Interview with Lisa Tillinger Johansen, Author of Stop the Diet, I Want to Get Off!

LISA TILLINGER JOHANSEN, MS, RD is a Registered Dietitian who counsels clients on a wide range of health issues. Her debut nutrition book, Fast Food Vindication, received the Discovery Award (sponsored by USA Today, Kirkus and The Huffington Post).  She lives in Southern California.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I live in Southern California and love it. Reading is one of my most favorite pastimes and has been most of my life. I joined my first book club when I was six years old. I love to entertain, from a small dinner party to a major bash. My husband and I love the arts and go to a lot of movies, plays and concerts. I would have to say that my biggest adult passion has been travel. It’s my goal to see as much of the world as I can.

When did you begin writing?

I wrote my first play when I was nine years old. It was about Native Americans and my friend and I performed it for our history class. The next year I wrote a play for my English class about Santa Claus, and I played Santa! In seventh grade I mounted my most ambitious play called Rocky and the Boys about bank robbers. I, of course, was Rocky and we performed the play on the school’s theater stage. It was very exciting.

Throughout high school and college I continued to write, but mostly essays and short stories. Then in my mid-twenties I tried writing a romance novel called The Girl With The Kelly Green Scarf. It was 86 pages from start to finish. Too funny! It was then that I realized how hard it is to write a book.

I took some time off from writing for a decade or so and then started back again several years ago with my first book FAST FOOD VINDICATION. It was well-received and won several awards. This inspired me to write my new book STOP THE DIET, I WANT TO GET OFF!

What is this book about?

STOP THE DIET, I WANT TO GET OFF! examines the pros and cons of dozens of the most popular diets out there and ultimately provides the reader with a healthy eating plan for life.

What inspired you to write it?                                              

I’m a dietitian and I’ve counseled thousands of patients about weight loss and management. So many of them have been on numerous diets that didn’t work. Too few have tried a common-sense diet approach. My goal is to help people learn to eat healthy for life. And because there’s so much misinformation out there about what to do, I felt compelled to write a book that answers all the diet questions.

Who is your biggest supporter?

I can answer two questions here. My husband is my biggest supporter and he’s also my favorite author. He writes mystery/thriller books and sometimes collaborates with my second favorite author, my mother-in-law Iris Johansen.

Where can readers purchase a copy of your book?

Readers can get STOP THE DIET, I WANT TO GET OFF! on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and local booksellers.

Do you have a website and/or blog where readers can find out more?

I have three websites. The one that is specific to STOP THE DIET, I WANT TO GET OFF! is www.stopthediet.com. I also have a Q&A website at www.consultthedietitian.com and one for my first book www.fastfoodvindication.com. I’m on Facebook at Lisa Tillinger Johansen and on Twitter @LisaTJohansen.

What is up next for you?

Right now I’m busy promoting STOP THE DIET, I WANT TO GET OFF! as well as teaching nutrition, conducting hypertension and diabetes clinics and holding cooking classes in various senior centers. So I’m pretty busy! But I’m looking ahead to my next book and hope to get started on it soon.

Is there anything you would like to add?

Thank you for taking the time for the interview. I appreciate it.

New to My TBR Pile

Not that I've had any time to read lately--too busy selling houses--but here are some books that were added to my TBR pile over the past few weeks.

What have you added to your TBR pile? 

Release Day Blitz: Stop The Diet, I Want To Get Off! by Lisa Tillinger Johansen, MS, RD

We're happy to be hosting Lisa Tillinger Johansen and her STOP THE DIET I WANT TO GET OFF RELEASE DAY BLITZ today!

About the Book:

Title:
Stop the Diet, I Want To Get Off!

Author: Lisa Tillinger Johansen

Publisher: J. Murray Press

Pages: 275

Genre: Nonfiction/Nutrition/Health

Purchase at AMAZON

The Paleo. The Zone.  The Gluten-free.  Another day, another diet.  We’re caught in a never-ending merry-go-round of weight loss plans, fueled by celebrity endorsers, TV doctors and companies
angling for a piece of a $60 billion industry. 

