Choosing Your Healthy Path: An Inspirational 24-Week Guide to Weight Loss and Wellness
Marnie Dominy
BCH Fulfillment & Distribution (2009)
ISBN: 9780984149735
New Book Gives Practical Advice for a 24-Week Journey to Better Health
Marnie Dominy has written a step-by-step book that makes weight loss and better health a practical, realizable, and not overly difficult goal. Rather than offering a “quick fix” to losing weight, which will usually result in gaining it back soon after, Dominy teaches us how to make gradual changes for the better. One can easily read this book alone and follow its suggestions, but Dominy suggests we make losing weight into a party by finding a few friends and forming a “weight loss club” to support us, allowing us to have fun in the process while reading her book a chapter a week and discussing and implementing the changes in it.
Over 24-weeks, Dominy guides her readers through numerous topics, providing knowledge and practical applications to help people lose weight and maintain the weight loss by becoming healthier. The chapters for each week are short, inspiring, and full of stories, examples, and easy-to-understand explanations of everything from walking and water to insulin resistance, fiber, and what to do when you go out to eat.
Unlike many diets, Dominy’s plan does not deprive people of what they want to eat, but it helps them understand the consequences of their decisions, so they can learn how to enjoy themselves while not sabotaging their health. Dominy encourages people to go out to eat—a weight loss club can even meet at a restaurant where the members can support one another in practicing how to eat without “pigging out.” To me, this sounded like one of the best suggestions in the book, and fun besides.
I’ve actually read quite a few books about dieting, weight loss, and improving our health, but I still found a lot of material in this book I did not know. I knew about the wonderful benefits of water, and have quit drinking soda as a result, but I didn’t realize how important water was to help a person have a productive workout. And while I vaguely knew about sugar and diabetes, I did not know that belly fat in men is a sign of pre-diabetes and the result of insulin resistance. Since diabetes runs in my family, Dominy’s explanations made me realize all the more that I need to be careful about what I eat, and I now better understand how sugar plays havoc on our bodies creating cycles that make us hungry, and how we can break those cravings. I also learned how carbohydrates fit into the blood sugar cycle.
Dominy knows what she’s talking about. She warns us that many people out there in the health care fields don’t have proper credentials so we need to be careful about the advice we take, check credentials, and consider the possible self-interest of people who endorse specific products and diets. Dominy herself has been an athlete and an instructor in healthcare for many years, plus someone who knows what it is to battle against a craving for sweets. She recalls how, as a high school student in the 1960s, she broke down barriers by fighting to be allowed to play on the golf team at a time when “only boys could participate in high school sports.” Dominy is an exercise physiologist who has been in the fitness business since 1975. Her experience includes teaching health and physical education at all grade levels from kindergarten to college, coaching a variety of sports, and owning and operating a fitness business. In “Choosing Your Healthy Path,” she shares how she has helped numerous clients lose weight, create nutritious yet satisfying diets, and improve how they feel. She also discusses her own choices in eating out, and how her situation has changed at different times in her life.
In addition, “Choosing Your Healthy Path” is fun to read, with many humorous cartoons throughout. Each week of the program provides a weekly chart to track what you eat, and several ideas for figuring out what will work specifically for you, as well as fun activities for your group to do as it achieves its weight loss and fitness goals.
What I like most about “Choosing Your Health Path” is that it is set up as a weekly program and one that is practical and doable. I think if readers buy this book, form a small group, and follow the chapters which only take a few minutes each to read, that people will stick with this program, rather than just getting excited only to fall off their diets a few weeks later. “Choosing Your Healthy Path” is a friendly, gentle, yet successful way to start down the road to wellness and all the joy that accompanies it.
For more information about Marnie Dominy and “Choosing Your Healthy Path” visit www.ChoosingYourHealthyPath.com
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, Ph.D. and author of the award-winning “Narrow Lives”
