A clear, detailed road map to getting in shape for serious fitness enthusiasts.
Cut the calories and lift the weights—but in exactly the right ways—to get a muscular, athletic body, argues this second edition of a guide to dieting and exercise.
Lee (The Essential Guide to Sports Nutrition and Bodybuilding, 2018, etc.) starts with the insight that losing weight is a matter of burning more calories than people consume. But while it’s “really as simple as that,” this practice is far from straightforward. Once readers have adopted a diet that puts them in a calorie deficit—more burned than eaten—they have to get the right balance of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, the author asserts, as well as micronutrients, from vitamin A to selenium. And he points out the vexing ups and downs of dieting. As people lose weight, their metabolisms slow, making it harder to burn calories—Lee suggests periodic diet breaks and “re-feeds” to kick the metabolism back up a notch—and they face weight-loss plateaus, water-weight fluctuations, bloating, fatigue, and cravings. The author then analyzes the other half of the complex equation, building muscle through weight lifting. He distinguishes the different types of muscle fibers and the various exercise regimens to train them, using low-weight, high-rep lifts for endurance and high-weight, low-rep lifts for size and strength. Then he delves into the byzantine interactions between diet and exercise. Weight lifting burns carbs but not much fat, so Lee recommends a cycling diet of high carbs on gym days followed by high fat on jogging days. And growing new muscle requires a calorie surplus, which means additional fat gain, thus necessitating, in the author’s scheme, larger cycles in which people cut fat on a diet, then eat more to bulk up on muscle, then diet again to shrink the fat so as to reveal the muscle definition they want to show off. So there’s a lot to learn, ponder, and calculate in the author’s system; it’s not a cookie-cutter approach, and readers need to do some work and a little arithmetic in applying it. Fortunately, Lee makes this fairly easy with clear, step-by-step instructions and planning aids. He shows readers how to find their “maintenance” calorie intake and figure out how many calories they need to cut to reach an appropriate deficit along with procedures to reckon the amount of protein—1 gram per pound per day when dieting, a little more for bulking—carbs, and fat in their diets. Superplants packed with micronutrients—hail kale—are discussed along with bodybuilding nutritional supplements. (The author recommends whey protein, creatine phosphate, and yohimbine.) Lee provides weekly weight lifting schedules and routines for men and women, specifying everything from the number of sets of Bulgarian split squats and butt-blasters to the minutes of rest in between reps; templates for tracking calories and exercises; dozens of inspirational color photographs of magnificently toned, ripped, and cut gym rats; and even suggestions for a workout playlist. There’s a massive amount of information here, but the author manages to keep it well organized, lucid, and readable. He boils the material down into bullet-pointed insights, convenient tables, cut-and-dried formulas, easy-to-use rules, and aphorisms—“The longer it takes to lose the fat, the longer it takes to put it back on”—that are both sensible and pithy.
A clear, detailed road map to getting in shape for serious fitness enthusiasts.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-916410-53-4
Page Count: 477
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.
The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14274-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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