Shauna Reid

I loved this book! At the start we meet Shauna 23 years old and 350 pounds. She is unhappy and unhealthy and decides to make a change. Joining Weight Watchers as the first and I think the hardest step for her - they have to get extra weights to put on the scale to weigh her. After the meeting she cries all the way home. The Amazing Adventures of dietgirl is the blog she starts to chronicle her journey - exposing herself and staying anonymous at the same time. The book spans 4 years and 175.5 pounds lost. Shauna is funny, smart and this book was a joy to read.


May 2013… (más)

Like many readers, I picked this book up in the hopes of getting some inspiration from Shauna's story. It's hard not to be inspired by someone who lost so much weight the hard, old-fashioned way through diet and exercise. Shauna spent years and years, not weeks and months, to lose her weight, which feels more real than what we so often see in the media. In this blog turned book, Shauna chronicles more about the head space she was in over the course of five or six years. Yes, she learned to eat healthy. Yes, she started to learn to exercise and love it. However, the biggest factor always seems to be how she handled it when things went wrong.

This journey was not a fast one for Shauna, which I could appreciate. It seems like too many people yo-yo up and down with their weight at insane speeds. Realistically, it was nice to see what one person did, in a reasonable fashion, to lose a large amount of weight. In fact, I mostly appreciated that her life went on and she lived it! It can seem too unreasonable to expect someone to just stop their life to focus solely on weight (I guess that is unless you're on a TV show or something), so I thought the directions her life took--moving to the UK--was an interesting reality to her story.

On the whole, this is an inspiring book if you want a realistic look at the ups and downs of one person's weight loss journey. There isn't necessarily a lot about how she did it, outside of the common sense "eat less and exercise" mantra, but it does give you a lot about her mindset and how it changed over time. Overall, this was a much more entertaining read than a mere self help book. This is one of those books that anyone could read to appreciate.… (más)