The Bookshop Blogger #21
J.E. talks tears and dieting and Michael Winner
Monday, 26 July 2010
A spot of nice weather and people feel the need to strip off - I certainly do. (I’m joking, of course.) But, in a related phenomenon, all the diet books seem to find their way to the surface at exactly the same time. Strange that.
I am lucky/hateful - delete as you wish - in that I have always been skinny. I am not slim, nor thin, I am skinny. People don’t believe me when I say I always wanted to be curvy. But there you go; I suppose we are none of us happy with what we have.
ESG, on the other hand, is not skinny. She is adorably rounded. She hates it. Poor love seems to spend her entire life on one diet or another. I’m sure he wasn’t trying to be callous, but when FCB asked her to make a ‘Get Into Shape For The Summer’ display, it certainly raised a few eyebrows.
It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes later that I heard a strange noise coming from the back of the shop. Reluctantly, I abandoned the till to investigate and found ESG sifting through diet books and crying gently.
Well I couldn’t leave the poor love, could I? And on top of that it was a Saturday, so unless we got a wriggle on our customers would have had to come in and see – oh, the horror! – an UNFINISHED DISPLAY, a sight so shocking that, no doubt, it would have sent them all scurrying out of the shop and back home to their computers. After all, there are no unfinished displays on the internet.
The first thing I noticed is that there seems to be a diet for everything, from Sarah Dobbyn’s Fertility Diet to Carol Vorderman’s Eat yourself Clever, which promises that in 28 days you’ll be slim, energised and brilliant. It’s a miracle. Then there are diets that utilise your blood type or your food’s Gi (that’s a glycaemic index by the way, and don’t worry I didn’t know either) to help you shed the pounds – I’d love to see the scientific credentials of Messers D’Adamo and Gallop, I wonder if they went to university with Carol Vorderman?
But, in the end, the five books that grabbed ESG and myself most were The Dukan Diet by Pierre Dukan (presumably Du Kan get thin if you do it); The New Atkins For a New You by Eric C. Westman and Stephen D. Phinney (apparently an initial in the middle of your name is more than an adequate substitute for a medical qualification) and The Clean and Lean Diet by James Duigan. The only one I liked was Rosemary Conley’s Slim to Win: Diet and Cookbook - she’s been around for ages, so she must be doing something right. Furthermore, Conley appears to have morphed into Esther Rantzen and she always fights for the rights of the little people.
What was the fifth?
Michael Winner’s Fat Pig Diet. Just because.
Of course, if I had my way, in a return to the dungarees and cropped hair of my student days I would have made a display of Susie Orbach, Germaine Greer and Naomi Wolf, three women who have no truck with this Body Fascism and who all happen to be really quite slim.
I’d better sign off now, ESG’s crying again.
