Great BookNovember 18, 2008 This was a fantastic book. I don't like to call it a diet because it's really more of a lifestyle change.
What's great? The recipes and what to eat and how to eat.
What's even better? The excercises.
Why is this book important? Diet alone is not good enough. The wrong excercise are good, but will not get you there. Follow this program and you'll be amazed.
My biggest problem is my spare tire... I don't need to focus on arms and legs, those are easy to build up. I also had no idea how much strength one can generate from their core. Understand that and you will do everything better - from sports to sex.
PS - You'll be amazed how tasty and filling protein shakes are. Speaking of which, that's how I stumbled across this program. A local natural and healthful smoothie shop was promoting this program.
Bad Science, Bad AdviceNovember 10, 2008 While there are some good things in this book, its overall message is based on some bad science and its recommendations may lead you to gain weight, not lose it. The fundamental flaws are that the author basically ignores the central role of calories, over-hypes weight training, and discourages cardio.
(A) Calories: Short of surgery, losing weight requires you to burn more calories than you eat. Period. The author completely glosses over this central truth and, in fact, encourages you to ignore calories and just focus on eating certain "power foods", which he thinks will get you to consume fewer calories overall. Well, that may be true for some people but not for others. If you check the other one star reviews of this book, you will find people who actually gained weight following his recommendations. If you want to lose weight, you need to figure out what your baseline, sedentary calorie usage is, which you can figure out from a variety of online sources (Google the simply named "Lose Weight Diet" for one, look for the calculator on the second page, and set activity level to sedentary). Then confirm the number by trying to eat that many calories for several days in a row and monitor your weight. If it stays flat, that is your baseline. From there you need to create a calorie deficit by eating fewer calories and burning more by exercising more, and preferably both. A deficit of 500 calories per day will drop you one pound of fat (as opposed to water weight) per week, and that is a healthy and sustainable rate of loss.
From a diet point of view, the author is right to encourage you to eat fewer simple carbs like rice, bread, pasta, and cereals. They heighten insulin, contain a ton of calories, and are too quickly digested and thus don't make you full for very long. Eat more meat and vegetables, some fruit and dairy, and check out the other power foods the author recommends. Throw in a daily vitamin and fish oil or flax supplement for good measure.
But remember that these are means to the end, which is creating a healthy, but sustainable calorie deficit. Buy a decent calorie book and keep track of what and how many calories you eat (and burn) in a diet log. You should also track your protein intake and shoot for 0.8-1.0 grams of protein per pound of desired weight to maintain and build muscle, with the protein intake spread as evenly throughout the day as possible (protein is not easily stored in the body, unlike carbs and fat).
While you do not need to track every single calorie and gram of protein that enters your mouth forever, you should do it for a while to get a real handle on what you are actually eating (vs. what you think you are). After that, use calorie counts to create a daily and weekly meal plan. Once that's in place, forget counting calories and just stick to the plan. Yes, you will occasionally stray, especially when you are out being social. But return to the plan as soon as possible and stick to it as often as possible.
(B) Weight Training vs. Steady State Cardio: The author is right to encourage weight training. But if you are trying to lose fat, he is wrong to say that is all you need, exercise wise. And he uses some bad science to justify his arguments. First, he argues that weight training burns more calories overall than steady state cardio (i.e. walking, jogging), once you add in the effect of after burn and muscle building over the next 24-48 hours. Research indicates that the calorie usage of after burn is actually quite low (1). Overall, even with after-burn, an hour of vigorous weight training will consume fewer calories (200-400) than an hour of vigorous cardio (up to 600 if you run a 10 minute mile). But to lose fat, you really need both.
Second, he says that muscle tissue consumes 50 calories per pound of muscle per day (actually he says "up to," but that is easy to miss). This is so central that it is the basis of the book's title. But the real number is more like 6 calories per pound per day (2). Fat tissue also consumes about 2 calories per pound per day (3), so as you add muscle and lose fat, you will only make tiny changes in your daily calorie usage. And that daily calorie usage may very well drop, not increase, if you are losing a lot of fat.
Third, he neglects to tell you how difficult it is to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. It requires almost perfectly timed protein and carb boosts (those whey shakes) before and immediately after weight training, and even then, simply focusing on either muscle building or fat loss at one time, and switching back and forth (called bulking and cutting by body builders), may get you there faster. Successful muscle building generally requires a calorie surplus, while fat loss requires a calorie deficit. Usually, when trimming down, maintaining muscle is the most you can really hope for, but weight training is critical to that.
Fourth, he says that cardio can actually hurt you by destroying needed muscle. If your primary objective is building muscle, avoiding cardio is fine. But if your primary objective is losing fat, cardio may be critical to achieving the calorie deficit you need. Associated muscle loss can be minimized or avoided completely by not creating too severe a calorie deficit in your diet alone (no more than 15-20% below baseline metabolism), eating sufficient protein (0.8-1.0 grams per pound of your desired weight spread evenly throughout the day, and tuna and whey protein, which the author recommends, help a lot here), and weight training. Weight training is critical because dieting + cardio alone may indeed be a recipe for muscle loss, and that will just leave you looking skinny and unhealthy rather than healthy and fit. But cardio is a critical addition. It is worth noting that even the author admits running every day after advising against cardio. Interesting.
