Review: These are NOT low-cal or low-carb recipes!
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 19, 2012
I picked up this book free during an Amazon giveaway. Supposedly, this is a cookbook offering "tasty, low-calorie beverages."Since I am currently dieting and running into the exact problem that Holcomb describes in her Introduction - plain water is boring - I was excited at this book, envisioning lots of beverage recipes with only a few calories each. But Holcomb's idea of what fits into a diet differs drastically from mine! On a 1000-calorie weight loss diet, it's possible to squeeze in a few 25-calorie drinks, and maybe a 50-calorie treat on a good day, but even a 100-calorie drink kills 10% of your daily allotment in one shot, and nearly all of Holcomb's recipes top the 100-calorie mark! Skim milk and sugar substitute are staples of Holcomb's recipes but often fail to bring the calorie count down to where a dieter can use it as more than an occasional treat: Minty Hot Chocolate has 146 calories, Lite Egg Nog 181 calories, Smoothie with Fruit 115 calories. Lite Milk Shake uses skim milk, fat-free whipped topping, and "fat-free sugar-free pudding mix" which I have never heard of, and STILL comes out to 137 calories per serving. ONE SERVING of the delicious-sounding Tropical Blend Drink would use up more a tenth of your daily calories, and the recipe makes 4 servings. One serving of Spiced Cranberry-Apple Punch (which makes 6 servings) would kill 15% of your daily calorie allotment. The one serving made from the Thick Chocolate Almost-Malt recipe comes in at a whopping 222 calories, and the Lite Margarita without tequila is still 231 calories! Pineapple-Vanilla Smoothie totals 245 calories per serving, or Autumn Smoothie (which sounds quite tasty and it well should) for 271 calories. Maybe Holcomb can lose weight with this kind of drink, but I sure can't. Those who are counting carbs won't do any better with this book: the Lite Margarita has 59 g carbs, Lite Egg Nog is 28 g, Minty Hot Chocolate is 24 g, Smoothie with Fruit is 23 g, Autumn Smoothie is 59 g.There are a few genuinely low-calorie recipes. Cold Strawberry Refresher uses diet ginger ale but at least manages to total a mere 24 calories per serving- unfortunately it won't help me because most diet sodas are sweetened with aspartame, which gives me headaches. . The famous Lite Imitation Cappuccino only adds 12 calories (or 2 g carb) to your daily total. The only recipe I may actually try is the Lite Orange Shake; even though it uses a sugar-free gelatin mix; at 38 calories it's something I could actually fit into my daily calorie intake.Some people might claim that these qualify as "diet" recipes because they are lower-calorie than the traditional recipes. That only works if your body uses calories in proportion to what would be in the normal recipe. Mine, and everyone's that I know, uses the 200+ calories in a so-called diet recipe just like it uses 200+ calories in a normal recipe. And on my food record, I don't get to ignore 200+ calories because it was made according to a "diet" recipe.What's sad is that a lot of these recipes do look pretty good. If she had simply marketed the book as tasty drinks, she would have succeeded. But labelling drinks with a calorie count of over 100 calories per serving as "diet" is simply absurd and does not help those of us who are looking for something besides water to drink.I have no explanation for the reviewers who praised this as a good source of low-cal drinks. Maybe they ignored the calorie and carb count, given at the end of each recipe. Maybe they are friends of hers. (If you look at the other reviews of the 5-star reviewers, you will see a quite remarkable number of the same books appearing on the different reviewers' lists, that most of the reviews are not verified purchases, and that nearly all the reviews are 5-star - all red flags to possible shill reviews. Add the organized downvoting of the only other honest review and I have no doubts.) Look at the figures above and continue your search if you are looking for diet drinks.