The NOVA Regimen: A Guide to Losing Fat and Building Muscle with Autoimmune Disease

This book was easy to read, very informative and very well written. She speaks from a place of personal experience and ties it together with research. I love how it focuses on fitness and not just nutrition. Living healthy is a lifestyle change that will completely turn one's life around for the better! We all can make positive changes, even if we have an autoimmune issue. This will help and teach many people how to make these changes! Excellent book!

This book is so well written and is an excellent resource and I would highly recommend it! I think this book will make all the readers more grateful for their circumstances and will enable them to develop an understanding of adjustments that are crucial to leading a healthy and balanced life. It would also make an excellent gift if you know someone who is suffering from an autoimmune condition and is looking for a new way to manage their symptoms and heal their bodies.

I highly recommend this book for anyone suffering from an autoimmune disease as well as anyone wanting to improve their overall health. The NOVA Regimen offers three tiers allowing for a variety of abilities. This book goes in depth with its four pillars-nutrition, training, recovery, and supplementation. It is well researched and well written. It even offers recipes. A fabulous book for all!

As I mentioned, I didn't want to put the book down. The author writes in such a personal/relatable way. I found it to be profound, intelligent, and fact based. There is something in it for everybody, whether you have an autoimmune issue or not. Thank you for opening up and telling about your life in order to help others! Highly recommend!

I found the book to be quite easily read and that the topics were on point and made for the reader to understand the importance of being accountable for healthy decisions. She has a way of making the reader feel personally connected to the plan and that there are no shortcuts to being healthy. This is a definite addition to my book collection and is a must read!

Honestly,I was pleasantly surprised. The program in this book is brilliant. If we all followed the nutrition and exercise guidance in it, we would be better for it. There is so much in here. There is a program for me, an elderly woman, and programs for my kids and grandkids who are athletes. There is literally something for everyone, especially those who struggle with chronic inflammation and pain. And I love that every statement is backed up with a study, so I trust its legitimacy. Lending it to my besty who suffers from Lupus asap.

For me this was a great find. I always thought that I can't do much exercise with my autoimmune issues. But here this book makes a strong case why that's just not true. Most books Ive come across for people with autoimmune problems are all about nutrition and diets. There's basically nothing about fitness. Until I found this. I am so eager to try out the regiment. The inspiring story of the author is a pretty good motivation to get off my bum and do it.

This book is well written, very easy to read, and fill with relatable information. The author put their knowledge together with their passion for healthy living. This book is filled with great info, both personal to the author and researched based. You won't find any fad diet information here. This is a lifestyle change for everlasting results. Definitely, a must-read.

