Waisted is a book that’ll bring out all of your emotions. I felt happy, sad, scared, hungry....and more. This book is about these women that are all big (overweight/obese) and they check themselves into a retreat to lose weight. What they don’t know is the way they’ll be treated in this retreat. These women are treated VERY BADLY.....I actually felt sorry for them. They got 5 minutes to eat their carrots and drink their water....(this is just a example as to how these beautiful women are being treated) The man that’s running this retreat is awful to these women. He humiliated them (making them weigh naked in front of everyone else).....anyways, these women want out bad, but their stuck....in the middle of no where, they took their phones....so they have to come up with a plan, but will it work.....hmmmmm, you’ll have to read to find out. I will tell you this, these women learned quit a bit about themselves while in this retreat.....they gained self esteem/love. They noticed their family’s as important people in their lives....and not just a fat person they don’t want to be around. I only gave it 3 stars because I felt like there’s too many characters to keep up with.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing a PRC in exchange for my review.

What extremes would you go to in order to lose weight? This book follows the journey of 3 women who volunteer to be part of a weight loss documentary. The book chronicles their obsession with weight and the effects of being overweight have on their personal and professional lives. Once they arrive at the Vermont mansion where the filming and program take place, they learn that there are no limits to the humiliation they must undergo. And this is where I struggled with the book. While the outrageous experiments were probably meant to be humorous, I didn't find them funny at all--in fact, I felt like running away from the book. Which is what the participants eventually did. The rest of the book is about the women's quest for redemption against the program organizers.

The writing is crisp and it's clear that the author is passionate about this topic. I just didn't enjoy the book. In fact, I kind of lost interest. While reading it, I couldn't help but compare the storyline to another book about at self-help retreat, Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarity. Both books started off with a great premise, but to me, it seems that maybe the plot of a self-help or weight loss retreat doesn't make for a good story. You'd think it would.

2.5 stars for plot, rounded up to 3 for good writing

Enjoyed reading from the perspective of many women and learning about their differences and how they came to have issues with their weight, and how they dealt with those issues in the end. Loved the positive thoughts and examples used to show how strong, unique and beautiful all women are no matter what the scale says. Highly recommend reading!

I really really wanted to like this book, but I unfortunately didn't. It's clear the author has good intentions and wanted to address a lot of issues surrounding women in larger bodies in our society. However, I think the scope of the narrative is just too large and overly ambitious. Trying to address race, gender, weight, relationships (familial and intimate), dieting, and how all those things intersect is really hard in one book. It's also not easy to come to the end of a story with all these issues and leave it with a happy, or at least satisfying, ending.

In addition to the subject matter being overly broad, the plot and dialogue is so unrealistic that it's hard to get through. In my experience, no one speaks the way the characters in this book talk to each other. The dialogue has a level of self awareness that I just don't think people have when they're struggling with identity, one's place in society, and being gaslight to believe your weight is the real problem.

The characters were both generic and too specific at the same time. I had a hard time keeping the two main characters straight as they were basically the same person, just with different "issues" assigned to them.

I especially took issue with the way eating disorders were addressed in this book. One character purges but the behavior seems to be attributed to the fact that she eats too much and is stressed out and so therefore, she vomits. In my experience eating disorders are so much more complex than that simple formula and making it only about food and weight was too reductive for me.

I don't want to be overly harsh in my review of this novel as I don't know what experiences the author has had with her own weight and relationship with food, but this didn't feel like a book written by a woman who's struggled with these issues. It feels like a book written by someone who's read about this stuff and thinks they get it based on the general stereotypes and assumptions they've heard.

It's possible I just prefer memoir when it comes to these issues and I know that I'm very close to these issues, so I'm naturally going to judge it pretty harshly. I don't, however, feel like I came away from the novel with any new insight into my own issues and I don't think that someone who reads this that hasn't dealt with these issues is going to understand them any better either. I don't feel like the characters ended up in a better place than where they started at and I don't think there was an overarching conclusion other than "it sucks to be a fat woman".

It's possible the author hasn't gotten further than that conclusion in her own life, but for me, I've read some incredible books that address this topic and manage to move past this conclusion to a much more satisfying place. Perhaps if I read this book several years ago I would have connected with it more, but from where I am in my own personal journey with identity and weight, this feels very dated. If the plot was more exciting or fun, I might have been able to overlook these things, but as it stands now, this was a miss for me.

