DIET | DETECTIVE^®

It's not difficult to find an overweight twenty-something in North America. If you look a little harder you may find a person who’s managed to lose weight and get in shape. But show me one woman who weighed over 200 pounds in her twenties, gave birth to three children, and ended up a swimsuit model in her forties! Don't worry. You don't have to show her to me; I'll show her to you. Her name is Tosca Reno.

If anyone knows what it takes to lose weight, get in shape and stay that way, it's Tosca. It can be difficult to take some fitness professionals seriously – sure, they work out and eat properly. But most of them worked out through their teen years and into their twenties ... where they still are, childless and unlived. Tosca has lived a little. 

Born in Lachine, Quebec, Tosca Reno graduated from Queen's University with a BSc, and from Toronto's York University with a BEd. But along with knowledge, she found she had gained so much fat that she tipped the scales at over 200 pounds.

After college Tosca married and had three children, all girls, now in their teens and twenties. Over the years her weight went up and down until finally at the age of 40 she had had enough. That's when Tosca discovered Eating Clean. Now she uses her beauty to grace the pages of magazines, she uses her chutzpah to beat beautiful women half her age in figure competitions, and she uses her brains, experience, and sense of humor to write regular articles for Reps! and Maximum Fitness, a regular column for Oxygen magazine, and three books, including the best-selling The Butt Book, and now The Eat-Clean Diet. She also has a website, www.eatcleandiet

Jim Foster just wants to make a difference. He runs the award winning Diet-Blog.com. And according to Jim, one of his main motivations for the site is that he once paid both a nutritionist and a fitness instructor good money for advice. The nutritionist simply repeated (in parrot-like fashion) the nutritional advice of the day. It didn't really work for Jim and he continued to have hypoglycemic problems until he figured it out for myself. Diet and nutrition is an active science - it's always changing."  Read the interview with the man behind one of the number one diet blogs on the web.

Cathy Wong is a licensed naturopathic doctor and nutritionist with 10 years of research, clinical, and teaching experience in the field of complementary and alternative medicine. She has been the Alternative Medicine guide for About.com since 2000, where she writes an enormously popular blog, newsletter, and weekly articles. She’s also a member of the American College of Nutrition, American College for Advancement in Medicine, and the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. She is also the author of the new book the Inside-Out Diet. Read on to find out her thoughts on dieting, detoxing and living a better life.