Blog Tour Review and GIVEAWAY: Denise's Daily Dozen by Denise Austin

Title: Denise's Daily Dozen: the Easy, Everyday Program to Lose Up to 12 Pounds in 2 Weeks

Author: Denis Austin

Rating:

Who Should Read It? Anyone looking for awesome tips and motivation on how to lead a healthier lifestyle! Anyone looking for a great, easy, step-by-step exercise and eating program to help in becoming healthy or losing weight.

What I Have to Say: This is, BY FAR, the BEST exercise book I have ever read. I should premise by saying that I didn't read it because I need to lose weight. I'm supposedly actually underweight. My interest in this book came from the fact that I NEED to start exercising, and I was hoping for a book that would motivate me and give me some tips.

This book did so much more than that. The focus was so much more on healthy living and healthy eating than to help you to lose weight than on diets or over-exercising to lose weight. It gives you healthy, balanced (and, unfortunately, not vegan) meal plans and exercise plans every day for three straight weeks, making following the Daily Dozen plan as easy as possible.

Having the exact exercises to do there in front of me made things so easy. I didn't have to think about which ones to do and the order in which to do them and for how long to do them. Denise did that for me. And with her bubble personality shining through on every page, I find myself excited to get up and exercise in the mornings. I have been exercising EVERY SINGLE DAY for the past two weeks (this is BIG for me, you guys!)

More importantly than that, I can already see a change. My arm and leg muscles are both starting to show more definition; I can actually feel my abs for once. And I have energy to do all of the mini exercises throughout the day that she calls Fidget-Cisers. It's just plain awesome.

Denise's Daily Dozen is full of practical tips and easy, step-by-step insructions as to how to lead a healthy life. They're so easy, and she's so upbeat about giving them to you, that you can't help but want to follow! Her system is a way of life, and she has given you enough to have step-by-step instructions for every day of that new way of life for as long as it takes for you to no longer need them.
This book is golden (even if I haven't used the non-vegan friendly meal plans at all), and I'm planning on buying a Daily Dozen CD when I really feel like I need new exercises.

Summary (from GoodReads): From Denise Austin comes the perfect health book for anyone who wants to live better but just can't seem to find the time. Much more than just another excercise book, Denise's Daily Dozen covers a whole range of health and diet related concepts yet manages it all in a no-stress, time-conscious program of 12's. At it's core, this book contains the minimum daily requirements to keep the reader flexible, strong and trim. Organized simply into seven chapters, which equal the seven days of the week, it covers a full week in daily allotments. Each day will have it's own focus from Monday being "fat burning day" to Sunday's "recharge and rejuvenate."

Denise has created a total body program, including a 7-day balanced meal plan that includes healthy recipes, and a workout that encompasses 12 exercises done in 12 minutes each day. Everyone can take just 12 minutes, at whatever time of the day works for them, and turn it over to these simple and fun exercises. Cardio, toning, yoga and breathing exercises...they're all here but in a way the maximizes effect while minimizing time.

Beyond a dozen exercises for each day of the week this book will include many other of Denises dozens for each day.

Now, this awesome book could be yours! It's open internationally and ends on February 1!
Just fill out this form to win a copy of your very own!


Disclosure: Thanks to Anna from Hachette for sending me a copy of this book to give an honest review and for sending the copy to give away.

Blog Tour Review: The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer by Dr. Jonny Bowden

Title: The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer: the Surprising, Unbiased Truth About What You Should Do to Prevent Diseas, Feel Great, and Have Optimum Health and Longevity

Author: Jonny Bowden, Ph.D, C.N.S.

Rating: 1/2

Who Should Read It? Anyone interested in the way the body works and in living the healthiest, most disease free life possible. Anyone wanting to feel young for all of their life. Really, the extension of the title says it all. Really, though, I think EVERYONE should read it.


