Book Review: Ten Things Your Skinny Friends Don’t Tell you

Few non-fiction books can make its readers laugh the way Keerthi Yella’s ‘Ten Things Your Skinny Friends Don’t Tell You’ does. Mackenna Goodman, in a recent column in the Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote, “A life-changing book is elusive”. While explaining the statement, she shares the longing of readers for ‘discovering missing pages of an honest diary.” In ‘Ten Things Your Skinny Friends Don’t Tell You, Yella has done exactly that. The experience of reading and relating is candid as though you are reading from your best friend’s diary entries.

While the topic is serious and thought-provoking, the author makes it feel increasingly funny and real by sharing real life anecdotes and snippets from her experiences too.

Smaller meal portions, home made food, slow eating and weight watching are some sure shot techniques to be skinny. In Keerthi Yella’s book titled, “Ten Things Your Skinny Friends Don’t Tell You”, readers can enjoy a generous helping of fun facts about the secrets tumbling out of ‘skinny’ closets. For instance where she tells you that skinny friends ‘diet for life’ and that they are very good ‘chartered accountants of the calorie balance sheet’, these are handy takeaways too.

Brace yourself to be inspired by the Japanese for their mandatory smaller meal portions. However , nothing beats the inspiration one derives from Indian households. Almost every Indian home continues with its golden rule to harp on the golden rule of good health, namely: eat home made food! Grandmothers used to insist on offering prayers before eating and being seated cross-legged on the floor when children and adults would get ready for their meals.

Fast forward to 2020, people have to be forced to move from their laptops and mobile phones or tech gadgets during meals.

Staying fit is not the same as staying skinny. In today’s rat race, however, few understand the difference. The author points out how ‘gobbling down food’ is now a way of life because we have stopped eating mindfully and assume that our stomachs have the speed of Google to process everything we are consuming.

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Keerthi Yella is not interested in just letting readers get a closer peek into the tips and tricks that constitute the life of skinny people, she cruises ahead with a humorous spin and turns the narrative inside out and shows us their vulnerable side too. The easygoing technique of Yella’s writing flows so easily that it is clear, quirky and bright.

Somewhere as she probes their areas of concern, her work deconstructs the human nature of judging others on the basis of how they weigh, be it skinny or fat.

With real life examples, she demonstrates why ‘being skinny’ has emerged as a ‘superpower’ in the rat race for social acceptance, Facebook posts and so on.

Published by Fingerprint! Publishing, this book offers a quirky, fun-filled and insightful take on how ‘skinny’ people stay the way they do and how it really has more to do with their smart choices than genes.