Penn Jillette, Presto

Presto is Penn Jillette's loose, somewhat rambling account of how he lost over a hundred pounds in the months before his 60th birthday in March of 2015.

Confronted with the medical necessity of losing weight—the alternative was a stomach sleeve—Penn opted instead to go on a severely restricted diet under the mentorship of his friend Ray Cronise (and under the close scrutiny of medical doctors).

The first part of this diet was a two-week potato fast—nothing but potatoes—and that was followed by the gradual reintroduction of other foods. Nowadays, Penn eats mostly whole plants and is active and feeling better than he has in decades, for which, as a fan, I'm grateful.

The book could have lost some weight itself: it's not the tangents that bother me—I kind of expect that (as well as a flood of curse words) when I'm reading something by Penn Jillette—but there was a lot of repetition in the book, and that could have been excised to good effect.

Meanwhile, I have no interest in joining Penn on his extreme weight loss journey, because I couldn't handle the whole plant diet, but I do find the potato phase that he underwent intriguing. I've been inspired to read more about the idea in Tim Steele's The Potato Hack.