Remember my review of the Eat Clean Diet by Tosca Reno? If you don’t, let me tell ya that she’s a woman who in her 40’s dropped 60 pounds by eating clean and exercising, and then went on to become a fitness model at the age of 45 – goes to show that it’s never too late to get in tip-top shape!

Well besides her Eat Clean Diet (and cookbook), she also has, you guessed it, the Eat Clean Workout.

This book was sent to me by the publisher who asked if I’d be interested in reviewing it because I write about how I’m eating clean, but in case you don’t already know this I give you my own opinion of whatever the topic is that I write about here at Fearless Fat Loss, so if there’s something I don’t like then I do pass that along, too.

The Eat-Clean Diet Workout

The Eat-Clean Diet Workout book is chock full of exercises that you can do with free weights and a flat bench. I don’t have a bench but I do have free weights, and I improvised with the bench exercises (more on that below).

What’s really neat about the book is that besides all of the content inside of it, you also get a 30-minute workout DVD along with it, the EZ Dumbell Workout. I hopped on the opportunity to use that right away. 😉

The workout consists of 9 exercises, which took me about 45 minutes to complete because I kept rewinding the DVD. For the exercises that required a bench (like the single arm dumbell rows) I used a kitchen chair with padding for my leg. It’s not ideal and you don’t really get the form with some of the exercises you’re supposed to with the bench, but I wanted to be creative and do what I could to do the full workout. The best thing though, especially to avoid injury, is to do them with the recommended equipment.

My Favorite (& Toughest!) Exercise

The biggest thing that I got out of the DVD workout was a simple yet powerful ab exercise (toes to ceiling exercise) that you do on the floor – I laid on the floor on my workout mat, lower back pressed against the floor, extended both legs straight up in the air to create a 90 degree angle with my body, and proceeded to lift my toes toward the ceiling using only my abs. Oh my gosh, was that ever hard, and I didn’t raise my backside up very far off the mat.

Nope, I don’t have a rock hard core, that’s why I’m working out! 🙂 So if you are already in fabulous shape this book might be too easy for you (and you probably already know all of these exercises), but if you’re like me, just a regular person who is shaping up and getting fit, then I think you could benefit from this book. You can do the exercises at home if you have the equipment or if you already belong to a gym then you’re all set since you can use their equipment.

This Exercise May Not Be For You

I don’t like are lunges, and there are 2 lunge exercises on the DVD. I think they’re dangerous for the knees because if you don’t do them correctly you could really hurt yourself (and I need my knees for skiing 😉 ), but maybe that’s just because of my experience with them. I’d recommend that you learn how to do lunges correctly, one-on-one with a personal trainer, and then you can decide whether or not they’re a good exercise for you.

I’ve focused on the DVD workout in this post however there’s a lot more to the book than just the DVD. In the book Tosca includes machine workouts, bench presses, how to keep track of your workouts so that you keep increasing reps and intensity over time, and more. She does throw in a bit about how eating clean is 80% of the component of gaining the shape that you want, however most of that is covered in her Eat Clean Diet book.

The Eat-Clean Diet Workout Journal

Tosca also offers a separate book, The Eat-Clean Diet Workout Journal, which would be a good companion to her Eat-Clean Diet Workout. This is the journal that she flips through in the DVD workout, the journal she suggests using to keep track of your routines. You can find both of them on Amazon:

What was really neat about doing Tosca’s exercises was that I learned how to do several of the exercises with free weights that I currently do with my resistance bands. So, if one of my bands ever broke I could use my free weights, or I could use free weights for a change once in awhile. If I were going to really get into free weights though, I’d need to get a bench.

What about you? Do you prefer free weights, machines, resistance bands, or something else? Are you a serious weight lifter, or are you into building muscle tone and strength for your overall health and well-being?