Do you want to lose fat? Build muscle? Feel better? Look younger? Optimize your health? Perform better? Now you can. You don't have to resort to infomercial style gimmicks and gadgets. This book will help you achieve your objectives. It provides the 'source code' to building diet and supplement plans for you (or your clients) no matter your (or their) level of experience. It is interactive: enabling you to follow the path through the book that is most applicable. This book is not meant to be read once, cover-to-cover, and then either committed to memory in some fashion or forgotten about. It's designed to be a tool - a resource - that is used interactively on an ongoing basis. Here is a sampling of FAQs from Chapter 9: Q: Are the recommendations in this book specifically applicable to a gender or age group? A: The short answer is "no." This book is written to be applicable to any healthy adult. Most of it will also apply to teenagers, though the energy expenditure estimations in Chapter 1 may need to be adjusted upward for teens and young adults (folks who are 13-20 years old). For kids younger than 13 - in fact, anyone younger than 18 - these individuals should work with their parent(s)/guardian(s) and their doctor or medical/health care practitioner on applying the principles from this book. Q: Since you're a vegan, why do you allow for the consumption of animal products in this book? A: I wrote this book for a wide audience. I don't like 'preaching to the choir' as the saying goes. Yes, if you're already eating vegan or plant-based you will benefit from reading this book. But I also want this book to be useful by those following other ways of eating: vegetarians, pescatarians, omnivores, those with allergies and intolerances, etc. I like to meet people where they are - not where I think they should be or others think they should be. I also don't view the movement from the typical western diet to a vegan or plant-based diet as having to be transformational - that is, a giant leap - it can be incremental. Some people will take baby steps, and that is okay. Some people will take no steps at all and choose to eat as much animal product as they can while following my plans. That's the choice of each individual to make, though I hope most move in the direction of plant-based and vegan eating - even if only by an inch or two. Of course, I would love it if everyone on earth stopped consuming animal products, but each individual needs to make this choice freely. Q: Why don't you emphasize exercise for fat loss? A: If your diet and sleep habits are off, then fat-burning exercise is not going to help you very much. There is a saying out there that is quite true: "you can't out-exercise a bad diet." This is true calorically speaking, since you can eat and drink a 1,000 calories very easily at a restaurant without even thinking about it, but would have to push yourself pretty hard to burn 1,000 calories during exercise (and you'd also find yourself pretty darn hungry shortly thereafter and likely to binge). But it's also true hormonally speaking: you can't out-exercise a hormonal s**t-storm (pardon my French!). If your diet and sleeping habits are off, you will only make a bad situation worse by piling on exercise. As just one example, cortisol, the so-called stress hormone, is elevated by exercise, lack of sleep, caffeine, stress, and other factors. If you have cortisol levels that are continuously elevated you'll have a heck of a time losing fat; you'll also be putting your overall health at risk. (By the way, this doesn't mean you shouldn't exercise. It just means you shouldn't view exercise as the magic bullet for fat loss. Exercise has many other benefits. Also, more is not better: you want to exercise the right amount based on your needs, capabilities, and objectives.)
