Book Review: Body With Soul

I recently read Randy Jackson's Body with Soul. This book was a quick read. I enjoyed the book mostly because he "kept is real". So real that Dawg was frequently used in the book. What I liked about it compared to other diet books, he actually had commentary from real doctors, dietitian, and personal trainers. He also stated that even though he had the weight loss surgery it took a lot of personal effort to get to the thin we see now on American Idol. He also talked about how people can get weight loss in a slow and steady fashion. So I felt for an at home reader, following him and his teams suggestions would leave you more satisfied then a 30 day cleanse type book.

Book Review: True You: A Journey to Finding and Loving Yourself

True You was a quick read. It is not a tell all book. She barely mentions her second marriage, she states for legal reasons. The premise of the book is that Janet is just like you and her insecurities and low self esteem caused her to have disordered eating which generally equaled stave/binge patterns. She tells her story as well as stories of fans who had similar issues and overcame his/her issues after listening to a Janet song. She does have her nutritionist do the afterward and he discusses the medical aspects of losing weight. His top tips:

• Stop dieting and change your lifestyle habits


• Get a medical evaluation before you start the new lifestyle, because the damage of past habits, could hinder weight lost of the new habits


• Also that proper sleep and nutritious foods are just as if not more important then exercise

The book also has some recipes with nutrition info mapped out for each recipe.

I would recommend this book.

Book Review: Badass

Badass: A Hard-Earned Guide to Living Life with Style and (the Right) Attitude by Shannen Doherty (Hardcover - Nov 2, 2010)

This was a tongue-in-check self help guide. The main focus points are:

• ownership of actions
• integrity
• self-esteem
• self-respect

The book is full of pictures of Shannen and top 10 lists. So it was a quick easy read.

The book was inspirational to me. It gave me the idea not to take myself so seriously. It endorsed my life internal dialogue of "live your life with our regrets".

I respect her take on the book by only describing her experience and not doing a tell all book about her ex-cast mates.

Book Review: Getting the Pretty Back

Well, Molly Ringwald of 80's fame has written a book. It is call Getting the Pretty Back: Friendship, Family, and Finding the Perfect Lipstick . This was a very good book. In this book she describes how women can reclaim there "Pretty". She defines the "Pretty" in terms of a inner beauty that is seen through a woman's actions and choices.

This book has help me revisit things I did when I was "single and fancy free" like my own private dance parties and trying own my my clothes creating outfits. These are the things I had given up for the sake of being a mature adult women. Yet, she suggests bringing these things back in order to make you current life circumstances enjoyable and bearable.

Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life

Yesterday I came home to find a shabby little Amazon.com box on the porch (it was battered by the mail-system due to a postal mix-up on the home front). In that shabby little box was a bright happy jewel: "Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life" a text I hope to review in the coming weeks regarding mindful eating and mindful living. I've been wanting to start a meditation practice that helps me deal with food anxiety (as well as general anxiety), so hopefully the tools offered in this text will help me with this enterprise. The authors, Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk, Nobel Prize winner and peace activist and Lilian Cheung, director of Harvard University's Health Promotion and Communication program in the Department of Public Health, are well known and respected in their fields, so this won't be some flim-flam cliche-strewn book, hopefully. I'll let you know in the coming weeks!

Book Recomendations for Running

Health Series: Fat Burning Exercises for Energy & Weight Loss by Jane Wake is a book that includes a Walk to Run Program. It is a 6 week program. If you do the Core and Strength Exercise in the book also it will help you build the muscles you will need for effective running.

I did this program when I was 240 lbs. I had to stop at weeks because the increasing running activies was causing trouble for my knees and I had to go back to walking.


How to start running with 10 easy steps from Time to Run is for the complete non -runner. These tips include warnings like:

• Don't run two days in a row for the first two months. Give your muscles and tendons a chance to adapt to running.
• Walk before you run! For the first four weeks you should have a 5-15 minute warm-up walk before breaking into a trot, followed by a warm-down stroll.
• Run for time, not distance.
• Be patient! Don't be in a hurry to enter road races, etc., no matter how much your friends pressurise you. Wait until you can run at least 30 minutes without resting before lining up for that first 5km fun run.

Intermediate Running For Weight Loss: Running Program is from Womens Health but suggests you be a 30 minute at a time runner before attempting.

