Reddit reviews Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength

I'd like to point out that the marketing of gyms always shows fit and healthy people using the gym. That's not the whole story, and I've always thought that the target audience is unfairly measured.

Gyms are there to help people start their goal of get fit and to maintain it. Don't think about the gym being only for people who are already fit. It's a great resource to get oneself to the level of fitness that they are happy with.

Suggestions:

• Call around and find a gym that offers a free session on sign-up. It's a great way to get comfortable with exercise, and they will help find what will be good for you.
  
  
• I find that audiobooks and podcasts are great. Not only can one accomplish a workout, but one can also take in a book, interviews, comedy, whatever. Many people are in their own world wearing headphones at gyms.
  
  
• Treadmills are great for improving fitness. Gyms are air conditioned in the summer, and heated in the winter. One can measure progress easier. Starting off slow and incrementing slowly over time is much easier to control with a treadmill. Also more time to get through that audiobook.
  
  
• Find a book with a plan to follow for both diet and workouts with which you are comfortable. I found this book to be very easy to understand but it demands a solid 3 mth commitment. The interesting thing is that the book is very open about how hard that commitment would be and very accurate when it comes to asserting that while the first couple of weeks will be difficult, that most certainly goes away and the groove sets in. The path becomes very easy to follow within a few weeks.

Join /r/fitness and read the FAQ (it's actually very helpful). Here is the section on losing weight. I usually suggest doing the program known as Starting Strength for people that are new to the gym, as it's pretty easy to follow when you first start weight lifting. Losing weight happens when you burn off more calories than you take in, and a lot of people don't realize that lifting weights burns a TON of calories. You should try to do some sort of cardio three or more times per week, concentrating on the running as much as possible. Don't neglect your diet - you can train really hard but if you sabotage yourself with junk food you can undo tons of the progress that you made in the gym. If you have no idea where to start on the diet I would look at Body For Life, by Bill Phillips. Good luck - getting in shape is not as impossible as it can seem sometimes. And if you need motivation /r/fitness it the place to go.

I don't know enough about your scoliosis and how it relates to the biomechanics of strength training to give any solid recommendations; so consider everything in this post to be guesses. I'm not a medical professional, and can't afford a lawyer, so check with your doctor before doing anything.

I think you should avoid any exercise that puts a compressive load on your spine, and anything that involves raising weight above your shoulders. I assume that perpendicular forces are okay (such as bench presses). I also assume negative forces on your spine are okay (that means things which stretch you, like pullups). So, you'll have to do isolation exercises on specific muscle groups. Look up the Body for Life program, in which you can construct a full-body lifting program targeting all your major muscle groups.

The Body for Life lifting plan is a split routine, and I imagine a full body, muscle-isolation plan, that minimizes compressive spinal loads, and never has you lift above shoulder level while standing, would look like this:

Upper body:

• Pecs: Bench press or dumbbell flies.
  
• Deltoids: lateral raises. (Since you're holding dumbbells or cables in your hands, this will still compress you, but this is a hard angle to work, so you'll need relatively light weights, thus minimizing the load.)
  
• Lats: Pullups, bent-over rows (one-handed, with the other hand supporting your weight on the bench), or weighted inverted rows.
  
• Triceps: kickbacks, or lying dumbbell extensions (I've also heard this called the "French press").
  
• Biceps: preacher curls or seated concentration curls.
  
  Lower body
  
  
• Quads: Leg press machine (since the compressive force is only between your hips and feet) or leg extensions (which I've seen done by grasping a dumbbell between the feet)
  
• Hamstrings: leg curl machine (which I've also seen done by grasping a dumbbell between the feet).
  
• Gastrocs: donkey calf raise, seated calf press, or single leg calf raise (again, holding a dumbbell like this will compress your spine, but if you do one leg at a time, and have your foot on a step, you can stress with muscle with relatively light weight).
  
• glutes: quadruped hip extensions, or bird dogs (while glute bridges don't offer a direct compressive vertical load on the spine, I don't think they're safe enough for scoliosis, due to the amount of spinal flexion involved)
  
• abdominals: legs-up (on a bench, back on floor) crunches, or hanging leg raises.
  
  I'm not suggesting you go out and do this, but I'm suggesting it as an avenue of research, in hopes it may be of use to you. Please be careful.

It's hard now to try and think about what was going on in my head as a kid.

