Seven or eight years ago, my doctor told me I need to lose a whole lot of weight. She put me on a low carb diet, and I lost 70 pounds. I kept it off for a while, but eventually I got tired of dieting, and over the last three years I’d put 40 of those pounds back on. Starting late last year, I made a concerted effort to get them off again, and only succeeded in keep my weight stable…until, a month or so ago, I read Gary Taubes’ book Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It. Since then, I’ve dropped approximately 8 pounds with no real effort.

I should note, I’m not anything like a diet book junkie. The only other diet book I’ve read is The No-S Diet, which was responsible for me putting the first 20 of those 40 pounds back on. I’ll also note that Why We Get Fat is not your typical diet book. It’s not about eating less and exercising more and lots of rah-rah stuff to inspire you to try harder.

Instead, it’s a book about what makes your body take on and burn fat.

I had always thought that putting on weight worked like this:

• You eat food.
• Your body digests the foot, and all of the nutrients and calories enter your blood stream.
• Your body burns some of those nutrients and calories for fuel.
• Whatever is left over—the nutrients that are getting past their sell-by date, as it were—eventually get packed away in the form of fat.

Hence, in order to lose weight you need to exercise more, so that you don’t have any nutrients left to turn into fat.

It turns out that this is not the case. The first part is true: the food you eat turns into nutrients that enter your bloodstream to feed your tissues. But the second part isn’t. Your blood flows by both your muscle cells and your fat cells like a buffet on a conveyor belt, and both kinds of cells consume as much as they like. If your fat cells are set to pull lots of nutrients out of your blood and sock it away, you’re going to get fat.

Taubes describes a study, done in the last ten years, in which two groups of white rats had their ovaries removed. The goal of the study was to determine the effect of having no estrogen. One group of rats was allowed to eat as much as they liked; the other group was fed the same diet as they would usually get.

Both groups of rats became obese. The difference between the two was that the rats that could eat as much as they liked were normally active, well the rats on the constrained diet moved as little as they could manage. You see, fat uptake is determined by hormones, and without estrogen the fat cells got turned up to eleven, and in effect stole energy from the rest of the rats’ bodies.

There are a number of hormones that control fat uptake; and the main one that’s affected by diet is insulin. The more insulin in your blood, the more fat your fat cells squirrel away. And the more carbohydrates you eat, the more insulin in your blood.

It’s a fascinating book; Taubes is a skilled writer, and he makes a compelling case. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so to speak, and in the month or six weeks since I read it, I’ve lost about 8 pounds. What did I do?

I cut out sugars and starches almost completely. This is not that different than what I was trying to do before.

Of the things that were left in my diet, I looked at their glycemic indices. That’s a measure of how quickly the food gets converted into glucose. And I cut out foods that have a significant glycemic index. For example, I’d always thought of beans as a protein food. But most beans also have a lot of starch, and a glycemic index of about 15. Carrots, by comparison, have a certain amount of sugar but a much lower glycemic index. So I eat carrots sparingly, and I’ve mostly cut beans out of my diet.

Third, Taubes suggests that if you listen to your body, you’ll eat what you need. Previously I’d been trying to eat only at mealtimes, and enough that I didn’t get hungry between meals. The upshot of that was that I never really got hungry. What I’m doing now is trying to adjust my meal sizes such that I get hungry maybe half-an-hour before the next meal. That means I’m consciously eating less at meals. But the promise is, I don’t need to be hungry. If I get hungry at some other time, I’m allowed to eat as much as I’d like—until I get full, and only from the approved list.

And it’s working. I’m eating less at breakfast and lunch, and much less at dinner, than I used to. Sometimes I have a snack in the afternoon, or after dinner, but not always, and only if I’m actually hungry. And here’s the weird thing: in the old days, when I was eating foods with more carbs in them, I never really got hungry…but I always wanted more to eat. When I think about some of the “snacks” I used to have in the afternoon, it boggles my mind.

Be clear: I’m not saying, “Gosh, I just gathered my will-power and cut down my food intake, and I’m losing weight.” What I’m saying is that by cutting certain things out of my diet, I’m not only eating less, I’m wanting less. And the weight is coming off. My weight is generally more stable from day to day, with a slight downward trend; my digestion is better; the only annoying part is eating away from home, where it’s sometimes hard to get the right things.

Put it like this: we had three birthdays during the last week at our house. I lost weight. ‘Nuff said.

Over the last week I read the family Patricia C. Wrede’s latest, The Far West, which is the third (and, apparently, final) volume in the series that began with The Thirteenth Child and Across the Great Barrier; and we all enjoyed it thoroughly. I read the last fifth of book on Saturday evening, and my voice was beginning to go as we got to the final pages.

So the main point you should take away from this is, this is a darn good series and you should go read it. It’s probably the best set of new fantasy novels I’ve read in ages: both smart and funny, but with a serious core, and with a deep understanding of how people and families work.

