For those of you who don’t want to waste a lot of time listening to me pontificate, I’ll get right down to business. The Ultimate New York Diet by New York-based personal trainer David Kirsch is yet another in a seemingly endless tidal wave of cookie-cutter guru books. But duller.
There’s nothing unique about this book, the plan, or Mr. Kirsch’s philosophy. For 25 bucks we get about 300 pages chock-full of the usual recycled information that is available in almost any other diet book that has been written over the past decade and on the Internet. Menus, recipes, testimonials, endorsements, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Have you ever heard of the guideline that is taught in “Public Speaking 101?” You know, the old “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.” Well, this old adage applies to the first 160 pages of the book and includes the usual celebrity testimonials and the average Joe anecdotal success stories. We get the same info over and over again presented in a preachy, most-foods-are-evil tone.
One of the most distasteful elements of this book is the constant demonization of most kinds of regular food. Despite his assertion that he doesn’t dwell on the negatives - or the foods that you can’t eat - Kirsch is constantly telling us how bad bread is for us and how bad dairy is for us and that we need to stay away from coffee — just please shut up and keep all of these very important secrets to yourself and your clientele.
We know the drill. White bread and sugar and pasta and coffee will kill us even though these foods have sustained countless generations. That’s why all of those old people are now dead; they ate too much bread and put too much sugar and half and half in their coffee. Oy vey.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
2 - Carrie
David makes it very clear that this should only be done for two weeks. Since you read so much of the book, you should have read that as well. It's just a quick fix. No one said to live by this book for the rest of your life. People,,,,,,,,,,it works!!!