It doesn’t take much detective work to see that diet books are an obsession in our culture.  All it takes is walking into your neighborhood Barnes & Noble and looking at the front “dump bin,” the pyramid-like stack of nonfiction books near the entrance of most stores.  There, at any given time, you’ll find six to ten diet books stacked up like cordwood: flat belly diets, over 50 diets, five-minute diets, diets for men, celebrity diets and more.  Diet books are among the most consistently popular genre of nonfiction, even though time and time again, we’ve seen that fad diets rarely work for keeping weight off over the long term.  Heck, our publisher even talked to us about a diet book as a follow-up to The Beauty Prescription.

What does our seeming obsession with diet books say about us as a culture?  We’ll give you some multiple choice options:

1. We’re obsessed with being as thin as the celebrities we see on the covers of magazines (forgetting that they have chefs and personal trainers and many hours a day to devote to just staying in shape).
2. We’re eager to believe the hype about a fast, easy weight loss miracle if it hides the simple truth that to lose weight over the long term we have to eat less and move more.
3. We consistently feel bad about our bodies thanks to pressure from a culture that promotes unrealistic body images.
4. All of the above.

We don’t know about you, but we’re going with #4.  Basically, the multi-billion dollar diet industry (which encompasses a lot more than books) thrives in a rich soil of wishful thinking and willful self-deception, as we convince ourselves that THIS diet, THIS time, will do the trick and keep us thin and healthy without sacrifice.  This all points to a national problem with accepting some realities about weight, health and beauty.  These are as follows:

• You don’t have to be thin to be healthy.  It helps, but there are plenty of people who are endomorphs (the body type that retains fat and loses weight slowly) who are fit, eat well and exercise regularly.  There are also plenty of thin folks who smoke to suppress their hunger or simply don’t eat enough and are malnourished.
• It’s more important to be active than thin.  Studies have shown over and over that physically active overweight people do better on tests for heart disease and diabetes risk factors than thin sedentary people.
• The only way to consistently lose weight and keep it off is to permanently change your lifestyle.  Move more, eat less, give up some unhealthy foods and dedicate yourself to working out 5-6 days a week for life. There are no shortcuts, sorry.
• It is far more attractive to be a bit overweight but happy and accepting of yourself and your inner beauty than to be thin, always worried about what you eat and beat yourself up when you gain an ounce.  Self-love is beautiful; self-loathing is not.

We would love to write a diet book for the inner self, perhaps about losing the excess “pounds” of guilt, resentment, shame or envy that seem to drive so many women in our culture to starve themselves in the name of beauty.  Perhaps someday, we will.  Tell us, what kind of diet book would YOU like to see?

Stay beautiful,

Debi & Eva