Which book should I buy?

This blog post is to help you get the right book for you.

I have written six books to date:

1) Why do you overeat? When all you want is to be slim (2004)

This book answers that million dollar question and it introduced The Harcombe Diet for the first time and the three conditions that cause insatiable food cravings. It was the book that changed my life and I hope it changes yours. You may enjoy reading this, as the original. However, Stop Counting Calories & Start Losing Weight: The Harcombe Diet was written in 2008 to effectively replace Why do you overeat?

(This book has been translated into Greek and is available in Greece).

2) Stop Counting Calories & Start Losing Weight: The Harcombe Diet (2008)

The original version of Stop Counting Calories & Start Losing Weight was published by Accent Press in the UK and it looked like this:

The very early versions looked like the picture to the left. The later editions (2010) had “Best-selling book on amazon” added on the front cover and a picture of me and a picture of the recipe book on the back cover. That’s how you’ll know how early your copy is!

This one is out of print as of July 2011.

We changed publishers in July 2011 to Columbus Publishing Ltd and the picture below shows the new book and cover. If you want our flagship diet book – the best seller, which has helped over hundred thousand people to lose weight – this is the one to get. So, if you have the option of buying a copy of ‘the green book’ or the one with me on the cover – the most up-to-date book is the one with me on the cover.

This has been the cover for the USA, Australian and NZ version of Stop Counting Calories all along, so this is the one to buy in any of those countries.

Rights for Stop Counting Calories were sold to Russia in 2010 and they have a different cover altogether!

FAQ) I have the old Stop Counting Calories - is it worth me getting the new one?

A) I’ll tell you the main changes to help you decide – about one third of the book has been completely rewritten:

- The Q&A section is the major change. It was really difficult to find questions in the green book and we now have these 80 pages organised alphabetically, so that you can find the answers from Agave Nectar to Xylitol really easily. We have new questions on chocolate, cholesterol, eggs, time-of-the-month and the key new sweeteners (don’t!) I’ve included the list of Q&A’s in the new edition of Stop Counting Calories at the end of this post (Appendix 1), so that you can see if this new section would help you. Any club subscribers who have library access will find all these Q&A’s (and many, many more) in the club, with a handy search for your convenience.

- Part 2 is new – this goes into my latest research on why counting calories has never worked and never will. It includes the amazing story from The Obesity Epidemic: What caused it? How can we stop it? where I asked the seven main UK diet and public health bodies where the calorie theory comes from and what their answers were!

- The Phase 2 chapter has a new section at the end sharing my learnings from working with clients. All about weight loss, plateaus, should you stay on Phase 1 longer and so on.

- The testimonials are all new at the front – taken from our on-line club members, who have very kindly shared their names, so the accolades are now much more personal.

There are other small updates throughout, but these are the main ones.

3) Stop Counting Calories & Start Losing Weight: The Harcombe Diet Recipe Book (2008)

This was the original accompaniment to the 2008 diet book. It became known as ‘the blue book’ and the picture is on the left:

This one is out of print as of July 2011.

4) The Harcombe Diet: The Recipe Book (2011)

This is the new accompaniment for the new recipe book and the feedback has been fantastic! It has Andy’s and my recipes from the first recipe book and over 100 new ones. There is far more emphasis on Phase 1 recipes and only a few classic Phase 3 dishes. We’ve made sure we have covered the classics from mushroom stroganoff to French onion soup to gravy to Harcombe friendly burgers. Mayonnaise, chips, cauliflower cheese are all in there. There is a wonderful section on curries, with an authentic Indian base recipe and then adjustments for the range from Korma to Dhansak. Andy and I have written this one together and we are thrilled with it.

One of the best bits is the new structure and index – it is structured by Phase, so that you can go to the section for the Phase that you are currently on and see all your vegetarian, fish and meat options. The index at the back is so much better – we took on board some feedback about the other index and we think you’ll love this one. So, if you have the option of buying a copy of ‘the blue book’ or the new one – there’s no contest!

