Thin In 10 Weigh-Loss Plan Review Part 1

 

What it is and why I read it

Thin In 10 Weight-Loss Plan is a book written by Jessica Smith and Liz Neporent. I've been doing a lot of Jessica Smith workouts lately, and I thought it was time to finally read her book. The book is 204 pages long and includes a DVD with some workouts on it. The book contains an eating plan as well as an exercise plan. The premise of the book is that you can work on losing weight 10 minutes at a time. It's NOT about only putting in 10 minutes a day. It's about finding 10 minutes at a time to lose weight. The workouts are set for 10 minutes and you start out with one a day, but you build up to 30 and 40 minute workouts. The meals in the book can be prepared in 10 minutes or less. Since everyone is so busy these days, this is a great concept. You don't have to find an hour to workout and you don't need to spend an entire Sunday preparing food for the week. I love this concept.

The Chapters

Part 1: The Thin in 10 Exercise Plan

Chapter 1: Your 10 Minute Exercise Plan

Chapter 2: The 10-Minute Walk

Chapter 3: Cardio QUICK

Chapter 4: Simple Strength

Chapter 5: The 10-Minute Total Body Circuit

Chapter 6: Core & More

Chapter 7: The 10-Minute Stretch

The Quiz

In this section, you take a quiz to find out your starting point. When I took the quiz, it said that I was a Novice. It gave me a workout plan for up to 20 minutes per day 7 days per week. I can workout for well over 20 minutes in a day, but I've yet to convince myself to get some exercise on the weekends. I plan to go on walks, but something always happens and we haven't gotten many of the hikes done yet this year. The workout plan suggested is a 10 minute walk per day, but not a leisurely walk. This thing is pretty intense. It also gave a set plan for a 10 minute strength training workout, a 10 minute Core & More program, a 10 Minute stretch twice in the week and a 10 minute cardio routine. There were two days with just the 10 minute walk. The book lays out some exercises, but it also has a DVD so you've got two different sets of exercises to pick from for the different routines in the suggested plan. She does say not to go backwards though. So if you're already exercising an hour per day, but your quiz results put you at Novice, you shouldn't drop down to the 10 to 20 minutes per day. If you get bored with the book and DVD exercises, you can also check out her website www.jessicasmithtv.com for a lot more 10 minute programs. 

Goals

You're also supposed to set goals in this section. I'm never really good at this part. I know that I want to lose 150 pounds. Once I get there, I'll decide if I want to lose more weight. I'm going to set down some goals right now though even thought I hate this aspect of weight loss. The book gives you instructions on how to set SMART goals. Here are my big goals. I need to work on some smaller goals.

I want to lose 150 pounds.
I want to wear size 10 jeans again.
I want to hike to all of the waterfalls in Central Oregon and the Gorge.
I want to hike to the top of South Sister.

The Exercises

The exercises in the book are a bit intimidating for me. I have 150 pounds to lose, so doing any exercise that uses my own body weight as the resistance is a bit scary. I can bounce around the living room without a problem. I can push weight around at the gym without a problem. Planking, push ups and lunges are just really hard for me. I'm going to spend two weeks working on the exercise plan in the book, but I can't start it just yet. I have a Leslie Sansone DVD in transit at the library and I'll only have 7 days with it. I have plans for it that will take up the whole 7 days! After I'm done with that DVD, I'll work on the exercises from the book and the DVD that came with it. 

Part 2: The Thin in 10 Meal Plan

Chapter 8: Your 10-Minute or Less Meal Plan

Chapter 9: Breakfast in 10 Minutes or Less

Chapter 10: Lunch in 10 Minutes or Less

Chapter 11: Dinner in 10 Minutes or Less

Chapter 12: Discretionary Calories

I was really excited to get to this section. I had set out to cook two meals per week, but we ran into a bit of a financial mess and the meals that I was finding were just too costly to continue making, so I stopped making them a couple weeks ago. I noticed that I haven't had as much success with weight loss since that point. I need to get back to cooking again, but it's just so time consuming for me to find a recipe and then get the ingredients and then cook the meal. 

The concept of these meals that only take 10 minutes to cook was very important to me. However, the meals were not all that I had hoped for and more. I'm still going to try some of them, but I'm trying to get into a more whole foods type of diet, and a lot of the meals had convenience type foods in them. Several of them had pre-made chicken nuggets, English muffins and frozen pancakes. I wish I had read this book back in January, because I think I would have found the menu a bit more of a step in the right direction than a step backwards like I do now. I do like that the recipes are set up for one serving. I also liked that they didn't have rare and expensive ingredients. 

The diet plan is set up with 1500 calories for women and a little more for men. I'm not a huge fan of diets that don't give extra calories to larger people. Larger people burn more calories just being alive, but the book doesn't give any concessions for that in the diet. It also doesn't talk about mixing up the calories until the very end of the book when it talks about plateaus. It does talk about getting away from the Burn and Earn mentality. The Burn and Earn mentality was something I actually learned while I did Weight Watchers several years ago. I like Burn and Earn. I like the option of being able to work harder all week in order to get to eat ice cream on the weekend, but this concept is a no-no in the book. When I do the exercise plan from the book, I'll also do the eating plan, or at least I'll try it.

Part 3: Living the Thin In 10 Life

Chapter 13: How to Burn (or Trim) Extra Calories Every Day

Chapter 14: Skinny Sleep

Chapter 15: It's Not Just Physical: The Mental Side of Weight Loss

Final Thoughts

I liked Chapter 13 in this book. It's something that I've talked about in the blog before, but I can't remember where, so I can't link to it. I bought a rocking footrest for my office at work. When I sit around typing, I try to rock my feet on the footrest to burn some bonus calories. When I'm standing at the copier, I do side steps instead of just standing there. When I'm talking to someone in the office, I try to shift my weight from side to side to get some extra calories burned. I have a hair clip on the couch, and today while my in-laws were visiting, I put my fingers between the teeth and kept opening and closing the hair clip. I have no idea if it burned enough to register on my BodyMedia Link device, but I know it was still doing more than just sitting here doing nothing. 

My Overall Thoughts

I really like the concepts in this book and look forward to trying out the workouts and the eating plan. I think this is a great book for anyone beginning an exercise and diet plan. I think this book is a much better book to start with from scratch than something like Dolvett Quince's The 3-1-2-1 Diet. This is partly because Thin in 10 is a much easier book to get through. It's a lot shorter and the writing is just more interesting. However, there are a lot of references to studies done on weight loss and diet. I started to tune those out since I am very skeptical about more studies. Everyone can skew the data to their way of thinking, so I don't give much credence to "studies." After I do the eating and exercise plan for a couple weeks, I'll post another review with information about my success or failures.