Dumping the Diet Books

Yes, friends, it's time. Time to dump the diet books that is. Well, actually, time to donate them to charity. Seems a shame to inflict them on anyone else. I hate to think of some other poor woman (or man) inflicting the same kind of body hatred on themselves that I did when I was following any one of these. But that's my hang up. Someone else may be grateful to find the book they've been looking for at a discount.

So here's the roll call of misery:

1. Body for Life
2. Body for Life for Women
3. Champions Body for Life
4. Eating for Life - the Body for Life cookbook, because the fact that three of the actual diet plan books didn't work for me made me go, if only I had the recipes, that'd make the difference!
5. 100 Days of Weight Loss - It's "the Secret to Being Successful on Any Diet Plan." Yeah, that worked out well.
6. The Dish: On Eating Healthy and Being Fabulous - Autographed copy! Woo hoo!
7. The Great American Detox Diet - By the wife of Morgan Spurlock, the guy who did the film Supersize Me. Great film. But the vegan diet of punishment, not so much for me.
8. The Eat-Clean Diet
9. Flip the Switch - which instructs you, like many books, to lose the excuses and lose the weight! Because I can work full time while putting myself through graduate school, but clearly I'm weak-willed and undisciplined!
10. Ultra-Metabolism - The simple plan for automatic weight loss. Uh huh, that sure whipped my metabolism into shape. Not!
11. The Raw Food Revolution Diet
12. Raw Food Life Force Energy - All I can say about these books is that any person who can do raw food 24/7 is a far better person than I am. Go with god; you officially have a will of steel!
13. French Women Don't Get Fat - Punish yourself in a continental fashion!
14. The Way to Eat - Aren't they all sold as the way to eat?
15. Tired of Being Tired - because apparently, we're all fat because we have adrenal glands that are burned out.
16. Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy
17. Shape Your Life - from the editors of Shape magazine!
18. The Business Plan for the Body - Run your body like a CEO and be a size 2!
19. Marilu Henner's Total Health Makeover - because who else would I look to for the secret of health besides a washed up actress?
20. Our Lady of Weight Loss - Billed as "miraculous and motivational musings from the Patron Saint of Permanent Fat removal." Humorous, perhaps, but also kind of confusing. Guess I figured that if I could be wackier that I'd be thinner??
21. The Volumetrics Eating Plan - fill up on watery foods and finally be skinny! Actually, not all that bad as diets, go, but still wasn't any more successful for me than anything else.

It's a pretty good sized pile, when you look at it. Sad thing is, I'm actually surprised it's not bigger. But I've given away other books in the past. So, it's by no means representative of all the diets I've ever followed. More like all the diets I've followed over the last year (excluding online and self-created diet!). Some of them were wackier than others. Some actually had good information about healthy foods that I've learned from. But the common theme of all of them (for me, anyway) is that they represent the idea that I can't trust myself to eat in a way that is best for my body. That I need some "expert" to tell me how to eat, otherwise I'll be fat forever. I still don't know where IE is going to take me. But wherever it is, it hardly seems like it can be a place that makes me more miserable than I was while following every single one of these diet plans. It'll be interesting to see what I think about this post a year from now and whether or not I think that statement is true.