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"In my little way I'm going to rattle the world," proclaims Covert Bailey, who already rattled the world when he changed the way America looked at weight loss and exercise with his original
Fit or Fat in the mid-1970s. Now he's back with a new spin on the
Fit or Fat principles. This small book (180 pages, about 5 by 8 inches) teaches you how to get fit faster and raise your metabolism. To improve your fitness level most quickly, Bailey recommends his "Four Food Groups of Good Exercise": aerobic exercise, cross training (varying your exercise choices), wind sprints (short bursts of high-intensity activity), and weight lifting. "I'm not burning a lot of calories while I'm exercising, but my body is changing into a better butter-burning machine," he says. "The purpose of my exercise is to change my chemistry." As we expect from Covert, his style is clever and feisty--the book is fun to read, and the information goes down easily. He offers some witty, memorable principles, such as "The more muscle an exercise uses, the less long you gotta do it!", "If you're fit, exercise long; if you're fat, go short but often," and this motto for the older exerciser: "When you are over the hill--you pick up speed!" He includes a body-fat test and a find-your-pace fitness test.
--Joan Price
From Publishers Weekly
Sixty-seven-year-old fitness instructor Bailey takes a systematic, straightforward approach to lifetime physical fitness in his final contribution to the successful two-decade Fit or Fat series. Here he begins with the basic premise that the tendency to get fat has little to do with the amount or quality of food eaten and as proof points to the ineffectual long-term results of dieting. Asserting that exercise is the ultimate control of metabolism (something diet is unable to change), Bailey claims it is the amount of fat-burning muscle that determines one's ability to lose fat (though he sympathetically notes women's lesser ability to control fat due to hormones, lower muscle mass and childbirth). Instructions for simple at-home tests allow the reader to accurately measure their own body fat percentage, lean body mass, ideal weight, ideal exercise heart rate and exercise pace, giving a starting point for any future progress. Likening his weekly exercise program to the four food groups, with three to four recommended servings of aerobics, two to three servings each of cross-training and weight lifting and one to two servings of wind sprints, Bailey offers a varied menu of exercises in each category (including a special no-barbells home weight lifting chapter for the gym-phobic), stressing the pros and cons of each and warning that exercise is not effective when the body has no time to recuperate. Bailey, in no-nonsense prose, will motivate the reader with his contagiously positive outlook and personal anecdotes. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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