The Diet Hack Book…4th of July Release!

My latest book, The Diet Hack: Why 95% of Diets Fail and How You Can Succeed, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. The official release date is July 4th, 2019. If you pre-order, you’ll get the electronic version for $2.99. This is the lowest allowable price for the category. I’ve also enabled “sharing” and free downloads for people subscribing to Kindle Unlimited (get a 30-day free trial here).

How it Came to Be

Winters in Alaska are long and dark, the perfect conditions for holing up and writing a book on my favorite subject….dieting. Originally, I was planning on a book that hacked the top-rated diet plans like Jenny Craig and South Beach, but when I started looking, I realized there was no hacking these diets. They are a total mess and rely only on advertising and gimmicks. They don’t work!

However, my research also showed that just about any diet that can be adhered to for long enough will result in substantial weight loss, but only if certain steps and stages are implemented and followed with great care. I think what I’ve written will help anyone who is serious about losing weight and regaining their health. I can’t promise you’ll lose 16 pounds in 16 days or have a chiseled six-pack in time for summer, but I can promise that you’ll understand why you look the way you do and what it takes to become as lean and healthy as humanly possible. And it’s not that hard.

Lessons Learned

I wrote The Diet Hack just as much for me as for you. It was a learning experience from the first page through the last. Here are a couple things that I learned while writing the book:

• The Diet and Fitness Industries are in worse shape than I ever imagined.
• Most commercial diet programs are terrible. They rely on ultra-processed foods and miss most of the elements that could make a diet work.
• Viral marketing of fad diets has messed up everyone’s perception of weight loss.
• Most overweight people have no idea how to lose weight or exercise correctly.
• Losing weight requires a lot more motivation, planning, education, and technology than I realized.
• It’s nearly impossible to lose weight without a plan. “Watching what I eat” is not a weight loss plan that will work. Over 90% of dieters use that plan.
• “Watching what I eat” is a fine weight maintenance plan.
• Exercising and giving up ultra-processed food are mandatory for sustained weight loss.
• Sleep and stress are possibly more important than food and exercise.
• Most people, even super-elite athletes and bodybuilders, are unhappy with how they look.
• Gut health is important, but there’s not much you can do except eat good food.

What I Like Best

As I was researching, I stumbled across a recently unclassified military document. This document was a short report by Dr. Ancel Keys concerning the initial phase of an experiment he was conducting to see how starvation affects people caught in famine or prisoner-of-war scenarios. I probably could have written the entire book around Keys’ notes (The Starvation Hack?). But anyway, I have produced an essay (included as an epilogue in the book) on Keys’ findings from a document that probably less than 100 people have ever laid eyes on…I hope I did it justice.

Gratitude to my Readers and Friends

As I was hammering out the manuscript, I leaned heavily on a small army of proofers who undoubtedly now think I’m the worst author in the world, lol. You know who you are…I’d list your names here, but would hate to embarrass anyone or leave someone out.

If anyone wants to write a book, take my advice: ask some friends to proofread and then hire a professional team to edit and format. It’s nearly impossible for a human to effectively proofread their own writing. I remember an interview with a famous author I heard once, was it Hemmingway? When asked how he wrote so many books, he said something like, “I just vomited my ideas onto paper and paid people to turn them into books.” I get it now.

A huge thanks to Rob, Kristie, Paige, and the rest of the behind-the-scenes staff at Archangel Ink for making this all happen!

Content and Pictures

Throughout The Diet Hack, you’ll see many more pictures and pop-out boxes than most books you’ve read lately. This was not done for filler!

Mom and Mentor

This was some well-taken advice from my Mom, Paula Steele, world’s best librarian. She told me that people make up their mind on reading a book after about 10 seconds of flipping through. If there is enough to pique their interest, they’ll keep the book. If it looks boring and lifeless, they’ll put it down.

 

I can see why authors choose boring and lifeless. Profits. Authors get surprisingly low royalties from each book sold. For books over a certain size, printing and download costs are deducted from the author’s royalties. At over 450 pages and 25MB, this book is a real dinosaur in terms of profitability. But I think it will easily pass Mom’s readability test!

Thanks!

I hope you enjoy reading The Diet Hack as much as I enjoyed writing it. Pre-order a copy if you want to save $4. It will be delivered to your device on the 4th of July. Unfortunately, you cannot pre-order the paperback, just electronic.

Talk later,

Tim