I went on my first diet when I was 6. It lasted about three hours. Later efforts have had similar levels of success. Along the way, I've read enough silly weight-loss articles in women's magazines to earn an honorary degree in nutrition from the University of Conde Nast. I am not a fan of diets; I find it a lot less effort to just make little lifestyle changes over a period of time. But I do have a soft spot in my heart for diet books, mostly because they contain recipes. Of course, being that I don't usually end up cooking most of them, I'm kind of like those dudes who say they read Playboy for the articles. But whatevs.
Since I left for the city I've read two diet books, which were nearly polar opposites of each other.
The first was The Supermarket Diet from Good Housekeeping. The basic premise being that you make all your own food (and buy certain frozen/prepared stuff), follow three decreasingly torturous phases of recipes and ta-da! You're skinny. Within the happy rhetoric about how much food you can choose from, this book is actually bossy as hell. The author promises "You won't feel hungry," But she prefaces the 1200-calorie "boot camp" phase of the diet by saying that if you just can't handle the hunger after two days, skip ahead.
I would never consider following this diet. If you're really dead-set on cutting your sodium, though, this book could be of help. Also, it does have a lot of useful information on how to read between the nutrition-label lines and pick the healthiest stuff from the grocery store. Also, there are LOTS of recipes (though I haven't tried any of them yet). For the $5 I paid for it, not a total rip-off.
I picked up French Women Don't Get Fat from a book exchange at work. I was skeptical. French women don't get fat — Spanish women don't either. But when I went to spain, I gained 10 pounds.
This book, however, has a really good point, which is that one of the reasons Americans have such a weight problem is that we, as a country, have a massively dysfunctional relationship with food. We eat junk — in huge f-ing portions — without really consciously enjoying it. And we don't move enough or drink enough water. So the point is that you figure out what your bad habits are and over about 3 months you cut as many of them out as you can. Also lots of recipes One of which I actually tried. And it even turned out OK.
I do disagree with the author's hatred of workout machines. And she does project a certain amount of snooty French elitism. But because of this book's suggestion of mixing fruit juice with seltzer water I've given up soda almost entirely (well, that and the fact that there is a tea-brewing machine right next to my desk at work). Which may not have done anything for my waistline but it's saved me a ton of money.
And that's it for the first installment of Hoty Takes Manhattan In Review. What are you reading/watching/listening to these days?
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I'm trying to finish The Nine by Jeff Toobin about the Supreme Court. It's readable, kind of gossipy and has a real insider's look at how certain big decisions were made, like Bush v. Gore. Most interesting to me is that Kenneday has spent a lot of time in Europe and has a broad world view. He wrote in a decision against capital punishment for juveniles that virtually no country in the world tolerates this practice. Right-wingers threatened to impeach him because of his reliance on law/morality from other countries rather than just relying on the good old American Constitution. Sometimes I think the gap with the extreme right is just too large to bridge. They also confuse the constitution with the Bible, treating both as the literal word of god.
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