Not your typical boring diet book, this is a tart-tongued, no-holds-barred wakeup call to all women who want to be thin. With such blunt advice as, "Soda is liquid Satan" and "You are a total moron if you think the Atkins Diet will make you thin," it's a rallying cry for all savvy women to start eating healthy and looking radiant. Unlike standard diet books, it actually makes the reader laugh out loud with its truthful, smart-mouthed revelations. Behind all the attitude, however, there's solid guidance. Skinny Bitch espouses a healthful lifestyle that promotes whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, and encourages women to get excited about feeling "clean and pure and energized."
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http://www.amazon.com/Skinny-Bitch-Rory-Freedman/dp/0762424931/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295643039&sr=8-1
Skinny Bitch is every woman's worst enemy. If you want a dieting book that rips your self-esteem and dignity, look no further because this book has it all. Written by a former modeling agent Rory Freedman and former model Kim Barnouin, these so-called experts have developed a dieting book in which being thin is being beautiful and healthy. By taking on this role of "expertise", Freedman and Barnouin take their skewed vision of health and bestow it on the "lucky ones" that purchase their book. As if buying the book isn't enough, both authors demean their audience nonstop by blaming them for becoming the way that they are: fat, stupid, and undesirable. Here is an excerpt from the book:
"Okay. Use your head. You need to get healthy if you want to get skinny. Health = skinny. Unhealthy = fat. The first thing you need to do is give up your gross vices. Don't act surprised! You cannot keep eating the same shit and expect to get skinny. Or smoke." Oddly enough, Freedman and Barnouin --renowned "experts"-- epitomize what public health is now shifting towards, "an increasing attention to body shape, diet, and exercise... the 'lifestyle' focus" (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 1).
Public health expertise in the recent years has become a study on the social condition of life where "expert knowledge" is used to convey messages of what is healthy and what is not. These ideals began back in the mid-1970's where academic papers were published in regards to the correlation between lifestyle choices and health. Most of the data concluded that "...it is 'lifestyles'-- lack of exercise, poor diet, overconsumption of certain products, exposure to hazardous chemicals, and so on-- that make people ill." (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 15) Not only do Freedman and Barnouin's book put focus on the importance of eating healthy, they also use this opportunity to promote veganism and to state all of the terrible chemical additives in our foods such as sulfites in wine, aspartame, and refined sugars all of which are carcinogenic. The authors also exemplify what Metcalfe (1993, pg. 41) mentions as "health promoters who wish to turn people into calorific and cholesterol counting machines." (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 15)
Skinny Bitch not only emphasizes the importance of eating right, it also projects the idea that eating meat is the most unhealthy thing you can do to your body (here is where the experts demonstrate that they're truly not experts at all...). Freedman and Barnouin relay that "... the meat on your plate is rotting, filled with pus, and decomposing..." and that when you eat fresh vegetables and fruits, they are alive and excellent for your body. (Um, excuse me?) The epidemiology article correlates with this idea of how public health has changed our views about certain foods, as Freedman and Barnouin point out: ".. the 'fact' that dietary fat leads to obesity and heart disease, for example, has meant that many people have almost a horror of fat, to the extent that the very sight or smell of it causes disgust." (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 50) This book as well as other dieting books has placed so much focus on what it means to be healthy but now I'm starting to question if Western society truly knows what it means to be healthy anymore? Do we all think like Freedman and Barnouin in the sense that being thin means being healthy? If so, then I have very little faith in humanity. An important quote from the epidemiology article sums up the issues with public health: "Epidemiology is thus one of the central strategies in the new public health used to construct notions of 'health' and, through this construction, to invoke and reproduce moral judgments about the worth of individuals and social groups." (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 60)
Skinny Bitch is not about dieting or veganism. I believe it is about control, indulging in eating disorders, and criticizing a group of people for what they look like. Similarly, if the focus continues to be on the presentations of our individual bodies, are we pushing away the actual concept of public health? Are we so concerned as to what the human body should look like as opposed to warding off diseases that we go to desperate measures to assume the role of experts and dictate how people should live their lives? Freedman and Barnouin, both of who were in the modeling business and have no prior knowledge of health, patronize those who don't fall into the dominant health norms of "healthism". Using Skinny Bitch as an example, Metcalfe (1993, pg. 35) goes to mention that, "Healthism... can lead to a general intolerance of those who subscribe to the dominant health norms against those who do not or cannot." (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 26) Unfortunately, this looks like the path that public health has chosen.
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