Why is it that even though we might maintain our high school weight, few of us maintain our high school belt size?

In your twenties and thirties, the layers of fat on top of your abs were the problem--but once you reach middle-age, the enemy shifts. The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle is the first book to deal specifically with the issues we face in the next stage of life, providing a plan for eliminating the unhealthy fat that accumulates around the organs--visceral fat--that is the true cause of the middle-aged bulge.

The good news is that with the right diet, visceral fat can be quickly reduced and eliminated, enhancing both your looks and your health. Even after twenty years researching and refining the science of weight loss and management, bestselling authors Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades fell victim to the middle-aged middle themselves. Although otherwise fit and healthy, both lost the flat belly that signals youth. In The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle, they share the simple dietary program they created to shed the weight.

Discover:
• How eating saturated fat can actively trim your middle
• Why the "eat less, exercise more" prescription fails--and what to do about it
• Why "inner" and "outer" tube fat measurements are important to your health
• How to fight the fat stored inside your liver that leads to hard-to-lose middle-body flab

With The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle the doctor duo that brought you to the low-carb lifestyle shows you how to regain in midlife the figure of sleek, flat-bellied youth.

From the Hardcover edition.

Profiles in History

"Our brains are hardwired. The cortex in the back of our brains scans the environment looking for fertile mates."

--Louann Brizendine, M.D., author, The Female Brain

If you believe the attractiveness of a slender body and especially a flat abdomen are a recent Western, industrialized-countries phenomenon, history will prove you wrong. In cultures around the world and across the millennia, a slender middle as the hallmark of health, vigor, and beauty has nearly always headed the list of desirable physical attributes in a mate.

Take, for example, Queen Hatshepsut, fifth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt and the most powerful woman in her world. She died at age 50 from a ruptured tooth abscess, an ignominious end to be sure. That notwithstanding, as she was borne to her grave a hoary, desiccated corpse, swaddled in folds of her own fat, her funeral procession passed myriad statuary and glyphs representing her, not as she was but as she wished to be: young, sleek, and of slender silhouette. Modern analysis of her mummified remains, however, tells us such was not the case. Middle age had caught up to the queen. It appears that along with being quite obese, she had wretched teeth, bones riddled with tumors, and may have suffered from diabetes as well. Yet during her lifetime and for all the many centuries since her death, her svelte form in statues and paintings belied the middle-aged sprawl of the real Hatshepsut.

In 1991, feminist Naomi Wolf opined, "Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact." In other words, Ms. Wolf views our opinion of beauty as being based not on any innate or inborn sense of what is attractive, but as a product of our cultural indoctrination. We think a pretty face is pretty or a flat belly is attractive for no other reason than that's the way we've been programmed to think by the society in which we live. The covers of Playboy, Playgirl, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, she claims, set our standards for attractiveness, not the reverse. According to Wolf and others of her opinion, there is no universal standard for human beauty. Were we not programmed by advertisers and the entertainment industry, we would find a fat man or woman just as attractive and desirable as a thin one.

We disagree.

Years of serious scientific study, across numerous disciplines, prove otherwise. Our attraction to a pretty face and a flat belly is in our genes and is an atavistic throwback to a time when such features represented health and the ability to reproduce--important requirements in the selection of a mate. As Harvard Professor Deirdre Barrett puts it, these deep-seated universal standards of beauty "reflect our evolutionary need to estimate the health of others from their physical characteristics."

It's not our cultural programming that sets our standards for beauty; it is our instinct.

As recently as seventy-five years ago there were no reliable antibiotics available to fight bacterial infections and absolutely nothing to deal with myriad other infectious agents to which we humans fall prey. Many diseases common to our great-grandparents' generation and before are virtually never seen now. And many of these diseases left disfiguring marks on their victims. For instance, it was common in those days to see people with terrible scarring from smallpox, along with ringworms and running sores from other skin infections. The peaches-and-cream complexions of persons of the opposite sex advertised their health. Who wouldn't be more attracted to...

 

Acknowledged as experts in the science of low-carb nutrition, MICHAEL R. EADES and MARY DAN EADES are the authors of Protein Power, the sixty-three-week New York Times bestseller, as well as twelve other books in the fields of health, diet, and exercise.

From the Hardcover...