America is known as a body image-obsessed country. Consumers hungry for a regimen that will seamlessly transform their bodies from flab to fit obsess over the next fad diet. No matter how ridiculous the diet’s recipe may be – abandoning all sources of vegetable nutrients and eating strictly red meat or eliminating all carbs, including fruit – people flock to them.
“We are all looking for a quick fix,” said Rory Freedman, co-author of the wildly popular “Skinny Bitch” diet book. “We don’t want to do the work and we want to eat what we want, enjoy the food we want and look great.”
“Skinny Bitch,” with its no-nonsense prose and blunt humor, has an opposite premise. Authors Freedman and Kim Barnouin, a former model with a degree in holistic nutrition, redefine the term fad diet with their approach to losing weight as a lifestyle revamp. The book recently sparked national controversy over the medical soundness of the authors’ health advice.
Both women deliver a book that teaches readers to “quit looking at calories” and begin to consciously understand what ingredients people eat.
“The words that you don’t understand are typically things not to put in your body,” Freedman said. “When I look at an ingredient label and see long-looking chemical words, words that I don’t understand, why would I put that food in my mouth? Even if it is just a little bit of poison. If I saw a bottle of (the chemical) would I want to eat it?”
The self-proclaimed “skinny bitches” strive to teach readers how to analyze whether a food is healthy or not. They rally against refined sugars, high fructose corn syrup, cigarettes because “they kill your taste buds; it’s no wonder you eat shit and garbage,” beer (“for frat boys not skinny bitches”), caffeine, meat and dairy.
The authors coin witty nicknames for junk foods such as Liquid Satan for soda and delve into disturbingly illustrative chapters of slaughterhouses, the meat and dairy markets and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s convoluted relationship with these lucrative industries.
The book does not hint to veganism until the third chapter, leaving readers a bit stupefied when they include graphic passages from Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” and Gail A. Eisnitz’s “Slaughterhouse.”
Media criticized the authors’ lack of formal nutrition experience after the book became a New York Times bestseller. Both writers have studied nutrition for years, but Barnouin chose not to study the “mainstream bullshit,” Freedman said.
“She didn’t want to learn the food pyramid. The holistic approach treats the body as a whole,” said Freedman, a former model agent.
The book also was scrutinized because it doesn’t market itself as a vegan diet, which Freedman fully acknowledged as a business tactic.
“We are not going to preach to the choir,” she said, adding that the book intends to present a healthier lifestyle by speaking the truth about food in simple language. Freedman said it’s important to cleanse the body of unnutritious food in order to revive taste buds and crave healthier options.
This December, the women’s second book hits stores. “Skinny Bitch in the Kitch” is a cookbook filled with many typical recipes that the authors use to maintain their own figures.
The women end the book with the overarching mantra throughout: “Just because we wrote this book doesn’t mean we’re perfect. If you see us eating junk food or doing beer bongs don’t hold it against us. We believe in enjoying life and maintaining a healthy balance.”
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