What I Have to Say:
Incredibly, amazingly, wonderfully useful. That's what I have to say about this book.
Now, I'm wondering what it says about my age that I was able to read this book from cover to back in three days, in the same way I normally devour a fiction novel.
I guess that probably says more about the books readability, though, than about me being an old 27 year old. It had so many interesting facts and so many great ideas about how to use those facts to live a healthier longer life that one might think it would be easy to occasionally get bogged down by facts. This didn't happen. Everything was presented in such a way that even the layman would easily get maximum benefit.
The book was separated into sections that will make it easy to go back and re-look up something I might later forget or be wondering about. The beautiful, glossy color pictures were a great addition to the words that made it easy to visualize everything he was saying. Bowden's "Four Horsemen of Aging:" free radicals, inflammation, glycation, and stress, are a humorous and realistic way of looking at the things that actually cause disease and then figuring out what we can do about them.
I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone. I think it is VITAL that people not only know how to lead healthy lifestyles but also understand the benefits and therefore have the motivation to do so. A book like this provides the motivation and the know how. It occasionally made me laugh, which in no way took away from the seriousness of the message. The power and beauty of the chapter on emotional intelligence is something I think will stay with me for life. The power of friends and community is, indeed, amazing!
That's not to say everything was perfect with the book, though, and there were actually a few things with which I had trouble.
And thus, my little rant, which you can choose to read or not: Okay, Dr. Bowden, I get it. You like wild salmon. No, you love wild salmon. Especially from Vital Nutrients. We can find this Vital Nutrients salmon via your website, and you recommend that, to live healthily, we eat A LOT of it! He might have overstressed this point just a little bit. I almost wish I had counted the number of times he mentioned it.
It might have been less annoying for me if he had also mentioned vegan alternatives to the omega-3s and health benefits of salmon, but every time he mentioned flax, it was in parentheses, as an afterthought.
Because the fact is, SO MANY STUDIES have shown that a vegan diet with B12 (because, studies say, the supplement is actually better for you than the meat from which you can get it naturally) is pretty much the healthiest diet there is. I understand that he doesn't believe this, and that's fine. The thing is, he has so many arguments that make is seem like a salmon-eating vegan would be the healthiest way to go that it seems odd of him to disregard veganism entirely. It would have been awesome if he had given vegan alternatives (which I know exist, and to which he occasionally alluded) that give the same nutrients as the things he was suggesting.
He also goes a little overboard on the supplement advice. It seems like I would be taking about a thousand pills a day. In "The China Study," I read that there are several studies that have shown that taking supplements of certain vitamins and minerals can often have the opposite effect of what we are hoping. In this book, I've now read the opposite. Does this mean studies are showing these two contradictory things, and if so, what am I supposed to believe? In any case, it seems logical to me that getting my vitamins and minerals from natural, food sources is the most effective way to go. I therefore think that a great addition to this book would have been this: each time he suggested a supplement, he could have also given a short list of foods that would also give the desired nutrients.
I'm also not entirely sure how I felt about the section on hormones. But this has nothing to do with what he was saying or his way of saying it; it has more to do certain beliefs of my own about living a more natural life. So I've decided not to go there.
Note: he does address some of these things in the conclusion, but it almost seemed a bit like 'too little, too late' for me.

Okay, rant over. What makes these things okay, I suppose, is that he was very clear about what was his OPINION and what came from studies and could be considered fact. In the end, like I said, despite my occasional negative thought about it (and the fact that my rant is longer than the actual review), I actually loved this book. I'm looking forward to reading some of Jonny Bowden's earlier books that he talked about in this one. They sound like they will be just as interesting and informative. And on that note, I'm off to exercise using some of the awesome methods he gives in his book. He makes exercising seem so doable! And while he in no way made me think I should stop being a vegan, he did make me think that I've got to find a way to start loving blueberries!

Summary:Author Jonny Bowden looks at what he calls “The Four Horsemen of Aging”—free radicals, inflammation, glycation, and stress—and shows how they can harm your health and shorten your life. Bowden then unveils an arsenal of anti-aging strategies culled from cutting edge research and lessons learned from the longest lived people on the planet. He examines how the major organs, such as the heart and the brain, age and how you can prevent damage to these vital parts of the body. In total, readers learn what they can eat, do, and take to feel great, avoid illness, and live a long life.


If you are thinking about reading this book but would like to know a little bit more about Jonny Bowden beforehand, be sure to check out his website, http://www.jonnybowden.com/. It's full of fun facts and information about how to lead a healthy life!

Disclosure: Thanks to Dorothy at Pump Up Your Book for providing me this book to give an honest review. If you click on my Amazon link and buy something, I will make a small profit.