But do these diets really work? 

And how healthy are they?

Registered Dietitian Lisa Tillinger Johansen examines dozens of the most wildly popular diets based on medical facts, not hype.  And along the way, she reveals tried-and-true weight loss strategies, relying on her years of hospital experience, weight-loss seminars and community outreach efforts.  With insight and humor, Stop The Diet, I Want To Get Off shows that the best answer is often not a trendy celebrity-endorsed diet, but easy-to-follow guidelines that are best for our health and our waistlines.

Book Excerpt:


The idea for this book began at a wedding.

Who doesn’t love a good wedding? The clothes, the flowers, the romance, the food…

Ah, the food. As we moved into the banquet hall, the culinary feast was on everyone’s minds. It was all anyone seemed talk about. But for some reason, guests weren’t conversing about the dishes being served; they were swapping stories of diets they had heard about from friends, magazine articles, even celebrities on talk shows.

I’m a registered dietitian with a master’s degree in nutritional science and years of clinical and health education experience. I’ve counseled thousands of patients and clients on all of these diets. But hearing the guests only momentarily distracted me from my horrible faux pas of wearing white (gasp!) to a friend’s wedding.

“I’m on the Blood Type Diet,” said a woman with an impossibly high bouffant hairdo. “You’ve heard of that, haven’t you? It’s the one where you choose your foods based on your blood type. I’m an AB, so I’ll be having the fish.”

“Really?” her friend replied. “I swear by the gluten-free diet. I’m on it, my daughter’s on it, and my granddaughter’s on it.”

I happened to know her granddaughter was six and didn’t have a gluten sensitivity or celiac disease.

Then there was the stocky guy who was trying to impress one of the bridesmaids. “I’m a paleo man myself,” he said, piling his plate high with beef kebabs. “It gives me more stamina, know what I mean? It puts me in touch with my inner caveman. There’s a restaurant near my apartment that’s paleo friendly. Maybe we can grab a bite there sometime, or…Hey wait, where are you going?”

And there were three Weight Watchers sisters who typed furiously on their phones and argued over their meals’ point values. Apparently there was some discrepancy between their various apps, and the sisters’ discussion was becoming more heated by the moment.

I’m past the point of being surprised by the wide range of weight-loss strategies—some worthless, some crazy, some quite reasonable—being tossed around. In the past few years, there has been a tidal wave of diets washing up on the shores of our nutritional consciousness. Celebrities prance across our screens, promoting a variety of weight-loss schemes on talk shows and infomercials. Medical doctors star in their own syndicated television programs, exposing millions to weight-loss techniques, often unsupported by medical research. Other diets get traction on the Internet, racing all over the globe in social media posts, YouTube videos, and annoying spam e-mails. It’s hard to walk past a shopping center vitamin store without being approached by salespeople trying to pitch the latest weight-loss supplements. It seems that everyone wants a piece of the pie; the American diet industry tops $60 billion annually.

It’s classic information overload. You can’t blame people for being confused by all the diets out there, even as crazy as some of them may sound. I didn’t speak up to my fellow wedding guests that day, but it occurred to me they would benefit from some hard facts about the diets they so ardently follow.

So during the toasts, I thought to myself, I should write a book.

I counsel clients on these matters each week, giving them information they need to make the best choices for their health and waistlines. I find that all too often there’s nothing to the diets that are presented to me in my counseling sessions and classes. They just plain don’t work, particularly over the long term. And some of them are harmful, even potentially lethal. But it’s also unhealthy to carry extra weight on our frames. So how do we separate good diets from the bad?

