by Reena Daruwalla, guest writer for Nancy Hayssen.com

If you are looking for some good gifts for plus size (or any size really) friends over the holidays, or just looking for some good reading material for yourself, then I may have a couple of good suggestions for you.

In The Diet Myth: Why America’s Obsessions with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health, author Paul Campos leads the backlash against weight hysteria and how we should be trying to achieve good health rather than obsessing about numbers on a scale or the measure tape. He also explodes the attempt of the weight loss industry (which incidentally is a 50 billion dollar one) to try and brainwash us into constantly trying to lose weight by one expensive means or another. In this book, Professor Campos “challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the medical, political, and cultural meaning of weight and brings a rational and compelling new voice to America’s increasingly irrational weight debate.”

A great sounding book is Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness — and Liberalism — to the Women of America which one reader termed as ‘juicy, pithy, fun and infuriating all at the same time.’ According to writer Myrna Blyth who has had an insider view of the media that she was part of for 21 years as editor in chief of the Ladies Home Journal, says “The story that began as an exciting movement for equal rights and morphed into a wonderful celebration of opportunity today has become a depressing, discouraging gains-means-pain tale of woe sold to women readers as the grim new reality of their lives,” She claims that the media directed towards women is out of touch with middle class American women and that there is an (erroneous) assumption by much of the media that all women think alike and are interested only in diet, fashion, sex appeal or stress relief.

These books may be just the thing for a likeminded friend, sister, mother, daughter or indeed brother, father, son!