Zero Belly Smoothies: Lose up to 16 Pounds in 14 Days and Sip Your Way to A Lean & Healthy You! Paperback – June 28, 2016

If you want to have smoothies daily, this book will help you. It has a variety of recipes that are healthy.

This is the BEST smoothie book ever. Who needs extra sweetener when a touch of fruit takes care of that? There are 5 chapters/types of smoothies in this book: fruit, green, nutty/chocolaty, savory, and nutritionist favorites. Each smoothie has protein, fiber, and healthy fat, making it a healthy meal. Smoothies start with nut milk, coconut water, green tea or unsweetened liquid of your choice. Healthy fats include nut butters, avocado, or healthy oils. Vegan protein powder is recommended (I like Orgain chocolate from Costco). Fiber comes from flax, oats, chia, or fruits and vegetables. Boosts include ginger, cayenne, wheatgrass, Cocoa, cinnamon, fresh mint or basil, Matcha powder, turmeric, fish oil or a fiber powder. I really love to add turmeric to my smoothies (always add a little black pepper with turmeric) and if your avocado or fruit is frozen it helps thicken like pudding. These recipes are simple and because they follow the pattern of protein, fiber, and healthy fat, you can interchange your favorites. You will not run out of ideas with this smoothie book and you will find recipes that are satisfying and help you slim down. This book is not a gimmick, it's a teaching resource with wonderful recipes that will enhance your health.

The basis for the zero belly diet is pretty straightforward. Replace either one or two meals with one of the smoothies, and you'll lose weight. For the most part this is a recipe book, but the authors throws an abundant amount of research data at you as well.There's quite a variety of smoothies to choose from, but by far my biggest complaint is the protein powder he's suggest. I just can't seem to find a protein powder that I find palatable. There's no question if you can tolerate the protein powders the smoothies will give you tons of energy, and you will have no problem exchanging them for a meal. I found the protein powders disgusting, so currently playing around with the amount of powder + different brands trying to find one I can tolerate.In some ways I prefer plain old green smoothies, without the protein powder. Overall for the $14 I spent I think it's money well spent. While I'm just in the initial stages, I believe you can lose weight swapping out meals for smoothies. There's also lots of good data as well but not exactly a book you would want to read cover to cover, at least I sure didn't.

I have tried three smoothies so far and they have kept me full my entire lunch window! The smoothies I have tried so far have tasted great! I highly recommend this book if you’re looking for an alternative way to lose weight and get healthier. One more thing - I think it has helped with my constipation! Since I have blending half of my meals now, I seem to be using the bathroom more frequently. All in all I’m glad I made this purchase!

