Body For Life

I really enjoyed the Body For Life program, and I recommend it heartily. It reintroduced me to weight lifting in a way I hadn't done in fifteen years, and helped me build back long lost muscle. If it works for you on a long term basis, by all means, pursue it with all your heart.

Body For Life is essentially a retelling of The Zone with an emphasis on conditioning and strength. It convincingly explains how muscle is crucial to our well-being, and especially our ability to maintain a higher resting metabolism. That's the main gimmick.

The secondary gimmick is the day of rest. That is a day that you are to let your body recover from exercise and not limit your eating or resist your cravings. So if all week you wanted ice cream, your day of rest is the day to enjoy. Get it out of your system so that you can return to the program the next day.

Again, this worked well for me, and I lost fourteen pounds while rebuilding muscle all over my body. I was very pleased, and I still enjoy the weightlifting inspired by that program.

However, that day of rest became like a hostage situation at the Country Buffet. I built up cravings during the week with severe prejudice, and exorcised those cravings with a vengeance. Once the weight began to crawl back on, I lost faith in the program, and soon I was succumbing to the cravings every day of the week. I still exercised, but, as I've mentioned before, you can always eat more calories than you can burn.

Dr. Phil's Book on Weight Loss

I was particularly vulnerable for a solution to my weight problem when I read Dr. Phil's book, so I was very enthusiastic about his program. What I liked, and what inspired me, was how he dealt with the problem of cravings. Dr. Phil recognized how our subconscious mind plays tricks on our conscious mind with urges that are compelling and, in the context of the brain, make perfect sense. Of course I need a cookie now. In fact, I deserve a cookie, so I may as well have two.

Dr. Phil's suggestion is a form of cognitive reprogramming wherein we train our own brain to detect when an urge is presented by the subconscious. When the urge is consciously detected, we tell it to go away, that we have other goals we wish to attain, and that the urge to eat cookies is not part of the solution. You have to work to make the response automatic, the idea being to integrate the right-thinking into the subconscious along with the urge. So as quickly as the urge arises, it also triggers a voice, the voice of reason, to suppress the urge. You learn little mantras to remind yourself of your goals and reasons for wanting to lose weight, and invoke them when cravings and urges arrive to change your own mind.

This worked pretty well for about eight months. In the meantime, the rest of the program is rather like any of the others I've mentioned: eat a balanced diet, exercise, and drink water. As had happened more than once in the past, I lost weight. I kept that weight off for two years but, eventually, I got tired of nagging myself, and so eventually the urges and cravings began to win over my mind. I was not able to integrate those urge-responses into my subconscious. It seemed so self-loathing.

I don't really need to tell you what happened next, but the weight began to creep back on. And this last time, I revisited my all time high, peaking at 232 pounds.

Diet Gimmick Summary

I thought it'd be interesting to summarize all the diet gimmicks on a single page, so read on.