I was a skinny adorable child up to somewhere between 1st and 2nd grade. I really couldn't tell you what happened but I chopped off all of my long blonde hair and started to gain weight and it never stopped until the end of college.

I went to a Catholic elementary school, where I KNEW I was fat. I knew I was literally the bottom of the social barrel - the pretty (aka normal) girls had cliques based on heritage (Italian, Irish, Filipino) and then there were the runts who didn't fit into those groups for whatever reason - even among the runts I was the bottom of the heap and it was surely because I was fat. I probably had behavior issues related to that but I don't remember. I know I was diagnosed with asthma but I don't remember if that was before or after the weight gain. I remember whispering to some girls, asking them how much they weighed - I weighed 100lbs (in second or third grade) - was that a lot?

I did ballet from a very young age. Around 3rd grade was when I remember being in rehearsal for The Nutcracker. I was moving up in the world - finally old enough to be a (special) snowflake. For some reason I was pouting or slacking off and the instructor muttered something about me being too fat to be a ballerina. I quit dance completely shortly after, humiliated because I knew she was right. I wish to God I could go back to that day and help little me, I feel like quitting dance was when it all started going wrong.

In middle school I transferred to public school. I started out with no friends since no one I knew had transferred with me. I was still fat and even more awkward. Desperate to find a clique I solidified my identity as a bookworm nerd. Every movie and tv show and YA book I saw told me that nerds don't do sports, nerds sit at a computer or read a book, nerds don't have to be pretty because they are smart so that was what I told myself to do. Meanwhile I fostered secret eating habits (hiding the trash in my room, stealing it after lights out) and my attitude grew worse and worse. To this day I apologize to my mom every time I talk to her for how bad I treated her. I remember her asking me "Why are you so angry?" I didn't know then and I still don't know. But food was a comfort, and books were a comfort.

My mom started dating a man who had my "best interests" at heart. He was a fatass himself and I never trusted any of my mom's boyfriends so I struggled against him. He bought me a book on manners and told me to read it. He bought me a dumbbell set - but never told me how to use them. He brought a juicer, then (/r/thathappened) literally pinned me and my sister to the kitchen floor when we didn't want to drink frothy warm chunky apple/carrot juice (my sister was skinny but an extremely picky eater so we both got this treatment) - solidifying that vegetables were the weapons of hypocrites and psychos.

My poor mom. She had a lot of convenience food and single-serving snacks around because she worked so hard and did everything she could to juggle us kids and a 8-6 job. It breaks my heart thinking of how I treated her, and how I repaid her by being such a little shit and not even being cute.

In high school I kept on keeping on, did all the stuff that smart fat girls were supposed to do - a hit in the drama club, "funky" dressing style, did anything desperate for the attention of boys. We had home ec in middle school but I only remember making cookies. In high school, health class was flour babies and "beer goggles". I actually started going to a gym. I'd get there as soon as it opened before school, use the elliptical, walk quietly around looking at all the other equipment, but that couldn't fix my awful diet. I don't even know where I got the junk food, or where I got the money for it.

In college I had the run of the dining hall and at my school they went all out. Softserve ice cream, dozens of different desserts, huge helpings of comfort food. I remember buying bags of "yogurt covered raisins" and eating the whole bag as a snack because it was healthy.

One summer I did an internship in Minneapolis. Trying to save money, I lived in the dorms but didn't buy a meal plan. Not realizing that in large cities, grocery stores are hard to find or get to, I ended up living on apples, plain pasta and peanut butter sandwiches - but my tight budget meant I ended up losing about 20 lbs in 2 months. One day I had to go to the big Target and fill a prescription - it was a long trip there so I hung around the store waiting and came across a book. Body for Life. This book was an overload of info - so much stuff I never realized, specifically about nutrition and diet. When I got back home, I started putting it into practice, got a real gym membership and began my journey.

Now, that wasn't the end of it. You guys all realize that when you first start getting into health stuff, there's a whole new world of fatlogic that opens up. The next summer I started a different, more physical internship. I was doing intense labor for about 15-25 minutes per hour, then a break the rest of the hour, repeat for an 8 hour day. I was still eating ~6 times a day like I had while doing BFL, but I wasn't working out anymore. My "tough" job moved me to pick up convenience foods - goldfish crackers are healthy right? These gummies are ORGANIC OK?

