As a pastry chef at Los Angeles’s glamorous Hotel Bel Air, Juan-Carlos Cruz created dazzling desserts. Surrounded by the best ingredients and the most tempting dishes, he began to gain weight, eventually topping 280 pounds. Finding little relief in fad diets, he developed his own weight-loss strategies and re-created many of his favorite dishes reducing both calories and fat content.

Today, he’s a buff television star who reinvents recipes on the air, slashing wasted calories and making flavors sizzle. The Juan-Carlos Cruz Calorie Countdown Cookbook reveals the tricks of his trade, delivering a five-week plan to get menus on track and establish a weight-loss plan you can savor for life.

After telling his own story of success and weight loss in the “Confessions of a Recovering Pastry Chef” chapter, Cruz eases readers into a gradual calorie-reduction plan. He provides five weeks of daily menus that incorporate his own recipes as well as popular commercial foods. By the end of five weeks, readers will have omitted five hundred calories from their daily intake. Tips, such as his “Chocolate-Chip Cookie Theory,” help readers identify how one deleted menu item can result in big annual calorie savings and sustained weight loss.

Recipes spanning breakfast, snacks, appetizers, sandwiches, main dishes, and even desserts put the spotlight on Cruz’s world-class cuisine. Chicken parmesan, macaroni and cheese, tortilla casserole, calzones, and even chocolate cake and cheese fries prove that with the right ingredients there is room for indulgence in a healthy diet. Sixteen pages of tempting color photography complete this savory, surefire package.