FAQ) Is it worth getting the new recipe book if I have the out-of-print one?

A) I would – it is just the perfect accompaniment to the diet book for anyone cooking real food from scratch.

5) The Obesity Epidemic: What caused it? How can we stop it? (2010)

You can find out lots about this book on this site. The whole introduction is on the site for free, all the reviews, summaries of each chapter, some research I have done since this book came out. Arguably the most useful bit – the 400 references from the book are on this site, with click throughs to the source where possible to make your own research as easy as possible.

This is not a diet book – it’s an academic book answering the question that is the book title.

6) The Harcombe Diet for Men (2011)

We are so excited about this one. It is at the printers now and is due out in the autumn. Advance copies will be available for our on-line club members, as ever. Here is the cover:

And the words on the back describe what it’s all about:

No More Mr Fat Guy!

You want to lose weight – fast
You’re not prepared to go hungry
You want to eat steak, pasta, cheese and the good things in life
You want the odd drink
(Some days, to be honest, quite a lot of drink)
You’ll exercise only if you want to
You won’t count calories or anything else.
Oh, and you want all of this in just a few pages…

So here it is – The Harcombe Diet® for men:
Real food, unlimited quantities and rapid results;
Just 3 simple rules – to get you to your ideal weight and keep you there for life.

“I read 4 pages and lost two and a half stone – I figured I’d better not read much more!”
John Davies

We think busy women (aren’t we all?!) are going to love this as much as men. It’s the slimmest book you’ve ever seen – just 80 pages, which is just about the smallest book you can properly bind. Everything you need to know about the diet and conditions is covered in c. 40 pages and then the rest covers optional stuff: why we don’t worry about fat or cholesterol, how to eat out and lose weight, fitness and nutrition etc. It’s really straight talking and probably takes little more than half an hour to read and then you know everything you need to know about weight loss.

Please note – The Harcombe Diet itself won’t change. If you have already got Stop Counting Calories, you don’t need this book. It was designed for those who would never read a 350 page diet book. You may, however, like it as a pocket size reference book rather than searching through the bigger book. It’s a great summary of The Harcombe Diet.

That’s it for now! We hope that this helps.

Very best wishes – Zoë & Andy

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Appendix 1 – Q&A’s from the 2011 Columbus Edition of Stop Counting Calories & Start Losing Weight:

Questions & Answers

This section has been substantially revised since the first edition of this book. As much of the book is in a question and answer format, we have taken out the questions covered in earlier chapters to avoid repetition.

This has enabled us to include many new questions, every one of which comes from followers of The Harcombe Diet. There have been so many questions that we are now able to establish a clear Top 10 most Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s). We have put (Top 10) in brackets next to these questions, so that you know you’re not alone in asking this one.

We have put all questions in alphabetical order so that Sweeteners, Sweet potatoes and Soy(a) will be under S and Caffeine under C, as examples. There is also an index at the back of the book to help you further. We hope that the following pages answer any queries that you may have. However, if your query is not answered here, we have literally thousands of questions asked and answered in our on-line diet club www.theharcombedietclub.com.

