Body for Life by Bill Phillips, Michael D'Orso (With), Michael D'Orso (With)

From Barnes & Noble

Body for Life details a 12-week program designed to get readers in shape, fast, using targeted weight training. Bill Phillips is one of bodybuilding's best-known gurus, and in this tremendously successful book he adapts traditional bodybuilding techniques to help ordinary people break through their fitness barriers. The legendary trainer provides a surefire strategy for developing the motivation and energy to rebuild your body and your life.

From the Publisher

Step into any gym in America, mention the name Bill Phillips, and watch the faces light up with recognition and respect.

These include:

Hundreds of thousands of men and women who turn to Phillips's monthly magazine, Muscle Media, for guidance and straight-forward information about exercise, nutrition, and living with strength.

Professional and amateur athletes--among them John Elway, Karl Malone, and Mike Piazza--and celebrities such as Sylvester Stallone, who have relied on Phillips' clear-cut information to enhance their energy and performance.

People once plagued by obesity, alcoholism, and even life-threatening ailments who accepted a personal challenge from Phillips and, with his help, turned their bodies and their lives around.

Body-for-LIFE is much more than a book on physical fitness, it's also an inspiring true story of one man's journey through life and the lives he's touched--a journey that began with a dream of helping one million people rebuild their bodies and has evolved into the challenge of a lifetime, a quest to help people from all walks of life search for, and discover, the hero inside each and every one of us.

Step-by-step, in language that is vivid and down-to-earth, Phillips maps out a guaranteed recipe for success.

This is not a vague, pie-in-the-sky "motivational" book. Neither is it a dense, technical manual about anatomy and physiology. In these pages, you will learn:

• How to develop the mind-set to cross the abyss between knowledge and action
• How to create not only more time but more energy in your day
• How to lose fat and gain muscle by eating more, not less
• How to trade hours of aerobics for minutes of weight training--with dramatic results
• How thousands of ordinary people have become extraordinary role models and how you can too

The principles of the Body-for-LIFE program are profoundly simple, but remarkably powerful. So pull out your calendar, mark 12 weeks from today, and allow yourself to experience the power of the information in this book. Then get ready to take your body, and your life, to a higher point than you may have ever dreamed possible.

Change Your Mind--Change Your Body--Change Your Life

Imagine, just 12 weeks from now, having the lean healthy body you've always wanted and not having to turn your life upside-down to get it.

Imagine having the energy to be at your peak from dawn to dusk, having the confidence to do all the things you've been putting off, having the certainty to make the right decision at the right time, knowing that you really do have the power to change--not just your body but anything in this world you set your mind to.

If this sounds unlikely, or even impossible, it's time you were introduced to Bill Phillips and his Body-for-LIFE program--it's time you join the legions of people who have reaped the benefits of his expert advice.

What People Are Saying

Russell Simpson
After completing the 12-week program, I not only achieved my physical goals, I rediscovered passion in my life. This became the primary driving force behind my success. I've become the person I've always wanted to be.
— (Russell Simpson, M.D., age 47 Physician; Huntsville, Alabama)

Christy Hammons
When I first read about Bill's program, I felt a sense of hope I hadn't felt before. I was inspired to take the first crucial step--I decided to change. Within weeks, I felt better, I looked better, and people started to notice. After 12 weeks, I lost 30 pounds, 3 inches off my waist, 4 inches off my hips, and dropped 3 sizes. My life couldn't be better. I'm not settling for mediocrity ever again.
— (Christy Hammons, Age 24 Accountant; Lexington, Kentucky)

Hank Johnson
While going through Bill Phillips' program, the physical changes I experienced were just the 'tip of the iceberg' for the changes in my mind-set. It empowered me and opened my eyes to the possibilities of change in all areas of my life.
— (Hank Johnson, Age 39 NASA Space Shuttle Engineer; Cape Canaveral, Florida)

John Elway
I admire Bill Phillips because he believes so much in what he's doing, and he's helped so many people, including me. The time I've spent with Bill over the last couple years has been tremendous for me. I feel better mentally and physically. I believe the more his message gets out, the better off everybody's going to be.
— (John Elway, Two-Time NFL World Champion)

Fred and Renee Scurti
When we discovered Bill Phillips, we realized we had been confronted with a simple decision, 'Change our lives or dig our own grave with a fork and knife.' After a few weeks on the program, our bodies were changing, but more than that, our relationship, our lives were changing.
— (Fred and Renee Scurti, ages 38 and 35, Sales Manager and Homemaker; Parker, Colorado)

Product Details

• ISBN: 0060193395
  
• ISBN-13: 9780060193393
• Format: Hardcover, 224pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: May 1999
• Sales Rank: 4,612

• Interviews & Essays
• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt

Interviews & Essays

1) What gave you the impetus to write the book?

