8 Minutes In The Morning(R): A Simple Way to Shed Up to 2 Pounds a Week GUARANTEED [Paperback]

Jorge's exercise plan involves two strength-training exercises daily, and you do four sets of 12 repetitions for each exercise. The only equpiment you need is a set of dumbbells. The total morning routine takes from 8 to 15 minutes, including the brief warmup and stretches afterwards. You roll out of bed, do your exercises for the day, and you're done before you're even fully awake. That's about as easy as it could possibly get---but it works!

Jorge's diet plan is basically a low-fat, low-calorie diet. He also stresses the benefits of flax oil. I have used the exercises in his book in conjunction with a low to moderate carbohydrate diet, and that has worked well for me. Your mileage may vary.

The book also provides great information about dieting and exercise in general, and gives many good sources to utilize as well. It's easy to read, and well-organized. The personal stories he uses as examples are real people, not supermodels, and I liked that.

I highly recommend this book for busy people like me, who aren't fitness junkies but want to incorporate some exercise into their lives.

As a lifelong yo-yo dieter and well-versed in nutrition (although in the past this didn't keep me from eating wrong anyway), Jorge's plan seemed safe, nutritionally sound and quite possibly do-able for me. The text read smoothly and offered interesting sidebars showing the dramatic results his clients experienced while on his program. Even though some of the exclamations of life-changing results of epic proportions rang a bit bogus to me, (I know for a fact that weight loss can make you healthier, but not necessarily happier), I liked the straightforward message Mr. Cruise was sending. If you try, even just a little, to live a healthier lifestyle, you will become healthier. That, combined with the sweet simplicity of the program itself, was enough for me to give it a shot.

I've been on the program for two weeks now and have lost a total of 9 lbs., thanks partially to the near-starvation diet that comprises the first week. It is pure torture, no two ways about it, but it does help rid the body of toxins (especially if you drink the recommended 8 or more glasses of water daily) and set you up with the right frame of mind regarding food as fuel instead of for gratification.

I found the daily affirmations fun but by no means necessary, nor did I eschew caffeine or my once-daily teaspoon of sugar in my evening herbal tea. I also did not change from regular milk to soy as he suggests. Buying the expensive and fishy-tasting flax oil and all those fresh veggies in mid-winter in the midwest was a financial challenge in and of itself without the extravagance of silly substitutions such as soy cheese and stevia, which is supposedly a super diet sweetener available only in health-food stores. Despite all this, I was not discouraged and have suffered no ill effects. Once past the restrictive first week of starvation dieting, I feel like I'm gorging myself on my 1,400 calories a day, even though most of it is comprised of veggies. I also find the eating cards helpful, although filling in all those veggie boxes can be a definite challenge, and some days I'd just as soon not eat anything at all rather than choke down more lettuce doused in flax oil.

The exercises range from ridiculously easy to almost impossible, and I have had to improvise in some ways, such as doing wall pushups instead of knee pushups, of which I could only do 5, not the recommended 48. In no way does the book suggest that you do more than you can, and I find this very freeing. I also customized the plan to incorporate from 15-60 minutes of riding my recumbent exercise bike 3-5 days a week, which I feel gives me a more well-rounded workout than the 8 minutes of weight-training alone, especially on the "off-day" that Mr. Cruise has designed into the program. I am not a fan of Cruise's recommended powerwalking, partially because of the icey-cold weather and partially because of bad knees and feet, which I feel might discourage others who seek to follow the plan as dictated. The best thing of all is what the title suggests. Only 8 minutes in the morning is sometimes all one can handle. It's true, as Mr. Cruise says, morning is an excellent time to work out, before a person in inundated with all the demands of the day. I also like the variety of doing two different moves for two different parts of the body every day. This in itself goes a long way toward conquering boredom with the program, and has the added effect of not causing too much muscle pain in one part of the body. I have experienced a little muscular pain, but that is to be expected with any weight training plan. The good thing about this plan is, by the time you get around to the painful body part again, enough time has lapsed to allow healing in the offending body part.

All in all, I found 8 Minutes in the Morning a helpful book in my quest to shed the extra pounds, especially with a little customizing to help it fit into my lifestyle. I recommend it to anyone who is sick and tired of fad diets and who has very little time to devote to losing weight.