Screw Inner Beauty: Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere

This book star­ted as two blogs by self admit­ted, (con­fessed is not a word to use here) fat people.
The ori­gins of the book have influ­enced the feel.
So there are occa­sion­ally snip­pets where tense doesn’t fit or where it jumps from talk­ing in the 3^rd per­son to talk­ing as one of the writers.
That said if you can get past these slight anom­alies, if you are a ‘large, over­weight, chubby, chunky, or just plain fat’ per­son – or try­ing to under­stand one — then you will find this book of interest.

Screw Inner Beauty cov­ers a lot of ground… classed as a self help book it cer­tainly gives per­mis­sion for you to learn to live with your body and gives a large amount of evid­ence on the fal­lib­il­ity of diets… not neces­sar­ily in the short term but cer­tainly when looked at in the longer term (over 3 years).
The evid­ence that most weight losers even­tu­ally put the major­ity if not all the weight back on is looked at and dis­cussed.
The by-line on the cover ‘trash the diet and self-loathing and get on with your life’ cer­tainly sig­nals the premise of the book.

The book covers:

• Health
• Mental health
• Socializing
• Avoiding neg­at­iv­ity
• Getting dressed
• the Media, and
• Getting your head on straight.

All the chapters have strategies, pro­cesses and solu­tions to make you feel proud to be who you are and not a self deprec­at­ing per­son who some­times inad­vert­ently makes other feel embarrassed.

This is not to say you will read this book and imme­di­ately feel at ease if you have a mind­set that you are too big and must diet… how­ever it is cer­tainly a book to go back to for self affirmation.

The last chapter head­ing says it all; ‘Don’t Diet Anyway. They Still Don’t Work.’
It is a shame that this book and the blogs which inspired it have to be written.

Our often unreal­istic expect­a­tions of what is a ‘right’ shape and weight and what is ‘wrong’ change as dec­ades and fash­ion pass by.
We tend to for­get to take into account genet­ics and that for some the cur­rent ‘ideal’ will forever be an impossibility.

As an invet­er­ate dieter I enjoyed this book and will prob­ably return to it at those times when I feel temp­ted to diet again!

Kate and Marianne and the dis­cus­sions and argu­ments they put for­ward make sense.
A voice in the wil­der­ness per­haps how­ever the book (and blogs are being well noted in the USA where of course they originate.