Rating: 
Summary: "The Man"
Review: I've been following the Body For Life, Eating for LIfe, for the past 6 years. And I've went from 18% bodyfat, to 6-9% bodyfat - and stayed there. I also went from 180lbs to 195lbs, and got the six pack that I never could before. From NFL football players to the over one million people who have transformed their bodies - know that Bill Phillips is THE BEST when it comes to building your best body. Atkins, Sugarbusters, etc... are all jokes in comparison!!
Neal Hilton
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: I've had the opportunity to get to know this family, and they are great! Which makes me love the book even more so, great people deserve great success! The new book is easy to use, they list the products in it and it stuff you have in the house. I just hate it when you have a new cookbook and it asks for things you have to buy at a speicality store. The meals are easy and nutrtious! I recommend this to everyone, even if you don't follow the program Bill has written about.
Rating:
Summary: Puts Atkins to Bed
Review: In this wonderful book, Bill Philips presents an overview of exactly what your body needs to be perfectly balanced and healthy, and then provides the recipes and eating schedule to achieve that result.What I particularly love about this book is that it flies straight in the face of the Atkins craze, picking it apart point by point. The fact is that humans were designed to eat carbohydrates - lots of them in fact. If your end result is losing weight, then Atkins will work just fine. But if you want to lose fat, actually *look good*, feel good and keep your muscle mass, then forget Atkins and buy this book today. The problem with Atkins that most people don't realize is that the catch word of the month - ketosis - is flowery talk for "starvation." Ketosis is what happens when your body starts eating itself - fat, muscle, even DNA breakdown in extreme cases. I've known people who have lost forty pounds on Atkins but actually increased their body fat percentage in the process. The weight they lost was muscle. These people were also miserable, not thinking clearly and completely lacking in energy. Eating For Life will give you the opposite. In the short time I've been abiding by the eating program I've been eating more than I ever have, enjoying eating as much as I ever have, and have lost weight. The most impressive results are the increased energy and clarity of thought from eating a balanced diet. These latter results were really my goal in buying the book - I'm not after severe weight loss. But if weight loss *is* your goal, Phillips provides you with many inspiring personal experiences of readers who have had success with his books. There are many full-color before and after pictures of amazing transformations, folks who were over 250 lbs. who ended up exactly in their target weights and looking amazing. (You might lose that weight with Atkins, but you will be a ball of weak, muscle-less flab when all is said and done.) Along with the pictures are the stories of these individuals, including a sample menu of what they ate before Eating for Life and what they eat now. The point is you can find someone who seems similar to your age and build and then model your weight loss after them. For healthy eating, this is the book to have. This is not some weird recipe book of organic foods, soy-whatever nonsense. It simply a program for eating great food, showing you what to eat, how to cook it, when to eat it, and why you should. If you take nothing else from this review, take the fact that Atkins is a marketing ploy based on terrible science. Yes it does produce weight loss, but at great expense. On Atkins you'll lose more muscle than fat, you'll be weaker than you've ever been, and you'll have as much energy as a piece of wood. It's a marketing scheme that works for all the wrong reasons. Don't buy into it.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book but with a significant flaw
Review: Like Bill Phillips's earlier books "Eating for Life" is a well thought out book with great execution but it has two problems in my view. The recipes lack a nutritional breakdown. Bill discusses in the book that he doesn't believe that people should try and mix diet plans so I suspect that he has skipped the breakdown thinking that this would keep people from trying to Atkinize his recipes. But, I try to plan my diet minimize both fat and salt intake and the lack of nutritional breakdown will limit the usefulness of this book. My second complaint is just personal preference. I don't care for the product placement advertisement. I expect to find advertisement for products by name brand in the cooking magazines sold at the grocery store checkout counter I don't expect to find such overt advertisement in a $35.00 cookbook. For roughly the same amount of money you can purchase both of Brenda Ponichtera's "Quick & Healthy" cookbooks. While not perfect these are better cookbooks without used car salesman feeling of Bill Phillip's books.
Rating:
Summary: If You Follow It, It Will Work.
Review: More reality for the obese, over-weight, and health-weary American public. There are no shenanigans here, just straight talk and common sense--that happen to work. After all the workout videos, metabolic drinks, Hollywood diets, fitness-gurus-cum-salesmen, "don't eat before noon" diets, and "only eat peanut butter" mantras, we are once again hit with what we don't get hit with enough: common sense. Eating several properly portioned and balanced nutritious meals over the course of the day will keep one's metabolism moving, provide energy, and improve and maintain mental and physical health. We are also reminded of a very important factor in improving and maintaining our weight and health: The more muscle we have means our ability to burn calories increases. More muscle speeds up our metabolism. Eating smaller meals more frequently increases metabolism. Our bodies are natural machines and focusing on metabolism is just as important as placing emphasis on what we put in our mouths (what we eat). This book is not for the sedentary, lazy, beer guzzler, fast food addict, or office-worker who comes home to watch TV at night. Worth noting is that Phillips does promote his supplements in the book and that's fair enough. If you're serious, get this book. It has helped me in several areas of my life.
