The Ultimate Fit or Fat

Covert Bailey has finished off his Fit Or Fat series with The Ultimate Fit or Fat. This small book, only $11, quite adequately summarizes what you need know to achieve fitness and escape fatness, Bailey's quest for over 20 years now.

Covert has always been keen on the physiology of fat burning, especially in the role of fat-burning enzymes. He covers these in more detail in some of his earlier works but summarizes by advising that aerobic exercise should be "gentle enough so that the muscle burns fat rather than sugar," but "hard enough to stimulate the growth of new fat-burning enzymes.

The basic enhancement of fat burning enzymes takes place during and after exercise, as they replenish muscle tissue's stores of glycogen, sugar ready to be used. He reminds us that when we exercise aerobically, such as in fast walking, we best stimulate fat burning enzymes and with them, fat loss. But he also again makes the point that even better conditioning and fat burning may be accomplished with wind sprints, simple sub-minute bursts of greater exertion. Wind sprints are defined as short bursts of more intense activity, such as jogging for a walker or actually sprinting for a runner. He notes that it is in the recovery phase of these sprints where the most fat burning actually takes place.

Please check the actual book for guidelines, as these can be important depending on your age and condition before pushing up your intensity.

Nutrition, a topic vital to weight control, is little covered in this book and addressed better in earlier works, such as Fit or Fat Target Diet. He does admonish readers to stop "putting grease on top of your food." He focuses here instead on upping your metabolism with aerobic activity, wind sprints, weight training and cross conditioning. The book presents a complete set of weight lifting routines using your own body weight to provide resistance. He offers ways to calculate approximate body fat and determine heart rate for safe and effective exercise.

Covert Bailey converts your pace for covering a mile with moderate exertion into an interesting metric of your general health. He quite correctly shows how your ability to cover a mile in say, 12 minutes or nine minutes does give a strong indicator of your general health and well-being, physical condition, and body fat. As a side benefit, his focus on pace and the benefits of wind sprints can quickly lead one to move a bit faster during daily exercise.

All in all, this is an excellent volume for anyone plagued by overweight. Especially at a time when book stores are overflowing with questionable best sellers on food types and overweight, Covert Bailey's basic and well-stated grounding on our daily activities and fitness being the real cures of fatness have a renewed importance.

While there are more advantages than disadvantages to living in an age where we can get so much information about anything, it's a relief to read something simple and sensible about exercise and fitness. Bailey never makes you scratch your head trying to figure out what he means or undermines his own credibility with impossible promises.

I also love that the program he outlines is so simple and straight-forward. In case you can't translate into the latest fitness lingo, he's advocating interval training as the keystone of losing fat (with cross-training and weight-lifting playing a supporting role). I've been doing all of the above for a while and seeing results, but now I finally understand that it's not a good idea to push myself so far I hurt.

Although Bailey is emphatic that this is not a book about dieting or nutrition, again, his good sense comes through even there. This book is anti-diet in the way the American public has come to understand it. Bailey doesn't advocate that we eat like pigs and cautions against over-indulgence, but basically advocates a straight-forward eating plan where we stay away from fats and sweets. He cautions that while exercise is ultimately how we'll stay fit and healthy, we can eventually undermine that if we eat badly. Again, pretty reasonable.

A word of warning: this is not for people who want to look like size 0 supermodels or brawny weightlifters. This is for people who want to get or stay in good shape and sustain it for the rest of their lives. He has some very good (and simple) tools for figuring out just how fat you really are and what you should weigh. A lot of people will be surprised to find they only need to lose 5 pounds, not 15, and that losing that extra 10 will make them less fit, not more.

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I am a high school health/nutrition teacher and included "The Ultimate Fit or Fat" on my optional reading list. (Each student has to read at least one book from the optional list.) Some of the students chose the fit or fat book, word got around about how much they liked it, and I would guess that at least 80% of the students ended up reading it. I'd see students with tape measures using the book's body fat test on all their friends. A couple of parents even called me to find out what kind of "magic" I had used on their kids because the kids were actually recommending that the parents read the book. This book is excellent. I'm going to make it REQUIRED reading from now on.

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If you've read any of Covert Bailey's earlier books, this one will seem very familiar. Many sections are lifted word-for-word from previous versions of Fit or Fat. But if you're not yet a "Covert convert," this is the only one of his books you need to read. The information is straightforward, accurate, easy to understand and, most of all, helpful. There's also a healthy dose of humor. You'll be healthier and happier if you get with and stay with Covert's program.

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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.

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