Is Bread the Devil?

Unless you have celiac disease or gluten intolerance, it is hard to see bread as a bad thing. That is, unless you are on a diet. The majority of popular diets focus on reducing carbs, but Heather Bauer's new book, Bread is the Devil, takes this to a whole new level of name calling.

OK, so bread isn't actually the devil. It is the placeholder for what Bauer calls our personal devils. These are foods that contain a lot of calories and are just too hard to ignore. The specific devils vary from person to person, but identifying them and building a strategy for weight loss that copes with these devils is the key concept in her book.

Heather Bauer

Much of her book focuses on how to cope with eating out and attending parties. She isn't writing about eating gluten-free, she is writing about eating glutton-free. Bauer's premise is that a handful of bad habits are preventing us from losing weight and keeping it off.

So people have devil foods. Some people have devil times. And some people have devil situations. Devil foods are obvious. For me, that's ice cream and M&Ms. I can't imagine life without them, so no amount of dieting will be successful as long as I back-slide (calorie wise) with my Costco bag of M&Ms.

Devil times are common, too. Many of us can stick to a diet all day. We eat a responsible breakfast and lunch, congratulating ourselves on our self control. Then we go home and BAM! all that food is just lying there, calling to us. This is a devil situation. It is very easy to snack our way from dinner to bed time. For some of us, the weekends are death to our diets, or the holidays. But our will power rises and falls with the clock and the calendar, to our peril.

And then there are the devil situations. Maybe it's an office party or a night out with friends. You've been good all day, right? So maybe that cocktail and surf-and-turf dinner won't be a problem. Oh yes it is! These situations stand between us and successful weight loss.

Bread is the Devil provides tools for banishing these various devils. There are chapters that help you identify your personal diet devils and give you strategies for keeping them at bay. Like most good diet books, there is a 21 day program with a structured path toward eating responsibly. Of special note is the chapter on dealing with office parties and dinners out. This devil visits pretty much every one of us at one time or another.

Have you banished your diet devils? Click on the Comment button and tell of about your exorcism!