Book Review: What I Cannot Change

I just finished reading What I Cannot Change by LeAnn Rimes and Darrell Brown. It is an inspirational book. It is a perfect gift for someone having a hard time. The first two chapters of the book describe the feelings that LeAnn Rimes and Darrell Brown went through that inspired them to write the song What I Cannot Change. The remain chapters are postings form the What I Cannot Change Website . The postings are broken down into the following categories: Sobriety, Health, Growth, Life, Family & Friends, Depression, and Faith.

This books motivation can also help in a weight loss journey. You cannot change your genetic makeup but you can change what you eat and when you exercise.

Book Review: Not Becoming My Mother

Not Becoming My Mother by Ruth Reichl is a cute interesting book. At about 105 pages it is a quick read. The book discusses how one woman changes her perception of her understanding of her mother after reading her mother's letters and journal entries after she is dead. The author describes how her mother provided and anti-example of what type of women to be.

This book helped me appreciate my mother a little more. I don't have the best relationship with my mother. There are was no cookie baking and hugs in my house. Yet my mother did produce a good citizen and a good solider. In many ways I live my life as the Soldier's Creed, because that was one thing my mother did well, be a soldier, . So America can be happy for that. So in away, my good citizenship lessons have served me more in my travels then I think cookie baking and hugs ever would have.

Book Review: How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life

How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life by Kirstie Alley is her book about the year before she did Jenny Craig. It was a very funny book.

She talks about her Cocaine abuse. She talks about the weight loss benefits of the drug. Yet, she really talks about the pain it brings with it, unlike Valerie Bertinelli did in her book. Kirstie Alley says the a Dianetics: The Modern Science Of Mental Health and Scientology got her off cocaine after one session. She also states that it help her get to the root of her weight gain. She says the weight started to come on after her miscarriage.

Well since this book is pre-Jenny Craig we know that something went wrong in her journey since she gained the weight back.

In my opinion, this book is very funny but not very deep. So if you have the time pick it up. If you don't your aren't missing great wisdom.

Book Review: Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters

I just finished reading Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters by Nancy Pelosi and Amy Hill Hearth. The book was a quick read about 170 pages. Nancy Pelosi tells just the service facts of her life. No deep family secrets here. She mostly talks about a lot of the catch phrase that she clung to to get where she is now such as:

"Don't agonize, organize"
"Do it for the 1 in 5" - Referring to the one in five children who go hunger in America.
"Know your power"
"The plural of anecdotes is not data"

Yet, what I like mosted about the book is her recognition of working mothers in politics. She said for her it was less of a burden because her youngest was high school jr. when she ran for congress. She acknowledge that it would have been harder if she still had little ones. Yet, she did acknowledge that women who started younger got further faster. Her final commentary on the issue was whatever path you chose. Chose it for yourself and be happy with your decision.

Book Review: High On Arrival

High On Arrival by Mackenzie Phillips was a very honset straight forward book. She also talks about being on the Cocaine Diet. Yet, she actually referes to it as a drug problem unlike Valerie Bertinelli. Mackenzie Phillips has gone through a lot in her life and she faced up to a lot of those things in this book. This is a great read if you want to see how far to the bottom someone can go. Yet, please avoid this book if you are in recovery. Her vivid descriptions of drug use maybe a trigger to you.

Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time

We at FFFB are often discussing Valerie Bertinelli. In order to be fair, I wanted to read more about her. So I read her book. Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time . She is so out of touch with reality. I felt that she spent the whole book talking about other peoples problems and not seeing her part in it. She talks about being on the "Cocaine Diet" but she did not believe that it was an eating disorder, disordered eating, or a drug problem. She talks about doing drugs with Mackenzie Phillips, but describes how she distances herself from her after the arrest. She kept saying she was such a good person and so thankful for her parents rules even though she constantally talks about breaking those rules.

The one thing I did learn from book that I always suspected, Jenny Craig recruits they celebrity spoke people and pays them a lot of money. She said she got with Jenny Craig threw her agent even though she knew Kirstie Alley from her kids school.

Wynonna Judd: Coming Home to Myself

Wynonna Judd: Coming Home to Myself is an excellent book. It has really changed my perspective on my on life. She is very honest in the book. She talks about how in order for her life to change, she had to learn and change her "life script". She discusses her weight issues, but she does it from a point of physical and psychological healthy versus the bikini challenge train of thought.

I also like how she talks about how your dysfunction in food, spending, and relationships can all show up in other areas of your life such as weight.

She is a big advocate for life coaches, medication, and therapy to get her where she is today.

