I read Classy: Exceptional Advice for the Extremely Modern Lady earlier this year (sometimes my library does have good stuff–if you can get past the vampire heavy teen section. sheesh! enough vampires already! Just because Stephanie Meyer hit the jackpot, must every publisher bring out a vampire trilogy or two?)
Back to my sweetie pie, Derek Blasberg. He is a genius. Plus he grew up in my home state! Good things can come from Missouri! This book was hilarious and I learned some super useful things too, like:
What do you take as a gift for the hostess of a dinner party when you and your friends don’t drink wine?
Answer: flowers! (perfect! I always wanted to be one of those classy people who brought a gift to their hostess, I just could never figure out what to bring. In movies it is always wine.)
How should you dress when flying?
Answer: classy and good-looking! The airport is one of the few places left where you can find a single man, and at least you know that his family can afford a plane ticket! (sheer genius. Heaven forbid I am ever single again, but if that day comes, I’m totally going to hang out in airports to meet guys.)
This book got a few too many negative reviews on Amazon (as in: any negative review was 1 too many.) They were either from people who had no sense of humor or people who write reviews for their own self-aggrandizement.
Mrs. “Everything in the book is quite predictable and even pedestrian,” Have you no sense of humor?
Miss “I hardly learned anything,” are you trying to impress us with your knowledge– because I’m very (un)impressed by your inability to learn anything!
Anyway, it was a great read and very fun. It made me want to hostess a dinner party and go buy a cashmere sweater. One more nice thing. Derek recommended some great wardrobe pieces that are worth investing in, but he has a sense of proportion as well. I read and enjoyed Nina Garcia’s The One Hundred: A Guide to the Pieces Every Stylish Woman Must Own but my needs won’t justify the 5 or 10 cashmere sweaters in all colors like she recommends. Derek’s recommendations geared more for starving college student budgets are much more fit to my budget and my lifestyle. Let’s face it, I don’t get invited to 10 dinner parties a year, so 1 little black dress is really all I could ever use.
“Why would you read that book, you’re not fat?” DH asked.
Wasn’t that sweet of him? The answer is, I read it because, while I may not be fat fat, I feel like I have no control over my size–which I’d like to be a bit smaller but I am waiting until after I am not pregnant to do something, obviously.
It’s just that for the last 11 years I have been the amazing accordion woman, shrinking up and down in size to accommodate 6 babies. La Leche League will tell you that you loose weight breastfeeding and I have seen it to be true for some women. For me, my body hangs on to at least 10 or 20 reserve pounds until I stop nursing to make sure that baby has food.
It’s not so much that I want to be skinny. I’d just like to be the same size for maybe a whole year or two. I feel a little delirious dreaming about being the same size for 5 years in a row. About 2 years ago, I gave up on the fantasy that I would someday be as skinny as I was in high school and right before I got married. The truth is, that wasn’t a healthy weight for me and I had achieved it by not eating. So I just want to be a size and stick with it long enough to actually build one of those workable wardrobes that you read about that has a sensible amount of clothing that I can mix and match. Not a closet that has to have normal clothes, bigger size clothes, maternity clothes, post baby size clothes that I can still nurse in, etc.
But I’ve gotten off track.
The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life blows some serious holes in the whole “you have to have a certain BMI (Body Mass Index) to be healthy” rule. I love it. It confirmed some things that I have often thought from my own attempts to lose weight and watching people I love try to lose weight.
I know lots of girls who carefully watch what they eat and exercise at least 3 times a week and yet do not lose weight. At best, they lose and regain the same 10 pounds over and over.
I know lots of skinny people who say that losing weight is a simple matter of caloric deficit and getting of your fat butt to exercise. If a “fat” person insists that they do exercise, the skinny person will insist that it must be the wrong kind/not enough exercise. Yet these skinny people will eat large servings of ice cream twice a day and rarely exercise more than once a week but will stay complacent in their assumptions that anyone who wants to be skinny can be skinny if they just do the work.
Did you know: *A moderately active fat person is likely to be far healthier than someone who is svelte but sedentary. What’s worse, American’s (largely unsuccessful) efforts to make themselves thin through dieting and supplements are themselves a major cause of the ill health associated with being overweight.
NEWS FLASH! Dieting and Diet pills are BAD FOR YOU
* There is in fact no medical basis for the government’s BMI recommendations or the public health policies based on them. The BMI range correlating with the lowest mortality rate is extremely broad, from about 18-32 BMI, meaning that women of average height can weigh anywhere within an 80 pound range without seeing any statistically meaningful change in her risk of premature death.
*In a decided majority of studies, groups of people labeled overweight by current standards are found to have equal or lower mortality rates than groups of supposedly ideal weight individuals.
*Large scale mortality studies indicate that women who are 50 or even 75 pounds “overweight” will on average still have longer life expectancies than those who are 10 to 15 pounds “underweight” aka fashionably thin.
*Numerous studies have shown that weight loss of 20-30 pounds leads to an increased risk of premature death, sometimes by an order of 700%
**** If you would like to hear some common sense and stop blaming yourself for all those failed diets, then this is the book to read. If you would like to stop feeling like the reason you are fat is because you are lazy, dumb, low on will power, and unable to delay instant gratification, then THIS IS THE BOOK TO READ.
