The New Beverly Hills Diet

"It isn't what you eat or how much you eat that makes you fat, it is when you eat and what you eat together," announces this follow-up to the smash original Beverly Hills diet plan. In a switch from the original, this updated version gives day-to-day advice and support and a full 35-day menu plan that includes a more balanced diet that includes animal protein (the first 10 days of the original diet included nothing but fruit). There's no portion control or forbidden foods, ergo the book's mantra: "Cheesecake and cheekbones, hamburgers and hipbones." Enthusiastic and encouraging author Judy Mazel dropped from 180 to 108 pounds by following this diet, optimizing the enzymatic action of foods by eating fruits by themselves, by not mixing carbohydrates with proteins or eating carbohydrates after proteins, and by following protein with protein. The many additional rules of this diet may be hard to keep track of, but the guideline that's easy to remember is that champagne goes with everything (however, wine goes with fruit, and other alcoholic beverages should be combined with other carbohydrates). Warning: some of the prescribed fruits--there are mangoes, papayas, pineapples, and apricots galore--will be hard to find out of season for anyone who doesn't live in southern California.