Be Your Best: How Anyone can become Fit, Healthy and Confident Book

Be Your Best is a home fitness plan from super-athlete Sally Gunnell (OBE) that aims to work for real lives. Gunnell's intentions are undoubtedly good as she aims to help Mr and Mrs Ordinary get on the track to fitness and health. The chapter on Motivation sets the tone for the sections on exercise, eating and relaxing. The focus is by no means on diet-only (only one of the "real-life" participants actually loses weight) this is about making gradual changes to every aspect of your lifestyle. Sadly there's not enough of the inspirational about this book and even the realistic visuals end up being simply unflattering. Translating this retired athlete's phenomenal and undeniable motivation into the basis of a start-up health plan results in an insubstantial approach. Part of the problem here stems from forcing an American self-help theme onto a British day-time TV format and allocating a journalist to write what in the end amounts to an extended magazine article. Instead of for example telling us that "yoga is very calming" which we all know, it would have been far more interesting to learn how the only woman in history to have held all four gold medals concurrently interprets, and uses, a totally different physical discipline. While the reader is urged Be Your Best, Gunnell has not been given the opportunity to provide anywhere near her best. --Lorna VRead More