In the chapters to come, we’ll take a good, hard look at the various weight-loss plans out there. I’ll pull no punches in my professional evaluation of some of the most wildly popular diets, both bad and good, of the past few years. And along the way, I’ll explore tried-and-true strategies for losing weight, based on my years of hospital experience, weight-loss seminars, and community outreach efforts. More often than not, the best answer is not a trendy celebrity-endorsed diet, but instead a few easy-to-follow guidelines that I’ve seen work in literally thousands of cases.

Enough is enough. It’s time for the madness—and the diets—to stop.

LISA TILLINGER JOHANSEN, MS, RD is a Registered Dietitian who counsels clients on a wide range of health issues. Her debut nutrition book, Fast Food Vindication, received the Discovery
Award (sponsored by USA Today, Kirkus and The Huffington Post).  She lives in Southern California.

For More Information

• Visit Lisa Tillinger
  Johansen’s websites – Stop the Diet,
  Consult the Dietician and Fast Food Vindication.
• Connect with Lisa on Facebook
  and Twitter.

Three Ways to Find a Healthy Balance in Your Life by Kathy Balland

Today's guest blogger is Kathy Balland, author of Lose the Diet: Transform Your Body by Connecting with Your Soul

In Lose the Diet you’ll discover your power to achieve and maintain a healthy weight naturally without diets. Food deprivation is uncomfortable and ultimately causes weight gain. Instead, enjoy the good health and joy that you deserve. Lose the Diet shows you how.

• Drop the diets and the weight in a healthy and natural way.
• Find out why deprivation doesn’t work.
• Learn about the mind-body-soul connection’s effect on weight.
• Discover that happiness leads to a healthy weight rather than the other way around.
• Insightful tools and information that help you to find balance — from the inside out!

Kathy Balland, an expert in the mind-body-soul connection, teaches people how to tap into their own inner power for success. Clinically certified in hypnotherapy, her publications and seminars provide deep insights into the true causes and their remedies that prevent people from achieving their goals. Balland is a graduate of the University of Phoenix and the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts.

She is clinically certified by the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners and certified by the American Board of Hypnotherapy. As president of Blissful Publications and author of Lose the Diet: Transform Your Body by Connecting with Your Soul, Balland provides information to enrich and empower people to achieve happiness and success.

Three Ways to Find a Healthy Balance in Your Life

Often when we try to find balance – whether it is in our weight or in other ways, we search for the answer outside of ourselves. (In the case of weight management it can be diet pills, diet food or fad diets and counting calories.) These “quick” fixes are actually not quick, because we end up spending a lot of time (and money) going from one quick fix to the next.

However, the reality is that you already have the answer within yourself. After all, we are all different – with different wants and needs, which is a good thing! But because we are so used to looking elsewhere, we can become “disconnected” from what those wants and needs are. We can also lose our sense of self-esteem in the process – and self-esteem is a major key in finding balance.

The book – Lose the Diet: Transform your body by connecting with your soul was created to help you to reconnect and find that balance, and there are three tools from the book that are located on the resources page of the Lose the Diet website: (http://www.losethediet.com/_site/pages/Resources.aspx)

The tools are:
1. Balance Chart
2. Affirmation Steps
3. Self-Guided Meditation


The balance chart helps you to discover your own inner wants and needs. The Affirmation Steps allow you to put those needs into a positive affirmation statement (which helps you to focus on your needs in a positive way, so that you can achieve success). The Self-Guided Meditation allows you to relax, re-connect and visualize so that you can reach your goal. (If you are familiar with The Secret – then you know how powerful the mind is!)

I do recommend that you sign up for the FREE half hour guided meditation audio, (on the left side of the resources page) which will help you to de-stress (another important part of finding balance) and it will introduce you to guided meditation so that you learn how to use the self-guided meditation. You will also receive a book excerpt and additional information through the Lose the Diet ezine.

The book Lose the Diet explains these tools in more detail, and provides additional tips and guidance for achieving balance from the inside out - but the three tools contained on the resources page will help you get started. Again, the page is: http://www.losethediet.com/_site/pages/Resources.aspx. Enjoy!