It seems to me we're living in a time of "extreme capitalism," where the marketplace rules as never before. We're living in a time when almost everything (news, politics, advertising, the computer revolution) is a form of entertainment. And we're obviously living in a time when the culture generally, thanks to technology and the aging of the baby boomers and the end of the Cold War and feminism and a hundred other reasons, is in a state of thrilling, terrifying flux and newness. All those seemed rich, ripe terrains on which to stake out a big, realistic, funny, social novel. I hadn't seen contemporary business or a certain kind of modern marriage drawn very knowingly or interestingly in fiction, and I thought I might be able to do an entertaining job of it.

2) Set in the not so distant future, Turn of the Century has many futuristic inventions and events — such as computer games that incorporate biofeedback, minty-flavored Prozac for kids, civil war in Mexico. What new developments from the book do you think we'll actually see?

Of the three "inventions" you mention, one—the mint-flavored Prozac for children—-actually exists. I am thrilled that reviewers and reporters (you're not the first) assume some of the actual things in the book are fictional, and vice-versa. I think practically everything in the book could come to pass, and may. In fact, some of my inventions in earlier drafts did come to pass before I was finished, and I edited them out.

3) As a writer for The New Yorker and Time magazine, editor in chief of New York magazine, and co-creatorof Spy magazine, you've been writing and editing for years, but this is your first novel. How does writing fiction compare to nonfiction?

After 20 years of adhering scrupulously to facts, fiction-writing was discombobulating at first—I felt giddy, like gravity had changed, or as if I were committing adultery. In the end, I find writing fiction (and a 659-page book, as opposed to a 1000 or 10,000 word magazine piece) both vastly more difficult and more fun than writing non-fiction. But without those years of writing and editing week after week, I wouldn't have had the confidence in my craft to attempt a novel—nor, I don't think, the experiences worth transmuting into fiction.

4) What research did you do to be able to so realistically depict the business lives of your characters who work in television, the computer industry (both software executives and hackers), Wall Street ...?

I have some professional experience in television and online, but only some, so as I was beginning the book I spent weeks doing research in Seattle and Los Angeles and on Wall Street, hanging around with friends in the software and TV and financial businesses as they did they jobs, and asking lots and lots of stupid questions.

5) Where did you grow up? Your young children could live to see the turn of the next century — How do you think their experience and their adult lives will differ from yours?

I grew up in Omaha. And the distinct possibility that my daughters will live in the 22nd century is a fact I regularly astonish myself with. I can't pretend to have any idea what that world will be like. Well, I can pretend—in fact, at one point, this novel had an epilogue set on New Year's Eve 2099, with two of the three children in the book reminiscing about their lives and the 21st century. I do have a hunch that a hundred and two hundred years from now, the current epoch—1960-2010, say—will look pivotal.

6) Real people mingle with fictional characters in your novel. Does anyone in the book have a real-life counterpart (if you can tell us) and are you concerned about whether people will see themselves, rightly or wrongly, as the models for your characters?

In general, I am not one for doctrines, but I did begin this book with a doctrine about reality and invention—that is, I endeavored either to concoct wholly fictional people (and places and companies and TV shows and movies and inventions), or to use real people (and places and companies and TV shows and movies and inventions) as themselves. This is not a roman a clef, thinly veiled or otherwise. That said, I will confess that my good friend Jim Cramer, the financial writer and stock trader, bears a certain strong genetic resemblance to the character Ben Gould.

7) Turn of the Century highlights the cultural differences between New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Do you think these and other American places will come to resemble each other more in the faster-paced, more technologically-driven future, or will they maintain their distinct characters?

I think they will maintain their distinct characters, even as they become, in places, more alike. I think it's places like Omaha and Minneapolis and Houston and Atlanta that are more quickly becoming more alike—as well as more like NewYork, Seattle, and Los Angeles. And I think Washington (D.C., not State) is as close to irrelevant to the national life as it has been in this century.



copyright Kurt Andersen 1999

Forewords & Introductions

Read an Excerpt