This easy-to-follow diet plan may leave some readers hungry for more information.
A brief, back-to-basics diet book aims to help women lose weight and keep it off.
“I have struggled with my weight since I was an adolescent,” DeSimone confesses on the first page of her debut. Shedding pounds wasn’t the problem, but keeping them off was, especially after she had two children. She tried numerous diets until finally discovering a straightforward strategy that worked for her: She started counting calories. The author realized she needed to consume no more than 1,500 calories per day if she wanted to achieve her goal of losing 10 pounds. With that information in hand, she devised a plan where she would eat five 300-calorie meals or snacks each day. (DeSimone’s diet is specifically aimed at women, who typically have lower calorie needs than men.) Once dieters reach their desired weight, they can switch to a plan that involves five 400-calorie daily meals. “Dieting is all about the numbers,” the author tells readers, urging them—in the manner of a supportive and enthusiastic friend—to become vigilant about checking the calorie counts of all the foods they eat. The focus here is truly on the numbers. While she points readers toward whole foods like vegetables and nuts and touts low-carb items, she doesn’t hesitate to suggest people get “prepackaged meals” if that makes it easier to track what they eat. Occasional cheat days, where you “eat what you love and don’t count,” are recommended as a way to stay motivated. No foods are strictly off-limits provided dieters stay within their daily calorie goals. DeSimone’s plan is easy to understand and appears simple to follow. Those overwhelmed by more complicated diets will likely appreciate the author’s basic approach, but there are times when the advice is too bare-bones. At several points, she simply advises readers to turn to Google if they have further questions about calorie counts. Nutrition and exercise are mentioned in passing, but the spotlight remains on the sometimes “tedious” process of counting calories—“the only way to gain control of your weight.”
This easy-to-follow diet plan may leave some readers hungry for more information.Pub Date: May 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-69870-041-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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