101 things to do before you Diet by Mimi Spencer.

The full title of this book is 101 things to do before you diet because looking great isn’t just about losing weight.

I picked up this book expecting a list of things that would deemphasize weight loss. You know what I mean. The title says that looking great isn’t about losing weight. So naturally, I thought the book would not be about losing weight and about loving the skin you are in. I was wrong. The book was absolutely about losing weight in everyway. It wasn’t about feeling good in your own skin, it was about the path of least resistance towards looking, feeling, and eventually being thinner.

Quite a few of the 101 things were just style tips to distract you from hating yourself. They were also awfully specific. Tips like blow dry your hair, wear heels, and wear opaque black panty hose were on the list. These are not tips that people need when they are told to find their own style and love the unique and wonderful person they are. These are the tips that are told when someone thinks that there is a uniform right and wrong for everyone. The right, of course, being skinny, and the wrong, of course, being happy for the person you are without changing a single thing.

The whole chapter two was about how to eat. I skipped a lot of this section. The author talked blood sugar, hormone levels, the importance of breakfast, and eating healthy food. For a self proclaimed not-diet book, this section was all about how to change eating habits to specifically lose weight. There was nothing about eating great to feel great, it was about eating great to lose weight. This chapter made this book a diet book. The only reason they couldn’t call this a diet book proper was because this chapter was extremely ill informed. She off handedly mentioned that one could try the raw food diet as a tip. You would need supplements, maybe, the author doesn’t know.  After reading that, I felt like I could take these tips with a grain of salt.

There was another chapter on exercise. I felt like I had to skim this section as well. She didn’t talk about exercise for fun, happiness, and new life experiences. She broke exercise down into calories. Truthfully, people that think about exercise in a healthy way do not do that. Sad joggers think about calories, not happy ones. This chapter also made me think that this not-diet book was actually quite thinly veiled.

The author is very obviously a magazine contributor. She obsesses about weight, beauty, and glamour in her own life and these insecurities are evident on every page of this book. She skims across useless tips and over the surface of deep topics at the same depth as, well, a magazine would. I’d say to get equally good content, you should pick up an issue of Cosmopoltion or Redbook. At least there would be pictures.