This is a book I have some mixed feelings about. I bought this book because I had seen a few of the recipes on-line and liked them. I tend to do one protein based smoothie a day post workout, albeit usually with less fruit then these contain. However, the recipes I saw contain less fruit in general then some popular healthy smoothie books on the market, so I felt like it would be worth checking into, despite the title, which unfortunately screams “fad diet.” I've also been making more protein smoothies for our son lately, and since he totally hates the texture of meat (he has sensory issues with it), I humor him pretty much anytime he asks for a smoothie on his speech device, which has lately been 2-3 times a day. But I thought it might be good to slowly expand his smoothie acceptance repertoire.So this is going to be a longer review, and in case you loose patience with it, I'm going to hit you with one of my criticisms first because it's super important and this is a conversation I would be having with any loved one in my life:Loosing 16 lbs in 14 days is not safe. *Not*. *Safe*. And the titular promise that following the dietary recommendations in here will do so is part of what gives this book some fad diet earmarks. I come at this from the perspective of having worked in healthcare, and being a woman who is currently in recovery from medication induced liver damage. The very first meeting I had with my GI Dr when this all went down, she told me, because I did have a few pounds I could loose at that time, that for *anybody* (not just people with liver damage), loosing more then 2 pounds a week puts stress on their liver. More then 4 pounds will damage your liver. She had wanted to make sure I was clear on that point because I already had liver damage we were trying to heal and she didn't want me to make it worse. You can actually do the same type of damage that will ultimately lead to fatty liver and cirrhosis by chronic yo-yo and/or crash dieting. So the best medical advice on the subject when it comes to your health is go slow. You'll get the same place in the end, put your systems under less stress, and you'll be more likely to keep the results long term. Unless there is a more serious threat to the patient's life that needs to be addressed, generally medical practitioners avoid encouraging rapid weight loss of this kind.That being said, there are a mix of things I agree with and disagree with when it comes to the content of this book. I agree with the author that only permanent lifestyle changes are going to achieve long term healthy weight maintenance. And I actually think the recipes are generally nutritionally sound, though I personally would reduce the fruit amounts and up the veg. I roll that way. But this book has some misstatements on a few factual matters and tries to present anecdotal testimonials as strong support for this approach, which I have mixed feelings about.I know when I'm reviewing books on things that pertain to my son's disabilities, I'm often relying on my own “testimonial” to explain my views. So I get that there is a place for that. But then I also try to be clear that what I do may not work for every child with the same or similar struggles. Testimonials are murky ground, from the scientific perspective. An example would be a woman mentioned who followed this diet plan and lost the weight. Her success was attributed solely to the diet, but then it was also mentioned she did zumba and had made some other changes in her life that, from the scientific perspective, would have also influenced her results. If you really want to demonstrate the efficacy of something, you do controlled studies where you are only looking at the difference of this one factor.I'm going to go through a few of what I consider to be a few of the misstatements. The author lumps sucralose (Splenda) in with sugars. It is the only artificial sweetener he does that with, the exact reference goes in part: “...crystalline fructose, and sucralose (all forms of sugar).” Sucralose is an artificial sweetener derived from sucrose, and up until studies came out showing that it kills of a bunch of your good gut microbes and that it can damage your liver, it was on the tips of many a physician's tongue when it came to recommending sugar replacements for diabetic patients. I think Sucralose is super bad news and won't consume anything with it, don't get me wrong, but it is an artificial sweetener and should be classed as such for informational purposes.He cites the number of Americans who have been benefited by his dietary recommendations and then says, “But the war is only partly won. Two out of every three of us still struggles with belly fat...” Technically, obesity rates are still on the rise in this country. He may have hundreds of thousands of people buying his books, but the way he states this makes it seem like his approach is leading to improvements in health that are affecting obesity rates, and there's no evidence that supports that, the very increase in such rates flat out refutes it. There are a few other similar statements in there where he attributes outcomes that aren't actually measurable or evidence based to his diet, and what I would tell you from the medical perspective is that usually, when you see that it should make you view what a person is telling you with a heavy dose of caution.Some of the recipes have inaccurate calorie and protein counts based on the ingredients listed. For example, his “Great Grape” recipe. I happen to use two of the protein powders he recommends, and this recipe calls for ½ scoop of the protein powder, but lists a protein amount of 30 grams, which would actually only be provided by one of the two protein powders...with the entire scoop, not half. That would be Vega's Vanilla Sport Performance Protein powder (which I totally love!). The calorie count shown would be closer to correct if it included the entire scoop, not half, but the protein would still be off because there is some protein in the flax, but not enough to account make 15 grams of protein from a half scoop into 30, we're talking only 1.5 grams in that 1 TB of flax...there were a couple other recipes I noticed similar problems on, but I'm going to save your eyeballs the full accounting ;)He says that watercress has a higher amount of nutrients then kale, and you know, it actually doesn't based on what nutritional labels tell you if you google them. He also tells you not to drink smoothies with juice as a base, and I encountered one recipe that had juice listed as an ingredient. It was no sugar added, but no sugar added apple juice still has on average more then 20 grams of sugar per cup and none of the fiber that would help slow down the absorption of those sugars.I actually could go on, but I don't really want to pound this one into the ground. Because I do think that overall, these are some pretty solid smoothie recipes and that's all I bought it for. Some of them are higher in fruit then I would personally recommend, and for some of them if I make them, I'm totally planning on adding cauliflower to them (in fact, I did that to the peanut butter sandwich one and it worked awesome) because it's a great way of sneaking veg into smoothies that may not taste good with the green stuff (he has smoothies in it that don't have any veg, and I always do veg in my smoothies). And if you medically need to go lower fat on some of the recipes, you can substitute things like PB2 for regular fat peanut butter. You can also add pumpkin to chocolate smoothies and it hides in there very well. So if all you're wanting out of this is some solid, healthier smoothie recipes, I think this could be a good find for you.My best piece of advice would be that if you need to loose weight and you can afford it or your insurance covers it, go see a registered dietician. Not your physician or medical provider, because as well-intentioned as they are, they don't have to take general nutrition as part of their training, they only need to learn a few dietary guidelines for management of certain chronic diseases. If you can't afford that, google a good base metabolic rate calculator, input your data accurately, don't cut your calories below the number given by that. And otherwise, you know, I think many of the other recommendations he makes in here from the nutritional stand point are solid enough. And I 1000% (that number is intentional) agree with him you should ditch the added sugars for most occasions, because they increase your risk for a rather sizeable list of health problems.