“Get off you Lazy ass and get skinny!” says the book Skinny Bitch. Personally, while I found these women’s approach to getting skinny modernly different, at times I felt that they were way too harsh. This book does not just suggest a diet. No, it suggest you throw out your entire lifestyle and embrace the vegan approach. While it is not advertised as a vegan book, Skinny Bitch promotes the cruelty-free, meat-free, dairy-free lifestyle. Basically, no meat, dairy products, sugar, eggs, or joy as it seems. While I don’t doubt that living this way would indeed make you a bit healthier and probably a lot skinnier, I found that the book pushes such a harsh, drastic change. I know that I, for one, am not willing to give up the things that I find such joy in eating, such as chocolate, coffee, sugar, just to lose a couple of pounds. Vegan is fine and dandy but I don’t think that I would just be able to change my eating habits just because a book is screaming at me to do so. That brings me to the diction and phrasing of this book. Overall, I found all of it a bit harsh. While reading the excerpts I could practically see the authors standing over me yelling at me to get off my lazy ass and throw out my cookies. From one page to another, it seemed as if it was insult after insult. The book goes from criticizing my coffee addiction at one moment to calling me a wimp for not being able to give up sugar on cue in the next moment. In fact, instead of feeling the desire to get up and do all of the things the book screamed at me to do, I wanted to chunk out the pack of excerpts and go eat a chicken sandwich and an ice cream sundae. I guess that this book might appeal to certain women, who find it refreshing that these authors are telling the “truth”. But I found myself more agreeing with the author of the second article, who criticized the book for being, in a way, a harsh cruel bully. And the comment about how the anorexic person hears the voice that sounds similar to that of the book really surprised me and made me dislike the book a bit more. It is not that I hate the book. In fact, I found it a bit witty at times and allowed me to relate because of the use of its language but it did not make me want to become a vegan. It was entertaining to read, but instead of convincing me to change my lifestyle, it made me want to cling on more to the bad habits that the book accused me of having.