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.

FROM THE BLURB.
Would I call this “wildly entertaining”? In a word, no.

However, I was interested in this book from the get-go. I’m a devotee of Jillian Michaels and Gwyneth Paltrow, while still craving (tee hee, I’m so funny…) Chrissy Teigan’s recipes and dreaming daily of nachos. Balance, sure, but it’s not always that easy. Weight and food and body image – they are all wrapped up in the fabric of my every day life, and sometimes, they take over. So it’s natural that Waisted intrigued me. The premise – a weight loss documentary gone wrong – seemed right up my alley.

I wish I could say the execution lived up to the premise. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what went wrong here, but for me, I didn’t buy that Randy Susan Meyers had ever struggled with her weight. I could be way off base, and I haven’t searched for any interviews to ascertain either way, because the proof is in the pudding so-to-speak, and this novel felt like it was written by a woman of average weight.

From the scene where the women’s bodies are described, along with their heights and weights, everything was just… off. I’m not sure if Meyers did her research but the height to weight ratios didn’t add up. A 5’2” woman who weighs 178 pounds is not going to look obese. I remember reading a mystery once where the author had the heroine pulling out her hair at the idea of being over 120 pounds. I DNFed that shit because no thanks. This novel reminded me of that. I mean, come on, one of the heroines is like, 5’10” and weighs under 195!

Rest assured, I am NOT saying these women might not struggle or feel like crap or want to lose weight, etcetera. But in a world where we’re lectured constantly about the “obesity epidemic” and fat shaming abounds, I find it very hard to believe that these very, very average women would be the subjects of an extreme weight loss documentary. We’ve all seen The Biggest Loser – TV sells itself on being OTT. I’m not sure if Meyers didn’t want to deal with heroines that couldn’t lose enough to be considered “normal” (heavy quotation marks implied) by the book’s end, or if she honestly thinks that the weights / heights she mentioned are reasonable for this sort of endeavor.

The novel is told from two viewpoints, but I couldn’t see much difference in the narrative voices. One of the husbands is such a colossal prick that I was shocked no one had set him on fire by the end of the book. Not to mention, the whole ‘message’ just felt super … icky. The women dabble in drugs pretty heavily to lose weight, and the ramifications of this is never touched on or discussed? One daughter cries because her mother doesn’t emphasize her beauty enough (she’s relentlessly described as “thin as a pin” and “a wispy waif”, gag me), another’s mother is an absolute monster and this is treated as endearing, and the much-touted “revenge” is extremely muted to the point of being nonexistent.

By the conclusion, the emphasis is back on who’s gained weight and who’s lost, and the examination of culture, beauty norms and body image that I was waiting for never arrives. There’s no feeling of growth or empowerment (besides one small scene that I enjoyed around the dinner table), and no realizations about unhealthy behaviours or patterns. This novel had so much potential to unpack, and for me, it fell short of true bravery in the telling.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. I appreciate the chance to read, as always!

I received this book from #netgalley. I had requested this book (#waisted) as I do always enjoy reading this author's books.

I truly connected with this plot and storyline as I'm a woman who has been on many diets throughout my life and I could resonate with not liking certain aspects of my body and trying to figure out how to make myself happy in the body I have.

I also enjoyed reading how there issues impacted their families as a lot of times we only see how we are affected by our problems, but not how our problems impact our families.

The issues brought up, along with the lengths these women go to to lose weight really show how in this day and age, we are led to believe that being skinny and beautiful rule all, but in order to get around this stigma we need to learn to love ourselves. This was a great book and hits on many points that everyone deals with daily. Can't wait to read more.

Does the number on your bathroom scale control you and your self-esteem for better or worse? Are special events like weddings or a business party a source of happiness or do you agonize over what to wear so you won’t look fat? For too many years, dealing with my own weight issues took up too much of my life. Author Randy Susan Myers tells us in the author acknowledgments to her new book Waisted that she faced many of her serious concerns when she planned this book: the number on the scale, how society rates women by appearance, and how we categorize ourselves by race, culture and religion.

I was eager to read this book, as a reference for my own health and spiritual journey. How I wish the author had written a non-fiction book, as she has many good thoughts and observations. I would have learned much from an organized expository essay or research paper. But, many of her careful thoughts are lost in this book that has a weak and unlikely plot, too many similar characters, and lots of telling.

