The Ultimate Fit or Fat » (Subsequent)

Covert Bailey is a popular PBS personality and best-selling author on fitness and nutrition, whose Fit or Fat series of books has sold nearly 6 million copies. One of the first to emphasize body fat and body fat testing, he has taught millions of people about low-fat eating and adopting flexible exercise programs that are both fun and healthy. Covert Bailey earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard and received a M.S. degree in biochemistry from MIT. He likes to say that his training in graduate school was spent with fit rats and fat rats.

With more than three million copies of previous editions in print, this classic exercise manual has shown Americans from all walks of life the route from fatness to fitness. Now Covert Bailey has totally rewritten and revised Fit or Fat for the first time since the book's original publication in the mid-1970s. His dramatically new approach to fitness incorporates the most recent scientific findings. Weighlifting, whose fat-burning potential is only now becoming fully understood, plays a large role in Bailey's new program, which stresses what he calls "the four food groups" of exercise: aerobics, cross-training, wind sprints, and weightlifting. He also stresses the importance of intense exercise, showing readers how to build intensity into their daily programs safely and effectively. Covert Bailey's Ultimate Fit or Fat will not only be of interest to a new health-conscious generation but will be eagerly sought out by the millions of readers who have come to rely on the Bailey approach to keep their bodies in peak condition.

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 Cahners Business Information.