This piece was first published on Six Pack Abs on April 1, 2014.
Today is the day.
April 1, and my book is now on shelves across Canada, and ready for immediate shipping anywhere if you don’t mind using a Canadian website and forking out a few extra bucks for shipping. It’s worth it.
It is published by Random House Canada, and rather than ramble on about how awesome Lose it Right: A Brutally Honest 3-Stage Program to Help You Get Fit and Lose Weight Without Losing Your Mind is, I’m going to publish another excerpt.
Here is the preface, in its entirety:
Margaret Yúfera-Leitch and I bonded over Oprah.
I wrote an “Open Letter to Oprah” for my fitness column in the Los Angeles Times. In it, I told Ms. Winfrey I thought her health and nutrition gurus were not helping. Margaret sent me an email, all the way from Spain, to tell me she thought the column was awesome.
Then I met Margaret, and I thought she was awesome. She’s a respected obesity researcher with a real PhD in psychology from a real university. The focus of her studies has been eating behaviors and their link to body weight.
We bonded over Oprah . . . and our mutual disdain for the mass of male bovine droppings scattered all over the weight loss industry. This book represents our desire to bring sanity and honesty to an industry sorely lacking in both.
“You’re not a real journalist until someone threatens to sue you.”
An editor once said this to me. It was comforting at the time, because the person doing the threatening was a famous “weight loss guru.” Our war of words made international news. And by “international” I mean they even covered it in the Ethiopian press.
That column led to much fan mail, moderate hate mail, and one threat to “cave [my] head in with a kettlebell.”
Although I’ve made enemies through my writing about fitness and health, I’ve also made friends. World-renowned obesity researchers have sung my praises and shared my work, and I’ve lost count of how many medical doctors have told me they recommend my writing to their patients.
In Lose It Right, Margaret and I have distilled the best of our combined knowledge of healthy weight loss into a guide you can use in your own life. We’ve come up with a three-stage program that will help trans- form your eating behaviors and your lifestyle to create a leaner, healthier and higher-performing you. No miracles, secrets or magic; we rely on science and big-picture planning to help you achieve your goals.
Final warning: take note of the words “brutally” and “honest” in the subtitle.
Okay. Now that all the wimps are gone, let’s do this.
Buy Lose it Right it on Indigo or buy it on Amazon.
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James S. Fell, CSCS, is an internationally syndicated fitness columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and AskMen.com. He is the author of Lose it Right: A Brutally Honest 3-Stage Program to Help You Get Fit and Lose Weight Without Losing Your Mind, published by Random House Canada.