Book review – The Dolce diet – Living Lean
Mike Dolce is arguably the go to guy when it comes to
nutrition and making weight for mma fighters and as I have worked with quite a
few mma fighters in prep for their fights I admired how he had positioned himself
and his client base. However what put me off buying the book was what I’d read
on forums about it, that it was nothing of note and that many of Dolce’s claims
in the book about what he’d achieved were actually massively overblown and it
was mainly an ego flexing book and not a worthy nutrition book. Still, following
Dolce on twitter and Facebook I thought while away on a training camp I’d be
able to sit down and give it a good read (it took me a mere 2 hours!) and for only £6.23 on Kindle I chanced
it wouldn’t be a great loss and I’d maybe pick a few nuggets of advice I could
use or try myself, after all I’d read 3 weeks to shredded and liked some of the
principles such as mindfully goal setting and writing goals down to encourage progress,
both of which are good tools everyone dieting can utilise to good effect.
First of all it should be made clear that this book is not
specifically aimed at fighters at all, if anything it is merely a book for the
average person to who needs a nudge in the right direction or needs some fresh
diet ideas to kick processed foods out of their diet and just wants to lose weight, nothing wrong with that
right? Well it wouldn’t make a good book review if I wasn’t slightly honest
about just how I felt about it, would it.
So the book starts with Mike Dolce’s life story, from his
childhood and how he was inspired by the magazines featuring arnie, frank zane
et al and his family’s poor health to hit the gym. It’s here that the tone is
set, Mike Dolce reminds me of the kid who wanted to be liked by everyone, some
things may have happened but all stories you take with a rock of salt because
nobody is that awesome, but this book is about ‘Living Lean’ right so let’s not
dwell on my opinion of the author too much.
The book’s first 6 chapters are all about Dolce, I’ll save
you the time of reading them, he’s fricken awesome bro…. as he’d have you believe. As the book gets
to the real important bits of educating you on diet and helping you plan meals
around your daily activities, the paragraphs and chapters become smaller and
the content a little less catchy. All of a sudden it seems Mike Dolce ran out
of things to say.
The diet principles Dolce preaches are great though, however
they are nothing more than Paleo principles and we all know that cutting out
processed foods is a very positive step to losing weight and you must be
creative with food if you’re to ‘live lean’ as boredom easily overrides good
health in nutrition these days, hence we reach for a high fat/high sugar snack
all too often. Eating clean is a huge part of controlling calories BUT Dolce
like many others states calories don’t count. This is where it becomes obvious
this book is not aimed at anyone competing in sports at all, calories really do
count if you’ve got to make a specific weight (that’s for another article
though). Switching from eating what is now a standard diet for most people to
the principles Dolce instils will help you lose weight, it will make you feel
better physically and mentally too because you’ll be taking control back of your diet and eating much better foods. But that’s a no brainer surely, this is
nothing new. Stop eating crap and prepare your meals, cook them yourself and
eat a wide variety and you will function better than if you ate highly
processed foods.
The meal plans outlined in the book are scarce, there’s just
the 1. So that’s one meal plan for every person reading it, the same meal plan
for those 100lbs overweight and the one’s 10lbs overweight. That ignores so
many variables you need to consider when dieting, added to the fact he gives
you no inclination on how to manipulate these factors and again it shows the
real information needed is a little light. It’s the same with the recipes,
although it’s now apparent why this is so as Dolce has released a new book
titled ‘Living Lean – Cookbook’ with all of his recipes in them, which you're expected to buy, the recipes however will be easy to find on the many Paleo blogs.
So on to the training section, which is quite comprehensive,
however for anyone that trains skip to the dumbbell deadlift photo demonstration
for a quick look at what’s in store!
The routine’s look simple enough, there’s reference to an
mma HIIT training sessions which must have been thrown in there to add some
credibility. It doesn’t though. The training plans are nothing new, easy to
follow and will get results to a certain extent as most readers will be sedentary and any sort of training os better than no training, just ask the P90X fans about that. in Living Lean however there’s no overall
training plan or advice on how to structure your week. There’s also zero
mention of pre or post workout nutrition which I find really odd considering
the proven scientific research out there on these hotly debated areas of
performance nutrition and Dolce’s positioning in MMA.
So there you have it, my view on Mike Dolce’s Living Lean
book. There are some great principles for the average person in there but
that’s it, there’s not much you can actually take from the book. Eat healthy
non-processed foods and get creative in the kitchen, that’s about it.
The rest is about Mike himself, who obviously likes himself
and is proud of what he’s done, maybe if he didn’t choose this path he would be
selling second hand cars, that’s the impression I get of him.
I would recommend ‘The
Paleo diet for athletes: a nutritional formula for peak athletic performance’
for fighters or athletes who are looking to drop weight and get in shape. This is
a much better resource than the dolce diet.
For anyone else looking to eat well based on the same
principles as Mike Dolce then look no further than the 1000’s of blogs out
there on the Paleo principles of eating. Rob Wolff would be a great start point.
As always I welcome your comments.
Next up will be The Renegade Diet by Jason Ferruggia
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