For anyone who loves good food, it can be a sad, sad day when the doctor looks you in the eye and tells you to strip the fat out of your diet. It"s one of those "if you fail, you die" messages. Never pleasant. Best to keep on hand a copy of Don Mauer"s A Guy"s Guide to Great Eating, if only for moral support in times of dread. Mauer received just such a message. But rather than sulk, he tore into his favorite dishes and figured out how to yank out a lot of the fat without sacrificing big flavor. He lost 100 pounds for his efforts, and published the wildly popular Lean and Lovin" It. A big guy not likely to take kindly to spa-sized portions, Mauer has intentionally aimed A Guy"s Guide to Great Eating at men with big, meat-and-potatoes appetites. The idea is that only 25 percent or less of the calories in any recipe in this book can be attributed to fat. This isn"t to say that the Double Chocolate Chip Fudge Brownies aren"t fattening at 167 calories per serving (it"s the two cups of sugar). They just aren"t loaded with fat (only 11.1 percent of the calories come from fat). The main point here is that they actually taste good and can fit into a realistic diet. Mauer includes recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. You"ll find Light-As-Air Buttermilk Pancakes, Great Gawd Almighty Gumbo, A Guy"s Better Burger, Kickass Beef-Chunk Chili, Sizzlin" Szechuan Chicken, Steakhouse Oven-Fried Potatoes, as well as cookies, cakes, and pies. All of that and Mauer doesn"t rely on any never-seen-in-nature products. --Schuyler Ingle