Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle - The Best Fitness Book?

I was searching through available fitness e-books a little while ago and ran into a book, Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle that seemed to live with a lot of hype even from others as the single best fitness books available, a book by bodybuilder was going to show people how to lose weight. I had to see this book myself and decided to give it a review.

Burn the fat feed the muscle is an e-book that has been created by Tom Venuto that attempts to teach people all aspects of losing weight while gaining muscle. Many people have called Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle the greatest single best fitness book ever put together and with that kind of hype I wanted to go through chapter by chapter to see if this book really lives up to it’s reputation.

My credentials may be important to anyone reading this review although as I go through an analysis of Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle is should be evident that I am more interested in the detail as well as the anecdotal and scientific proof for the details of this book to see whether it is the best fitness book ever. I have been a fitness enthusiast since my early teens and have been lifting weights on and off for in excess of 20 years as well as counseling many people in all matters of fitness, weight loss, muscle gain and well being. My fitness weblog is among the most popular on the internet as is my Weight Watchers weblog. I have sadly had to proven on more than one occasion that I can go from flabby and out of shape to peak physical condition in just a matter of weeks by using sound nutrition, exercise and fitness principles even though my love for junk food and pop is very well “documented” by my wife and two kids.

The Initial overview of Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle Sales Letter

First of all to buy the book Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle you must go off to Tom Venuto’s website and endure a very long sales letter. You would not expect the best fitness book to need this but it has it anyway. We have seen these sales letters for many years on the internet and for the best fitness book it seems that the hype of the book is a little bit overblown. I found that the sales page is about average for the sales pages of any of the common books being sold on the market and is likely due to the fact that the buyer of the book is not able to buy an actual physical copy of the book but instead is buying an Adobe Acrobat version of the book. There are a couple of things that you can get for free from the sales letter for Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle, you can get a 32 page report detailing parts of the plan as well as signing up for a monthly newsletter and tips to help you succeed.

As you go through the sales letter there are a few things that stand out. Tom Venuto is positioning himself as an “Outlaw Bodybuilder” that has secrets that no one wants anyone else to know. Two things that strike me from this statement, I am not sure that there are secrets that no one wants anyone to know but it sure does help in selling the hype. The next thing that you do notice and is really true is that Tom Venuto is in fact a natural bodybuilder that has a really great physique and is a champion bodybuilder so if there really are any “secret” secrets he would know them.

The rest of the Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle sales letter is a mixture of Tom Venuto’s story of 14 years of bodybuilding and food / fitness research as well as testimonials from people that have used the materials. One thing that Tom points out is that 95% of all dieters fail. This is a true statement and is pointed out a couple of times in the sales letter to show why the book is important as the best fitness book.

The book now also includes these three special bonuses!
Check out the site to see what else Tom is offering.

Food that turn to fat	Foods that burn fat	The A food B food lecture

Tom Venuto offers the book for $39.00 plus an eight week money back guarantee. I like the guarantee as if you were to buy this book and decided after a few weeks that it is not something you ant to follow then you should really deserve to get a refund.

The book setup itself

Burn the Fat Fee the Muscle weighs in at an impressive 340 pages. The book is really solid and has not a single picture although there are some tables of information so there is a lot of reading to do. You can still print up the book but just as any other book on the internet you are going to have to either read the book on your computer or get it printed up. One nice thing that I had noticed is that Tom Venuto has allowed us the ability as readers of the book to copy text out and paste it into a Microsoft Word document. I am not sure how long this will be allowed but this does allow you to copy text that you find important to another word document so you can find it more easily when you want it.

My choice for reading this book would really be to print up sections of the book as you want to read them until you have printed up all 340 pages. To print up Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle you should use a laser printer as an inkjet printer would cost a lot to print up 340 pages and make sure you duplex, print the book on back to back pages so that you end up with 170 double sided pages. Trust me 340 sheets of paper is a lot to have hanging around.

Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle is setup with 17 chapters, a conclusion and an appendix and each of the chapters is broken up into many smaller sections so it is nice and easy to read even at its rather large size.

I will not review each chapter individually but instead would like to go through an overview of the sections of the book as well as list some points that the author raises.

First section: Introduction
The author stresses the importance of some principles such as no quick fixes, weight loss is not the same as fat loss and that the book is not even just about fat loss but more about making people healthier.

