About the Author
Bob Greene is an exercise physiologist and certified personal trainer specialising in fitness, metabolism, and weight loss. He has been a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show. He is also a contributing writer and editor for O, The Oprah Magazine, and writes on health and fitness for Oprah.com. Greene is the bestselling author of Get With the Program!, The Get With the Program! Guide to Good Eating, The Get With the Program! Daily Journal, and The Get With the Program! Guide to Fast Food and Family Restaurants.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Twelve weeks to total transformation. If you're familiar with Get With the Program!, Make the Connection, and Basic Training, a program on my Web site www.getwiththeprogram.org, you know that I've always said that it takes time and patience to lose weight. Now here I am with a three-month program. Have I gone off the deep end?

Not at all, and I think you'll agree when I explain the thinking behind Total Body Makeover.

Anytime I work with someone, be it on a one-to-one basis or through my books, my goal is to help that person attain physical health and emotional well-being. The 12-week Total Body Makeover is simply an accelerated program. It's a bit like boot camp: intense and meant to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time while giving you quicker and more dramatic results. One (and the most important) of those results is obtaining a new, elevated, and healthier metabolism. Through a combination of vigorous exercise and five simple eating rules -- no strict or formal "dieting" -- you will be burning far more calories each day when you reach the end of the 12 weeks.

This program offers something for everyone. Whether you're a beginning exerciser, already have a regular workout routine going, or are at an advanced level of fitness, you can personalize the Total Body Makeover plan to suit you. And no matter whether you have a substantial amount of weight to lose, a little to lose, or are just trying to get into the best shape of your life, you will see substantial changes in your body at the end of 12 weeks. Some of you will have reached your ultimate goal by then; some of you will have made a great start and will still have a way to go. But all of you, if you stay committed, will look and feel significantly different. Some of you will even have changed your lives in ways that were totally unexpected. Most important, you will be on the road to a lifetime of healthy living.

I can't stress enough how critical it is to have the proper mind-set before you begin this program. This means you have to think like an athlete. (You don't have to be an athlete, just think like one for now.) Athletes train intensely for an event, but once the event is over, they scale back and continue to stay active at a less rigid pace. That's essentially what you're going to be doing. You're going to ramp it up for 12 weeks, then pull back a bit but continue to be active and eat healthfully so that you don't lose the fitness, weight loss, and health strides you've made. Your goal should not be to follow this program for 12 weeks, celebrate the results, then abandon all the changes you made and return to what you were doing before. Granted, the 12 weeks are tough; I want to be honest about that. But I also want you to bear in mind that if you keep your goal in your line of sight, it will help you power through the days when staying on the program seems particularly difficult.

Here's what else I think will help you succeed on this program: the success of others. The pages of this book are peppered with stories of real-life people who have made over their bodies -- indeed, their very lives -- through their dedication and commitment. As you read these motivating tales, I hope they'll both inspire you and allow you to see your own struggles -- and your own possibilities! -- in the experiences of others.

To listen to the news these days is to hear some pretty dismal reports about Americans' ability (or rather, inability) to adopt healthy habits. Obesity rates are rising, large numbers of both kids and adults aren't exercising, many people find it hard to stick to a nutritious diet. And even when people do make an effort to slim down, they often give up after a while. According to some estimates, as many as 95 percent of people who lose weight gain it back. That's particularly scary when you consider that the latest figures indicate that obesity is fast on its way to replacing smoking as the number one cause of preventable death.

But there are people who are beating the odds and losing weight -- permanently. I know because I've met them. In my travels around the country, I've talked to many, many people who have committed themselves to change, with striking results. And they're not just slimming down for a few months, then ballooning back up again. They're dropping pounds and keeping them off over the long haul. That's the real challenge, and these inspiring individuals are meeting it.

As I see it, we all have a choice. We can dwell on the sad state of affairs and moan about how it must be impossible to be fit and healthy. Or we can take a look at those people who are successful and ask, What are they doing right? How did they overcome the obstacles that have tripped up so many others? We have so much to learn from these folks.