In addition to dealing with their weight, appearance and ethnicity, the women in the book have mother issues, husband and marriage issues, children problems and job issues. It’s all too much to sort out and since we don’t get to bond with the characters, it really doesn’t matter. I was also puzzled because as modern and socially correct as this book tries to be, part of the plot seemed to be critical of the media and how it manipulates people.

Five hugs to the author for taking an in-depth look at how women deal with this lives. Thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for a review copy. This is my honest review.

I received this ARC in exchange for an honest review and honestly, I didn’t love it. I wanted to. I wanted to think the two main characters were stronger women than who they were, and that had nothing to do with the amount of food they put in their mouths. They both had amazing, very admirable careers, but I didn’t love them or cheer them on and I think I was supposed to. The book tended to drag in parts and was repetitive in others. I could be one of the “waisted” women, I fit within the parameters and I felt I should relate to them more because of that but it never happened for me. It was a good premise and I bet many people will love it, just not me this time.

I’m giving this 3 stars because I liked it. I did not *really* like it, but I didn’t hate it. The problem is I don’t know how to review this book which, at its best, is problematic. It gets away with the most if you label it Chick-Lit, yet it’s too self-help-y to be considered pure fluff. It tries to cover a variety of the many issues women face when it comes to their weight, their looks, and just plain everyday being a woman, but that might be the heart of the problem – it just tries to cover too much and it’s not meaty enough to do it.

We have seven women, three in the main group, but only two as narrators. The author takes great pains to make sure this is the most diverse group of seven women possible, both racially and in body type. Though it’s great to see this amazing, true-America character depiction, it feels like the author is trying really REALLY hard to do this, instead of it happening organically. But then four of the women are mostly excluded from the story, and the fifth woman is mostly ignored even though she’s a big part of the story.

The book tries to cover every type of mother/daughter relationship including race factors, weight factors and attention factors, and it is just too many while at the same time feeling like a relationship instruction manual. We cover the relationships these women have with their mothers AND with their daughters AND with their husbands, and every one of those relationships are trying to tackle a different problem.

The story starts out with the seven women joining a Biggest Loser type documentary show even though the women are barely in the obese category. It is noted that these women are not as big as Biggest Loser contestants, but it’s not explained WHY they are using women this size.

After leaving the house I really didn’t understand why there were no police involved, and/or lawyers. They talk about doing things their own way instead, but it’s not clear why they made this choice when I think lawyers would have jumped all over this. At the very least police would have been involved once the hospital was involved. Bringing in issues with the career of Alice’s husband is just Problem #20 too many for the plot to deal with.

So we have a book that wants to be a fun chick-lit story but also wants to be taken very seriously. The seriousness of the relationships and what the women are going through psychologically and emotionally don’t allow the reader to ignore the problematic issues on the fluff side. You can’t be chick-lit and self-help and women’s literature at the same time.

I wish the author had decided to cover the subjects she wanted to cover while using a more standard TV show format, but instead a lot of outlandish shenanigans are introduced and bring too many complications to the story. WAY too many. (Did the author not think it problematic when the heroines stole drugs and then drugged others in the house??) After slogging through ALL the different issues, I mostly skimmed all the exposition used to close up the story. I wasn’t brought to care about five of the women, and I was done caring about the main two.

The three stars is because I was interested in many of the women’s stories, and a lot of thoughtfulness was put into most of them. I really wish they had taken these women and their stories and plopped them into a “normal” TV show so we could really dig into the issues without all the shenanigan distractions. I have a hard time recommending this as chick-lit because it’s too serious, but I cannot recommend it as a thoughtful story about being a woman because of the nonsense fluff. So I’m stuck in the middle.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It started slow, with a *lot* of secondary characters who weren't well developed. Then it picked up, and became quite engaging and very relatable. Then towards the end, it became a bit unbelievable, over the top and preachy. However, throughout the roll coaster that this book was for me, I found I couldn't put it down and it made me think about weight and fat shaming. I also enjoyed the relationships formed by the women who attended the "fat camp".

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Great book. At times I found myself laughing so hard. But as a woman who has struggled with her weight for so many years, it rang true, and was at times very sad. I can totally relate to their struggles with food, diet pills, fad diets. The characters were very real, the plot was very real, although at times the diet center they went to was a bit unrealistic. That being said I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Thank you for my advanced copy. I will certainly recommend it to friends and family and continue to follow this author.