So what's the answer? To lose fat, trim your calories slightly below maintenance, make sure you eat enough protein throughout the day, and slowly build toward incorporating an hour of weight training and cardio into your day - either alternating between them from one day to the next or doing both on one day and resting the day in between - to create a daily calorie deficit of about 500 calories, which will result in a pound of fat loss per week. When you are ready to shift from fat loss to muscle gain, lose the cardio, keep the weight training, and adopt a slight calorie surplus of 200-400 calories per day. That's it.
The basic problem with this and many other diet books is that it is only loosely based on real science. Any book that says "studies say" without giving you actual references to peer reviewed scientific literature is suspect. Detailed footnotes and references are a good thing. I have provided references for my comments below.
(1) LaForgia J et. al. Effects of exercise intensity and duration on the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. J Sports Sci. 2006 Dec;24(12):1247-64. [...] (2) Wang, Z., Heshka, S., Zhang, K., Boozer, C.N., & Heymsfield, S.B. (2001). Resting energy expenditure: systematic organization and critique of prediction methods. Obesity Research, 9, 331-336. [...]
(3) Ibid.
A real diet for menOctober 27, 2008 This book was definitely worth buying. I've been on the plan for 5 weeks now, and I feel stronger, I feel full (more than before I started the diet), I eat a big fatty pizza once a week, and amazingly, my fat has been slowly draining away. The author is editor of Men's Health magazine; part of his job is to read all of the studies anywhere that have been done about nutrition, health, weight loss, and strength gain. He basically took all that information and made up his own diet plan.
I really like the plan. It's got two components: food, and exercise, mostly weight lifting. The food component relatively simple to implement, and he gives a lot of good examples of how it works out in practice, and how it can be fit into every day life. It's designed to be something you can keep up for the next 50 years, not something you "go on" until you're down to the weight you want. The best thing is that I feel full most of the day. (As he explains in the book, feeling really hungry and then eating a big meal is really counter-productive for losing weight.) I also really enjoy weight lifting. I had done lifting before, but his emphasis on gaining "lean muscle mass" is nice.
And yes, he also has 36 different exercises for the abdominal region; but no matter how toned your abs are, they're not very sexy if they're under a 2-inch layer of fat. The total-body workout is to help with the weight-loss part.
The writing is good too - fun and informative. Other reviewers complained that he kept trying to "sell" the diet instead of just getting to it. I think that "selling" the diet itself was still a key component in motivating people to actually stick with it. It's not over-done at all; if you're already 100% sold, you can just skip those chapters.
Overall, a great book; I wish I'd found it 5 years ago.
Great Lifestyle that Works!October 13, 2008 I have been following this lifestyle for about 5 months now (it's not a diet, as others have said before). I've lost 40 pounds and 4 inches off my waist so far. It is hard to get used to eating so much, and at first you might feel like it's impossible to lose weight when you are eating so much.
Be prepared to go to the grocery store about twice a week to stay stocked up on fresh fruit and other foods that don't keep very well. Also be prepared to spend a lot of money on new clothes. I have had to either tailor or replace everything in my closet. A small price to pay I guess for increased health.
Please read this book, for under $10, isn't it worth the chance that it might just work for you?
Nice exercise book, but a middling dietSeptember 14, 2008 1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I got this book after having great success losing weight with Dr. Shapiro's Picture Perfect Weight Loss: The Visual Program for Permanent Weight Loss, but finding I wasn't doing much on the exercise front and had lost a lot of muscle as well as fat. I had also picked up David Zinczenko's Eat This Not That!: Thousands of Simple Food Swaps That Can Save You 10, 20, 30 Pounds-or More!, which I felt had a practical approach similar to Dr. Shapiro's.
One thing that really bothers me about a diet book is when I see something in it that's just an oft-repeated myth, without vetting it. For example, the Abs Diet recommends that we drink at least eight cups of water a day. Google "eight cups water myth" and you'll see that that's pretty much a myth - check the link from [...]. That makes me even more concerned about downing whey powder, which the Abs Diet recommends, along with a recommendation to take in a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight a day - a really large amount of protein. I haven't seen good medical evidence on this one, but I do know that it's heavily promoted by every whey powder manufacturer in existence, and I bet you the original science is lost in the shuffle. Finally, we're told that a pound of muscle burns "up to" 50 additional calories per day. Even bodybuilding sites question this (maybe it depends on what is meant by "up to"), and there are studies that say the additional metabolic effect of muscle is very minimal. Those last two points throw the entire diet into question in my mind, since the diet is all about eating more protein to build more muscle to burn off more calories.
As a recommendation - just because one scientific study or a thousand different websites say something about diet or exercise doesn't mean it's true. Scientific studies about diet and exercise are often contradictory and confusing, and there are often tens or hundreds for one particular area, making it easy for someone wanting to make an argument to cherry-pick. Websites (and people) often repeat misinformation. David Zinczenko's problem is that he repeats a lot of what he has heard without doing much vetting.
With that said I did start following the exercise plan - which I like a lot - and got a few decent diet ideas out of the book. The exercise plan is written so you can do it with dumbbells or in a gym. You're put through a total-body circuit very quickly. The net effect is that you get cardio and strength training in a single workout.
And the diet as a whole doesn't seem horrible depending on how you interpret it - but I think there are better diet ideas out there, including the Dr. Shapiro one above.