So even if you aren't into country music this book is still an excellent book if you are a woman seeking 'balance' in your life.

Fat Girl: A True Story

Fat Girl: A True Story by Judith Moore is a book you can pass on by.

Here is the Amazon Review
Judith Moore's breathtakingly frank memoir, Fat Girl, is not for the faint of heart. It packs more emotional punch in its slight 196 pages than any doorstopper confessional. But the author warns us in her introduction of what's to come, and she consistently delivers. "Narrators of first-person claptrap like this often greet the reader at the door with moist hugs and complaisant kisses," Moore advises us bluntly. "I won't. I will not endear myself. I won't put on airs. I am not that pleasant. The older I get the less pleasant I am. I mistrust real-life stories that conclude on a triumphant note.... This is a story about an unhappy fat girl who became a fat woman who was happy and unhappy." With that, Moore unflinchingly leads us backward into a heartbreaking childhood marked by obesity, parental abuse, sexual assault, and the expected schoolyard bullying. What makes Fat Girl especially harrowing, though, is Moore's obvious self-loathing and her eagerness to share it with us. "I have been taking a hard look at myself in the dressing room's three-way mirror. Who am I kidding? My curly hair forms a corona around my round scarlet face, from the chin of which fat has begun to droop. My swollen feet in their black Mary Janes show from beneath the bottom hem of the ridiculous swaying skirt. The dressing room smells of my beefy stench. I should cry but I don't. I am used to this. I am inured." Moore's audaciousness in describing her apparently awful self ensures that her reader is never hardened to the horrors of food obsession and obesity. And while it is at times excruciatingly difficult bearing witness to Moore's merciless self-portraits, the reader cannot help but be floored by her candor. With Fat Girl, Moore has raised the stakes for autobiography while reminding us that our often thoughtless appraisals of others based on appearances can inflict genuine harm. It's a painful lesson well worth remembering.
--Kim Hughes

In my opinion the root of the author's problems is that she is crazy and not that she is fat. The author seems to never have gotten over the childish notion that "you are the center of the universe and every thing happens because of you". Even for the 196 pages that are the story, I would have had a better perspective on the thoughts of a fat person by reading Vogue Magazine.

As a fellow fat person, who is on a Weight Watchers to not be fat I can identify with fat discrimination. Yet this woman really wasn't experiencing fat discrimination most of the time. She was experience child abuse and that had nothing to do with fat and everything to do with the lack of parenting skills.

Delta Style: Eve Wasn't a Size 6 and Neither Am I

I just finished reading Delta Burke's book Delta Style: Eve Wasn't a Size 6 and Neither Am I . I loved the book. It was very pro-self versus pro-plus size. She talks about how childhood experiences and how the Hollywood life made her do crazy things to be thin. She tells how age, experience, and therapy helped her come to love herself and apperciate her life and body more.


Here is a clip of Delta Burke as Susan Sugarbaker on Designing Women addressing her weight.

Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat?

Eating disorder activists Claire Mysko and Magali Amadei's have written a new book, Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat?

The book deals with the anxieties and fears women have regarding pregnancy weight and the celebrity baby-bump watching phenomenon that is making these fears (and expectations of losing "baby-weight" two weeks after giving birth) more and more common.

Jezebel gives a good account of the research found in the book here. But reading Jezebel's comments kind of freaked me out more than the snippet of the book!

Here's a couple:

as a recovering anorexic that didn't tell her doctor about her ED past (because of insurance issues, but that's a whole other post!), i completely agree that pregnancy & the associated weight gain/loss
obsession can wreck havoc on you. i was pretty seriously underweight when i got pregnant and ended
up gaining 42 much-needed pounds. and of course, getting scolded by my doctor and nurses.

i became so fixated on the weight that i had a severe relapse. as in, i was back in my pre-pregnancy
clothes 2.5 weeks after giving birth because i simply didn't eat. and even my family, who knew about my
ED, were just so impressed and constantly cooing about "how quickly i lost the weight!". it wasn't until
months later that anyone realized i was back to being under 100lbs.

so please, if you know a friend of family member has/has had an ED, try to talk to them and make sure
they aren't absorbing these terrible messages.


Another:

I will admit that part of the reason why I don't want children is the weight gain and everything else it
does to your body.

I'm heavy, but short and shapely (think a shorter, much darker version of Joan). I'm finally at a place
where I'm mostly comfortable with my weight. I finally stopped weighing myself every other day, but
that's only because I found out that my scale is off by several pounds and haven't purchased another
one.

