Wes Cole's Healthy Habits: How to Change Your Diet & Exercise Habits for Lifelong Fitness [Paperback]

"Way to Go and Well Said! Our thoughts do become our actions, and repeated actions can become successful, lifelong habits. The step by step plan and gradual goal setting is easy to follow. I was relieved to not be reading a book about another "quick-fix approach that ends quickly", but to read about a realistic and attainable approach to a healthy lifestyle."

I bought this book at the urging of a friend who trains with Wes Cole in Tulsa and has lost weight using his method. My problem's not really fatness or unfitness. I just seem to hit a wall where I can't lose any more weight, hard as I try. Willpower's good, but only to a point: it can help you lose some weight but it won't keep it off. What makes me think this book will work is that Cole's program is greater than just losing "x" number of pounds. It involves developing healthy dietary, exercise and mental *habits* that'll help you get into better shape and health - and keep you there. Thus the title: Habitual Health.

At the core of the Healthy Habits program, and something that makes the book unusual in my view, is a series of four "cycles" as Cole calls them that last about six weeks each. Each cycle incorporates a program of diet and exercise to burn flab and build up stamina and strength. On completing a given cycle, you take a self test that lets you know if you're ready to move on to the next. The cycles are slowly progressive - you gradually build up habits you can use in the next cycle.

Cycle one is mainly about the importance of getting rid of refined sugar from your diet, and how to do it. Americans are hugely addicted to refined sugar and the average person eats about 150 pounds of it a year. Unfortunately, it has no nutritive value whatsoever and gets stored in your body as fat. Worse still, it leaches out essential vitamins and nutrients that you need to function. I'd heard refined sugar isn't good for you but never realized before just how contrary it is to good health. Basically, you'd do better starving because refined sugar's worse than nothing. After a lifetime spent eating it we don't even realize how addicted we've become. Not only that, sugar's a hidden ingredient in lots of foods, even those that are touted as healthy. Manufacturers slip it into all kinds of stuff. Cole goes after refined sugar like public enemy number one. He tells how to eliminate it from your diet and gives a list of sugar alternatives with their relative merits. Interestingly, it seems that once you beat your sugar jones, it starts to taste bad - even to the point of making you nauseous.

The fitness component to this cycle involves doing stuff that you already enjoy doing. This is an important point with the book: you don't have to kill yourself doing stuff you'd rather not. You can burn lots of calories doing things you actually like to do.

Cycle two is about eating healthier, and getting the right balance of proteins and carbohydrates in your diet. Recipes for healthy eating are given. The fitness component involves expanding on your exercise routine.

Cycle three is about eliminating certain fats from your diet entirely while reducing others; and decreasing your sodium intake. Along with refined sugar, there's lots of fat lurking in our cupboards. The book discusses these in some detail (especially Trans fat and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil), and ways to purge them from your diet. The reader's encouraged to read food labels to see just how much hidden sugar, fat and salt their food actually contains. Here I think the book could have been improved by giving some examples and instructions for reading food labels, but it's not hard to learn. More recipes for healthy eating are given. The fitness component discusses upper level activities like group sports, charity runs, etc.

Cycle four gives instructions about calorie counting - and its importance for people who really want to be slimmer. The first three cycles were about losing weight while becoming fitter, this cycle is about keeping the weight off and keeping fit. The simple math is that if you want to lose weight you must burn more calories than you take in (to lose a pound a week you need to burn 500 more calories a day than you eat). To maintain stasis it's necessary that you eat no more than you excrete. Apparently lots of people can't wrap their brains around calorie counting, but the way Cole describes it it's really not hard, just an acquired skill you'll be able to do in your head before long. There are sites on the Internet that do much of the grunt work for you. The fitness program of this cycle offers types of advanced exercise regimes.

For me, Healthy Habits was a very fast read. Especially given that it's a weight loss book. Cole has an accessible, conversational style; like he's lifting weights next to you in the gym. There are lots of interesting observations based on his experience as a strength and conditioning trainer that make sense. One thing he repeatedly emphasizes is the importance of group exercise, be it jazzercize, Judo or jousting. Solo exercise routines rarely endure - as all the dusty Bowflexes and Nautilus equipment in America's garages attests. There are just too many interruptions for you to concentrate on exercising properly. Plus, humans are by nature social beings. The four Healthy Habits cycles seem to me very reasonable. You build up over six weeks until you're ready to graduate to the next cycle. And if you fail to pass one of the self tests in order to graduate, you just back up a couple weeks and continue on.

I'm in cycle one now and, God willing, will report back in a month or two to report on my progress!