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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A paper appeared recently in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that seems to have a whole lot of people on edge.  If you read the press accounts of this study, you might think anyone stupid enough to follow a low-carb diet would be doomed to certain death from heart attack.  But is that the case?  Or is it simply another instance of the media either failing to understand how science works or, worse, misreporting to get a better story?

I suspect the latter, but before we get into it, I need to go over a few blog housekeeping issues.

As I’m sure everyone has noticed, the look of this blog has changed – as has the look of the entire website.  Our designer and tech guys have been struggling to get everything working right, but, finally, my incessant whining got to them, and they went ahead and put the thing up in its not-completed state.  Please bear with us – it will ultimately work as it’s supposed to.  If you are having a problem, send me a description in the comments section.  Make sure you tell me what kind of computer you’re using (Mac (Intel or pre-Intel)  or PC) and which browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.) so that the gurus will know what to do to fix it.

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MD and I just got back from yet another cross-country trip, which gave me the opportunity to catch up on my reading.  While reading a golf magazine, of all things, I came across an article that demonstrates why all such articles should be taken with a grain of salt.  I can’t tell you how many letters MD and I get from people who become concerned because they read a piece in a magazine or newspaper that, for whatever reason, got under their skin.  So, I thought dissecting this article like I did a while back with a scientific study would be instructive.

Before taking these kinds of pieces seriously, you’ve got to realize how they are structured.  And believe me, they are as structured as a sonnet.

Freelance writers are always trying to get their pieces sold, and they write them to a formula that most magazines demand, which is why most of them are pretty much the same.  Just switch the experts and the subjects and you’ve got an article on most anything.  Magazine editors give writers assignments often telling them what they want the article to say and how many words they want it said in.  The writer’s job is to follow the format, cram the info into the required number of words and sound authoritative.

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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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