I gained the 20 back +10. When I started my final year at college, I was at my highest weight ever. Most of my friends had graduated (I took an extra semester off for internship) and I was all alone in apartment housing. I finally had a kitchen! That's when I realized I had no idea how to cook. Cereal and boxed cake mix do not count. After wasting a semester being depressed and playing WOW, I stumbled upon "thinspiration" and pro-ana stuff. I'm not proud to admit it but that was what got me started again. I worked out intensely and calorie restricted. In three months I lost 40 lbs.

It's been 4 years since then. I lost another 10 lbs, regained it, and now I've lost that 10lbs and another 3. I'm close to my goal weight. But Every single day is a struggle with my own fatty impulses, desire to eat food when I'm not hungry, wanting taste sensations and rewarding myself with food or treating sad/upset times with food. I think that for some people, the fatass impulses are so worn into our brains that it requires constant, unceasing vigilance, that we will never just stop craving, that if we stop paying attention to our actions and thoughts, we'll slip right back. I'm dreading the fall and winter - food-based holidays and cold weather impeding the desire to exercise. I'm determined to not slip and regain the weight I just put off - but how strong will my resolve be in 3 months? In sub-freezing temperatures?

This is really incredibly long. My point is that sometimes there is no answer to "Why do you do this to yourself? Don't you realize how bad this is?" - the answer is often "I didn't know, I don't know." I want to believe that in the next 15 years binge eating and impulsive eating are going to be classified as mental disorders, much more heavily researched and talked about than they are now, right alongside anorexia and bulimia - but the cynic in me says that there are just too many people who don't realize it's a problem, and they never will.

My relationship with food really did ruin a massive portion of my life. I don't want anyone to go through what I did, the experiences that still have repercussions on my current life. That's what anti-fatlogic is to me - trying to bring attention to this issue, hopefully saving young people from wasting so much of the important years of their life they won't ever get back.

> How does one who has never tried at anything, try at life?

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Some challenges seem huge but if you break them down into little pieces you can conquer them. How do you do that? Just start doing anything and something will happen.

Succeeding in my line of work is all about the effort I put into my projects. Even if I work my tail off there is a chance I could fail but the success is so sweet that I have to keep trying. Just do anything. Good luck.

Books: The Four Agreements

Ender's Game

Body for Life

If You Haven't Got the Time to Do It Right, When Will You Find the Time to Do It Over?

The War if Art

I got something out of these, maybe you will too. Good luck.

[Body for Life by Bill Phillips](
http://www.amazon.com/Body-Life-Mental-Physical-Strength/dp/0060193395) - regardless of its merits, it has some fantastic progress pics and a 'change for life' philosophy. This is not what got my current journey going, nor do I use it now, but it's what made me take the first step, long before I took any successful steps.

Burn the fat, feed the muscle by Tom Venuto - technically an e-book, so not sure if that counts. Still, this little PDF taught me a lot that my college courses did not, and has an excellent philosophy behind it. Probably got me half of the way to starting out properly, even if I don't necessarily adhere to his approach, the knowledge was invaluable.

Body for Life, Eating for Life, and Transformation by Bill Phillips. Transformation is his latest book. If you want just one, get that. Body for Life is pretty cheap though (especially on half.com).

I went from 240lbs with a 42" waist to 160lbs and a 32" waist back in high school. I'm on the diet again (college messed me up) and I'm down 50lbs in the last 5 months.

With your body make up I suggest this:

http://www.amazon.com/Body-Life-Mental-Physical-Strength/dp/0060193395/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321196057&sr=8-1

It's one of the best body building books there is. You'll have to up your caloric intake to put it on however this book and workout is simply amazing.

Everyone should know these principals as a foundation for training.

Here's a really good book that will tell you everything you need for maximizing your work outs and eating healthy.
Body for Life.

I wanted to put a little more emphasis on nutrition. You need to be eating your protein if you want to build muscle. In addition to adding more chicken, eggs, tuna to your diet buy some other protein supplement and drink a couple protien shakes a day. This is more important than working out. I've heard the rule being eat 1.5g of protien per lb of body weight each day but I think that might be overkill..

For a quick and dirty guide, you can try Bill Phillips' Body for Life. It has illustrations and descriptions for some very basic exercises, and what I like about it is that it explains what muscle groups you are targeting and why, and recommends plans for each day of the week. There are also diet recommendations, but you should eat more vegetables than they suggest. And don't buy his rotten shakes, they are gross.

I did the twelve weeks, and the transformation was indeed dramatic.

Edit: It was pretty popular, so you can probably find it at thrift stores or used book stores.