A – Addiction (2); Agave Nectar; Alcohol (2); Avocados
B – Bacon; Benefits (of doing this diet); Bingeing (& Starving); Butter
C – Caffeine; Calories (3); Candida (4); Carbohydrates (2); Cereal; Cheese; Chewing gum; Children; Chips; Chocolate; Cholesterol; Constipation; Corn Flour; Couscous; Cravings (4); Cream; Crème fraiche (& fromage frais)
D – Dairy Products; Diabetes; (Candida) Die-off; Diet Drinks; Drinks generally (2)
E – Effort; Eggs (2); Eyesight
F – Falling (off the wagon); Fat (4); Food Intolerance (by country); Fruit; Fruit teas
G – Gravy; Grazing
H – Healthy; Honey; Hummus
I – Insulin; Insulin resistance (Syndrome X)
J – Jam (preserves) (2)
L – Lemon
M – Mascarpone cheese; Meat (2); Medication; Milk; Mixing (2); Moderation
N – Nuts (& Seeds)
O – Olives; Olive Oil
P – Pain killers; Pasta; Phase 1 (staying on Phase 1 & going back to Phase 1); Potatoes; Pregnancy; Protein; Pulses
Q – Quorn
R – Real food; Recipes
S – Salt; Sausages; Smoked food; Snacks; Soy(a) milk; Stevia; Stock cubes; Sugar; Sweet corn; Sweeteners; Sweet potatoes
T – “Time-of-the-month”; Tinned tomatoes; Tofu
V – Vegetables; Vegetable crisps; Vegetable juice; Vinegar; Virtuous & Vicious circles; Vitamins
W – Water retention; Weight loss (2)
X – Xylitol
Y – Natural Live Yoghurt (NLY) (4)

Plateaus & weight loss – a few thoughts

This is a new section in the latest edition of “Stop Counting Calories”. I hope it helps share some of the learnings that clients and I have had working together since the first edition was published:

1)    The incredible weight loss, which many people achieve in Phase 1, is not sustainable. Much as I would love for you to lose several pounds every week, week in week out, it is extremely unlikely to happen. Candida and Food Intolerance cause significant water retention and, if you lose over half a stone in five days (as regularly happens), much of this will be water and this can only be lost once. As long as you keep these two particular conditions under control, there is no reason for this water to return, and this weight loss really does count – you can drop a clothes size, or even two, in a matter of days and look and feel so much better.

2)    On the subject of water vs. fat loss, weight is weight. The human body is approximately 50% water, so you are always going to lose water as you lose weight. So long as you don’t lose water in an unnatural way, with diuretics, if you are normally hydrated and you weigh less than last week, you have lost weight and you will feel and look slimmer.

3)    There is no formula on earth when it comes to weight loss. The “to lose 1lb of fat…” formula in Chapter 2 absolutely does not work (ask the next person who says this to you where it comes from and what the evidence for it is – they won’t be able to tell you). If you had found something that gave you sustained 2lb a week weight loss, you would have lost 104lbs in the past year (and the year before and the year before that) and you wouldn’t be reading this book. I’m really sorry if I am the one breaking this to you, but there is no formula.

Hence, sadly, I genuinely cannot predict what your weight loss will be on The Harcombe Diet. I can share with you numerous testimonials from people who have lost a great deal of weight and kept it off. Many come to say that the weight loss is almost a bonus – what they love even more is the freedom from food addiction and cravings and the incredible energy and wellbeing that they have.

I can share that people comment time and time again that a pound lost on this diet is gone for good – because you have not slowed your metabolism, there is no tendency for you to put on weight the minute you start eating ‘normally’, as happens on other diets. Your whole concept of normal eating will become a lifelong commitment to nourishing your body with real food and cheating when you want to and getting away with it.

Check out Facebook, Amazon and YouTube for comments about the diet. You will find lots of inspiring stories of people who have lost stones and are wearing their target size jeans for the first time in years. Posting such as “Bought the book, it’s a super read, I have lost 2 stone 2lbs in 5 weeks” (YouTube) make my day! Follow the rules and you will lose weight and you will keep it off. However, no one on earth can tell you how quickly you will reach your natural weight.

4)    Phase 1 vs. Phase 2 is up to you. Phase 1 is the fastest weight loss plan I have come across, but Phase 2 delivers better on the practical and enjoyable characteristics of a diet. There is a trade off between faster weight loss with a more restricted plan and steadier weight loss and a more varied plan – the choice is yours and you can flex between the two from week to week, to suit your lifestyle. If you want to stay on Phase 1 for longer and find it OK for your lifestyle – do so.