Rating: 
Summary: Dining with "The Guru"
Review: Mr. Body For Life finally gets down to putting together the next phase in his "correct the way America lives" series - and once again, he hits the target with practical, "slow fix" methods to achieving nutritional balance and increased energy. It's little suprise that someone most known for getting millions to follow a very practical fitness program wouldn't deviate far from that model in composing a guide to proper eating. Phillips emphasizes the importance of frequent, smaller meals, which has been the call of the "fit set" for years now. And he has no love for "diet of the week" programs (you know what he is talking about), calling most diets on the market today dangerous, and contrary to healthy nutritious eating. Nutrition, after all is about eating, not starving. After deconstructing most popular beliefs about eating and dieting, Bill goes on to provide a very insightful guide to shopping for, PLANNING (and don't mistake this, as Eating For Life stresses over and over again the value of planning out meals, and calls this the one factor that will make or break any plan to stay on a nutritious eating path) and preparing nutritious, well rounded meals. If you are allready on a healthy eating path, you'll quickly recognize the meals and ingredients Bill reccomends, but there are some nice recipes in this book, and enough variety to keep the meals interesting. There's no Million Dollar contests associated with this project, but there are interactive media supports (an Eating For Live website has been established, and Bill has been actively promoting the program through Muscle Media), and as in past Phillips projects, the sense that you have the support of the author, and thousands of others as you work your way through the materials. This is certainly going to be another Phillips best selling project - Body FOr Life demonstrated how huge a market there is for practical advice in the fitness market, and Bill knows how to sell his audience - under-deliver and over-perform. Coule this book with "Body For Lifew", and Shawn Phillip's "Ab-Solution" and you have a great holiday gift for someone looking to get on track in personal fitness in the New Year.
Rating:
Summary: WOW! Solves my bland food problem!
Review: My fiance did the Body-for-Life challenge and lost 40 pounds in 12 weeks! Currently we are 2 weeks in to another Body-for-Life challenge and we've found the biggest problem for us is lack of interesting food to eat. We decided to pick up the Eating-for-Life book to hopefully get some better recipes and all I can say is WOW! Bill Phillips really outdid himself with this book. This book starts with 70 pages describing many of the ideas about food he covered in his bestselling book, Body-for-Life. As he explains, diets are BAD. They are impossible to maintain, so 95% of people who go on diets end up gaining back everything they lost (and often MORE than they lost). His philosophy is to eat balanced, nutrient-rich meals six times a day. This keeps you full, so you never feel like you're starving, and also signals to your body that its getting the nutrients it needs and can stop storing all the fat. This is the first time I've seriously done the Body-for-Life challenge and I've already lost 8 pounds of fat! The biggest problem for me, as I said, was how BORING I thought healthy foods were. This book has shown me how wrong I was! The first day I got it, I flipped through it and salivated at all the delicious recipes! There are over a hundred GOOD recipes in here, including shrimp scampi, chicken noodle soup, filet mignon, chicken fajitas and SO much more. There are even several healthy dessert recipes, including fruit crepes, cheesecake and walnut brownies! The recipes are not only healthy, but extremely easy to prepare and very delicious! A lot of people have said that Bill Phillips plan takes a lot of dedication and hard work, and that's true. But there is no "easy" diet out there. I've tried some of the "fad" diets, including low carb diets and diet pills. While they sometimes work, I found them impossible to stick to and maintain weightloss on. With Body-for-Life, and especially now with this AMAZING cookbook, I can eat healthy, delicious meals AND lose weight. Plus, with Body-for-Life, you have a free day every single week (usually Sunday) where you can eat whatever you want in whatever quantities you want. I highly recommend checking this book out, even if you aren't interested in the Body-for-Life program. The recipes are better than I've seen in most diet books.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant if a little hokey
Review: Okay, the opening chapter was a bit hokey, but I guess the railing against the Fat Food Frenzy is deserved. Bill Phillips makes a major point though - you can make healthy and delicious meals in a short amount of time (he goes overboard here - fast food really is faster, don't try to convince us that it's not). But I think the real strength of the book is that it truly presents a way of "eating for life". Frankly, those Atkins dieters are off their rocker. You're telling me I can't drink a glass of orange juice in the morning? Those diets eventually end in a massive ingestion of carbs and failure. Here's what I like about the book: the recipes are great and easy to make. For example, the turkey meatloaf contains oatmeal and egg whites. It is disgustingly healthy and yet it tastes delicious. I really can live with this. The recipes are balanced and varied at the same time. Chicken enchiladas with cheese - awesome. To top it all off, you get one day off to eat anything you want. I think the brilliance of the book is that all these years I've been looking for SOMETHING that doesn't require ridiculous sacrifice: no carbs, no fat, no sugar, etc. Stupid. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can eat this way 6 days a week, knowing that there's one day to indulge. The key is that it's all mental -- knowing that you don't have to "start" a diet on a Monday. You want a way of eating that is a seamless transition and where you can be in control. This book does that - highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: They Should Call Him "Dollar" Bill Phillips
