FitSugar

Book Review: Half-Assed by Jennette Fulda

FitSugar — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:30:00 -0700

The clever title and cover image of Half-Assed ($15.95) brought more than a delighted half-smirk to my face. After reading the tag line "Think the last 20 pounds are the hardest? Try the last 200," I realized that the author was standing in one of the pant legs of pants she used to fit into. Then I was amazed. I never thought a weightloss memoir would be a page turner, but this book certainly was. Fulda is funny and insightful, and the book is littered with gems like: "Being fat is like having a built-in asshole detector." She compares the process of building muscle by lifting weights, the destroy and rebuild cycles, to the many incarnations of Rome. And we all know that Rome wasn't built in a day.

Her path to losing weight is not a direct one. Muffins and hormones can create mundane detours, but she fights them off. What I enjoyed most about the book was Fulda's realization that she enjoyed cooking and exercising, that eating well and working out made her actually feel better. She experiments with star fruit and flax seeds. She starts running and takes up Pilates. She writes "Weight loss itself was a somewhat empty reward. All the cool things I could do because of my new fitness and health were the real prize."

At the beginning of Half-Assed, Fulda weight 372 pounds, and by the end she is down 200 pounds but still shy of her goal weight. Although the book is satisfyingly written, you do end up wanting more and because Fulda still writes her Half of Me blog, you can still keep up with her. Get her book here.

Source

Trend Alert: Antidiet Diet Books

FitSugar — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:00:00 -0700

Move over, Atkins and South Beach: antidiet books are the new diet books. Lately I've noticed a slew of what might be called weight management, rather than weight loss, books landing on my desk, reinforcing the ever-growing sentiment that diets, at least in the traditional sense, don't work. But changing your eating habits does.

People like Maria Langer, who I heard interviewed on NPR the other day, are admitting that the diet books they bought over the years turned out to be a waste of money. But the publishing industry is filling the void with books about how to stop dieting and keep off the weight, among them Naturally Thin: Unleash Your Skinnygirl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting by Real Housewives star Bethenny Frankel and The Big Skinny, an instructive memoir from a woman who learned to keep off the pounds without dieting. For more on the trend, read more.

Other very recent additions include The Skinny by Louis J. Aronne and Master Your Metabolism by Jillian Michaels (stay tuned for more on that), both of which purport that managing your body's chemistry and metabolism is far more effective than dieting. Similarly, some of my favorite food books of the past year, including The Daily Fix by Alexa Fishback, have focused not on short-term fixes but on changing your eating habits for the better, for good.

I'd even put in this category Michael Pollan's books The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, which have changed many people's eating habits more than any old diet book could. What's your favorite antidiet diet book?

Weekend Reading: Master Your Metabolism by Jillian Michaels

FitSugar — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 03:30:00 -0700

The key to mastering your metabolism, according to the new book by Jillian Michaels? Hormones! But not in the way you normally think of hormones.

In Master Your Metabolism: The 3 Diet Secrets to Naturally Balancing Your Hormones For a Hot and Healthy Body!, the Biggest Loser trainer explains how the myriad hormones that make up your endocrine system - including cortisol, ghrelin, testosterone, and leptin - work to keep your body healthy and balanced.

One of the new anti-diet books, this incredibly detailed guide combines personal memoir, serious science, and healthy eating recommendations to shed light on how artificial additives and other external factors can sabotage our weight-loss efforts. The book starts out incredibly academic, defining the various hormones and how they work; it was too much scientific jargon for me. But after wading through that I learned a lot. To find out what, read more.

Michaels's basic premise is that the toxins in processed foods, nonorganic produce, prescription medications, and the environment can throw our hormones out of whack, wreaking havoc on our systems. She writes, "Any and every body function you can imagine is controlled by your hormones." Her "three diet secrets" divide the book into three phases: removing these toxins from your life, replacing them with healthy foods, and rebalancing your hormones through diet, sleep, and exercise.

She offers a strict and simple meal plan that involves eating every four hours and tells you how to look at all the labels in your pantry and toss out the really bad stuff. She also acknowledges that we can't eat perfectly all the time and offers suggestions for good but not great foods. Along the way, she adds personal touches, like memories of being an overweight kid and confessing that she hates to exercise (which I have a hard time believing).

I like how the book offers different reasons for eating healthy than the ones we're used to hearing. It really made me think about how bad junk food really is and how every decision about what we put in our bodies has a ripple effect. This certainly isn't a book you can absorb with a quick skim; it's very dense with information. But I learned a great deal reading it and plan to return to it as a reference.