Second section: Goal setting, strategies and motivation.
As we all know goal setting is very important to reaching what you want with your health and although I have written extensively about this subject in the past Tom Venuto has done an admirable job in really crystallizing the art of goal setting so that it will work much better for almost anyone.

Third section: Body types, how to identify what you need
This is the first place in this book where I like the way that Tom Venuto has really broken down how people have different body types. Almost every trainer I have ever seen thinks that every person’s body will react the same way with the same diet and exercise and this book stops that idea dead in its tracks.

Fourth section: Meal frequency and macro nutrients
This is one of the two sections that I can not go into great detail with as it would give away too much of the book and let’s face it Tom Venuto is a much bigger and stronger guy than me. Suffice to say he talks here about how many meals to eat as well as the relationship that you should use between protein, carbohydrates and fats to have a good diet that you can live with the rest of your life.

Fifth section: Liquids and actual meal plans
The author covers a couple of very important points that are very often overlooked in most other books and those are proper intake of liquids and foods that you should eat. Tom Venuto uses about 20 pages to cover foods that you should and should not eat including replacements for some of the bad foods that you are already eating. Most of the foods listed are based on the rules that he has set up in the previous section and because of the breadth of the good foods listed the diet that you would have yourself on is not at all restrictive and allows you to eat a wide variety of foods that is so often missed in conventional diets.

Sixth section: Supplements
Tom Venuto and I are of essentially the same mind on the use of supplements and how this industry is very good at marketing many overpriced products with very little benefits to almost any user unless they are in a very sickly state. Let’s face it, in North America our prosperity has not lead most people to under eat so the supplementation is not the most important thing. However, the author has included information on the most important supplements and I was a little surprised but happy to see how straightforward he is about many of the supplements in the bodybuilding industry and the effect that magazines advertising has had on the objectiveness if those magazines.

Seventh section: Cardio and weight training
We all know how important exercise is in losing weight and the diet that has been created in Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle is definitely geared toward having both cardio and weight training as an essential part of the package. I have never seen a diet that did not at least mention exercise but this book stresses it as very important part of the equation and many other diets would do their followers more justice by stressing a lot more exercise. Having said this I was a little disappointed at this point that there are not any pictures showing proper form for exercises however there is one very good book that Tom Venuto has recommended that is an essential book to exercise. I believe that the lack of pictures to follow these weight training exercises may be due to the fact that Tom Venuto is an active bodybuilder and has taken the assumption that it is impossible to keep a book with a lot of exercises in it at a reasonable length. There are very good sample plans that are great though for making sure that anyone new to weight lifting would be very comfortable getting started as well as a very extensive list of frequently asked questions on weight lifting itself.

Eight section: Appendix
The appendix of this book is basically a series of tables with food values and charts on what foods to eat and not eat as well as other statistical information. This information is invaluable as a person gets started on the road to healthy living but I was disappointed not to see some any references to books and magazines that Tom Venuto finds as good reference material that people could read as well.

Price and purchase information

Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle sells on the website for $39.00. This price seems to be in line with most ebooks and is a very popular price. Prices for e-books seem to be artificially low probably because of the lack of a hard bound product and some people’s lack of confidence. In purchasing this book there is a secure page in which to make the purchase so credit card information can be trusted across the internet and a third party takes care of the transaction so that there is no one person that has access to your credit card number but instead only secure computer systems do the transaction.

Conclusion

I was initially skeptical of Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle as I have seen a hundred “Miracle Diets” come and go over the years and did not expect anything more, especially from a competitive bodybuilder. I am now though pleasantly surprised and happy to have found this book.

Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle is not without shortcomings as I have pointed out earlier in this review; it could use some pictures, more detail on exercises and although there is reference material for further reading I would have liked to see more of that so that a person could really round out their education.

On the positive side this book is really packed with a lot of detail on how to eat, what to eat, cardio and weight training plans as well as a easy to read style that definitely does away with the hype and does a very good job of realistically training a person to think, eat and exercise right to drop the weight that the want and need to live a healthier lifestyle.

In an industry that is full of fads, quick fixes and hype, Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle, although relying on hype in its sales letter definitely does not fall into this trap in its content. I think that this book just may be the best fitness book. I highly recommend this book for people that are just starting to improve their health as well as to people that have a last few stubborn pounds to lose. And to all of those yoyo dieters out there hurry up and buy this book.

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