They’re pushing a new diet book, The 3-Hour Diet(tm). The author, Jorge Cruise is a handsome, mid-thirties fitness guru. Quite a hunk and yes, formerly fat. He’s been there.
According to a New York Times article, diet books can be perennial best sellers, and so they are big business. The book and its spinoffs running its course now is The South Beach Diet. While the new book marketers feel that SBD has run out of steam, the hardcover is still number 28 at Amazon.com. The paperback is lagging at number 223 of all book titles at Amazon. The South Beach Diet and its spinoff volumes have sold 14.5 million copies in two years.
The new book — meant to take a year to write — was hurried out in several months to catch the supposed backlash against the Atkins Diet and its low-carb progeny. (The death of Dr. Atkins, decades after he wrote his first diet book, has hurt sales of the latest generation of Atkins diet books.)
Still Atkins diet books are popular: they’ve sold 21 million copies in the 33 years since Dr. Atkins wrote his first diet book.
The hook for this new diet book? Eat small meals every 3 hours on the theory that this schedule tricks the body into not storing fat.
Hmm, it’s time for my mid-afternoon meal.