Skinny Bitch: A Beginner’s Guide

How does this diet sound? Eat all the bread, potatoes, pasta and cookies you want and quit counting calories. Jump for carb-loaded joy! Okay, there is a catch: no meat, dairy, sugar, refined flour or artificial sweeteners. But after reading Skinny Bitch by former Ford Models agent Rory Freedman and former model Kim Barnouin, going (dare we say it?) vegan sounds less like the lifestyle of crunch-granola hippies and more like a recipe for becoming slim and gorgeous.

What do “skinny bitches” eat anyway?What makes this diet easy to swallow is the book’s tough-love attitude ?- part best-friend counsel, part drill-sergeant abuse and a dash of sailor mouth, wrapped in a pretty chick-lit package. “Say goodbye to soda and hello to a sweet ass,” “You are a total moron if you think the Atkins diet will make you thin” and many priceless-yet-unprintable dictums certainly make you laugh in a way few diet books can. “If we wrote a meek, apologetic diet book, it would go in one ear and out the other,” Freedman explains.

The basic concept of the Skinny Bitch diet is surprisingly simple: “You need to get healthy if you want to get skinny.” And to be healthy by the authors’ definition, you should eat foods that are easy to digest, rich in nutrients and free of harmful additives.

That means saying goodbye to sugar (aka “the devil”) and products containing it, and not just because of empty calories. “When sugar enters your body, it’s acidic,” Freedman says. “When you put acidic foods into your body, in order to protect your organs, your body produces fat cells.” Just don’t turn to NutraSweet or Splenda to satisfy that sweet tooth. Artificial sweeteners have been linked to everything from cancer to diabetes. And if weight is your only health concern, Freedman adds, studies have shown that these chemical substitutes actually stimulate your appetite.

Never fear. Freedman says you can still get your junk-food fix, ironically, at your local health food store. “Kim and I are pigs,” she declares. “We live to eat, and there’s no reason you should have to live without cookies. We just read the ingredients and look for better substitutes for sugar, like evaporated cane juice, brown rice syrup, molasses, raw sugar, beet sugar, maple syrup, things like that.”

Along with sugar, toss out anything made with white flour or white rice. The nutrients are stripped out during processing and then added back in, but the body doesn’t absorb those additives as well as it sucks ‘em up from the whole grain stuff. So go for brown rice and whole grain pasta and bread.

In a decidedly direct manner, the book reminds us that in order to be thin, what goes in must come out. And one of the easiest ways to ensure such regularity is to eat a lot of fruit. Cribbing an idea from the book Fit for Life, Freedman suggests eating fruit alone for breakfast, since it passes through the body fastest when there’s no interference from heavier foods.

For the steak and cheese addicts among us, all of the above sounds easy enough. Then we get to the bit about giving up meat and dairy. Freedman and Barnouin are passionate animal-rights advocates, but again, for those of us more concerned about our waistlines, they offer a believable argument for going veggie: Meat takes a long time to break down in the body, and much of it ends up just staying put, blocking the intestines and slowing the metabolism. Plus, Freedman says, the growth hormone given to most animals could affect your own body the same way it’s intended to affect theirs.

As for dairy products, by age four, humans (like all other mammals) lose a large amount of the lactase enzyme that helps us digest milk, because that’s when we’re supposed to have switched over completely from breast milk to solid foods. That’s why dairy consumption as adults leads to digestive problems, which lead to weight problems. So why does it feel downright unnatural to go a day without eating cheese? “You are physiologically addicted to cheese because it contains casein, which breaks down into opiates in your body,” Freedman explains.

Luckily, there are plenty of cheese and meat alternatives out there made from soy. Though less processed soy, as in tofu, is better for you, the processed fake-meat products are fine for curbing your flesh-eating habit. Also, try to find organic products, since soy is often genetically modified. That goes for just about any other food too. “Read the ingredients” is practically a Skinny Bitch mantra, because the fewer artificial ingredients you consume, the healthier and skinnier you’ll be.

Freedman advises approaching this diet very gradually, giving up one bad thing at a time and setting achievable weekly goals. Best of all, you can cheat. “Just pick and choose what works for you,” she says. Well, that’s not a very bitchy attitude, is it?

Just what does a “skinny bitch” eat?

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