Excerpt: 'The Game On! Diet'

July 2, 2009— -- "The Game On! Diet" turns fitness into a game.

Developed by Az Ferguson to help ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" writer Krista Vernoff lose 40 pounds after her pregnancy, it's the perfect program for people who always say they're too busy to work out.

The book explains how to organize opposing teams, set goals and compete to earn points for healthy meals, and to make exercise and lifestyle changes.

Read an excerpt of the book below and head to the "GMA" Library for more good reads.

This is not really a diet book. I hate diets. Everyone I know hates diets. Diets are stupid and hard and not fun, and worse than that, they rarely work. I can only pull my theory on why they don't work from my own experience, which is that they suck and are stupid and not fun. But more than that, if you have any rebellious spirit in you whatsoever, you're gonna rebel against the deprivation of a diet. And whether you rebel at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the diet, the results will be the same: you'll eat like crazy and refuse to move your butt an inch off the couch for weeks. You'll undo any good you may have done, and, if you're like me, you'll end up fatter, flabbier, unhappier, and with lower self-esteem than you had when you started.

Maybe you're not like me; maybe you're like my coauthor, Az, and you thrive on restraint and restriction and deprivation. And if so, yay you, and we can still be friends. (I only hate Az and resent his discipline, like, fourteen percent of the time.) My point is, this book is not going to offer you any fads, any extremes, any swanky new science that says if you eat only protein, or only citrus, or only peanut butter, or only watermelon (all diets I've tried at some point, by the way) you will drop seven sizes in two days. (If that's what you're looking for, we can't help you. Good luck, God bless, return this book now and get your money back. We'll miss you.)

This book isn't even so much about encouraging weight loss as it is about encouraging health and an attitude that will allow you to accomplish healthy weight loss if that's your goal, or toning up if that's your goal, or getting up off your couch for the first time in three years if that's your goal. Truly, I think you're great just the way you are. But if you're not feeling so great, I think the super-fun game you're about to play will help.

I should note here that I am not anything resembling a doctor (though I write some on TV) and neither is Az. Az is really into fitness and we are friends and we played a game together and it made us healthier and now we want to share it with you. Any health advice we offer in this book is coming from copious research and conversations we had with people who are much better educated than we are in the fields of medicine and health (and we have credited those people throughout the book).

Az invented this game to help me lose weight and feel better about myself. Isn't he a good friend? I had a baby a while back (the world's most amazing baby) and while I was pregnant I gained fifty pounds. Fifty. 5-0. 'Cause that's what happens when you're nauseated from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep and the only thing that staves off the nausea is eating something bready every 15 minutes. And like I mentioned, I got the world's most amazing kid out of it and I don't regret any of it, so there. BUT. Four months after giving birth I was still carrying twenty-four of those extra pounds—which maybe wouldn't have bothered me so much except that when I got pregnant, I was already twenty pounds heavier than I'd ever been.