Author: Chris Powell
Publisher: Hyperion Books – 202 pages
Book Review by: Paiso Jamakar
Chris Powell, host of the television show Extreme Makeover Weight Loss Edition introduces his 7-Day Carb Cycle Solution to readers in this book.
When Chris was a teen, his fondest dream was to play football. Unfortunately t his high school in Salinas, California did not have a football team. But after his family moved to Portland, Oregon, that opportunity opened up to him. The high school there had one of the best football teams in the country.
When he went for tryouts just before classes started, he found that he was easily overpowered by bigger, stronger players. “I was no match for the other kids,” he writes.
“I dropped passes. I fumbled the ball every carry. I got laid out every crush. Players would push me aside at the drinking fountains and mock me in the huddle. It was devastating.”
The problem was he was small and not strong enough. But that changed over time for Chris. With the gift of a weight bench he received from his father – a pilot for a major airline who was very much into fitness – Chris began to build his body and gradually increase his strength.
He was not sure whether he wanted to be a pilot like his father or study exercise science and get into helping people become healthy. He had an interview for a pilot job scheduled for two days right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The interview did not take place. That cancelled interview changed the course of his life. He decided to get into fitness and his first job was as a personal trainer at a local gym.
Among his accomplishments are helping the 26-year-old extremely obese 630-lb David Smith lose 401 pounds and literally regain his life. David weighed only 229 lbs after the amazing feat of weight reduction initiated by Chris Powell. In 11th grade when he was just 17 years old, David was already weighing 375 lbs.
Chris was incredulous at the size and immobility of David when the two met. When David told him he had no money to pay Chris for trying to help him, that did not matter He took it as a challenge upon himself and developed a diet-and-exercise program that enabled David to shed pounds, in some periods rapidly, in others, slowly or not at all.
But the end result was almost an impossible prospect at the beginning. David’s steely determination to change his life was an essential contributor to their mutual success.
Chris Powell’s strategy for helping David Smith lose almost two-thirds of his 630 pounds of weight involved reducing his intake of food and beverages along with gradually increasing the amount of daily exercise he had to do. Get the book to learn the details as to how and why it worked.
The book is packed with specific information to help you understand why and how our bodies gain weight and shed it. Based on your weight, height, body mass and other characteristics, you can develop your own plan to lose weight. There are chapters on how to keep the pounds off you once you’ve shed them.
Included in the book are a section, with pictures, of different exercises you can do. There are helpful charts that classify foods into different types, such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats and others. Meal plans with suggested foods you can eat, with recommended portions, are also in there for your benefit. This is a useful book for those who want to shed pounds and keep them off.