An interesting book. The author's story is interesting, but it is also sometimes harrowing. I am left wondering if she ever thought she might have Clinical Depression or even PTSD. I am not a doctor and know very little about Auto-Immune disorders [AD] although I have had friends with Auto-Immune-related health conditions, as well as others with thyroid problems, etc. I have got this book, but have not read it all. I will not comment on the Auto-Immune specific claims, as I do not know enough to comment either way.I do know something about fitness and so would want to comment in general. The author recommends what she calls ''High-Intensity Resistance and Strength Training" where the focus is on ''Intensity" as defined by Sports Science and Strength Training - she distinguishes this from other methods, such as ''High-Intensity Interval Training" among others, where 'Intensity'' refers to extreme effort. So she is not arguing for all-out, make you vomit, training, but for lower volume work with heavier weights. That seems sensible, as long as the loads are not too heavy, since low rep sets are not as systemically/metabolically challenging. However, she says you should not go below 5 to 6 reps or above 20. The templates provided actually seem to end up around 12 to 15 reps and she advises advanced techniques, such as giant sets and drop sets, which are used in bodybuilding to push up the volume and the time under tension. They also bring the trainee to or even beyond failure. This is despite saying that failure should be avoided. The author has a bodybuilding-type background, but even within that world her rep ranges and volumes do not come across as low and the necessary loads are not that high intensity (even if you allow that women can perform more reps at any given percentage of max.) One could pick somewhat heavier weights and deliberately limit reps, so as to avoid failure and build up load and volume over time.At times, she refers to a 'general consensus' for her recommendations, but any look at the strength training literature shows that her 'consensus' may only exist among a small segment of the training population. To my eye, her templates look very packed with work and would be daunting to a healthy beginner. It is possible to get strength benefits from a very much reduced set of exercises and fairly low volumes. As the load gets heavier, some hypertrophy will occur, even if the aim is not to add muscle and one could always add a small volume of slightly higher rep work for muscle shape. In my opinion, this seems like a lot to recover from.When it comes to cardio/aerobic training, she recommends medium intensity and around 15-25 minutes of training and seems to want to avoid very high heart-rate training. This makes sense if the idea is to provide good stimulus and avoid over-stressing the system. However, the general consensus is that it takes a longish period of low intensity working out to establish an aerobic base and 30 mins is the lower limit for a single session. That does not mean that shorter sessions would not do good, but one should aim for 30 mins as the target. Interestingly, the recommendation is 30 mins at low (not medium) intensity, so that makes the workout easier and more doable.Even healthy and fit runners are supposed to focus primarily on lower-intensity endurance work. 40 years ago, one recommendation was to alternate very slow days - below 70% of max HR - with very fast, maximum effort days. Even very fit runners may have to take it very easy to keep their heart rate at this level. More recently, the emphasis has swung to even more days of easy work and only 20% hard work. The reason for this is that many medium intensity workouts were just a little too hard and the athletes were not recovering enough to do any really hard work. For competitive runners, the easy sessions meant that they were fully recovered for their race-pace and fast work.For someone with a disability, poor recovery or perhaps, AD, the fact that lower effort work is positively recommended should be welcome, since they can use those days to recover from their harder days. For such a person, instead of alternating very low intensity with maximum intensity, they could alternate very low or low intensity with a medium pace, such as the author recommends. If you do not have access to a Heart Rate Monitor or disability or illness means you do not have an accurate maximum heart rate to base your training on, the talk test is a good basic guide. A very easy session should mean no difficulty having a conversation or, if you are alone, singing as you walk, a medium session might mean that you can speak fairly comfortably in short to medium sentences. If you begin to find it hard to speak while exercising, you might want to slow down. The only time the talk test might prove difficult is if you are swimming and concentrating on doing a correct stroke. I have known people carry on a conversation during an easy swim, however, but they were keeping their heads well out of the water. That may not be good for your neck and shoulders.As I say, I have not finished this yet. I feel that it might be a little too complicated for most people and if they share the author's tendency to overdo things, it might be a good idea to limit the volume and keep to brief workouts - deloading or even dropping back to a lighter load, every now and again, along with a focus on easier cardio combined with regular, but infrequent, medium-paced runs. At times, the author seems to have come near to burn out and certain styles of training will only exacerbate the problem, hence my recommendations to keep weight training brief and to deload or wave the loads occasionally. It is a bodybuilding fallacy that progressive overload should always mean doing more (even with deloads). Strength athletes employ deloads within their training phases, but they also drop back and work up from lighter loads to heavier as a normal part of life. I know the author says something like this, but the bodybuilding emphasis on more weight or more reps has a tendency to shout louder.While you should not spend all the time taking it easier or working on recovery, low intensity cardio has the effect of turning on the parasympathetic system - which calms the body and reduces stress. Whereas, a lot of higher intensity work and trying to be constantly on the go, turns on the sympathetic nervous system. This is high alert, 'flight or fight' mode and it is this kind of response to stress which is believed to be behind a lot of inflammatory illness, such as metabolic syndrome, etc. I admire the author's commitment to active fitness and not just taking the easy path, but it does not seem to be a good idea to push too hard, too often, esp. if that actually means missing more training days.I think this book is good, but the templates could have been much more varied and to be quite honest, simpler and easier to read. As it is, they are almost impossible to view, even using the Kindle's expanded view function.