Review: Mike Dolce: Living Lean

"Don't count calories! Make calories count!" is the tag line/mantra of this book. In it Dolce outlines his history and how this helped him develop an eating and conditioning methodology currently popular in mixed-martial arts. His approach is holistic rather than formulaic concentrating on realistic shopping and mealtime habit changes. His argument that healthy calories trump unhealthy ones, has not been verified in the scientific literature, although anecdotally people do feel better and are therefore theoretically more like to expend calories if they "eat lean". He shares his general diet principles followed first by a series of healthy and tasty sounding recipes. Next he outlines a series of exercise programs for audiences of all fitness levels with pictorial explanations of the exercises afterwards. He also includes some cardiovascular treadmill workouts.
Overall I would have liked more "meat" as much of his weight loss strategy comes down to willpower. Although I think his diet plan is practical it is not novel and a guide to coupling together healthy dishes after exhausting the menu in the book would have been helpful. The exercise programs look graded and reasonable if you have prior experience but like most unsupervised programs poor form will cause more harm than good. This section contains exercises that can be seen in other dedicated books on the subject of strength and conditioning, and nothing new here to people familiar with the area.

Overall I rank it a purple belt.