Making the Cut - Week 8 of 52 in 52

I know I'm supposed to be finishing week 9 but finding time to read has been tough the past couple of weeks. I finally finished a book so here goes...

Making the Cut by Jillian Michaels

Since I was trying The 30 Day Shred DVD by Michaels to eliminate my "I don't have enough time" excuse for exercising, I decided that I would check out a couple of her books from the library as well. Making the Cut was the first book that came in on hold so that's where I started. First, for a full disclaimer, I did not read every word in the book. My overview of the menu section and the section explaining the different exercises would more rightly be qualified as skimming, but then again I consider these sections more reference as you work through the program.

Overall, I have to say I was disappointed with the book. I am not a big fan of counting calories. It just takes too much time. When I calculated the number of calories per day, I got about 1300 which seemed really low to me. The menus consisted of a lot of ingredients I don't care for or can't afford and overall would have required more prep time than I currently spend. Not all of the exercises can be done at home. Some require gym/weight machines or equipment, exercise balls, steps, weights, or resistance bands. To follow the program to the letter without a gym membership isn't really feasible in my opinion. There is also a lot of weight training, but not a lot of cardio. I've tried weight training only before and it just does not help bring down weight like a good cardio program. In the end I decided it simply wasn't a good fit for me.

The one portion of the book that I actually learned from and enjoyed was the information at the beginning about finding your metabolic type. I took the quiz to figure out my type and came up with an eating ratio of 40% carbs, 30% protein, and 30% fat. That is some information that I can actually put to good use.