Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

I’ve heard lots of rave reviews about Curves. When I saw this book at the library, I picked it up, hoping that the book would tell me a little more about their program.

What’s Good About This Book:

The Calorie Sensitive Plan will help you lose weight. It restricts your calories to 1200 a day in Phase 1 and ups them to 1600 in Phase 2. It doesn’t take into account different body sizes, unfortunately, so if you are 5’11” and weight 250 pounds, they are going to recommend the same amount of calories as someone who is 5’2″ and 150 pounds. That seems a little short-sighted, but at those calorie amounts, you WILL lose weight.

What’s Not So Good About This Book:

Unfortunately, they still believe in the high protein diet, so they have an option that recommends allowing you to eat as much protein as you want and limiting your carbs to 20 grams in Phase 1. This program has shown to lose weight only when the calorie consumption is low enough to cause weight loss. If you overeat protein, you WILL gain weight.

Additionally, they seem to have “magical” workout machines at their facilities that adjust the resistance based on how swiftly you use them. They didn’t explain the physics of it, but I have a hard time believing that the hydraulic resistance is better than free weights. They gave me nothing in this book to persuade me otherwise or convince me that their machines actually do what they say they do.

Over 100 pages are forms: dining out diaries, exercise diaries and daily calorie logs. The book is only 206 pages long, so almost half the book is EMPTY, waiting for you to fill it out. There are also several pages dedicated to calorie lists of foods. All in all there is very little “meat” in this book unless you count the Carbohydrate Sensitive Plan.

Should I Buy This Book?

No. Don’t bother with it. You could buy the Runner’s World Training Journal and get a better log to write down your exercise and food intake.