Thinspiration Books: what should you read on a diet?

There is a big difference between a diet book and a thinspiration book.  A diet book always tells you how to get healthy and achieve some arbitrary weight.  A diet book is non-fiction.

A thinspiration book is fiction or memoir.  They are books about girls dieting or books about girls who are very thin.  They often deal with the mental trauma that causes an eating disorder, or the paths these girls take in their successes and failures, and the stress of the lifestyles they choose.
 

I really hope to write one of these books someday.  It's on my to-do list, but right now I'm working on a sort of "Pride and Prejudice" educational thing.  No I'm not joking.

These are professional published books, not personal thinspo books (although I love those and have one of my own actually!).  I forget who originally recommended these to me, but I have had this list for a while.

Anyway, here are a few books that inspire dieting:

Balancing Act

Eve's Apple (this one was great)

Fat Chance

Girls Under Pressure

I Am An Artichoke

Kim : Empty Inside

Passion of Alice 

Life Size  (by Shute)

Second Star to the Right  (loved this one too)

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

Best Little Girl In the World  (for everyone who has such "wonderful" parents)

Winter Girls  <<< a classic.

Winter Girls kind of gets a category all its own in terms of fucked-upness and incredible fame in the skinny web-sphere. It's kind of the unofficial must-read for people on the edge between normalcy and something darker.  Kind of like Cassie from Skins became an unofficial mascot, and Maya's book "Wasted" became the pro-ana bible, Winter Girls has a similar cult fame among those teetering on the edge.  Some of these books are valuable only for the feeling they give of "Oh god I don't want to eat," but Winter Girls is (imo) an amazing piece of literature that stands on its own without needing to be propped up by the pro-ana mindset.

I purposefully am not including Wasted because we're not going in that direction on this blog, no sir.  We are keeping this BMI-appropriate and beautiful, not starved and ill.

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Healthy Skinny Grocery List

So every blog and website has one of these, and I may as well get it over with quickly and early. What do I buy at the supermarket?

Now, these lists seem a little pointless without any context, so let me frame it first. The number one thing I do when going on a diet is to get rid of all the white carbs in the house. Now, if you have a different binge-food, of course get rid of that, but as someone who cooks for herself at home, white carbs are the enemy.

 Sometimes I toss them out, sometimes I give them to friends, sometimes I just put them in the freaking attic to forget about them. Whatever it takes. Actually, if we're being honest, sometimes I just eat them in massive quantities during that special time of "oh god what's happened to me?!" which comes before any diet.

The point is, get them out of the house, and DON'T BUY THEM AGAIN. For me, the real killer is pasta. I can cook a perfectly healthy and low-calorie meal, then ruin it by "accidentally" making a giant portion of pasta that I can't resist. So I just don't buy it.

Other things I don't buy? Bulk anything. No huge portions of meat, no huge packs of veggies, no loafs of bread. No boxes of crackers. I recently read some studies (like, real scientific shit, not from a magazine) which talked about "hoarding" food. Basically, if you have a huge stockpile of food, you feel kind of pressured to eat it. Whereas if you live on the edge of not having any food at home, you feel pressured to save it. Makes sense to me. I can eat 90% of a loaf of bread in 3 days, and then the last slice will last for a week because I don't want to buy another loaf.

So, small amounts, no crap. Last principle is "taste the rainbow." You can usually take a guess at what vitamins and minerals a veggie contains based on color. So I don't bother thinking about that shit and just buy a rainbow of fruit and veg for the week.

Finally.... The List.

•  1 head of cabbage
• 4 heads of broccoli
• 1 tomato product (paste or fresh)
• oranges
• apples
• spinach (not much- this alternates with broccoli for "green")
• enough fish or shrimp for 3ish meals
• eggs
• onions
• low fat milk
• chicken or beef, enough for 2ish meals
• cheese

 I know cheese is the enemy, but adding 100cal worth of a good cheese to an otherwise extremely "diety" meal of veggies makes me feel like I actually ate.  So replace "cheese" in this list with that one item you love, that's hard to binge on.  E.g. I don't buy a 5lb bag of shredded cheddar, I buy a small block of romano.

Of course there's a secondary list of things that I just keep in the house, which don't need to be bought every week.  Some of these include:

• splenda
• coffee
• sugar / flour / corn starch / spices
• sauces
• teas

And more.  Just the normal stuff everyone has.

So that's it.