I know this isn't realistic, but my goal is to simply stay the size I am now for the rest of my days.
Knowing that a pregnancy can alter my body and make it impossible to get back to my smallest size just
isn't acceptable for me. And my skin scars at the tiniest thing. So my future child would cause me to
become this great big whale with authentic markings and push me into the official "Plus Size" section,
preventing me from ever slipping into designer clothes.

I just made myself really depressed. And realize that I have serious body image issues. Damn

WOW! Seriously, wow! I really do want to send out healing energy to those two commenters--so in no way by quoting from them do I want that taken as criticism and I'm really glad that they shared regarding this issue. Birth and pregnancy is a major life-transformation as well as physical transformation and adding this crazy making celebrity obsessed standard of bikini body ready two weeks, a month, six weeks into the equation is cruel and dangerous. We've covered this issue before, but in times like these, where a Senator states in a committee meeting on CSPAN that maternity coverage isn't necessary in a health-care package, we really do need to take some stock in how birth and pregnancy are viewed, in pop-culture and in those important value statements, health-care budgets (yes, your country's budget is a statement of VALUE).

The anti-abortion advocates like to sweep under the rug the fact that serious complications from pregnancy can result in a woman's death or her overall health (think permanent blindness, diabetes, the diminishment of heart, kidney function, and liver health, let alone a host of other problems). This move to systematically hide the side-effects of a complicated pregnancy is political--only dirty sluts have abortions, afterall, goes the refrain. Coupled with celebrity baby-bump culture, healthy and wanted pregnancies (and the realities of birth, unaided by baby-nurses or nannies) can be quite shocking to new mothers (and supportive fathers). Healthy pregnancies, pregnancies that encounter complications--both are extremely hard on the body and sometimes spirit, but that has to be swept under the rug, hidden from view. Considering that a sitting male Senator doesn't see the necessity for maternity coverage to be included in mandates for healthcare policies, its little wonder that the realities of pregnancy and child-birth are so removed from the cultural framework.

The pressures for perfect baby-bumps (which I think means, stick thin arms/legs, perfect basketball like roundness about the abdomen--and if you gain too much weight, which most celebrity watchers thought Salma Hayek did, you get ridiculed)--are now considered standard for all women. Nothing ever goes wrong in pregnancy--those slutty feminists need to shut up already. And of course, healthcare policies don't need to cover a silly thing like maternity care, isn't that elective, like a nose job or breast enhancement anyway? Ugh, the stupid burns. I think that studies and books like "Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat?" are needed and whether or not you intend, or never intend, to become a biological or adoptive mother, think about checking out Mom's Rising an advocacy group that seeks to enact progressive policies that support work/life and family balance--ideas that are good for single, child-free people as well as marrieds w/ children and single parents as well.

Impulse Buy

Okay, so I needed a new pillow and I woke up pre-alarm contemplating how much I want just ONE nice pillow in my life. So, after work I went to Meijer and went pillow shopping--I got two and two new shams for balance. Anyway, on my way to linens I stopped of in the book section and Jillian Michael's Making the Cut jumped out at me. Although we here at Fat Feminist Fitness Blog seem to have a complicated (read: critical/jealous) relationship with The Biggest Loser, see our previous posts on the subject I've recently contemplated watching one season of the show to be fair. It will be 8 p.m. Tuesday nights (during which I have a class, so I'll have to watch it via hulu or nbc.com). Last season, I watched the first 15 or so minutes and once I saw someone puking on a treadmill because they were being pushed too far on the first day, I said "I'm done" but I was flipping channels, so maybe context was needed before passing judgement. Many people seem to gain a great deal of satisfaction and inspiration from watching this show. So, if I do try to watch it, I figure, I'll find the charm or I'll mock it in the blog. Win/Win.

So, having decided to review "The Biggest Loser" I picked up Jillian Michaels' book and flipped through it. On a total impulse, I bought it because it offered a 30 day exercise routine, complete with toning exercises with diagrams & rep recommendations. I can't afford a personal trainer right now, but having a toning regime might be useful for a while. I didn't really read much, so it could be crap, but I'll let you all know as I progress through the book. As always, take diet/fitness gurus with a dose of salt or reality checks.

p.s. Notice that the cover references getting that "bikini" body, ugh. See our collective previous tirades against the false idol known as bikini worshop over actual indicators of health.