Review by Catherine Romanick:

I really enjoy this DVD; it is very well done. Dr. Douillard simply and clearly explains principles of Ayurveda on the DVD and the 36-page guide included with it is a helpful reference. The seasonal grocery lists are great, and the action plan at the end, including skin brushing, self-massage, breathing exercises and yoga practice are now an important part of my morning. I did the 4-day cleanse this autumn to manage my allergies with success; I feel light and clear. I think anyone would benefit from this information and technique to maintain and/or improve health.

Review by L. Mansur:

The DVD is complete, simple and very helpful for ideas about well being on a mental, spiritual and physical levels. I liked it so much that I plan to give friends copies of the DVD as an empowering gift for well-being.

The Book 3 IN 1 by the same author was and is also excellent (I am still reading it). It simplifies ones life and it makes sense about how to eat in harmoney and circumvent or solve those problems with craving.

I love both and recommend them highly.

Lamees

Review by Michael Stack:

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 Joseph S. Maresca:

The standard detoxification diet seeks to purge the body of toxins. Certain foods magnify toxin problems, promote yeast accumulation, excess acidity and a whole host of other issues

which interfere with the bodily healing and equilibrium processes. These foods are processed sugar, white bread, coffee, alcohol, excess dairy , artificial sweeteners and red meat. We should say yes to generous helpings of water, whole grains, millet, nuts, blackberries, strawberries, beans, acidophilus, fresh food, chicory, escarole, dandelion root, ginger and licorice. Water acts as a classic body detoxifier. The author fears excess amounts of nutrasweet which breaks down into methanol and eventually formaldehyde. Trace levels of formaldehyde have been found accumulating near vital organs.

This work will assist in customizing your diet so that a complete detoxification can occur painlessly. The bodily healing processes cannot do their marvelous work optimally until toxins have been discharged or significantly minimized.

This work explains the biochemistry of dieting simply with a

minimum of extraneous material. It is a solid value for the price charged. A copy should be in every personal health library.

Review by International Diva:

I had about 20 pounds to lose, and tried other methods but couldn’t seem to budge them. The key thing about any diet or eating program is that everyone’s chemical makeup and metabolism responds differently, and so they don’t work for everyone.

The people who would benefit the most from this book and this program are those with a combination of certain symtoms and habits, plus a willingness to spend time, energy and money on shifting how they eat.

This is a good book for you if (like me) you suffer from a collection of symptoms:

- overweight

- bloating

- fatigue

- bad skin/rashes

- gastric issues

- problems sleeping

- cholesterol problems (among other things)

While at the same time you have erratic eating habits, such as:

- lots of restaurant meals & takeout

- non-organic food

- fast-food or processed prepared meals

- a passion for sugar, alcohol or caffeine

- overeating/portion control problems

- too much starch, not enough vegetables in your diet

And:

- you decide you can live without coffee

- you’re not dependent on drugs or alcohol

- you have accessibility to a steady supply of organic fruits, vegetables and meat into your diet (read: a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s near you)

- the pocketbook to afford more expensive food, plus supplements

This book would probably benefit these types of people the most, as it changes your focus toward food, and makes you understand why certain foods and habits are bad for you. The focus on the liver/colon is especially helpful if you’ve never given these two organs much thought. For me, it was a major eye opener. Her arguments for organic foods (especially meat) are especially persuasive.

All that said, this is not a one-day detox, and I agree that the title is misleading. I lost six pounds in 11 days on this program, despite a sluggish thyroid. Since then, I’ve lost an additional two pounds in about a week. I don’t stick to it daily but I’ve incorporated some lessons and I’m continuing to lose. I now find it almost impossible not to eat organic, and I realized that I had a sensitivity to gluten that I was not aware of which surely affected my weight.

One thing you have to keep in mind when selecting an eating program is choosing one that has foods that you like. To be successful on this program, you must like or be willing to eat some dark leafy vegetables (kale, mustard greens, chard, etc.), plus your choice of asparagus, artichokes, broccoli, brussel sprouts and the like. And eggs, you’ve got to eat some eggs on this plan. But otherwise, you can eat a lot of your normal foods – the key is on elmininating wheat, sugar, alcohol and caffeine. (I cheated, and drank a cup of decaf organic coffee each morning so I didn’t lose the “ritual” and it had a sort of placebo effect.) Someone posted that you can’t use olive oil, which is erroneous; it’s encouraged as part of “healthy oils” intake.

You must also like cranberry juice, which is required for the fast to help stave off hunger. The requirement for unsweetened cranberry use probably makes this impractical for most people living outside the U.S.Canada, as it’s difficult or not impossible to get in Europe, Asia and Australia.

Many people complain about the cost of her supplements. But if you take her book into a local health food store, they can hook you up with an equivalent of whatever she’s offering. I bit the bullet and ordered Colonix (you can find through a search engine) instead and while spendy, it’s been incredibly effective as part of this program.

One secret to the 11 day diet for me was vegetable soup. I made a couple of batches of different soups on the weekend (such as cabbage soup, broccoli/cauliflower, kale/white bean) and ate those each day for lunch to get several of the required vegetables. I also learned that I really like mustard greens and chard – I’d just never realized it. Just visit a recipe site like [...] for the recipes and plug in the ingredients.

She has recipes in the back of the book, but I didn’t try them save for the flax “pancake” that I made after the fast. It was fine, mostly apple-y, but I hadn’t eaten in a day so anything tasted good!

Review by Dallas Clouatre:

Gittleman’s Fast Track Detox Diet brings together two problems that usually are treated separately–detoxification and weight loss–and does a credible job at answering the needs of both. Moreover, no matter what approach one ultimately takes toward losing weight and establishing weight maintenance, her book is a good starting point. The reason is simple: whether or not an individual gained weight because of environmental toxins, it is certainly the case that toxins are stored preferentially in fatty tissues and are released when a person diets. This release of toxins has been shown to be one of the major factors involved in dieting mood swings and in the slowing of weight loss. Simple fasts cause toxins to be released, but these compounds are quickly reabsorbed under fasting conditions, plus the body reacts badly to being suddenly pushed to the wall with fasts. Gittleman knows this and therefore carefully prepares the dieter in the period up to the fast, tells the dieter what to consume to prevent the metabolism from plummeting during the fast, and then maps out an approach for the days following the fast.

Something that I have always liked about Gittleman is that she is very aware of the maxim, “do no harm.” Are there more thorough detoxifications available? Of course, but few of us have the luxury of following them, which sometimes I think is a good thing. Are there faster weight loss approaches being marketed? Of course, although speed and lasting weight loss seldom go hand-in-hand. Gittleman describes an initial approach that gets results for the dieter about as quickly as anyone could ever reasonably hope for, yet does not lead to a nasty rebound in weight gain. Thereafter, I would suggest that dieters follow, instead, the approach given in The Fat Flush Plan for consistent and lasting weight loss.

In short, this is a good and useful book. I agree with Gittleman that the data is overwhelming linking environmental toxins to metabolic disorders. Yet even aside from the issue of stored toxins, the preponderance of individuals with weight problems suffer from sub par liver performance and can use Gittleman’s tune-up to improve their results from dieting. Highly recommended.