Finding It

I recently finished Valerie Bertinelli's second book, Finding It. It is the follow up to her book, Losing It. I liked this second book quite a lot better than her first book. She talks a lot about how to maintain weight loss and even how to maintain that peacefulness in life. She does give detailed information about how she was able to get her body into the shape she wanted in order to appear in a bikini for one of her Jenny Craig commercials.

I am not sure I should have read this book when I did in life as I am finding myself at my heaviest weight ever not pregnant. I mean it is good information for someone like me who does want to get off some of the extra weight through exercise and eating right, but I also have an obsessive personality, so I find myself thinking about this almost all the time. I think I am driving my family a little crazy with my new obsession over weight when my body really does not look that bad. My legs are more shapely than they have been since high school, and I do not really feel that I appear to be all that chunky. I don't have a magazine cover ready body for sure, but I am an avearage person. I do have body image problems, which were not helped by the fact that I just went to Las Vegas with my best friend from high school, who still barely weighs 100 pounds and is about as thick as my pinky finger. (In her defense, her body is just built that way. She eats all the time and that is just her lucky lot in life to have that cute little body!) My sister tries to remind that anyone would feel chunky standing next to my best friend.  

I run almost every night on my treadmill. I try to eat right; although admittedly, I have a sweet tooth. I have found myself trying to be more aware of what I put in my mouth. I have cut way back on drinking soda pop and eating candy. It helped me to lose a couple of pounds in a week.

Bertinelli states in her book that she feels that her plan is doable for the average woman. The problem I have with that is that while she is a single, working mom similar to me, she is also not like me. Her job is to be a spokesperson for Jenny Craig. She doesn't have to work a regular work week, and she can afford to hire a personal trainer who kept her on track and pushed her to be able to fit into a bikini with a nice shapely body. He also fit her with a computer device called a Body Bug, which read her every movement and calculated how many calories she ate versus how many she burned. Again, something that I do not think I could afford to purchase. I do believe that the average woman could do a modified version of her plan and get her weight down to a manageable amount, however, I do not have time to go on a 45 minute run every morning nor do I have the financial resources to hire the top of the line trainer with all of his fancy gadgets. I think she means well, but it still comes across as not quite as accessible as she would think.

I think overall the book was an enjoyable read, much more so than I found her first book. I think one needs to take the parts that work for you and put those into practice as much as you can while still living in your own reality.