Carrots 'N' Cake

April 18, 2011
Blogger Haupert's approach to healthy living is a fascinating slow-motion train wreck. Eerily similar in tone and style to The Onion's fictional columnist Jean Teasdale, Haupert welcomes readers into her life, dishing out homey advice and recounting details both big (her marriage) and small (cereal eating habits), along with long-winded anecdotes on Christmas shopping, the gym ("Things I hate about strength training: the boredom, crowded gyms, feeling self-conscious around meatheads"), and other topics. All roads eventually lead to food; Haupert's stated goal is to help readers lose weight and keep it off, not with drastic measures, but moderation. While laudable, her advice is essentially common sense: pay closer attention to what you eat, watch portion size, avoid processed food, and so on. When she does offer recipes, many are standards, though her "Homemade Iced Coffee," which calls for refrigerating a pot of coffee overnight, then serving it over iceâthat's itâis notable only for its inclusion. Best enjoyed for its Teasdale-like properties, with plenty of lines to remember ("I've been known to drink every now and thenâand have the stories to prove it!"), this one has to be read to be believedâfor all the wrong reasons.

May 1, 2011
For diet-obsessed Americans, Haupert offers some advice thats well known but often disregarded: its the combination of intake control with sustainable exercise that makes a diet successful. Based on her popular blog, this book documents just how Haupert keeps up her exercise routine, whose individual components she carefully records so that others can follow her progress to their own profit. She also records a lot of recipes that feature dishes packed with high-quality foods offering good nutrition, plenty of fiber, and controlled fats and sugars. But no one can follow a strict regimen every day of the week. Thats why Haupert advocates for cookie Friday, her way of saying that one has to have some joyful treat every so often to satisfy cravings before they build to diet-wrecking proportion. She even notes how the really determined can concoct healthier cocktails by using flavored vodkas.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)