State of Slim – by Dr. James Hill & Dr. Holly Wyatt

The premise of this book is “people in Colorado are on average the slimmest in the US”, and sets about establishing why, and then doing what Coloradans are doing. As per the subtitle (drop 20 pounds in 8 weeks), this is a weight loss book and does assume that you want to lose weight—specifically, to lose fat. So if that’s not your goal, you can skip this one already.

The authors explain, as many diet and not-diet-but-diet-adjacent book authors do, that this is not a diet—and then do refer to it as the Colorado Diet throughout. So… Is it a diet?

The answer is a clear “yes, but”—and the caveat is “yes, but also some associated lifestyle practices”.

The diet component is basically a very low-carb diet to start with (with the day’s ration of carbs being a small amount of oats and whatever you can get from some non-starchy vegetables such as greens, tomatoes, etc), and then reintroducing more carbohydrate centric foods one by one, stopping after whole grains. If you are vegan or vegetarian, you can also skip this one already, because this advises eating six animal protein centric meals per day.

The non-diet components are very general healthy-living advices mixed in with popular “diet culture” advices, such as practice mindful eating, don’t eat after 8pm, exercise more, use small plates, enjoy yourself, pre-portion your snacks, don’t drink your calories, get 8 hours sleep, weigh all your food, etc.

Bottom line: this is a very mixed bag, even to the point of being a little chaotic. It gives sometimes contradictory advice, and/but this results in a very “something for everyone” cafeteria approach to dieting. The best recommendation we can give for this book is “it has very many ideas for you to try and see if they work for you”.

Click here to check out State of Slim, and take your pick!