To provide concrete evidence of how basic our country's obesity problems truly are, Matthew Bennett deliberately gained 34 pounds of unwanted fat (or, perhaps in this case, wanted fat) over a six-week period. He gained the weight solely by stopping all forms of exercise and by changing his normally healthy diet to one of gluttonous and reckless junk/fast-food consumption.  Then, he lost all of the fat over a six-week period simply by following a program of sound exercise and nutrition.  No magic pills or miracle diets.

The multi-billion dollar weight loss industry has failed us miserably.  It has filled our bookstore shelves, newspapers and television programs with completely contradictory hypotheses.  We have "toyed" with every conceivable gadget, gizmo and gear-every pill, program, drink and diet-and are effectively paralyzed by the overload of options.  The multi-billion (if not trillion) dollar fast-food/junk-food monsters just keep cranking out promotional campaigns highlighting the new and improved versions of their most profitable non-nutritional swill.  We are caught in the cross-fire of the most powerful marketing giants on the planet.  We are victims with nowhere to hide.and must become more adept at recognizing the enemy.

People who choose to consistently over-indulge and then claim that they will "get in some exercise this week" and "burn it off" must have [a magical] jogging partner, because the numbers just don't pan out.  If you ate a mere 1200 extra calories every day for a week, you would have to run for 12 hours to "burn off" the additional baggage.  At 6 miles per hour, that's 72 miles per week-over 2.5 marathons!  At the same rates, over a year's time, you'd have to run considerably further than the distance between Los Angeles and New York City! 

This book is not telling anyone that they need to be skinny, fit or anything else.  But let's stop the counter-productive whining and acting like the situation is one of the great mysteries of our age.  Complaining doesn't burn calories.  Besides, I don't want you or someone you truly care about to be the next person to get "the bad news" from a doctor.

Another key concept is that you can't effectively spot reduce (lose weight in just one area of your body by training it especially strenuously) without the help of liposuction or other surgical procedures.  There's no such thing as "stomach fat."  Whether it's on your thighs, belly or neck, it's all just plain old accumulated fat.  When you cut your pinkie, do you worry that you're going to have a shortage of "finger blood"?   Even if you exercise your abdominals all day long, no one is going to see them if they are covered by a generous layer of flab.  Sumo wrestlers have incredibly powerful, well-developed stomach muscles, but I'd venture a guess that most of you aren't interested in sporting that particular look.

My ultimate message comes from a place of the deepest concern and compassion.  I am terrified for the well-being of our nation's children and that of future generations. 
The average person is lambasted with a constant array of mind-numbing dietary/fitness rhetoric in virtually every form of the written, spoken and broadcasted word. Our current daily fare encourages confusion and is usually aimed at selling something, and, while most people recognize and acknowledge the health advantages a fresh garden salad has over a chilidog, we are left woefully short of true inspiration and direction.  Nearly all of today's media focuses on finding the "silver bullet" magical solution rather than the systemic root of the problem.  We are getting the wrong answers because we are asking the wrong questions.

Please think of me as Simon Richards.a fitness advocate with the exact opposite persona of Richard Simmons! I'm not going to hold people's hands or sit and cry with them.I'm going to wake people up with the simple concept that if we all ate balanced healthy diets and exercised a few times a week, our country could escape this destructive cycle of disease and obesity.  At the very least, we all need to stop complicating the issue.

"As obesity and its myriad maladies increasingly threaten our way of life, it becomes clear that we desperately need this radical philosophical shake-up.  "