Thin Is the New Happy

By Valerie Frankel

Book Overview

Frankel, like most women, has endured years of dieting, starvation, and total preoccupation with her weight. Not wanting to pass this legacy onto her own daughters, she set out to cleanse herself of these painful and damaging cycles, which she chronicles in this hilarious, unflinching memoir.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312373929
• ISBN13: 9780312373924
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Great book if you have a sense of humor

I really enjoyed this book. It was a simple, easy read that is also easy to relate to even if you didnt have the mother issues. Especially in this day and age when a lot of girls are growing up with the media, their parents, and their peers judging them for the way they look it is a nice relief to know that someone overcame all that and just became happy with themselves. I think the book title doesn't mean that she is happy being thin, but that she is happy being herself and by being herself she could let go of worrying about her weight and could become happy with the way she was. Any chronic dieter knows that any weight you lose on a diet is never enough and she overcame this and became ok with her weight, whatever it might be. I think this is an idea that many women today need to think about and take heart too - that maybe just maybe by worrying so much about your weight you are actually blocking yourself from losing more weight simply because you care about you more and not what other people think of you. I think some of the negative reviewers need to remember that this book is supposed to be comic and not take it so seriously. I would like to know what person l didnt have bad thoughts about their childhood tormentors - no one is that perfect of a person. Just enjoy the book and dont take everything so seriously.

This is my mom and me!

Valerie Frankel speaks about things that she endured that I absolutely relate to. This book is about my mother and me! I was put on my first diet at the tender age of eight. (I have photos from that time proving that I was not heavy.) I remember at age 15 having to speak to the masses at Overeaters Anonymous. There were many diets between those two, as well as many (way too many to mention) afterwards. I was also put through hell in school like Ms. Frankel, although with me it was weight and religion! Her insight and humor made this an enjoyable and cathartic book for me. I too went on the non-diet and go to the gym four times per week, having a similar outcome as she. This is the first book of hers that I've read, and I can't wait to get my skinny fingers on others! I'm going to give a copy to my mother for Hanukkah!

"I was my own worst enemy."

Valerie Frankel's "Thin is the New Happy" is a seriocomic look at the author's thirty-year battle with her weight. In sixth grade, she was eleven years old, five feet tall, and tipped the scale at one hundred pounds. This propelled her mother, Judy, to start "Project Daughter Diet," a humiliating and frustrating plan that destroyed Valerie's ability to relax and eat normally. Not only did her mother weigh her regularly and force her to count calories, but Judy "colluded with other adults," including teachers and the mothers of Valerie's friends to monitor her child's intake and prevent her from cheating. When her weight dropped to eighty-eight pounds, both she and her mother "cried big fat sloppy tears of joy." Unfortunately, the "acute sense of cynicism" that Mom's regimen instilled in Valerie lasted a great deal longer than her slim figure. Frankel candidly discusses her relationship with her family, numerous sexual escapades, drug use, and love-hate relationship with food. She is a clever writer whose wisecracks and puns soften the obvious pain that she must have felt while dredging up a host of unpleasant memories. An example of her gallows humor is the line, "I might go to my deathbed wishing I'd left a skinnier corpse." "Thin is the New Happy" is a blistering critique of "diet addiction," the tendency of women with a negative body image to go on one diet after another in a futile effort to achieve physical perfection. It is also a bittersweet memoir in which Frankel describes her journey of self-discovery: She makes peace with her mother, contacts a boy who bullied her during childhood, and attempts to do a thorough emotional housecleaning. Her goal? To learn to eat normally, exercise sensibly, and pass on a healthful psychological legacy to her two lovely daughters. This book would be heartbreaking if it were not so laugh-out-loud funny.

Great Book!

Wow! This is one of the best books I've ever read, and I've read thousands of books over the years. With the exception of a few things, this book could have been my life, and I suspect many women can say the same. I have toggled between anorexia and obesity for 25 years, and have not come to term with my body image issues, but this book gives me hope that it can be done. Bravo!!

Frankel Digs Deep to Unpack the Weight, Real and Mental, She's Carried Since Childhood

As someone who has struggled with my weight, dieted, and mainly, worried about my appearance, I've read plenty of weight loss memoirs, and will continue to do so, I'm sure. I can safely say that while Frankel's overall message (don't diet, eat what you want) isn't new, her approach, humor, frankness and willingness to dig deep are something unexpected. Frankel starts with her mom pressuring her to lose weight as a child (sadly a very common scenario). She does, and immediately reaps the social benefits, but of course once she goes off her diet, the weight comes right back. This started her on her lifelong path of going up and down with her weight, something she only vows to stop when she realizes that her two daughters are approaching the age she was when weight became a central issue in her life. It's in talking about her first husband's death that Frankel really shines here, not overdramatizing her story but sharing the real issues she dealt with. "Weight loss became my Vicodin, my Prozac. The red jeans were my delivery system. It took the edge off my pain. Shrinking calmed me, pleased me, gave me something to feel good about." The other chapter that truly stands out is the third one about her mother, where she confronts her with the revelations Frankel's had about the roots of her behavior. The final exchange with her mom about her weight issues is illuminating. Far from seeing herself as part of the problem, her mother feels that she was protecting Valerie from a world that hates the overweight. Her mother's own food issues (she refuses to eat in public alone, even passing up Frankel's offer of $1,000 to sit at Starbucks for five minutes) come through clearly, but are not really the point; Frankel's acceptance of the fact that they will never see eye-to-eye is. In some ways, what makes Thin is the New Happy so powerful aren't Frankel's tales of her highs and lows, but her relationships with those around her, from her parents to her two husbands to the classmates who teased her mercilessly. Each of them has a different perspective, ones that often clash quite extremely with her own. Frankel doesn't back down, but she does, when confronting people like her mother or her former classmate, Z., let them have their say. A stray comment from her husband about her belly being big stays with her for five years (!) until she finally asks him about it. Her adventures with What Not to Wear author Stacy London, who gives Frankel's tame, boring, baggy wardrobe a complete overhaul, are fun, as is her tale of posing nude for Self magazine; these stories are a welcome complement to the heavier material. Though the tone can sometimes be a bit too perky by the end, knowing Frankel's lifelong struggle makes it easy to cheer for her newfound happiness (though one does wonder if she would have the same level of optimism were she not to have dropped two dress sizes and twenty pounds). A fast but intense read, Thin is the New Happy is refreshingly blunt about