The 4 Day Diet Review

• Title: The 4 Day Diet
• Author: Ian K. Smith, M.D.
• Cost: Around $17
• Pages: 256
• Launched: 30 December 2008
• >> Click here to get this from Amazon.com

Overview

The 4 Day Diet is probably the strangest diet product we have reviewed. The first 96 pages of this book are dedicated to the mental side of dieting which the author says is 80% of the struggle when losing weight (it is important I agree).

There is some good information in that section of the book which really can help you stick to your diet and motivate you, if you do the exercises that are given to you. But then it launches straight into the diet plan, which in total is about 9 pages of explanation spread across 7 different eating plans, so just over 1 page per plan to explain the whole diet!

This means there is no explanation about why you should be following it other than the fact it is meant to confuse your body to help you lose weight, you feel like you are just thrown right into it.

In fact that happens earlier in the book as well when you are in a chapter on motivation, then suddenly it is talking about the GI values of food, then you are in a chapter on the power of positive thinking and then suddenly you are being given an exercise plan to follow and exercise advice…??

So basically there are 7 modules, each 4 days in length, which you are required to eat different things during and exercise for different lengths of time, but there doesn’t seem to be a massive amount of difference between them, at least to my untrained eye anyway!

Each of them gives you just one list of foods and quantities for the entire day, then you have to put it all together to make yourself a plan for the whole day, which is really difficult to do (you can use the recipes he gives you but they seem to use things not on the lists and don’t tell you which module they can be used on…).

I checked one of the ‘transition’ module days against NutritionData.com and the total calorie intake for the day is 1355 calories which is a low calorie intake and is why you will lose weight, it is about 800 calories a day below my daily calorie expenditure for instance.

Then you are supposed to exercise almost every day for between 40 minutes and 1 hour and 10 minutes (two 35 minute sessions it says), which would be taxing for most people anyway as most people do not do much exercise, but on a low calorie diet too then that is going to be really tough.

So this diet needs more explanation and some sample meal plans for each of the days on the module would have been nice, but with those few calories and that much exercise you cannot help losing weight (as long as you don’t pass out first!) Consult with your doctor before trying this!

User Comments

I struggled to find many opinions online other than on Amazon.com and a few other sites. Some people like it, they like that the food differs and it is broken down into little chunks to keep it interesting. A few people are reporting they have lost weight too.

Others think it is nowhere near as good as the Fat Smash Diet book he wrote and think it focuses too much on the mental side of the diet and provides nothing new. So this gets 3 stars as the comments are more positive than negative but the results people are reporting are not huge.