The thing I loved most about this book is the acknowledgement that the experience of being a fat woman in the U.S. is not monolithic. While parts of the book were hard to imagine other parts resonated deeply and it was wonderful to follow the multiple narrators and characters as they came to terms with how others treat their bodies and how others treat their bodies. It also showcases the power of female friendship, and that was lovely. [An ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.]

Waisted by Randy Susan Meyers was refreshing, moving, and just the book I needed in my life right now :)

Daphne and Alice are very unhappy with their bodies. They both meet one another at Privation for a month long stay at a camp that promises weight loss. Instead, it's an awful reality show documentary called Waisted that shames women for their weight. This is an experiment designed to see how far women will actually go to lose weight.

Like all women, I have struggled with my body image time and time again. I really connected with this book due to struggling with my own body. It was difficult at times to read this book but also powerful because you see the main characters break out of their shells and take control of stopping that hate cycle of body image.

I enjoyed this one and believe that a lot of women also will!!

4 stars for Waisted.

Huge thank you to Atria for an advanced arc via netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Publication date: 5/21/19
Published to Goodreads: 2/15/19

Waisted by Randy Susan Meyers

Daphne and Alice are deeply unhappy with their bodies. They meet at Privation for a month-long stay in a remote Vermont location that promises weight loss with mindfulness. What they find instead is that they are trapped literally without access to their phones or families, in a cruel, fat-shaming, reality-show documentary called Waisted. An experiment devised by the producers and director to see how far women will go in search of weight loss.
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This book is for every woman who looks at themselves in the mirror and doesn’t like what they see. The muffin tops, the big thighs, struggling to get into a body shaper and feeling like a stuffed sausage in the process. Feeling like you should only eat steamed vegetables for the rest of your life. I immediately understood and connected with the main characters and how they dealt with their weight problems and what women will put themselves through to be thinner. When Daphne, Alice and the other women realize that they are just pawns in a horrible game played by the producers of the documentary for the purpose of entertainment, they take matters into their own hands and find the strength within themselves and each other to finally break the cycle of self-hate that has dominated their lives for so long.

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It’s difficult to read Waisted but it’s also joyous. Daphne and Alice alternate in telling their stories and this way, the reader gets to know both women and the people in their lives. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it turned out that I read this book in a day and I really loved it. Thank you to Atria and Netgalley for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

This book was so much deeper and impactful than I was expecting. It really captures the self loathing women can experience related to their weight/appearance.
The book follows Alice and Daphne who attend a weight loss retreat that turns out to be not as advertised. While the plot is focused on the camp and the aftermath, much of the book seemed a character study is these women and how they measured their self worth.
As someone who has felt many of these same feelings, this book spoke to me and felt real.
One issue I had was with the dialogue, especially at the beginning of the book, felt stiff and unnatural.
My only other issue that kept me from rating this book higher was that I felt it brushed over some very serious issues such as bulimia and emotional abuse within relationships. I felt other issues were handled so well and these could have been handled better.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with this arc in exchange for my review.

This book just didn't work for me. I think that this is a very sensitive and important topic that should be discussed but I didn't find that this format worked in this situation. I found many parts of this book came off as insensitive and judgemental. People struggle with weight and body image issues for a variety of reasons and I felt that was not reflected here.. Thank you to NetGalley and Atria books for a copy of this book, all opinions are my own.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wow. This novel will resonate with any woman who has been desperate to lose weight. It is thought provoking and brutal. It would be a great book club read for a group of women who struggle with body image.

Oh my goodness, I thought this was going to be so good. Unfortunately, it was one of the worst I've read in a while. High hopes dashed.

Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free, it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and especially the female characters who are all struggling with a negative body image. It speaks about the real life struggle so many females, young and old deal with to this day, our “thin” obsessed society. The primary characters feel they would be more loved and much happier if only they were thin. It broke my heart that these beautiful, smart, & successful women had such self-hate. Even worse how some people including members of their own family made them feel worthless and unloved just because they were not “thin.” The abuse they endured while enrolled in an extreme weight loss documentary enraged and saddened me. A heart wrenching story with a powerful pertinent message for all women AND men in our “thin” obsessed society.

I was initially drawn to this book as I expected it to be like a season of The Biggest Loser. However, I was a little disappointed. It felt rushed at times and long winded at times and I honestly was not a fan of the main characters and their decisions. I am glad I finished as I felt the ending was realistic and that was exactly perfect.