The day after Labor Day (six days from today) our new book comes out, and our publisher finally gave us permission to excerpt it.  I’m going to post the entire introduction so you’ll know why we came to write this particular book.

The story you will read will be true and the names won’t be changed to protect the ‘innocent.’  Until the events transpired that you will soon be reading about, I was not especially a proponent of fast weight loss.  I mean a low-carb diet will make people lose weight quickly, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about the people who used to come into my office saying, “I’ve got my high school reunion in a month.  How much weight can I lose by then?’  I always considered these as fairly ludicrous requests because the requesters clearly weren’t concerned about health issues, but simply about how they would look in the short run, without an eye to maintaining their lifestyle.

As a consequence of dealing with so many of these patients, I really developed an aversion to the notion of quick weight loss to meet some sort of deadline where appearance counted.  But, as with so many things in life, it’s easy to pontificate until you find yourself in the same position as the people to whom you’re pontificating.

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Don’t panic.  I don’t have a paid ad for the RealAge Test stretching across the top of my blog post today.  This one is for illustration purposes only.  If you are like me, however, you’ve run across this banner countless times in your online surfing.  It seems to pop up everywhere.  Or at least it used to.  It hasn’t too much lately since the big New York Times exposé, more about which later.

But first let’s take a look at something else brought to the public by the team of Roizen and Oz.  I came across this page on their RealAge website while I was googling something else.

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I’m almost afraid to say it, but it looks like after being delayed two times our new book is actually coming out on September 8.  As we have done with all our books, we will be expected to be available for all kinds of media appearances and interviews.  It is a giant pain, but it has to be done.  It’s part of the book-writing gig.  If you don’t sign up to do the PR, they don’t sign up to publish your book. (If you want to see a little of what a book tour is like, read this piece by Joe Queenan to see what we’re up against. Sometime I’ll write a piece on the nightmare of my first three-week-long book tour and my dealings with the escorts that are a part of the book tour experience.)

MD and I have been in discussion with our publisher and have gotten permission to excerpt part of the book, which I will do on this blog soon.  The book is about the weight gain that seems an inevitable part of moving into and through middle age and how this weight is different from that gained in the younger years.  It’s a kind of bad news, good news story because middle-age weight comes from a more dangerous kind of fat (the bad news), but a kind of fat that is fairly easy to lose (the good news).  But despite its being easier to lose, it still requires some effort…and a little different approach.  And, surprisingly, most of this fat can be lost in a 6-week window.  That doesn’t mean that we promise that all weight will be lost in a 6-week window, but most of the middle-aged weight can be ditched or at least significantly shed in this time period – thus the title.

Since we don’t have an active practice right now, most of the subjects we’ve given the diet to are former patients, friends and relatives.  We have had almost unbelievable success with those who gave the program a fair try.  We had one middle-aged friend who had struggled with lipid problems for years.  Despite our telling her not to worry and not to go on a statin because those drugs have never been shown to be beneficial for women, she was worried.  Her doctor was hectoring her, telling her that she would have to go on a statin if her lipids didn’t come into line.  She had an appointment in two weeks, so she went on the first two weeks of the program, then went to her doctor.  Not only did she lose eight pounds in her first two weeks, her lipid numbers plummeted.  Her total cholesterol fell from 240 to 174; her triglycerides dropped to below 100; and her HDL ran up to 60.  Happily, this all happened during the editing phase of the book, so we were able to include her story.  Other subjects have done as well if not better.

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MD and I just spent a couple of days with the grandkids at Disneyland.  They’re here visiting for a couple of weeks, so we decided to bite the bullet and take them on the front end and get it over with instead of waiting until the end, as we usually do, and dreading it the entire time.  It was brutal but it is now over.

I loathe Disneyland and refer to it as the biggest people trap ever built by a mouse.  Which isn’t an original, but I’ve been saying it for so long that I’ve forgotten where I heard it years ago.

This year I at least was able to avoid the Small World ride.  Our 7-year-old grandson informed us that it was ‘lame.’  I couldn’t have agreed more.  I wasn’t so lucky a couple of years ago, however.  We took the kids then and did end up going on the Small World ride, which experience the grandkid remembered when he referred to the ride as being lame.

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