Shauna Reid

This is just a wonderful book. Whilst it is primarily about Shauna's weight loss journey, it is so much more than that, and it is, to boot, just wonderfully written. Vivid, funny and moving by turns. Read the opening chapter and tell me this girl can't write. I dare you.

This book is spectacular! We'll all be so lucky when it's finally available in the United States and more than just a handful of Weight watchers know about it. Her blog is free online at www.dietgirl.org but the book is much more immediate and moving.

My first bout of tears came on page 41 when she describes her sister, who helped her get started and stayed glued to Shauna's side though the first three years of her efforts:

"I must admit Rhiannon is the brains behind the operation. She's the show more real superhero of this story; I'm more the bumbling sidekick. ...I couldn't ask for a better ally in the fight against flab. The girl doesn't even need to lose any weight if you ask me, but she says her jeans are a bit snug and she wants to be healthier. I could bawl from sheer gratefulness. I feel so overwhelmed by my mountain of lard, but Rhiannon's support makes me want to try."

Something about that paragraph made me realize how much easier losing weight would be if people were kind instead of cruel. And how much less traumatic it would be if we all had a friend like Rhiannon with us along the way.

I wish I could give this to people who haven't yet started losing weight; I wish I could make them realize that the terror they're feeling, the hopelessness, is not unique just to them, and that it's curable, just like the weight is loseable.

My favorite sentence from the book, the one that's going to stay with me while I try to lose my own weight: "My body is a mass of contradictions - muscle and curves, stretch marks and strength - but I'm starting to embrace it all."

Doesn't it sound like something Walt Whitman would say? I love that line. She doesn't spell it out for you, but she experienced a real change when she stopped dieting and focused on exercise instead. Her self esteem just shot upwards and she began to like her body instead of see it as a never ending challenge to fix. It's a good case for exercise, even when that seems like an even harder thing to do than diet. show less

Shauna Reid is my hero! My superhero! I recently came to the end of a major weight-loss journey (90 lbs lost, woohoo!!) and ended up stumbling a lot along the way and even after I had reached my goal. I wasn't prepared for all of the emotional issues I would have to tackle when it came to dealing with my weight, losing the weight and learning to be happy with who I am, imperfections and all. It's still a struggle. But reading Shauna's own personal journey with her amazing wit and flat-out show more honesty has really encouraged me to keep moving forward and to take the time to get to love the body I have. I know I'm not alone, that I'm not the only person who has experienced what I've been through and what I still go through.

The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl started as a blog (which Shauna still runs today) and chronicles the years spent going from 351 lbs to 175 lbs. But it's also so much more than that. The weight loss is front and center but really, where her story becomes so inspiring, is when she begins to blossom into a confident woman ready to create her own adventures as opposed to waiting for life to happen. That's the kind of person I want to be. I used to think "Once I lose the weight, then I'll be able to...." Shauna started that way too, but then she realized what a waste of precious time that really was! So she took some risks. She moved from Australia to Scotland, attended cardio classes at her local gym, traveled Europe, met up with friends more often and stopped obsessing over what and how much she was eating. And along the way, she found her self several sizes smaller, happy with a life full of great family and friends, and also managed to stumble into the man of her dreams.

This is such a great book for any woman to read, whether you've struggled with weight or are just looking for inspiration to get out and live life. I loved this book and am now a subscriber to Shauna's blog :) Great read! show less

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 show more 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. show less