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From Amazon
"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.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
His heart's in the right place but some wrong information,
By
This review is from: The Ultimate Fit or Fat (Paperback)
Covert Bailey remains a strong proponent of the fitness-health connection, and is an entertaining writer. Overall this book is pretty good. There are several pieces of misinformation though:1. He makes the common "low intensity exercise" mistake of depicting fat-burning vs sugar-burning as a black and white issue. At higher exercise intensity levels, you don't suddenly switch to burning sugar instead of fat, you just burn a higher percentage of calories from sugar. But since you are also burning more total calories, you'll burn more fat than when exercising at lower intensities, AND burn more sugar. Further, higher intensity exercise leaves the metabolism higher so continues to burn calories after exercise (he mentioned this effect for weight lifting but missed it for other types of anaerobic exercise). 2. In addition to his incorrect prejudice against swimming (mentioned by another reviewer), he also incorrectly states that bicycling burns little fat. At slow speeds bicycling is comparable to walking in rate of calorie (and fat) burning, at higher speeds it is comparable to running. Just check any of the calorie calculators on the web to confirm this. 3. I think he is still missing one of the main points of the value of weight lifting, which is to reverse the continual muscle loss that occurs with aging in sedentary people.
5.0 out of 5 stars
very practical and understandable,
By Living in Budapest "livinginhungary" (Budapest, Hungary (originally Ann Arbor, MI)) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Ultimate Fit or Fat (Paperback)
Ultimate Fit and Fat is an easy and quick read. Just as he did in his earlier book Smart Exercise, Bailey discusses the importance of exercising over dieting in improving and maintaining one's fitness. The recommendations that he makes regarding exercise are practical and easy to implement. I would strongly recommend this book to people who would like to improve their fitness AND understand the process of improving their health.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very readable, helpful guide to burning fat through exercise,
By Marchez Vite "marchezvite" (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Ultimate Fit or Fat (Paperback)
This is a highly readable guidebook to burning fat through exercise. Bailey uses just enough science to back up his suggestions, but not so much that an unscientific minded reader (such as myself) gets bogged down.Bailey is very adamant that burning fat comes through exercise, and that trying to burn (lose) fat through diet alone is not nearly as effective. The best fat-burning combination includes 4 components: aerobic exercise, cross-training, weight training, and sprints. Bailey does a great job of explaining how each of these exercise components works to help retrain the body and muscles to burn fat. There are very helpful tables and graphs throughout the book. My one disappointment with this book concerns his formula to measure percent body fat. Although he claims this formula is "nearly" as precise as expensive medical alternatives (especially floatation methods), it has a 2 percent margin of error. That means your final calculation is correct *plus or minus 2 percent.* That means you have a range of 4 percentage points. That does not sound very precise or helpful to me. Nonetheless, I found the book overall to be very instructive, and it will help me design my exercise workouts for no doubt much better fat burning results.
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