New York Times bestselling author Nancy Redd just released her latest book, Diet Drama, a follow-up to the bestselling, Body Drama. Nancy is the self-esteem adviser to FITNESS magazine, and as an AOL Health Insider. She has also been featured on ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS’s The Early Show, NBC’s Today Show, Oprah & Friends, CNN, The Tyra Show, E! True Hollywood Stories, PEOPLE magazine, NPR, PBS, Inside Edition, and more.
Nancy took time out of her busy schedule to answer a few questions for DietsInReview.com on her new book, which releases in January.
Why do you think that no one has featured real young women in an exercise book until now?
Because most diet books are written by a fitness expert who wants to show off their hot bod, and the intent is usually good but it tends to be tinged with an invitation for jealousy and a hierarchy of health based on looks, which isn’t fair or healthy. Diet Drama is the first diet book to present information and exercises in a flat system where we all are equal when it comes to our health goals, and thus no one body type deserves to be lambasted or lauded!
By showing bigger girls, are you promoting an unhealthy lifestyle?
Absolutely not. Again– it isn’t a zero sum game…big doesn’t necessarily mean unhealthy, but most importantly, even if an individual is in need of getting in shape, why does that preclude them from being featured? We all need motivation and encouragement, and exclusion is not the answer.
What’s the difference between Diet Drama and Body Drama – don’t they both have to do with self-esteem?
Body Drama deals with how we feel about and deal with what’s going on underneath our clothes, our bodily functions, while Diet Drama is more about what we look like in our clothes, and how our body feels as a whole. It’s an entirely separate issue – many women who suffer from tremendous Body Drama might not have as much Diet Drama, and vice versa. For both, unfortunately, the same scary level of misinformation exists– in the same way that most women don’t know the official names for the parts of their genitalia, most can’t tell you the difference between a carb or a calorie, either, and that’s a big part of the problem.
What about the increasing number of eating disorders in America?
That’s one of the main reasons I open Diet Drama with the Body Image chapter – because eating disorders are on the rise, and that has to do with the mental aspect of everything which I feel is ignored in nearly all other diet books. Eating disorders are a big deal, indeed, and not just undereating, like with anorexia, but also with overeating, too –there are more individuals suffering from compulsive overeating and binge eating than anorexia and bulimia. Many, if not most people who binge are not bulimic, and thus pack on unhealthy excess body fat due to this disorder. So yes, eating disorders of all kinds are discussed in the Body Image chapter, with an intensity and a compassion unmatched by any other diet book on the market.
Don’t you think that the expensive programs and the usual models in exercise books, with their mantras and programs and tough love, give the reader something to aspire to or plan with?
For the most part, it just creates another barrier, another great excuse to not try. When you’ve got seventy pounds to lose, your focus needs to be on the first five, or maybe even on just five minutes on a treadmill, and not on expensive machines or negative reinforcements like “do you want to look like a mermaid or a whale?” which was actually used in a gym’s ad this year! Diet Drama is chock-full of completely free exercises that require nothing but a floor and extremely inexpensive foods so that anyone can accomplish their goals, without being made to feel like a pig or encouraged to break the piggy bank.
Read the complete review of Diet Drama here.