Guys, I like totally just read the best book, like, ever! It’s called Six Weeks to OMG, and even better, the subtitle is Get Skinnier Than All Your Friends. Wanna know all about it? Check it out, like, right here!
This book came out last summer, and I apparently missed all the hype. The author was on a bunch of talk shows, and if you Google the title, you’ll find plenty of testimonials about how this book changed people’s lives and helped them get skinnier than all their friends – forever!
As you can guess from the title, the book is targeted at teenage girls. The author (Venice A. Fulton – that’s a pen name, you betcha – who is sometimes called a “celebrity trainer” and sometimes an “actor”) makes a few passing attempts at including guys in his writing, but it’s full of language, pop-culture references, and “clever” asides meant to appeal to the youngest female dieters among us. I’m not even kidding you when I say that, more than once, he talks about how his readers might be as young as twelve.
Okay, let’s get to the good stuff. Here are some of the rules laid out by Venice:
- When you first get up in the morning, drink black coffee.
- Then run a cold bath (not too cold, but pretty cold), and sit or lay down in it for up to 15 minutes.
- After your bath, have a workout.
- Then, wait about three hours before you have breakfast (yes, most of us refer to eating a meal at this time as “lunch”).
- Several times a week, blow up a balloon repeatedly before you go to bed – this will help you achieve a super flat stomach that will get you tons of OMGs!
I’m not making any of this up. Let’s go a bit deeper, by taking a peek at some direct quotes from the book:
- “There’s no limit on how much fat you can lose. If you’re very fat, you can lose a bigger total compared to those who have less fat to start with. But everyone, and that means e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e, can be skinny. Yes, skinny.”
- “Being skinny is for everyone. It’s healthy, it’s possible, and importantly, it’s how the human body loves to be.”
- “In 6 weeks, you can lose between 10 and 20 pounds of fat.”
- “Losing fat quickly is exciting. And so is keeping it off. To do this, you need a body and brain that works normally.”
- “There’s no such thing as a healthy snack.”
- “Humans don’t need carbs.”
- “It’s much healthier to lose excess body fat fast, even if the methods used aren’t ideal for a whole lifetime. Every second that you’re fat, you’re damaging your health and your confidence. Screw tradition, and save both right now.”
- “… all excess body fat is proof that we’re doing something wrong. This can’t be denied.”
According to Venice, you need to “make sure you lose fat permanently” and that “you’ll easily keep it off.” I guess he thinks all the people who regained the weight loss through diet programs (remember, that’s like 95% of people) just didn’t try hard enough? Maybe we didn’t blow up enough balloons.
There is, surprisingly, some good advice sprinkled throughout the book (but you have to read closely), such as:
- Ignore height/weight charts, body fat percentage charts, and BMI charts.
- Not stressing about arbitrary clothing sizes.
- “If a diet tells you to live on a limited number of foods, you’re in trouble from the start.”
- Find a form of movement that suits you and makes you look forward to doing it.
- Lifting weights/strength training is important (although he claims “If you do weights at least once every 10 days, you’ll get a fantastic body, skinny and with shape”).
- Get plenty of sleep.
- Drink lots of water.
- Eat a wide variety of fruits and veggies.
Throughout the book, he repeatedly equates being skinny with both being pretty and being happy. I can’t express to you how irresponsible I find this book. It seems like a blueprint for developing eating disorders, serious body issues, and depression.
Based on some brief internet research, it seems like a lot of proponents of this book are adults, and what an adult wants to do is their prerogative. But this book is meant to appeal to young, impressionable girls. It’s bad enough that this man thought it a good idea to make some money preying on the insecurities of young girls, but that other people thought it was a good idea to publish and market it? All I can say about that is… OMG.
