Thin Is the New Happy Review
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Summer Reading: Thin is the New Happy
By Valerie Frankel
This book is our book groups read for May 2009. Everyone gets to pick their own books for the group to read and discuss. I never would have picked this book myself, and am glad that I was given the opportunity to read it.
This is a personal story about a woman's journey to finding a happy body image. Her body image woes began long before she began as an editor at Mademoiselle Magazine. Her Pediatrician suggested to her parents that this daughter would have to be watched because she would have a problem managing her weight.
This is the most major similarity to me in the whole book; my pediatrician told my Mother that I would always have a weight problem. This my Mother found hard to believe because everyone in her family was complaining about how skinny I was and what "bird legs" I had.
My Mother had tried several diets along her path, but discovered that people just thought she was heavy because of her well endowed chest. She went on three major diets in her life and was successful each time and kept it off for years. Her mother sent her tons of ads and stories about dieting so she vowed not to do that.
Frankel writes the book as a look into what she had to do to make peace with herself and find a body image that she enjoyed and felt good about. She did not wish to pass on her body image problems to her two daughters.
"I was a chronic dieter simply out of habit. Diet was what I did. It was all I knew. In fact, dieting know-how had been hardwired into my brain since preadolescence. Thanks to recent advances in MRI technology, we now understand that the brain takes shape according to the stimuli it receives. This was a good argument for forcing a kid to take piano lessons. If she learned to play young, her brain's nerve and synapses would retain musical affinity forever. I didn't play piano. Or chess. My teenage brain was honed, forged, and wrinkled for dieting. Reducing was my chief adolescent pastime. I made charts. I logged calorie input and output. I kept food journals. I read diet articles in magazines, ripped through weight loss books."
Frankel has put her years of weight loss, study and magazine work to good use in this book. It is quite entertaining and she details many of the subtle media inputs that many people do not know about.
Her clicker trials on her own thinking are very informative, just how many times in the course of a day she thought about her body image and that these thoughts were negative was astounding. Frankel's self studies informed her as to what she needed to do to find peace of mind.
I would not want to read this book without a discussion group to follow, I think each individuals insights into their own body image, stimulated by this book would be profoundly informative.
An important read for nearly every woman I know - there is benefit on many levels.
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Thin Is the New Happy Overview
“Val Frankel is a woman of amazing insight. . . . Read this, weep, and heal.”
—Stacy London, cohost of What Not to Wear
You’ve heard the phrase “the mirror is not your friend.” For Valerie Frankel, the mirror was so much more than “not a friend.” It was the mean girl who stole her lunch money, bitch-slapped her in the ladies’ room, and cut the hair off her Barbie.
If you’re like 99.9 percent of women, the war you wage with yourself over your body image begins at the ripe age of eight, and the skirmishes are fought for the next eight decades. Sometimes youdon’t even know whenyou’vewon. (How many of us have taken out a photo from high school and thought, “Hey! I looked great—why didn’t I know it?”) This book is for anyone who has spent most of her life on—or thinking about being on—a diet. It’s for anyone who ever wished for candlelight in dressing rooms. It’s for anyone who has ever owned a pair of “fat pants.” In short, this book is for anyone who ever felt good or bad about themselves based on how they look.
Valerie Frankel, like most women, has spent most of her conscious life on a diet, thinking about a diet, ignoring a diet, or failing on a diet. At age eleven, her mother put Val on her first weight-loss program. As a teen, she was enrolled in Weight Watchers (for which she invented creative ditching methods). As a young woman, her world felt right only when she was able to zip a certain pair of jeans. Not wanting to pass this legacy on to her own daughters, Valerie set out to cleanse herself of her obsession. Thin Is the New Happy is the true story of one woman’s quest to exorcise her bad body-image demons, to uncover the truths behind what put them there, and to learn how to truly love herself. It’s a poignant, hilarious, and all-out honest account of one woman’s struggle with body image—the filter through which she’s always seen the world—and the way she ultimately overcame it.
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