5)    If you did well on Phase 1 and then don’t lose any weight for more than a couple of weeks in Phase 2, this can pretty much only be due to something you have re-introduced in Phase 2. You need to be quite analytical and look at everything you have added back in and see if you have added in anything that could have started to ‘feed’ one of the conditions. Wheat would be my first suspect. I have yet to meet someone who does not feel better and lose weight faster staying off wheat until at least close to their goal weight. Things that ‘feed’ Candida and Hypoglycaemia are the next suspects – fruit, whole grains – any substantial increase in carbohydrates into your diet can have an impact if you are very carb sensitive. Re-read Chapter 7 on Phase 2 and follow the advice for the three conditions really carefully to make Phase 2 work for you.

6)    Plateaus – because there is no formula that can predict weight loss, there is no way of knowing how much will be lost each week. Some people do find that they plateau – even for a few weeks (this is rare), but then they suddenly start losing steadily again and a month later almost another stone has gone. Plateaus are so frustrating and my heart really does go out to people who are sticking so well to the diet and who don’t get the reward that week – but the reward does come. We just can’t predict when – boy do I wish I could. I know I can take away cravings and I know that Phase 1 works for everyone who has tried it. I just can’t guarantee you will lose weight every single week, week in week out.

Consider this, though: the majority of my success stories have been doing calorie controlled diets for at least 10 years and they had reached the point where they had stopped losing a single pound, despite trying to survive on 1000-1200 calories a day. They try Phase 1, lose 5-10lbs in a week and never look back. You will get there and you will be eating really healthily in the meantime and will no longer be hungry and exhausted.

7)    I have developed a theory, working with clients, that weight loss is as much about overcoming fat storage as it is about encouraging fat burning. I really believe that the bodies of long term calorie counters are trained to store fat and we need to re-train the body to stop storing fat. The best way I have found for doing this is to have clients eat three substantial and nourishing meals a day and to eat these as regularly as possible. The body then knows when the next fuel is coming and quickly learns that it doesn’t need to store fat any more. I am really pleasantly surprised how quickly the human body responds positively to healthy eating and how rapidly it starts to work with you.

To accompany this principle, I cannot recommend strongly enough (I do repeat this so often in the book) – limit snacking and avoid snacks altogether if at all possible. If you really are hungry between meals try to eat more at meals, so you are not hungry and/or stick to carb free snacks if possible. Whenever you eat a carbohydrate, the body goes into a glucose/insulin/fat storing environment and you want it to be in a fat burning environment, to use up your love handles. The less often you eat carbs, during the day, the better. Carbs and insulin really are the secret to weight loss.

Is The Harcombe Diet OK for someone with high cholesterol?

Q) Is the Harcombe Diet OK for someone with high cholesterol?

A) Wow – there is almost a book’s worth to answer this question – I’ll try to give the headlines:

0) There’s a point before even getting to point (1), which is that we don’t actually have cholesterol freely floating around in our blood. Hence it is not even strictly accurate to say we have a blood cholesterol level! Cholesterol is not water soluble, so it is carried round the body to do its many functions in things called lipoproteins. We measure these as Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL) and High Density Lipoproteins (HDL). LDL is called bad cholesterol – it is not. It should more accurately be called the carrier of fresh cholesterol, as LDL particles transport fresh cholesterol from the liver out to the parts of the body. HDL is called good cholesterol – it is not. It should more accurately be called the carrier of recycled cholesterol, as HDL particles transport residual cholesterol back to the liver to be recycled.

1) Cholesterol is a vital substance in the human body – so much so that it is actually made by the body (in the liver). Every cell needs cholesterol to survive and repair itself. Our muscles need cholesterol, our sexual functioning requires cholesterol and so on. This is why some of the side effects of statins (drugs designed to mess up the body’s own process by which it makes cholesterol) are muscle fatigue (and even wasting) and sexual problems. I would not allow any doctor to try to lower my body’s natural production of cholesterol for any reason – that’s my personal position – each of you need to have your own, but do your own reading and research to come to your own opinion. Don’t just take the view of your GP – or at least ask them if they receive any funds for performing your cholesterol test (they do – from the government of all places) and see if they or the surgery receive any funding or perks from pharmaceutical companies that make statins.