Blog Tour Review and Giveaway: One Day Way by Chantel Hobbs

Title: One Day Way

Author: Chantel Hobbs

Rating: This is the first book I have read like this, so it's hard for me to rate it, as it might compare to others. I am tempted, though, to give it somewhere between 3 1/2 and 4 stars. Why don't we go with 3.84.
.84

Who Should Read It: People looking for motivation to finally lose the weight they want to lose, although the tips in it could also be great for anyone trying to get something done.

What I Have to Say: So, I agreed to review this book NOT because I need to lose weight (if anything I need to gain weight), but because I need to learn how to exercise. And I find that often weight loss books have great tips on exercise and motivation.
That said, I thought this book was great! At first, I kind of thought it was repetitive. She seemed to just be saying over and over again - if you want to lose weight, you have to change your mindset. Think about things one day at a time. As I continued reading, though, I realized just how important it was for her to be repetitive like that. If you say something to yourself over and over again, it eventually begins to feel true. As I read over and over again, in slightly different words, it eventually began to REALLY sink in. In the beginning, I understood what she was saying - by the end, I felt and knew with all of my being what she what she was saying. Knowing that Chantel herself lost 200 pounds with this very method made the words sink in that much more.
More than that, IT MADE ME FEEL MOTIVATED! And I think that, for an exercise/weight loss book, motivating someone has to be up there as one of the most important necessities.
Another positive was that she was able to constantly bring in examples from her own life that not only made it easy to visualize what she was saying but that also made it interesting and easy to read as a book and not just a weight-loss guide.
She also gave some great exercises that one can do, which is something else I think is a necessity in a weight loss book. Unfortunately, most of her exercises involved a medicine ball. The fact is, a lot of people don't like exercising. So while working with a medicine ball is great for those of you that don't mind exercising, for me it just makes me feel like I'm actually exercising. I need to be tricked into breaking a sweat (which is why my martial arts classes are perfect for me), and, even one day at a time, it's hard for me to force myself to do something that I HATE to do (exercise). Still, her exercises were simple and doable.
There were a couple things, though, that I didn't really love about the book. She mentions at some point that you CAN be vegetarian while following her method, but she really doesn't give any tips how. She also says that, if you are vegetarian, you need to eat lots of cheese and dairy. This seems counter-intuitive to me, since ALL the studies show how unhealthy and free-radical forming dairy products are. I'm a vegan, and there was not a SINGLE meal in her recipe section that could have been eaten by a vegan.
Lastly, she asks us to start with a fast. I personally wouldn't have trouble doing this, but I know people that have tried to fast, even for a day, and ended up sick, passed out, at the hospital. Fasting isn't for everyone.
So there we have it. I unfortunately didn't receive the book early enough to have had a chance to put her method to work, though I do think the idea of taking things one day at a time, never thinking of the future, is quite a good one. And I'm looking forward to trying it out!

Summary (from Waterbrook Multnomah): Lose All the Weight You Want, One Meal, One Pound, One Day At a Time!

I've got great news for you: You are about to feel better and look better beginning today! Today is truly a new opportunity for you to reach your weight loss goals. No, you won't fit into your "skinny jeans" today, but I'm going to show you how each day will get you closer to that goal.

Yesterday's mistakes are gone so let them go. You can't control tomorrow, so stop worrying about it. Today is your opportunity to lose weight, get strong, and look great. It won't happen overnight, but you can build a new life by changing your actions immediately and I'm here to show you how to make the changes that will create the new lifestyle you dream of: body, mind, and spirit. Best of all, you will start celebrating right away!

Come on, my friend. Let's get started! By opening this book, I'll show you how to unlock every tool you need to lose weight and get fit —and stay that way for the rest of your life. Success can be yours, what are you waiting for?

-Chantel

To learn more about this book or purchase it, check it out here.

Now, thanks to Waterbrook Multnomah, I've got one copy of this book to give away to one lucky winner.
RULES:
-open internationally
-ends January 18, 2009 at midnight in France
-I'm asking for your address now so that I can send the book immediately
-the usual for extra entries: tweet, sidebar, comment
-just fill out the form below!




Disclosure: This book was provided for review by the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group.
If you click on my amazon links then buy something, I will make a small profit that will go back into the blog.