Notes on "The Park Avenue Diet: A Tale of Two Books"; Sunday, March 6, 2011

How do you define "health"? The arrival of spring is the perfect opportunity to consider this issue. I tend to agree with the definition as articulated by the World Health Organization: "Physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease." Dr. Stanley Krippner reminds his students and readers of the extreme importance of social well-being, something that has obviously had a tremendous impact on my personal and professional philosophy.

Health is definitely an evanescent entity: one minute you have it, the next minute it may be lost. I learned this first-hand as a medical student at Maimonides Medical Center. I also learned that health is an ongoing responsibility. If you relax your efforts and vigilance, you may not be able to regain lost ground.

I have had the honor of having two books published consecutively by the erudite company, Hatherleigh Press. They are The Little Book of Big Medical Emergencies and The Park Avenue Diet. Does the topic matter for these books seem wildly divergent to you? One of the editors at Hatherleigh Press asked me if the two books had anything in common. Of course they did, I said, they are both about health.

The Little Book of Big Medical Emergencies, which I wrote with Mark Steisel, is a user-friendly guide to the most serious and life-threatening health issues. It reflects my four years as an emergency room attending physician at Cabrini Medical Center where I worked between 1983 and 1987 for 600 twelve-hour shifts. Naturally I saw every conceivable type of medical, surgical, orthopedic, urological, and psychological emergency, just to name a few.

But what seemed most crucial to me was the patient's ability to minimize or avoid debilitating consequences, if possible, by recognizing the onset of the medical emergency. Certainly many emergencies can not be predicted, such as accidental falls or fractures. But others such as cardiac problems, back pain, and fainting might require immediate attention and first-aid before an ambulance is called.

The Little Book of Big Medical Emergencies is a concise guide to a complex subject, written in easy to understand terms and covering hundreds of possible scenarios. The book was originally published in 2002 by Barricade Books: the legendary publisher Lyle Stuart personally selected it for his catalogue, one of the greatest honors of my life. Hatherleigh Press published an updated and more elegant edition in 2007. For this version I asked fourteen different academic physicians to proofread and add comments as they felt necessary. The contributing physicians, all brilliant and generous colleagues, included famed diabetologist Dr. Philip Felig, pioneering surgeon Dr. Avram Cooperman, pediatrician Dr. Amy Glaser and superlative orthopedist Dr. Jacob D. Rozbruch.

Simply put, this is a book that belongs in every home, and here is one way to get a copy:



The Park Avenue Diet is also ground-breaking, albeit in a totally different way. I had been approached by numerous publicists and publishers to write a diet book after my nine year professional relationship with Dr. Robert Atkins. Most weight loss books seemed too monolithic to me: they were essentially a list of recipes, some pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, and perhaps a few semi-fictional case studies. Moreover, study after study in respected medical journals conclusively proved that the constituents of a weight loss menu have no predictive outcome in an individual's ability to become thinner. Macrobiotic=low carbohydrate=low fat. Even worse, diets that are food-centric have a 95% chance of failure. The "cure" rate of obesity is approximately the cure rate for lung cancer, namely 5%.

The only people who successfully lose weight and maintain their new-found body shape have undergone changes in their philosophical approach to physical, mental, and social health. In common parlance, they have adopted a "healthy lifestyle." That's why I set out to write not merely a "diet book" but a guide to changing one's entire image.

As with The Little Book of Big Medical Emergencies, I sought input from multiple experts, this time in unusually diverse fields. The Park Avenue Diet is thus the only book of its kind to juxtapose advice from celebrities such as Tinsley Mortimer, Laura Geller, and Joel Warren with personal health specialists such as Dr. Stanley Krippner, Berrnadette Penotti, and Chef Marie Annick Courtier. As a bonus, internationally respected fashion consultant Helene Hellsten is there to show you how to choose the most flattering clothing.

And here's how to get your own copy.



It's even available as a Kindle download.



And that's "A Tale of Two Books".