Here is my favorite favorite quote from Wendy (who is 5’7″ and weighs around 220 lbs. despite the fact that she spends an hour on a treadmill 3-4 times a week and lifts weights as well and sticks to a healthy, reasonable diet.) “Think about how much time you’ve spent thinking about that poundage, and the time you’ve spent punishing yourself about that poundage. Then I’d like you to imagine NOT doing that. Instead, imagine the relief you’d feel if you could walk past a plate-glass window without cursing your reflection. …. Now imagine if we all did it. The Fat Girls, the Skinny Girls…..all that free time on our minds that we aren’t using to rip ourselves to shreds. All that money in our wallets that we’re not going to spend on fat-free, sugar-free, taste-free sorbet. That’s a lot of minutes and a lot of money from a lot of women who have a lot of brain power.”
As I read this, I couldn’t help thinking, we are doing exactly what Satan wants us to do. We are obsessing about something that isn’t important. All of us intelligent, powerful women are using up our time stressing and worrying about whether we are fat and beating ourselves up about it. Think of all the good we could do if we quit worrying about fat.
So I have a new determination to not worry about what I weigh. I am determined to exercise moderately so that I can be healthy. I am determined to eat lots of vegetables so I can be healthy. But I am not going to worry about what weight comes along for the ride. I hope you’ll join me. 🙂
First world problems: I’m reading a totally exciting novel but I could only get it to download on my computer– not to my phone, so I’m having to fight with the 5 year old for computer time. #troubledskies #whathappensnext?
It was all started by a book, as many good things in my life are.
I have never been a “Huggy” person or a “touchy-feely” person. I like my personal space to stay personal. Not that I didn’t love my children, but somewhere around their second birthday, I just didn’t actively think about hugging and snuggling them any more.
That changed the summer I read “Missing May” by Cynthia Rylant. It is about an orphan girl who has been passed from relative to relative until she is taken in by a couple named May and Ob.
“…the first time I saw Ob help May braid her long yellow hair, sitting in the kitchen one night, it was all I could do not to go to the woods and cry forever from happiness. I know I must have been loved like that, I must have; otherwise, how could I even recognize love when I saw it that night between Ob and May? ….[My Mother] must have known she wasn’t going to live and she must have held me longer than any other mother might, so I’d have enough love in me to know what love was when I felt it again.”
I spent several hours after reading that imagining how if I took in an orphan how I would hold her and sing to her every night and tell her how much her mother had loved her. Suddenly I thought, “I don’t even do that for my own children.”
Yikes! So after that, I started remebering to hug my kids when they got home from school. And instead of saying, “Last one in bed gets a spanking,” I said, “First one in bed gets a snoodle.” Actually, everyone gets a snoodle, but it still works every time. They all go running and laughing to bed for the honor of the FIRST snoodle.
What, you may ask, is a snoodle? Well is is a cross between a kiss and a raspberry. You start about 2 feet away from your child and make those kissy smoochy noises as you get closer and closer and suddenly plant a whole bunch of little kisses on that tickly part of their neck. Admittedly, I have had my face smashed a couple of times by a wriggling giggling child, but it is worth it.
Here’s what I found: our family is happier. Hugs make the hard parts of the day work better, like in the morning getting ready for school, at bedtime, any other stressful time. When I say “no,” to my 4 -year old and she starts wailing, instead of saying something like, “stop that awful noise,” or the old “Stop crying or I’ll give you something real to cry about,” I just hug her. I don’t give in and give her what she wants, but I do hug her. I let her know that I understand it’s tough when we don’t get our way. After all, I have seen many an adult (including myself) throw a tantrum because they can’t have what they want. Working from a viewpoint of empathy is so much more effective than working from the angle of force and control.
Okay, I have to ‘fess up to my guilty secret. I am a Twilight Fan. Lucky for me, I didn’t read the first three books until January 2008. So I didn’t have to wait as long as some to read each book. I loved Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse. I have to say that the third book, Eclipse, is still my favorite. Why, you ask? It is my favorite because Bella begins to grow up. She isn’t just a love-sick teenager any more. She learns about compromise. She learns that she has to make a choice and that choices mean you have to give up some things that you want. She actually considers for the first time what she will be sacrificing in order to become a vampire.
I have been looking forward to Breaking Dawn for months!
Will Bella become a vampire? (I was pretty sure she would)
What will happen to Jacob? (I had no idea–things sure looked bleak at the end of Eclipse)
Will Bella really be okay with not having children? (she doesn’t seem to care at all–hard for me to understand because my day dreams were always more along the lines of Rosalie’s. So will something happen to really make her think about it???)
Something had to happen with the Volturi…we needed resolution there
What was being a newborn vampire like? How bloody would it be?
And finally, I just wanted more steamy scenes between Edward and Bella. Admit it, so did you.
So I bought Breaking Dawn on Saturday and finished reading before dawn Sunday morning. It was great 🙂 I was surprised by a few things, others I expected. I am consoling myself with the fact that even though the series is over, the books are very fun to re-read.
p.s. It is obvious who the white queen on the cover is (new vampire Bella.) But who do you think is the little red pawn?
1. Pick up the nearest book (with at least 123 pages)
2. Turn to page 123
3. Find the 5th sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag 5 people
“Simon went to the door and opened it. I ran full tilt down the stairs, and across to him. There was a light above the door which made everything seem pitch black beyond.”
This is from “I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith. It is a marvelous book, loaned to me by my friend and prairie hen, Vea M. Dodie Smith also wrote the book which Disney based the movie “One Hundred and One Dalmations” off of. But don’t let that stop you from reading this one. It is re-he-he-heally good. I totally enjoyed it and it made the fact that I was sick in bed with the worst monster cold/flue thing ever a little more bearable last week.
Now I am supposed to tag 5 people, but I don’t even know who I would tag… except my sister Katie, BRILLIANT!! so Katie, you are IT!
Marvelous Pigs in Satin 