Tosca Reno - The start here diet : three simple steps that helped me transition from fat to slim ... for life

This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

This book proposes a program of diet and exercise recommendations for the reader to follow. However, you should consult a qualified medical professional (and, if you are pregnant, your ob/gyn) before starting this or any other fitness program. Please seek your doctors advice before making any decisions that affect your health or extreme changes in your diet, particularly if you suffer from any medical condition or have any symptom that may require treatment. As with any diet or exercise program, if at any time you experience any discomfort, stop immediately and consult your physician.

Copyright 2013 by Tosca Reno

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

B ALLANTINE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Reno, Tosca.

The start here diet : three simple steps that helped me transition from fat to slim for life / Tosca Reno with Billie Fitzpatrick.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-345-54801-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-345-54802-3 (ebook)

1. Reducing dietsRecipes. 2. Weight loss. I. Fitzpatrick, Billie. II. Title.

RM222.2.R463 2013

641.5635dc23 2013020752

Jacket design: Mary Ann Smith

Jacket photograph: Paul Buceta

Web assets: Excerpted from The Start Here Diet by Tosca Reno, copyright 2013 by Tosca Reno. Published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.ballantinebooks.com

v3.1

Im Tosca Reno, the mom of four who went from fat and frumpy to slender, healthy, and sexyall after age forty. You may know me as the author of the Eat-Clean Diet franchise, the New York Times bestselling author of Your Best Body Now, or the creator of the diet lauded by celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, and Halle Berry for helping them shed their post-baby weight. You may recognize me from Good Morning America, CBS Sunday Morning, Access Hollywood, or one of the hundreds of other media and personal appearances I make as I travel around the United States and Canada inspiring people to lose weight, get fit, and become healthier.

If youre reading this book, then you probably already know a little bit about me. But with all the time that Ive spent on the road, I am just beginning to find out about you.

I always assumed that the people who bought my books were those who mirror the person I am todaytotally committed to a healthful lifestyle and the changes necessary to achieve it. But what Im learning is that the majority of my books are purchased by people who are more like who I was when I began my journey.

I didnt always look the way I do now. For years, I was a fragile pawn in my own yo-yo dieting nightmare, in which I spent the majority of my life starving myself, bingeing, and trying every diet known to mankind to lose weight and fit into my pre-kid jeans, all to no avail. I was seventy-five pounds heavier than I am now, then I got a little thinner, then got fat again. Up and down went the scale. I stayed in this limbo for more than twenty years before finally figuring out that I had the power to not only lose weight but keep it off and get healthy.

But like most stories that seem to fit into neat nutshells, the version that I have told up until now only touched the surface of my experience. Indeed, the life I have described in my other books is a somewhat sanitized version of what really happened to me; what Ive shared before only hints at the real struggle I went through and that millions of peopleperhaps including youstill endure. And for reasons that will soon become clear, it is only now that I have the courage and power to dig deep and be fully honest about what had to change inside of me before I could truly transform my life. I hope that sharing my experience and my journey to a healthy weight will inspire you to travel the same roadthe road to happiness with the way you look and feelbecause to be truly successful in reshaping yourself is to find the why first. Why are you not at your ideal weight? That answer is paramount.

Its not that I have some shocking, tabloid tell-all to reveal. My story is epically relatable. Nearly 130 million people in the United States alone live just like I did: terrified of making changes, without the know-how to stop their self-sabotaging behaviors.

I am not only a former fat girl, a woman who stayed up late to avoid being caught eating ice cream and peanut butter and hunks of cheese. I am also a woman who was tangled up in a bad relationship and so many folds of fat that I no longer knew who I was. I had lost a sense of where I ended and others began. Sound familiar? I was a member of what I fondly call the invisible millions. I couldnt see myself clearly; I felt lost and humiliated; I was hiding from myself.

Most stories that have at their heart the loss of our true selves have one of two endings: we either find ourselves or we continue to muddle through our livessad, powerless, and often very, very overweight and very, very sick.

I found myself. But not without wrestling with what was at the center of my fear of change. At first, I had no power to stop eating certain foods that were sabotaging my life and my health. I was so fearful of adjusting even the slightest thing in my day that instead I stayed immobilestuck physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Then slowly I gained clarity and courage. I began to feel less threatened by small changes. I began to listen to another voice within me.

If you, too, belong to the invisible millions, if you, too, cant seem to move off the couchliterally and metaphoricallyI hope that my full story and the Start Here process for change will finally inspire in you the confidence and courage to change your life forever. I hope it is the spark for your personal renovation. If I can do ityou can do it.

The Start Here Diet is a simple three-step process. Its gentle and easy and brought me out of my dark, lonely, and heavy place, the place where you must begin, too.

, Coming Out of Hiding, turns your focus inward. Many diets begin by asking you to identify your goals, such as the number of pounds you want to lose. My strategy is a bit different: I want you to focus on whats behind your weight gain and behind your desire to lose weight. No diet will ever be successful if you dont go to that place inside you, a place usually wrapped in pain, discomfort, shame, self-defeating habits, and fear. Unless you take care of this inner place, this inner fat person who is hiding from the world and herself or himself, then no matter what the diet, it will not work in the long run.

And I am all about the long run. I am all about showing you how you canand willheal that inner place, that part of you where your gifts and secret strengths reside.