Book Excerpt: 'The 90/10 Weight Loss Plan'

Jan. 8 -- In The 90/10 Weight-Loss Plan, author Joy Bauer encourages dieters who have tried to lose weight and failed to continue to eat their favorite foods, but limit these to just 10 percent of their complete diet.

Bauer, who joined Good Morning America's team of experts in its "Lock the Door, Lose the Weight," series believes that severe food restrictions set up dieters to fail. Read Chapter 1 of her book, The 90/10 Weight-Loss Plan, below.

Chapter 1:

What Do You Mean I Can Eat Fun Foods and Still Lose Weight?

Congratulations! You are about to change your life forever. What I'm going to tell you about the 90/10 Plan will enable you to lose weight while still eating the foods you love.

You may not believe me yet — but you will. And you'll love it. You're going to learn a weight-loss strategy that will even let you eat chocolate, cookies, chips, ice cream, and hundreds of other delicious goodies banned on other diet — and you'll still lose a significant amount of weight in just 14 days!

I know it sounds too good to be true, but I also know it works. And it definitely is not a gimmick. My clients would never stand for that.

I have been a registered dietitian for more than a decade and have built one of the largest nutrition centers in New York City. I've counseled thousands of people including some of the most high-profile businessmen, celebrities, models, and Olympic athletes. Believe me, the last thing they want is another fad. They know that I've spent my entire career developing sensible nutrition plans, and they come to me because they trust me to help them improve their health, their energy, and their looks — without gimmicks or risky diets.

In my years of working with so many different people with such a variety of diet problems, I've become convinced that there are no protein-to-carb ratios, food-combining methods, or pill popping regimens that will magically melt their fat away. That is why I designed the 90/10 Plan around the only time-tested principles of healthy, long-term weight loss that really work: portion control and cravings satisfaction.

The question was, how could I create a diet that would meet my clients' health needs and satisfy their taste buds at the same time? My final answer is the 90/10 Weight-Loss Plan, a scientifically designed diet that actually encourages "Fun Food" flexibility 10 percent of the time, so they'd feel satisfied throughout the weight loss process and wouldn't feel guilty for indulging in sugary or fatty snacks.

The 90/10 Plan works for fast, effective, healthy weight loss because it includes all types of foods — nutritious items as well as fun indulgences — in a healthy balance, so that you're sure to feel satisfied and motivated. All 90/ 0 menus are carefully calculated to provide ample amounts of nutrition while keeping total calories low enough to guarantee weight loss.

I call it the 90/10 Plan because I recommend to my clients that about 10 percent is the average amount of calories that should come from their Fun Food choices. But, as you will see in each of the menus, there is some room for personal choice. And although my recommendation is "approximately" 10 percent, the daily menus do offer options ranging from between 100 percent of the caloric intake from healthy and nutritious food to 80 percent healthy and 20 percent fun.

But the 90/10 Plan is not about exact math anyway. It is a food philosophy for an overall weight-loss strategy. And it's a strategy that not only works for fast weight loss but it's also, if you can believe it, even better for long-term weight maintenance!

Why? Because it teaches your mind and your body how to lose weight while learning to eat the way you should be eating for the rest of your life. The fourteen-day plan offers such a variety of delicious, nutritious meals plus treats that not only will you never feel deprived, but you'll also never get bored. And to make sure you don't, I've provided ten additional dinner recipes, so there is a total of twenty-four deliciously different main-course dinner options. That's more choices than most people who aren't on a diet would even think about.

The reason I am so confident the 90/10 Plan will work for you is that I've already seen it work for so many of my clients whom I know for a certainty lost weight and kept if off. I have also met thousands of unsuccessful dieters, and time after time I see the same pattern to their failed efforts: They have all tried to lose weight with an eating plan that is different from the way they normally eat.

Whether it is food-combination diets, high-protein diets, no-sugar diets, fat-gram-counting regimens, no-dairy/no-wheat diets, and so on, if you are not used to eating this way, you're eventually going to fall off the diet wagon. Furthermore, most leading health organizations recommend that if you're going to go on a weight-loss plan you should do it only if it's a well-rounded diet-exactly what the 90/10 Plan offers.

The 90/10 Plan is a reasonable, healthy, and easy-to-maintain approach that has already proven successful for countless dieters who found those trendy plans too restrictive and unrealistic for their lifestyles, not to mention unhealthy. And trying to follow an unreasonably difficult diet is not only unhealthy for your body but it is poisonous for your emotional health as well.

The more you jump from one diet to the next, experiencing failure after failure, the more your confidence plummets, and you learn to doubt your ability to ever successfully lose weight. It is awful to feel this way. I have heard too many painful stories from clients who have struggled with unreasonable diets and have emerged feeling more lost and hopeless than when they started. I vowed never to promote a diet that produced such frustration and heartache.

Instead, I worked to create a healthy, easy diet that would work and that was grounded in the known successful principles of weight loss-a weight-loss plan that takes as its starting point that people should lose weight eating the very same foods they dream about eating after the weight is off. That is my 90/10 Weight-Loss Plan. No gimmicks, no magic, just solid science and countless proven success stories.

As I mentioned, most of the currently trendy fad diets tend to focus on omitting entire food groups (foods your body needs, and will miss and crave) or on counting fat grams without paying attention to portion control. The 90/10 Plan focuses on what's truly important for permanent weight loss-behavioral changes that will transform your life.

On the 90/10 Plan, you will learn how to include all types of foods in your diet, and how to recognize and eat appropriate portions. The 90/10 Plan is designed to help you feel good about your ability to control and choose your food, while also making you feel good (never guilty!) about those daily fun indulgences. Because the foods you crave and enjoy are built right into the plan, balanced with more nutritious fare, you'll feel satisfied both physically and emotionally on the 90/10 Plan. Even after you've reached your weight loss goal, you can easily incorporate the 90/10 Plan into your life on a regular basis, because everything your body needs and wants is part of the program.

In Chapter 4, 1 will introduce you to three different caloric plans for weight loss. I will help you choose the right starting plan for you — either the 1,200-calorie plan, the 1,400-calorie plan, or the 1,600calorie plan-based on the amount of weight you want to lose, the rate at which you would like to lose it, your dieting history, and the amount of exercise you are willing to commit to doing each week.

Once you've selected your plan, you'll have two full weeks of deliciously different daily menus to choose from. There are menus for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks for each of the three plans for all fourteen days — that's forty-two meals for each plan, plus Fun Foods — which means that you don't have to spend your time obsessing over what foods do or do not fit into the 90/10 Plan and how much of them to eat.

Although controlling the number of calories you consume is important for weight loss, the 90/10 Plan is specifically designed so that you don't have to make yourself crazy counting those calories. I've already done the calorie counting for you. You'll also see that the menus are the same for the corresponding days in each of the three caloric plans, but the portion sizes or accompaniments will vary accordingly.

To limit the work required on your part, all of my food recommendations are presented in portion-controlled servings. If you don't like a particular breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack, you can swap it for another day's menu. That's because all of the breakfasts within the specific plan you decide to follow are calorie-equivalent, all of the lunches within your particular plan are calorie-equivalent, and so are all of the dinners and snacks.