Like many women in America, I struggle with weight and, in general, my overall fitness level, so I was intrigued by the title of the new book The Fit Bottomed Girls Anti-Diet. It is written by the founders of the web site fitbottomedgirls.com, Jennipher Walters and Erin Whitehead, and published by Harmony Books. The copyright date is 2014, and it retails in the US for $17 and Canada for $20.

I am going to just admit that I may not be the intended audience for this book. It made me feel old! I say this because many of the suggestions are things my well over 40 body just cannot do any more. The book offers a number of ideas for very short workouts, which in theory I love the idea of that. The concept is that you can do a lot of small 10 minute workouts, and if you do enough of them throughout the day, they add up. Great! However, here is an example of why I say my body can’t do most of them. One of the “strength” mini-workouts they suggest has you hold hand weights on the ground as you do push ups while still holding the weights, and then you are supposed to pick up one of the weights while you are still in plank position. It tells you to do as many of these as you can in five minutes. I know I could not do one in five minutes. Now, maybe when I was 30 I could attempt this, but now? This is an extreme example, but for the most part, many of their suggested activities I found more intense than I could manage.

The other reasons this seems to me to speaker to a younger crowd is the constant motivation to be positive about your body and yourself that rings throughout the book. That, of course, is good. I know women can by hyper-critical of their bodies, especially younger women. I actually find that sad. I’m not perfect. I do need to lose weight and become generally more active and healthy, but I do not constantly beat myself up about it.

There are a lot of very positive reviews about this book, so it must be helping some women. I’m guessing it tends to help those who might, for really the first time, be trying to lose weight and exercise more regularly, and this book offers a lot of concrete ways to do that.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.