Body for Life Diet: What It Is

What It Is

Body-for-Life is an intense exercise and nutrition program based on the premise that you're more likely to stick with a diet and workout if you see results quickly. Indeed, founder Bill Phillips makes this promise: Follow his program for 12 weeks and you'll have the best body you've ever had. The program is challenging. It involves training with weights for 45 minutes three days a week, then alternating with aerobic exercise for at least 20 minutes three days a week.

The diet involves eating six small meals each day for six days a week, drawing from a list of healthy foods such as vegetables, brown rice, poultry, and fish. On the seventh day, you rest -- free to eat anything you want and take a day off from the rigorous workout.

Open the best-selling Body-for-Life book and you'll see before-and-after photos of people who went from flab to fab. They don't just look slimmer. They look terrific. Their fab abs and chiseled muscles in the "after" photos are in stark contrast to the "before" pictures that look, well, like most of us. But remember, strenuous exercise virtually every day is the key to this program. Odds are, your body would improve significantly with such workouts, even if you weren't also dieting.

What You Can Eat

The good news is that with all the work Body-for-Life requires, you have to eat. Grazing, not gorging, is the key. The program requires you to eat six moderate-sized meals a day. Each meal consists of a fist-sized portion of protein -- lean mean, poultry, fish, egg whites, or cottage cheese -- and a fist-sized portion of carbohydrates such as potatoes or brown rice. You must also eat at least two portions of vegetables, and drink 10 glasses of water each day. Nutritional supplements (sold by another company that Phillips founded) and a tablespoon or two of healthy oil (such as flaxseed) round out the diet.

The diet breaks down to about 40%-50% protein, the same for carbohydrates, and very little fat. (A traditional weight-loss diet is 60% carbohydrates, 20-25% protein, and 20-25% fat.)

Body-for-Life provides this list of authorized foods to choose from: