[ernie]

If a book helps I say great but ultimately what one needs is to find the inspiration to put them on the right track. While ultimately that inspiration has to be "for me so I can live longer and feel better doing it" you may need a kick to get you there. Early death of a loved one. Birth of a child etc. If the book gives that kick then great. By all means use it.

When it comes to "diets" the old food pyramid still works pretty darn well. Follow it (learn what a serving means!) and lean towards whole grains, eliminate sweets and artifical sweeteners (or greatly reduce) and you'll generally be in the necessary calorie intake portion of things. Some adjustment may need to be made throughout...lower to start as your resting metabolism for a sedentary individual is going to be below average and increasing as you increase activity and fire that metabolism up. Then you throw in the exercise. Start with 3 days x 30 min of cardio a week as this tends to be easiest for people. When you start to desire more add in some strength training and get yourself to 6 days x 30 min and continue on. Before you know it you'll be exercising an hour or more a day 6 days a week, and when not exercising you'll be far more active (and therefore doing more exercise you just won't consider it such). Start slow. You may even want to just start with exercise and worry about diet later on or vice versa.

It isn't easy to be sure. I've battled my weight for 24 years (I'm 38). I've gone up and gone down countless times. It wasn't until my own personal moment of inspiration came about a year ago that I actually really started to change things and change my lifestyle. And to be honest I did start slow. I spent the first 6-8 months slowly changing my diet. I changed the foods I ate but didn't worry about calorie intake too much but was taking in the calories in the end that allowed me to maintain my much too big weight. I've changed the diet too fast in the past and couldn't stick with it. Above all for most overweight people, if you change the foods you are eating they need to taste good so it can take some time to find out the recipes/preparations to make those foods taste as good as anything you enjoyed before.

Once I had that obstacle out of the way I really concentrated on the exercise portion of things starting about 3 months ago (it's sounds cliche now but the P90 series has really been good for me...yes it's essentially the same as many programs but Tony Horton doesn't annoy me like everyone else does. My wife likes Jillian Michael whereas I would love nothing more than to punch Jillian in the face several times). I've dropped 30 lbs in those 3 months. This weekend, for the first time since I was a teenager I bought pants with a waist size that started with a 3. Still it's a struggle everyday but this time I feel I have a much better handle on things because I'm doing it the way it worked for me rather than the way someone else said would work for me.

So after completely derailing the thread the end result is what I said first....if a book works for you great! But it's very individual and you may just need to discover what your program needs to be for you to be successful (as I mentioned my biggest obstacle was diet so I slowly dealt with that first before piling on the other stuff such as better calorie control and intense exercise)


edit: on the other hand after reading the review posted above this book seems to be a minor portion of common sense and major portion of complete whack-a-doodle.