HGV Man Review

By WLR Staff, by John Litchfield

Now this is something of a rarity. While the shelves seem packed with books and magazines aimed primarily at helping women to lose weight and improve their health, little attention has been paid to helping us blokes.

This may be that it is still not seen as “the done thing” for a man to be health conscious or to worry about the excess baggage he’s carrying around his waist. However, when 65.4% of men in the U.K are now overweight and obesity in men has rocketed to 21% from just 6% in 1980, many are ignoring this stigma and are looking to improve their lifestyle to correct or stop the onset of ill health.

If you fall into this category, this new Haynes title, written in the style of their successful series of car maintenance manuals could well be the best way to start you off on the right road.

Packed with sound advice and information, HGV Man has been written by Dr.Ian Banks, President of the Men’s Health Forum, and it is worth noting that while compiling this book, he lost 3 stone himself.

Rather than being a book purely about how to lose weight, HGV Man has a sizeable section on diseases and other medical problems that can be caused by being overweight and from leading an unhealthy lifestyle, helping motivate the reader to steer away from the greasy takeaways and towards healthier options. There is also advice on increasing your exercise level, particularly for those of us who may have been inactive for some time and need to start slowly.

One flaw may be that the book contains too much information and not all of it will be of interest to every reader. If you’re just looking to do an oil change, there’s no point in reading the section of your car manual on how to fix your carburettor. If you find yourself reading something that doesn’t seem relevant to the changes you want to make in your life right now, skim ahead and you’re bound to find something that is. Once you’ve fixed a couple of aspects of your lifestyle, you can always go back later and look at the rest.

So whether you are looking at improving your fuel efficiency, losing a little luggage from the boot or getting a better performance out of your engine, this could be just what you are looking for to get you running more smoothly.