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In this provocative, wildly entertaining, and compelling novel, seven women enrolled in an extreme weight loss documentary discover self-love and sisterhood as they enact a daring revenge against the exploitative filmmakers.

Alice and Daphne, both successful and accomplished working mothers, harbor the same secret: obsession with their weight overshadows concerns about their children, husbands, work—and everything else of importance in their lives. Scales terrify them.

Daphne, plump in a family of model-thin women, learned only slimness earns admiration at her mother’s knee. Alice, break-up skinny when she met her husband, risks losing her marriage if she keeps gaining weight.

The two women meet at Waisted. Located in a remote Vermont mansion, the program promises fast, dramatic weight loss, and Alice, Daphne, and five other women are desperate enough to leave behind their families for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The catch? They must agree to always be on camera; afterward, the world will see Waisted: The Documentary.

The women soon discover that the filmmakers have trapped them in a cruel experiment. With each pound lost, they edge deeper into obsession and instability…until they decide to take matters into their own hands.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

She, along with six other substantial women, stood in the parking lot avoiding each other, as though their abundance of flesh might transfer from body to body.

“I’m in shock at the number.” Daphne refused to state the actual number. “Shock without any baseline of knowledge. I don’t know what I should weigh. Last night, watching those men and women being weighed like heifers at market, I wanted to cry.”

Mirrors engulfed them, mirrors sharper and brighter than Daphne imagined existed… Mirrors courtesy of Satan.

“Alive is a story— decades old, but true— of plane crash survivors in the Andes Mountains,” Daphne explained. “The passengers who lived survived by eating the flesh of the dead.”   A week ago, Hania would have groaned in disgust. Now she looked as though she understood cannibalism.

Fat women looked more naked than normal-weighted women. Clothes made the woman. Naked made the shame.

When they learned that Susannah worked as a nursery school teacher, Daphne imagined toddlers climbing up onto her giant lap as though scaling the Matterhorn.

Daphne snuck up on the scale as if approaching it slowly would trick the machine… Like the smuggest of men, the scale mocked her.

My Review:

Oh what wickedly clever insights Randy Susan Meyers skewered me with, it was as if she has been spying from my pantry. I could have easily been a character in this book. I was blessed (overly so) with a curvaceous body shape and am a life-long expert dieter (yoyo) and as one who counts vacuuming as strenuous exercise (begrudgingly done), I saw my crazy on several pages of this revealing tale and had a fleeting worrisome thought of whether I should possibly check my home for hidden cameras. I will confess to having fervently thrown myself into countless fad diets and “lifestyle programs” as well as begged a few (numerous) doctors for the latest magic pill being advertised, all while keeping fingers crossed it will be as promised – the last one I’ll ever need. I know I’m not unique, and imagine 90% of women have suffered from similar concerns at least once in their lives.

Ms. Meyers’ narrative raised several interesting points and provided thoughtful if not a bit painfully reflective entertainment as to the extreme measures (including soul-shattering humiliation, deprivation, and degradation) that women would willingly allow being perpetrated upon them for the goal of quick weight loss. She had me there. While the plot and storylines were relevant and topical, I also deeply appreciated how this perceptive author craftily navigated the nuances and complications of racial and cultural quirks toward these issues with the use of clever wry humor and insightful observations. While many of the characters’ revelations and inner musings were markedly profound, my favorite combination of all the words used in this book was a notation of “the secret obese of France,” snort, you know there has to be at least a few hidden away.