Naturally Thin: A Review

I picked up Bethenny Frankel’s book, Naturally Thin: Unleash Your Skinny Girl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting the other day. Bethenny, for those of you who don’t know, was featured on the Martha Stewart Apprentice show and is also one of the Real Housewives of New York City. She’s a natural foods chef and owns her company, BethennyBakes. She’s straightforward, with an acerbic wit that makes her a fan favorite.

And I am a fan of Bethenny’s. I appreciate her attitude toward things and think she’s certainly interesting to watch! So I was very excited to see what she had to say about eating and living, because when you’re talking about being “naturally thin,” that’s just what you’re speaking to.

A naturally thin person, in her eyes, is someone who eats whatever they want (they don’t deprive themselves) and they don’t obsess about food. They don’t beat themselves up when they mess up, but they are good to themselves and don’t binge eat or act as if every meal is going to be their last, either.

To get to this miraculous point (and for some, it is truly miraculous), Bethenny offers ten tips to act, think, and live as a naturally thin person. The tips are all common sense things (such as: “you can have it all, you just can’t have it all at once” and “check yourself before you wreck yourself.”) The tips are not the secret to this book, however. To me, it’s Bethenny’s explanation of each and her approach. You will definitely appreciate her realistic take on life! She doesn’t, for example, believe in counting calories or carbs or weighing food because it just doesn’t make people stick on a “diet” long-term. She talks about never dieting again, but instead looking at food as something you balance, making good choices, and being realistic.

The thing women will find very helpful is the attitude and spirit of this book, because it will change your life.

If I had one criticism at all, it would be for the second half of the book where Bethenny talks about the ten tips in practice by showing us what she ate during a typical week. I found this confusing and sometimes a bit aggravating. There were a couple times she mentioned skipping meals due to her busy schedule (she doesn’t recommend people do this, it was a circumstance of her own doing) and then just fluffed it off like “I didn’t eat lunch, but you know what, I didn’t miss it.” To me this was like sitting with a thin person who tells you they forget to eat. When you are struggling to eat normally and lose weight, you don’t want to hear how people forget to eat.

So rather than hear how Bethenny put this plan into practice for a typical week, I would have left it entirely out of the book or put more of a structured plan into place so people could see what she was talking about. Part of the reason she didn’t do that, of course, is because she doesn’t want to give us hard and fast measurements for food. She wants us to develop our real hunger and learn to eat based on what our individual bodies need. (So I understood what she was trying to do at the end but it didn’t work for me.)

Still, if you read nothing but the first half of this book alone, your life will change for the better. It’s truly positive and smart, and it will help change your thinking about food and your body. I highly recommend for every woman on the planet to read it!

Image: Amazon.com