Certainly, in the grand scheme of things, the number of people who are able to lose weight and change their lives for good isn't staggering -- it's really just a blip on the demographic chart that highlights the nation's expanding waistline. Nonetheless, each of the individuals you'll meet in this book proves that it's truly possible to effect significant change. And within each of their stories are some very important clues to how it's done. No two tales, as it turns out, are exactly alike, but every one of them shows that resolve can pay off.

Twelve Weeks to a New Body

Though the 12-week Total Body Makeover program is challenging on many levels, it doesn't include a formal diet. That may both surprise you and alarm you if that's the way you've tried to lose or control your weight in the past. But one of the things that sets my philosophy apart is that I firmly believe in getting an exercise program going and adopting a few simple eating rules: get a grip on your emotional eating, eat breakfast, have an eating cutoff time, drink plenty of water, and abstain from or limit your intake of alcohol -- before you even begin to think about "officially" dieting. If you don't meet your goals, you may feel that you need to go on a structured eating plan when the 12 weeks are up. With this in mind I have devoted a lot of space in chapter 5 to helping you make sense of the most popular diets. However, right now it's in your best interest not to drastically cut calories before you have had a chance, through exercise, to ensure that your metabolism is running on high. And this may be particularly true if your metabolism, owing to the effects of going on diet after diet through the years, is as slow as molasses. Everybody can benefit from a metabolic charge-up before they start dieting, but chronic dieters especially need exercise to increase their calorie-burning rate.

Greatly restricting your food intake does the opposite of boosting your metabolism: it slows it down. The body is very sensitive to calorie input. Cutting way back on the amount of calories you consume triggers a survival mechanism, which developed when food was a lot scarcer than it is now and which causes your metabolism to switch into lower gear so that you don't expend energy too quickly. In fact, one of the worst things you can do is to restrict your calorie intake drastically without exercising at all. Because exercise can help moderate the body's survival tactic a bit, dieting at the same time you're exercising regularly is a little better, but, it's still not optimal. Best of all -- and this is the approach built into this program -- is to avoid formal dieting altogether, concentrate on exercise, and let the five simple eating rules in chapter 4 guide your approach to eating. While the rules may help you reduce your calorie intake a bit, you won't eat so little that your fat-defending survival mechanism kicks in.

Here's another important consideration: When you're in the throes of an intensive exercise program, you need to make sure you're getting enough calories to fuel your workouts. Go on a very-low-calorie diet, and you may feel too weak to work out!

When I tell my clients that they won't be dieting, some of them balk at first, but I ask them to be patient in order to see how well they do with just exercise and the eating and drinking guidelines first. The vast majority of them end up reaching their goals without ever having to go on a formal diet. Generally what happens is that after a certain point -- it could be week two, it could be week four, it could be even after the 12 weeks are over -- they reach a point I call the "free fall," when their metabolism revs up and the weight starts consistently melting off. Some people, though, even if they do eventually go into the free fall, don't lose enough weight. A small percentage of people find that they ultimately do need a structured plan to help them reach their goal.

I'm asking the same thing of you that I ask of my clients: Follow the 12-week program, then decide whether you need to follow a formal eating plan. I do think that under the right circumstances, diets can be very helpful, which is why I go over ten of the most popular ones in chapter 5, "Making the Transition to Real Life." They can assist you in clarifying your dietary needs and learning to make better food choices. Some of them will introduce you to a whole new way of eating that you never knew would be satisfying.

But whether you end up going on a diet or not, I think it's important to keep in mind that exercise has some revitalizing benefits that dieting, and especially going on a very rigid diet, doesn't. Working out is a proactive approach to reshaping your body. It's something you do, something you add to your life, and something that you'll quite possibly find can even be pleasurable. On the flip side, cutting calories is about not doing something, and, to me at least, that seems a lot harder, not to mention a lot less fun. I also believe that exercising combined with sensible eating is a much more effective, healthier -- and ultimately more life-changing -- approach than trying to diet your way there.

I can think of no better example of this than the struggle Oprah went through many years ago. Some of you may remember that she went on a liquid d...