2) I do not believe that we even have a consistent and reasonable definition of “high cholesterol”. Doctors used to only even look at cholesterol levels in excess of 7, then it became 6 and now 5 is deemed the magic number beyond which everyone shall be put on statins and told to eat man-made, likely hydrogenated margarine. There is no science behind the number 5 – it has been driven down by pressure from pharmaceutical companies over the years. They would happily have the number at 4 – at which level almost everyone in the UK would need to be on statins. How can it be that a ‘normal’ reading is one that would require virtually every adult to be taking drugs?

3) I am one of the growing minority who do NOT believe that cholesterol causes heart disease (why on earth would the body make a substance that kills us? This defies everything logical about evolution). Even if you believe that cholesterol does cause heart disease, the next massive assumption is that anything we eat can have any impact on cholesterol. It is widely accepted (but not widely known) that eating cholesterol (in eggs and other animal products) has no impact on a human’s cholesterol levels. Eggs have been exonerated of any crimes they were alleged to have committed but no big announcement was made to tell people this.

4) The next allegation is that eating saturated fat causes cholesterol. The Food Standards Agency have admitted to me in writing that the study to prove this has not actually been done but, from a number of  studies of association, it is believed that eating saturated fat causes heart disease. I liken this to – we have observed a number of people in the bath who are also singing, so we will claim that taking a bath causes singing! To jump from association to causation is a school boy error and we have made it time after time with fat, cholesterol and heart disease.

Again – I do not believe that nature would put anything in real food that would kill us. I have no idea what sugar, emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated margarines, transfats and so on could do to us – I don’t put them in my body, so I don’t take the risk of finding out. (*)

5) The whole body functions better at normal weight. Hence you have are significantly more likely to have ‘normal’ cholesterol, ‘normal’ blood pressure, low risk of Diabetes etc when you are within the normal weight range. The single most important thing you can do for your overall health is to not smoke. The second most important thing is to eat well (real food, not processed food) and to be in the normal weight range.

Given that 98% of calorie controlled diets will fail (Stunkard & Hume 1959) and given what we know from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, The Harcombe Diet has to be good for someone with ‘high’ cholesterol (whatever that means) because it gives you a high chance of losing weight and maintaining a normal weight. The other diets that will do this (if you can stick to them) are the extremely low carb diets (like Atkins). Interestingly, a study for the 2004 Horizon programme on Atkins found that not only did people lose more weight on Atkins than on low fat/low calorie diets, they demonstrated a 10 fold improvement in cholesterol vs the low fat group! So, this study alone showed that eating fat will neither make you fat nor raise cholesterol – quite the opposite.

I personally think that The Harcombe Diet can only help with your health, weight and body tests. There can be no doubt that humans are better off avoiding processed food – we have simply had no time to evolve to adapt to the massive number of unfamiliar ingredients that go into our body every day, if we eat processed food. You may like to have more carb meals than fat meals (you will lose weight more slowly if you do this) and you may like to have lower fat versions of protein (lean meat, fish etc). If I tell you that the main fat in lard is monounsaturated fat, would you start to realise how much misinformation you have been given and how you shouldn’t worry about ‘fatty meat’?! The only meat you need to avoid is processed  Pepperamis and other manufactured horrors.

I have this little factoid that I’ve developed:

“If we have been eating food in the form that nature intended for 24 hours, agriculture (large scale access to  carbohydrates) developed four minutes ago and sugar consumption has increased twenty fold in the last five seconds. I wonder which food is more likely to be responsible for obesity, diabetes, or indeed any modern disease…”

(*) I consume no more than 10g of sugar a day in a 85/90% cocoa bar of chocolate. I don’t consume any sweeteners, emulsifiers, transfats, hydrogenated fats etc .

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