Thank you to Erin Stern, DK, Alpha Publishing, and NetGalley for this advanced reader copy for an honest review of “The Bodybuilder’s Kitchen.”

A heavy weightlifter of over three years now, I get leery on which lifting books, advice or cookbooks, I’m willing to picking. Especially because most of them are by men, and thus, are only about 25% applicable to me, my present, and my future goals. So, you can imagine how fast I snapped this book up the moment I saw it was written by a female bodybuilder.

I wanted to like this book so much more than I ended up liking it. I was so excited to receive the notification of being accepted for review and for getting the book down, but neither of my perusals through it turned up much for me. I like that she includes some early persona anecdotal information, but the rest is a little bland.

The 5 full-week plans are nice, and I do like how widely she uses her three-tier scale on every one of the recipes, but for a book being sold in ‘Cooking, Food, & Wine’ and not being touted as an exercise book, it’s highly lacking in a lot of helpful notes a cook book might. It’s definitely missing having more examples of what her dishes look like, or even notes about how to change up more than a handful of them. ( )