Review: One reviewer asked if anyone else is reminded of a used car salesmen when they see Bill Phillips. Well, as a car salesman, I resent that comment. But, as a car salesman, I also must agree. Is he trying to make money? Yes. Is he entitled to? Why not? Four years ago, after reading Body for Life (BFL), I said, "Man, wouldn't it be great if they had a cookbook to make this easier? The 'Nutrition for Life' section of this book needs fleshing out." Never came about but nonetheless, I did the routine and managed to lose a lot of fat and put on a lot of muscle. But year after year passed with no cookbook. Sure the Web site had recipes but they were kinds of cheesy half-assed user-posted recipes. Many of them were redundant and many of them were just plain nasty. One day I said, "I'll bet he's gonna' wait for the popularity of BFL to wane and then make some comeback with a more detailed workout book or nutrition book." Sure enough...here's Eating for Life. But...the guy is entitled to make money so why complain? So what if he waited for book sales of BFL to die off before releasing this (which basically just expounds upon the Nutrition for Life section of the BFL book)? That's smart business. He'll sell 4 million of these and another 2 million of his first book. Who's better than him? I say stop your whining. Bill Phillips does give a lot to charity. And even if it is just for favorable tax status, the money does a lot of good. And of course his fitness ideas (while nothing new) have changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people--including myself. All my life I'd read Muscle & Fitness, watched Bodyshaping, accumulated nutritional articles and knowledge...for naught. I was probably eating Twinkies while doing all that reading. BFL was the only book (which regurgitated all the basic concepts I had been bombarded with over the years) to challenge me and inspire me. And I got in shape. So what if the guy was out to enrich himself with that book as he is with this book? Enron execs and televangelists gave nothing back to the people who enriched them. At least Bill Phillips sells knowledge. Frankly, I was more suspicious of his motives when I bought BFL than I was buying this book. At the time he was owner of the nutritional supplement company EAS. Whenever he mentioned "Myoplex shakes" (their biggest seller) in that book, I felt like I had purchased a 200-page commercial and was being brainwashed into buying more of his stuff. On the plus side, I sent away for the kit to enter his yearly BFL Challenge and got tons of free stuff. Three free videos, the book on audiocassette and more. So I felt like less of a rube when buying my Myoplex--I guess I had been brainwashed :-) So anyway, my review. Great book. Just what I had dreamed of all those years. This is a must have if you own BFL. It makes things so much easier. It's not a piece of crap like his "Body for Life Success Journal" was. I mentioned above that it just expounds on the Nutrition for Life chapter in BFL. While that's true, it's definitely a chapter that needed to be made into a book so get this one. It has helped me get back on track (as my healthy eating has leaned toward the unhealthy side of the spectrum over the years). It has appetizing, colorful pictures and they all taste good...so far. Way to go Bill. You may an opportunist as well as being cocky and narcissistic (just read the "interview" in Jan 04 Muscle Media magazine. It sounds like Bill is the interviewer as well as the interviewee. The questions and answers are so phony and contrived as to be laughable) but you provide the spark that so many people need. And for $35 minus 30% right here on Amazon.com, I'm willing to buy that spark. I'm sure in 4 years when things start to get slow again we'll see "Workout for Life" with more exercises, sport-specific routines, stretching regimens, etc. And you know what? I'll buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Good Ideas for Health
Review: Phillips creates his exercise and diet plans based on both his peersonal experience and that of his clients. Eating for Life is somewhat liike a sequel to his Body for Life book, which I used to develop a diet and exercise plan that has helped me lose over 60 pounds in the past year. I eat a reasonably balanced diet comprised of 40% protein, 30% carbohydrates, and 30% fat. The fat may be a bit high for some people, but combined with one hour of exercise per day, it seems to work out. Phillips goes beyond what I have described above, to discuss how food and exercise impacts your metabolism. He also gives plenty of examples of how other people have used his plan to find greater levels of health and fitness. I noticed Jamba Juice also carries his books--which is a recommendation in itself. However, don't waste your money with this book if you plan on working Phillip's plan half-hearted. His plan requires discipline and hardwork.
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