Trim Healthy Mama
2Trim Healthy Mama
- Used Book in Good Condition
Trim Healthy Mama No More Fads! A Common Sense Guide To Satisfy Your Cravings And Energize Your Life. By Pearl Barrett & Serene Allison. For Women Of All Ages And Stages! Over 250 Recipes, Proven Ways to Lose Weight, How to Balance your Hormones, How to Re-fire your Metabolism, Make your Skin Glow, Ignite Marriage Intimacy, Simple but Effective Exercise Plan. (for Pregnant Mothers too!) Answers for Postmenopausal Women.
List Price: $ 35.00
Price: $ 34.48
D. S. Brewer “Green Mountain Man”
Trim Healthy Mama,
Their premise is that our societly is overloaded with carbohydrates so they reccomend eliminating sugar from your diet, and a lot of grains including wheat. Stevia is their sugar substitute. I’m not big on artificial sweeteners, and Stevia has never been an option for me because of it’s odd bitter aftertaste, but they have several recommendations for brands of Stevia that have overcome this drawback. I still don’t like the odd flavor, but seem to be getting used to it after a week without sugar.
The recipes are doable. I was able to start immediately from with what I had in the pantry. If you have meat, frozen vegtables, canned tomatoes or fresh, salad, oatmeal, cheese, cream, greek yogurt and butter, just about anything, you can at least get started with their plan. There is a lot of suggestions for adapting the eating for families. snacks and tricks to handle hunger when you’ve been running errands, and an encouraging tone that you don’t have to do everything perfectly. (At least Pearl says so.) Like adding different sides to meet growing children’s needs. You don’t have to wear yourself out preparing multiple meals for the family and for you.
Mainly I’m writing this because I now have recipes for all those freaky weird ingredients I see in the health food store. I find myself saying, “Oh that’s what that does?” I suppose my science geek side is coming out, but watching glucomannan turn water into pudding is facinating. Don’t worry, there’s other stuff in it, sweetener, and flavoring, but it is munchie busting! If you can afford some of the ingredients for their desserts you won’t be sorry. And they have a lot of frugal advice on how to obtain these preferred ingredients. They also have main food recipes, and all kinds of ways to prepare eggs.
Read the plan section thoroughly so you know what the S and E plans mean. Yes there is food combining, but it’s not the kind you probably already know about. At least I didn’t. They do have lots of recipes, but they’re not written in a formal way. “Pinches”, “splashes”, “dashes”, and “sprinkles” of ingredients, are interspersed in the directions.
After the plan is a “life advice” section. Everything from hormones and sex to exercise, and keeping it real. They have little cartoons with “laugh out loud” captions interspersed here and there. It is a fun and easy read. Finally, I would say their five years of hard work was worth it. I look forward to ammending this review in a few months, or years to write down my progress .
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|TempleBuilders Personal Training
Wanted to love it but…faulty nutritional premise,
Thoughts and Precautions on Trim Healthy Mama
Currently, the latest fad diet in Christian circles is Trim, Healthy Mama by Serene Allison and Pearl Barrett, the cover of which boldly proclaim “No More Fads.” Unfortunately, the deciding factor for any program’s fad status is not its self-proclamation that it is not one, but rather how it is handled by its users. The authors base their ‘not a fad’ assertion on their insistence that it must be adopted for life, however almost every diet out there makes the same claim or provides some sort of ‘maintenance’ program at the end. Right now THM’s star is rising, but it will be another shooting star, not the north one.
The cover of this book also proclaims that it is a “Common Sense” guide to satisfy cravings and energize your life. While healthy eating will most certainly satisfy cravings and energize your life what they promote in this book is anything but ‘common’ sense. Their program is based on their limited understanding of metabolism and blood sugar control; an accumulation of knowledge gained from a plethora of other diet books and various low carb websites and blogs. While much of the information is accurate and the metaphors they use to simplify the body’s insulin response to food are helpful, they fall short of the big metabolic picture.
You must understand that I really wanted to like this book, and from a recipe source standpoint I actually do. I use the recipes almost daily in my home. My favorite lunch is based on one of them. My refrigerator is rarely without a batch of skinny chocolate, secret agent brownie cake, or choco pudding (though I add whey protein to the pudding). I am very grateful for the introduction to Joseph’s bread and many other great products. But the plan, I can not recommend.
When I first read this book I was very optimistic about it. They were on the right track in so many areas. Eating the food God made versus man-made frankenfoods and not excluding any of the macro-nutrients (carbs, fats, or proteins) is right on target. Illustrating protein as the fulcrum in a meal’s balance was sound,though I would have gone with more of a foundation approach. Unfortunately, they then plummet into a ‘tandem fueling’ tangent and base their entire plan on this faulty premise. With every page of Satisfying and Energizing nonsense, all my hopes for a solid resource to share with my personal training clients went right down the drain.
If they had designed their program based on what they call cross-overs and S-helper meals I would have been a happy trainer. Alas, they did not do that, but in fact dared to tell people that they can’t lose weight tandem-fueling! Now I have to credit them that they did not leave out all carbs from their S meals, nor exclude all fat from the E meals, I will give them that. But they also claimed that calories don’t matter as long as they are just S or just E per meal with adequate space in between. This is flat out wrong. Too much fuel, no matter what source, will result in storage of the excess as fat. Yes, even protein calories can be converted to stored fat.
Proper, God-designed nutrition is based on tandem fuel. While fat can be burned as fuel it only happens in the presence of carbohydrate. It is not fuel on its own. Think of it as the ethanol added to your gasoline. When your body accesses stored fat to compensate for a fuel shortage in what you eat, you must have carbohydrate in your system to access and metabolize that fat. If you don’t your body will resort to cannibalizing your muscle tissue to get at the glycogen in the cells and reassemble the proteins through glyconeogenesis so that it can access the fat. Muscle is the furnace that burns the majority of the fuel we take in, so less muscle results in lower metabolism.
‘But, my friend (fill in the blank) has done this plan and lost (fill in the blank) pounds, and she swears by it.’ I have friends like that too. The thing is people lose weight on all kinds of diets, that’s how they get popular and sell. It doesn’t mean they are right. So far, I have yet to hear anyone say they did the program and didn’t lose any muscle, or they did the program and lost weight consuming twice their daily caloric needs in food every day. Unless I initiate it I doubt anyone ever will, because according to Serene and Pearl you don’t have to fuss with calories, so no one if going to track them while THMing.
In my own use of the recipes I have logged a few things, because I log my foods regularly. So far all their recipes come in very reasonable calorie wise, so if you stick with just their recipes while you do the plan you are very likely going to stay under your daily calorie goal which will result in weight loss. The strong emphasis on protein in the plan is what…
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