Book Review

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In a way all diet/workout books are the same. Question: How do you lose weight? Answer: Diet and exercise. All the rest is details, and as we know the problem is in the details. Often, it’s more than just knowing what to do; it’s being able to get yourself to do it. That’s the real challenge for fitness/weight loss books; saying something to people that will help them to really do it. One of the best ways to do this is by using some kind of a metaphor that will make sense to people, make them clearly see the problem and solution, and somehow motivate them to action.

In his fitness/weight loss book, Jim Karas uses the metaphor of “flipping the switch” in an attempt to get people started on the track to a leaner, smaller body. The metaphor, as I see it, reminds me of the Eastern idea of “sudden enlightenment.” It’s also kind of like the Christian concept of “sudden faith,” like the Apostle Paul, who after being “blinded on the road to Damascus,” went from killing Christians to being one. What the metaphor is inferring is that once you get in the right mindset, you’ll find a way to change your life, including diet and exercise, and it’ll be relatively easy from there.

Karas has some credibility in saying that his metaphor works, because he’s had experience with a considerable number of people trying it. Some time ago he created a “weight-loss” management firm called Karas Personal Training in Chicago. On the book’s dust jacket it’s called “the most successful weight loss management firm in the city of Chicago.” I don’t know what statistics were used to come to that conclusion, but the firm does seem to have been in business for a number of years, and to have had “hundreds” of clients. Also, as Karas makes clear on page 3, he personally “flipped the switch,” by losing weight after years of struggle.

Karas has an interesting take on the types or categories of folks who need to lose weight. He divides them into two types 1) Lifelong Strugglers and 2) Slow Gainers. Lifelong Strugglers are folks like him who have struggled to be lean all of their lives. They can’t remember a time in their life when they were thin. Even as children they were teased about their weight. Slow Gainers, on the other hand, are those folks who were thin for most of their young life, could “eat anything they wanted,” and then, suddenly in their 20’s, 30’s, or 40’s, began to gain weight. I think he’s on to something here. There is a difference between these two types.

The first part of the book asks you to go through some self questioning. For Lifelong Struggler’s there are exercises like, “My very first impression of my body was. . .” For Slow Gainers there are exercises like, “In my twenties, my highest weight was _____, my lowest weight was ____.” I always wonder about books that ask you to fill out forms. I don’t think I’ve ever filled one out. I’m sure that many people do, and it works very well for them. At any rate, I think the idea of looking at what could be some psychological reasons for weight gain is a good thing. My theory is that there is always a psychological component to weight gain. The ones that are alluded to in the book might not be the ones you have, but it couldn’t hurt to look at them as a starting point.

There are a couple of things that I really agree with in Karas’s book. The first one is his calories in, calories out idea. He shows the equation like this:

Energy In -- Energy Out = Body Weight

I like the simplicity. I know there are a ton of diet books out there proclaiming the supremacy of protein, or carbohydrates, or sometimes even fat, and there may be something to some of these theories. To me all this macronutrient stuff just muddies the water. It confuses things and keeps folks as fat as ever. The real deal is what energy goes in (calories) and what energy comes out (metabolism & activity), any energy left over becomes fat.

The other thing I really agree with in the book is his take on strength or resistance training. In Karas’s opinion you can’t lose weight without strength training. He speaks from experience. It seems that he spent a few years with intense cardiovascular work and never lost weight, but when he added weight training he finally slimmed down. That was his personal experience, so that’s what he teaches at his weight loss clinic. He teaches 25% cardio, and 75% strength training. Strength training and adding muscle is usually the real long term solution to what we’ll call, “weight control.” It’s pretty much general knowledge that muscle is much more metabolic than fat. In other words muscle eats more food than fat, so a smaller, leaner body can burn more energy/calories than a larger fat one. All that extra burning will give a person an edge on the energy in – energy out equation. I’m not so sure about the 25%, 75% split. I’ve seen a lot of people who require more cardio work, especially to move from one body weight to another. For me personally, I really leaned out (20-25 pounds) after doing some intense running for a summer (of course, along with my strength training).

Also Karas has some good comebacks for the seemingly endless excuses that people come up with. I’m sure this is from his experience of working with many, many folks and weight loss. My experience is that, at first you tend to believe everything the clients are saying, but with time I find you develop a stealth BS detector. Not that I think it’s a good thing to be confrontational with clients, but you have to try and help them get at the truth, or what I call the real deal. In a way, lying to me really doesn’t matter, what matters is lying to themselves. When clients do that, they’re stuck. There’s simply no way to move further. Karas gives good answers to things like, “I don’t have the time,” “I don’t have the money,” “I don’t have the energy,” “I don’t have the right genes or metabolism,” “I love to eat,” “I hate to exercise,” “I’m a woman,” “It’s just too late,” and many others.

All in all, I think “Flip the Switch” is a worthwhile book, and could be a really great book for some people. It certainly doesn’t give a huge number of scientific references like Fuhrman’s “Eat To Live.” A lot of the arguments are based on what is sometimes called anecdotal evidence, meaning it’s from what the author personally experienced, or from what his clients have experienced. Anecdotal evidence is often put down by scientific types, but sometimes I’ve found it to work out better than scientific studies which are often confusing and contradictory. I found “Flip the Switch” to make good, basic common sense, and that is often a rare thing these days.