The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program

The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health by Travis Stork M. D. ★ Summary & Analysis 

The Doctor's Diet by Travis Stork, MD, of The Doctors offers a remarkably conversational, common-sense weight-loss and health-improvement plan that is solidly grounded in current and recent research. Its recommendations seem relatively easy to follow, and they are amply supported by anecdotal and peer-reviewed research, making it a reasonably authoritative source well worth considering in consultation with a physician or dietician. 

Stork is to be commended in The Doctor’s Diet, not only for outlining a common-sense, research-supported approach to weight loss and healthier living, but for doing so in a way accessible to a non-expert audience without being overly reductionist or insulting. It is to be hoped that more people will read what he has written and that he will write yet more. 

Dr. Stork offers a well written diet guide that is likely to be convincing to those who pick it up with an eye toward losing weight and living healthier. The frequent breaks in the text—call-outs that pervade the book—encapsulate information effectively and help to divide the text into more manageable chunks that aid comprehension and ease the reader’s experience. He embeds recent and current research throughout the text makeing the work more authoritative; it becomes more than simply one doctor’s assertions, but his synthesis of the best practices in the field at large. 

More to his credit is that he acknowledges the sometimes-contradictory nature of ongoing research. Too often, experts writing for non-expert audiences (as Stork is doing in The Doctor’s Diet) oversimplify their materials, reducing multiple threads of research to a single “truth” that may not be as adequately supported as other ideas and comes off as fixed knowledge, not subject to revision. True scholars know that their opinions may need to change against the revelation of more data; Stork notes that he is awaiting further research in a number of cases, which presents him as more open-minded and therefore more likely to have considered alternatives to his views. It makes those views far more believable and makes the recommendations of The Doctor’s Diet far easier to accept.