Alton Brown: The Good Eats Guru: Eat Your Way to Weight Loss

Take a bowl of behind-the-camera experience, mix it with a large dose of food expertise, sprinkle common sense for taste, add humor for flavor, stir fry in health-consciousness, then serve piping hot in top television shows, - and you've got Alton Brown. An undeniable delicacy to savor for food enthusiasts, his no-nonsense and entertaining shows earned Alton Brown the title of ''Cooking Teacher of the Year'' in 2004 from Bon Appetit magazine. In 2005, Atlanta magazine named him the ''Best Food Guru.''

One of the rare personalities who practices what he preaches, Alton Brown was recently in the news for losing 50 pounds over nine months by healthy eating and without taking recourse to ''diet'' food. Alton Brown, in fact, holds the opinion that commercial products labeled ''diet'' should not be on the diet of anybody who is health conscious.

What makes Alton Brown the Good Eats guru can be seen from his personal diet for weight loss as revealed on the January 4, 2010 episode of Good Eats named ''Live and Let Diet.'' He had four lists of food from which he partook and abstained in regular frequencies creating a pattern that resembled our normal eating pattern more closely than any health regime-dieting course. The four lists of food are as follows:

1. Fruits, leafy greens, carrots, whole grains, nuts, and green tea. Alton Brown partakes daily, some of the constituents from this list.
2. Oily fish, yogurt, broccoli, sweet potato, and avocado: constituents are consumed from this list at least thrice a week.
3. Red meat, pasta, alcohol, and desserts: taken no more than once a week
4. Fast food, soda, processed meals, canned soups, anything labeled ''diet'' – completely avoided!

Alton Brown is quite different from the run-of-the mill cooking gurus you find on television and the internet. A private pilot, a motorcycling enthusiast with two tattoos, a Born-Again Christian, a fond family man, and a person with outstanding grip on the camera, Alton Brown is a man, who gave up a professional career at its height, and began from the bottom in the food industry because he felt he had something to give to the people.

Alton Brown was moved to create cooking shows for the people after observing that most television cooking shows had chefs preparing exotic food with constituents that were no part of food prepared daily at households across the country. Once giving an example of such a show to LA Times he recalled a show he had seen of a chef preparing monkfish liver, and he thought, ''Where am I supposed to find monkfish liver? What does this have to do with me?'' It doesn't have anything to do with any normal person, leave alone somebody like Alton Brown. Most television shows extol fantasy food with ingredients that are difficult to find and harder to use. They have no place in the kitchens of ordinary citizens. This is where experts like Alton Brown create a refreshing change, and create shows and recipes that are easy for us to understand as well as use in our daily lives.

To do something constructive rather than complain about the quality of cooking shows, Alton Brown quit his job at the age of 34 and joined the course at New England Culinary Institute. The experience of being a commercial director on one day and being a novice in a new industry on the next by choice is something people without deep passion and commitment are unable to do. In this Alton Brown has proven his worth to himself and the world.

Besides being the author of several how-to-cook books, Alton Brown is the creator and host of the popular television show Good Eats, and also of the mini-series Feasting on Asphalt and Feasting on Waves. He is also the chief commentator and host on Iron Chef America. Still recognized in the industry as an outstanding cinematographer, Alton Brown continues to create commercials.

The hallmark of shows created by Alton Brown, besides the obvious cooking angle, includes masterful use of props, visual aids, informational text, and extraordinary camera angles.