I always have trouble reviewing the later books in series, because I don’t want to spoil the earlier books; consequently, I’ll just say a few words about the Frontier Magic trilogy as a whole. It takes place in an alternate United States, circa 1850 or so, but this is a world in which technology is magically based. More than that, human beings never made it to the New World, here called North and South Columbia, until the first Avrupans (Europeans) came. At that time, the continents were still the home of a vast variety of wildlife, including mammoths and saber cars, and also stranger things: magical creatures like spectral bears, swarming weasels, and steam dragons. It made colonization rather difficult, until Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, working together, managed to cast the Great Barrier spell—a magical boundary that runs up the Mammoth River from New Orleans to the end of the St. Laurence Seaway, and thence to the Atlantic. Wild animals can’t cross the barrier, and once the more dangerous fauna were dealt with the eastern territories were safe to settle in.

But that leaves the Western Territories. When Eff Rothmer is five years old, her family moves to a new town just beside the Mammoth River, where her father will teach in a new college. Settlers are moving out into the western territories despite the danger, and the college is intended to train them before they go. Eff’s father teaches magic, which is essential for safety in the territories. Eff’s father is a seventh-son; and her twin brother, Lan, is the seventh son of a seventh son, and consequently gifted with great magical power. Eff, herself, is a “thirteenth child”—and what that means, for good or ill, is one of the things you’ll need to read the book to find out.

Wrede’s web site definitely refers to The Far West as “The final book of the Frontier Magic trilogy,” so the whole story is available now; go read ’em all. Me, I hope she gives in and writes another.

The second of Jack McDevitt’s series that I’ve read a few of is the Alex Benedict/Chase Kolpath series, which has a very different feel than the Academy series. It also concerns archaeology, but as it is set 9,000 years in our future, and other intelligent species are scarce, it pretty much all has to do with traces of past human societies.

Alex Benedict, the narrator of A Talent for War, is not, in fact, an archaeologist; rather, he’s an antiquities dealer, the sort of person that makes Indiana Jones scream, “That belongs in a museum!” However, he does spend a certain amount of time following leads and tracking down finds; the easiest way to make a lot of money in the antiquities business is to obtain your own supply of antiquities. He hires a pilot, the beautiful Chase Kolpath, to help him hunt down a mystery that his uncle had been chasing when he died, and that other people clearly want him to give up on.

In the subsequent books (I’ve read Polaris, Seeker, and The Devil’s Eye, but there are two more I’ve not gotten to yet), Chase is the narrator. She’s become Benedict’s assistant and sometime pilot, and makes a fine Watson, thank you very much. And that’s important, because every single one of the books is a mystery, and the fun is in watching Alex and Chase track down the clues while managing not to get killed by the bad guys. There are plenty of chases and narrow escapes—Alex and Chase have had to cope with sabotaged air cars on at least two occasions, and I might be forgetting one—but in general the entire series is much more human scale than the Academy books, and I find I like it better. Not that planetary catastrophes are unknown; but they are handled rather differently.

I’ve noted McDevitt’s even-handedness with respect to religion before; I’ll note that the first book, A Talent for War, opens in a Catholic monastery. Catholics don’t seem to be all that common, mind you, but it’s delightful to see the Church as a going concern 9,000 years down the road. (It’s what I’d expect to happen, of course…but one doesn’t expect science fiction authors to see it that way.)

Anyway, good stuff; and I expect that I’ll read the two remaining books in the series before too much time goes by.

Having thoroughly enjoyed Wilkie Collin’s The Moonstone, I went out and got a copy of the same author’s The Woman in White. Short answer: it’s even better. The Moonstone‘s climax is marred by a plot point that seems completely implausible today, although it would have seemed more more reasonable when it was written, whereas The Woman in White has no such problems.

The premise is straightforward. While out walking late at night, a young drawing master named Walter Hartwright encounters a strange young woman, dressed all in white, who calls upon him for help. He grants it, only to discover later that she is a madwoman escaped from a private asylum. Later he encounters another young woman who might be her double, and loses his heart. She, of course, is promised to another…and therein hangs the tale.

Like The Moonstone, the story is told by a number of voices, each supposedly first person; like The Moonstone, it’s a mystery, perhaps the first mystery novel in the English language; like The Moonstone, a romance is central to the tale. It’s long, a bit slow, but it kept me reading.

If it has a fault, it lies in two notions that were commonplace in novels of the day: that a good, cold wetting invariably leads to a horrible, life-threatening illness, and that the minds of women (and of men) are all too easily unhinged. Its strengths, as with The Moonstone, are its characters. I was especially taken with the larger than life Count Fosco. I wouldn’t want to know him, mind, but I enjoyed all of the scenes in which he appears.

One minor quibble: if young Walter had any sense, he’d have fallen in love with Marian rather than Laura. Marian’s worth the whole rest of the family.

Note: Lars Walker has also recently read and reviewed this book; go here for his take.