet: Feel Better, Look Better, and Lose Weight by Cleaning Up Your Diet
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I found “Supersize Me” to be one of the great documentaries (of sorts) in quite a while, not the least of which was the healthy dose of irony in that the girlfriend of star Morgan Spurlock, Alex Jamieson, was a vegan chef witnessing this diet he went on.

Well, the movie’s a huge success, Morgan and to a lesser extent Alex are mild celebrities, and they both took the time to write books. Admittedly, this wreaks of commercialism, but remarkably both turned out good pieces, Spurlock’s a companion to “Supersize Me”, and Jamieson’s revolving around the “Detox Diet” that she put Spurlock on after his month of McDonald’s.

The book essentially is broken into three parts– the first part is sort of introductory/background material– Jamieson describes her journey from confessed junk food nut to vegan/health maven. It makes for an interesting read, but I felt the level of repetition (and endless reinfocement about processed sugar, etc.) that get to be kind of a drag.

The second part is the “detox diet”– a week by week transition plan for abandoning the many processed and chemical additives that are throughout our food.

The third part is a series of healthy vegan recipes, some of which look quite interesting, and while I’ve used none of them, I’ve stolen a couple ideas for my own cooking.

My thoughts on this– before I go further, I’m not a vegan, nor am I likely to become one anytime soon, but I derived a lot of value in this book, in particular from its advice in reading food labels and what’s missing from them, and its advice in checking ALL food labels– for example, we all know High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is a corn-based sugar syrup (and at least some of us know that the body doesn’t seem to register it as consumed calories and so hunger isn’t effected which is why many folks can down ten cans of soda and still eat a full meal– but if you didn’t know that, Jamieson points it out to you). But what I don’t think I knew is how prevelent it is– on advice from the book, I read labels of seemingly innocent product– bread. In my local grocery store I read about two dozen bread variety labels, and most of them (including a number advertized as “whole grain” and “multigrain” and “healthy”) contained HFCS. In fact, I STOPPED looking when I found one that didn’t have HFCS. And that scares me.

She also spends a lot of time talking about the flour enriching process, oil processing, water chemical additives, and so on– I found all of this quite valuable in its own way as well, and armed with this knowledge, I made some subtle changes in my purchasing habits.

Mind you, Jamieson also recommends against plastic, I don’t suspect I’d ever purge my life of plastic, and against caffeine, another thing I don’t particularly want to go without (while I can and have gone weeks without my morning coffee, I enjoy the taste and decaf never tastes right to me). But its certainly all worthwhile to read, the more knowledge you have, the better.

One thing to point out– adhering to the changes wholesale she advocates would get rather expensive– there’s a reason HFCS is all over the place, its cheap. This is true of all sorts of things from enriched flours to hydronated oils. While I’m certainly not hurting for cash, I think it’d be a bit too much of an impact on me financially to move in this direction. One other thing is that Jamieson recommends a wholesale purge of your diet of negative substances while overlooking that a number of people love this kind of stuff. I’m not advocating any behavior, but I know personally that when I restructured my diet about a year and a half ago, I still had to make room for the occasional deep fried takeout order to keep myself sane.

The recipes like I said look very interesting– I haven’t tried anything (yet), but I may, and like any good recipe book, there’s a lot of worth-stealing suggestions in here.

Its a good book, packed with information, and well worth the read. Recommended.

Review by Jeana Malcolm for The Great American Detox Diet: Feel Better, Look Better, and Lose Weight by Cleaning Up Your Diet
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I picked up a copy of this book because, despite being a long time vegetarian, I had been feeling sluggish and weighed down, and I knew that my diet was a major culprit. I’d been working long hours and had been ordering pizzas and nuking frozen dinners all the time rather than preparing healthy meals for myself and my husband. It’s a hard rut to get out of, and I needed a bit of a nudge.

When I first started to read the book, the first thing that really struck me was her advice on water consumption. When I really thought about it, I couldn’t even remember the last time I had a plain glass of water! (I’m a terrible diet soda junkie.) Of course, most of us have heard the 8-10 glasses of water a day rule, but I have also heard it said several times that we get enough water from drinking pretty much anything and that plain water is not a necessary component. How wrong that is! I decided to replace about half of my liquids with water, to start (spiked with some lemon juice, because plain water still tastes bland to me) and I immediately noticed a difference in the way I felt.

There are plenty of other bits of advice in this book, and most of them make perfect sense (cutting sugar, salt, artificial sweeteners, etc.) though if you’re used to eating a lot of processed foods it can be a bit of a struggle at first. I don’t think I’ll necessarily be following all of her advice, as I don’t plan to ever give up regular coffee or wheat, but I’ve tried just about everything else and so far it’s truly helped me.

I’ve read a couple of reviews that state that eating in the manner she suggests is expensive. Personally, I’ve found it to be quite the opposite. It’s ultimately much less expensive to purchase fresh vegetables and fruits and grains and put together a meal than it is to buy processed food all the time. Cooking your own healthy food doesn’t have to be a chore. You can prepare almost anything yourself in the time it takes to get a pizza delivered, and there are all kinds of meals you can make in twenty minutes or less. In fact, the author features several quick recipes in her book, all of which are easy to prepare and not nearly as ingredient-intensive as you might expect vegan fare to be. I’ve prepared several of her dishes already, all of them delicious, none of them time-consuming. My personal favorite recipe is the Avocado Sesame Pasta, which features a raw sauce that can be prepared and ready by the time the water starts boiling for the pasta. And it’s hearty enough that you don’t need anything on the side.

Overall, I think this book is a great buy. The only reason I gave it four stars instead of five is that I felt it could have given a bit more transitional information for people to start out with. I doubt most people are going to be able to just give up something that is a large part of their diet cold turkey, especially when she’s expecting one new thing a week. But even if you don’t follow all of her advice exactly, I still think you will find a significant difference in how you feel.

Review by Merope for The Great American Detox Diet: Feel Better, Look Better, and Lose Weight by Cleaning Up Your Diet
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Jamieson offers some really good and innovative recipes at the end of this book. They are fun to try and she even manages to make bok choy and tofu tasty. There is no “diet” plan per se, just 8 things you need to kick, like sugar and caffeine. The first part of the book has her and her boyfriend’s nutritional journeys, and those are interesting and informative, and very representative of the kind of “you are what you eat” tales you read from other reformed adherents of the Standard American Diet.

Be warned, though, much of this pastiche of medical details and alarmist nutritional info is cobbled together from less than reputable sources. What good medical and nutritional advice she does dole out is directly taken from Andrew Weil, David Katz and other MDs or RDs who actually have studied the subject and know how to interpret medical studies. Jamieson claims that everything in our modern life is killing us, and she joins her voice to the thousands of others in pop-culture who cry for a simpler time, a purer time, a chemical free time… which of course never really existed in this fantasy form because humans were dying of infectious diseases and cholera. She and her ilk ignore the fact that people are living longer than ever, and now have the diseases of old age and over indulgence.

This book address the over indulgence and there is NO QUESTION that you will be healthier and happier if you follow it. But if you want more substative, and more reliable, medical and nutritional advice, you would be wiser to turn to writers like Andrew Weil, Stephen Gullo, or David Katz. Weil has an actual 8 week eating plan that offers more guidelines and recipes than this book does, though very similar.