I do believe Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is the most famous of all the downloadable diet books. This is the gold standard by which others are judged and rightfully so. I thought the title was great and certainly reflected what I would like to do with my body. So I paid for it and downloaded it and let it sit on my hard drive for a few months Didn’t do much good there.

Then I noticed that I had fewer and fewer clothes I could get into and that I looked pretty much stuffed into those few I could get into. So, I decided, back to The Diet.

Just as a bit of background. When I was in college I had a pretty long walk to class, rode my bicycle all over Boston, and played several sports. Also, dining hall food wasn’t that tempting and so I was fairly trim. I got married right after college and didn’t have a job right away so I stayed home and cooked for my wonderful, appreciative husband. I soon blossomed forth out of all my clothes and even after I started my new job, I continued to gain weight. I had worked up to a women’s size 22 dress when my mother-in-law, always helpful, handed me a diet book she said her sister swore by.

The book was called The Eating Man’s Diet, written by Ralph Sharkey, as I remember. It’s out of print but you can sometimes find it for sale from individuals. Without going into too much detail, what this book advocated was alternating days of very low calories intake, less than 1000 calories, with days of enough calories to maintain your ideal weight. What kind of calories wasn’t really an issue, although the author did stress that you should eat a balanced diet with lots of fruits and veggies and protein. He said the occasional day of fasting wouldn’t hurt. He also said that, while exercise was probably a good thing, it wasn’t at all necessary to lose weight on this diet and that he purposefully didn’t exercise when he was testing this diet to make sure that was true.

Well, I set out to follow that diet when I hadn’t been able to stay on other diets for long at all. I would be OK for a week or two but I would just get hungrier and hungrier and feeling more and more deprived until I was a psychological and physical wreck. Then I would go back to my old fattening ways. One really good thing about The Eating Man’s Diet is that the deprivation was only one day in a row. You can stand just about anything for one day. The next day, I could have whatever, as long as it fit into the allowed number of calories. I got to be very good at calorie tradeoffs and stayed on that diet until I lost 80 pounds, 12 in the first month. My husband and everybody I knew loved my new look and everybody accommodated themselves to my “diet day” and “eating day” schedule quite happily. I kept those pounds off for a decade plus by just going back to The Diet whenever I saw my weight creeping up past a certain ominous number. It worked for years but gradually I got busy sitting in front of the computer all day and half the night munching on almonds between my three square and didn’t watch my weight and… You probably know that story.

So, once again, I took myself in hand, and decided to go back to The Diet. I stayed under 800 calories on my “diet” days, which left me definitely hungry and feeling deprived, and never went above 2200 on my “eating” days. I lost 8 pounds in two months. Years of largely sedentary living had allowed my muscle to atrophy so my resting metabolism had gotten lower, making it harder to lose weight. In the meantime, I had bought one of those scales that also measures body fat and it said I was 35% fat (!!!) at the beginning of those two months and 38% (!!!!) fat at the end. So the pounds didn’t come off so easily and I sure wasn’t losing much fat. I thought there had to be a better way.

Open up Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. This book is so compellingly written that I went right through the whole thing in two days. Started the program the next day. This one also uses a “zig zag” approach, with two to four “light” eating days interspersed with a “normal” one but what a difference! You eat five or six times a day, so even on the “light” days you never go below 1200 calories and you’re never hungry. No feeling deprived. No pain. Also, since you set the ratios of the types of nutrients to fit your body type on this program, you are always full of energy. Exercise is definitely part of this program, too, and Tom explains very clearly what kind, how much, and how often.

This is no “one plan fits all” approach. Tom tells you how to figure out what your body type is and so what would be a good starting ratio of good carbs, protein, and good fats for you to start with. Then he tells you what to watch for and how to modify your diet and exercise plans to get the best results for you. This is one of the very few books that deals with the dreaded weight plateau effct. He tells you exactly what to watch for and how to correct it.

The author is a body builder and so he knows all the secrets. You don’t have to want to look like him or the woman on his web page to use his secrets to your advantage. This book really is worthy of being called his life’s work. It is a complete approach to living the fit life that you can master regardless of where you’re starting from. If you really want to be mistress/master of your physique and are willing to learn how to do just that, you NEED Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.

If there’s anything I would point out as a drawback to this book, it would be that perhaps it has too much information. It’s hard to digest it all in one reading. I got a pretty good idea from my first reading but got a lot more the second time through. Also, you shouod know that if you follow the plan he teaches completely, you will be doing lot of calculations of calories, calories from carbos, proteins, and fats and percentages. The calculations can be alittle daunting at first. Fortunately, he does describe how to do this in an approximate kind of way that works fine. So no need to do all those numbers if that’s not your cup of tea.
I’m not a body builder. I’m an old lady with a sedentary job who wants to look and feel like she’s twenty-two again. After twelve weeks of following Tom’s system, I am 18 pounds lighter and three dress sizes smaller. My merciless Tanita scale says I am still 25% fat but that’s a huge improvement. When I go out for a brisk walk with a few sprints thrown in, I feel like I’m floating because I have so much energy. I give Burm the Fat, Feed the Muscle a four and a half star rating out of five. Go get it here:

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