I finished Skinny Bitch, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin this weekend. This book is for anyone looking for a good bitch slap about their eating, drinking, smoking, processed food, sugar, meat and dairy eating addictions. There wasn’t really anything in this book that was new to me, but it definitely reaffirmed my choice to be vegetarian and made me think more about my dairy consumption. Did I mention the authors are both vegan and that’s the diet they are advocating for? Oh yeah, sorry. The authors are both vegan and they advocate a vegan diet.

There are two reasons I don’t eat meat, the first is for health and the second is for ethical reasons. The Dead, Rotting, Decomposing Flesh Diet chapter was the literary version of Peta’s Meet Your Meat that I still have on VHS in my closet here if you’d like to borrow it. I’ll even kick in the puke bucket and box of kleenex to go along with it.

The chapter on dairy starts out on the wrong foot for me giving a few inaccuracies about breastfeeding, but maybe I should save that for a future breastfeeding blog that I won’t create. When a child is anywhere from 12 to 24 months old, a mother stops breastfeeding. Her milk dries up. The child will never drink breast milk again. Now wait just a doggone second. There are plenty of children who nurse beyond 2 years (AHEM) AND children who wean while their mother is pregnant and go back to nursing once the new baby is born. Oh wait, I said I was going to save that, wasn’t I? Their point is basically that humans, or any species for that matter, do not need milk much beyond infancy, and that cheese and milk and ice cream are keeping you from being a Skinny Bitch.

During my weight loss last year I cut down considerably on the amount of dairy products I ate, and even experimented with veganism for about a month last spring. While I’m not ready to cut dairy completely out of my diet, I do feel better choosing organic dairy the majority of the time, so that at least we are avoiding the hormones and antibiotic issues that surround cow squeezings. (The perfect opportunity to plug my mom’s entry in the Urban Dictionary!) It did make me more mindful of how much dairy I consume and eating less of it. I completely agree that we do not NEED dairy to live and be healthy, and in many cases dairy is actually making us unhealthy. We are the only species that drinks the milk beyond infancy or drink the milk of another species. Zak says: What about cats? Oh yeah, I guess a cat will drink cows milk if you put it down in front of them, won’t that? Anyway, I digress.

The crude language and name calling got a little old at times but I also find myself laughing out loud and making anyone within ear shot listen as I re-read aloud what just made me laugh.

I love the message they send though about Trusting No One, and that we cannot have any faith in the governmental agencies that are supposed to be protecting us and our food supply. We have to rely on ourselves when it comes to our health, whether it’s what we put in our bodies or how we birth our babies. (Oh wait, they didn’t talk about birth…. that was me.) They are exactly right. You can TRUST NO ONE. Educate yourself, do your own research, consult people you consider to be experts, make your own choices based on your own findings when it comes to your health.

They definitely tell it like it is and I like that. If you want to be a Skinny Bitch, you can’t be a pussy, get out there an exercise, cut out the processed junk from your life.

I like that they sing the praises of organic foods and produce, but given this book was written in 2005 I feel a little sheepish having only really gotten on this boat within the last year. Better late than never, I suppose.

I didn’t like how much they push fake meat and cheese products on readers, but at the same time when we first became vegetarians we ate a lot of that stuff too, and it is a helpful way to make the transition from being a meat eater to vegetarian or vegan a little easier.

This book was a quick read and entertaining too, and is definitely worth taking a look at if you are motivated when someone is totally blunt with the truth and calls you names too. They tell it like it is and there is no beating around the bush or gentle hint dropping here.