Reading List: Books By Bloggers

I love reading blogs about food, healthy living and weight loss. A few of my favorite bloggers have turned their stories into books. This reading list houses all of the bloggers turned authors.

Books Written By Bloggers

Carrots ‘N’ Cake: Healthy Living One Carrot and Cupcake at a Time

Tina’s healthy living blog Carrots ‘N’ Cake is one of my favorites and her book is fantastic! It’s a great read about finding balance and moderation in a healthy lifestyle. I love her because she is one of the bloggers who loves to include sweets and beer into her daily eating along with the healthy stuff.

From Amazon: Let them eat cake!  From one of the most popular blogs on the internet comes an innovative, even fun way to diet.  Carrots ‘N’ Cake is all about eating your carrots… and savoring your cupcake, too.

For some people, losing weight means restrictive dieting, obsessive calorie counting, and constant hunger.  Not Tina Haupert!  She learned that it didn’t have to be that way.  Tina shows how to drop the pounds and keep them off by adopting eating habits that are healthy, balanced, and above all, livable.  She serves up easy-to-follow fitness routines, food tips, and her most popular feature: cookie Friday.

The Amazing Adventures of DietGirl

I absolutely adore Shauna and her book is hilarious and wonderful and parallels my own life.  It’s a great read.

From Amazon: At just twenty-three years old, Shauna Reid weighed 351 pounds. Spurred into action by the sight of her enormous white knickers billowing on the clothesline, she created the hugely successful blog “The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl.” Hiding behind her Lycra-clad, roly-poly alter-ego, her transformation from couch potato to svelte goddess began.

Today, eight thousand miles, seven years, and 175 pounds later, the gloriously gorgeous Shauna is literally half the woman she used to be. Hysterically funny and heart-wrenchingly honest, The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl includes travel tales from Australia to Paris to Red Square, plus romance when she meets the man of her dreams in a Scottish pub. This is the uplifting true story of a young woman who defeated her demons and conquered her cravings to become a real-life superhero to inspire us all.

Half-Assed: A Weight Loss Memoir

Pasta Queen is one of the first bloggers I started reading and her book is a wonderful retelling of her weight loss story.

From Amazon: After undergoing gall bladder surgery at age twenty-three, Jennette Fulda decided it was time to lose some weight. Actually, more like half her weight. At the time, Jennette weighed 372 pounds.

Jennette was not born fat. But, by fifth grade, her response to a school questionnaire asking “what would you change about your appearance” was “I would be thinner.” Sound familiar?

Half-Assed is the captivating and incredibly honest story of Jennette’s journey to get in shape, lose weight, and change her life. From the beginning—dusting off her never-used treadmill and steering clear of the donut shop—to the end with her goal weight in sight, Jennette wows readers with her determined persistence to shed pounds and the ability to maintain her ever-present sense of self.

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

If you’ve seen the first major movie about a blogger, do yourself a favor and read the book too.

From Amazon: Julie & Julia is the story of Julie Powell’s attempt to revitalize her marriage, restore her ambition, and save her soul by cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, in a period of 365 days. The result is a masterful medley of Bridget Jones’ Diary meets Like Water for Chocolate, mixed with a healthy dose of original wit, warmth, and inspiration that sets this memoir apart from most tales of personal redemption.

When we first meet Julie, she’s a frustrated temp-to-perm secretary who slaves away at a thankless job, only to return to an equally demoralizing apartment in the outer boroughs of Manhattan each evening. At the urging of Eric, her devoted and slightly geeky husband, she decides to start a blog that will chronicle what she dubs the “Julie/Julia Project.” What follows is a year of butter-drenched meals that will both necessitate the wearing of an unbearably uncomfortable girdle on the hottest night of the year, as well as the realization that life is what you make of it and joy is not as impossible a quest as it may seem, even when it’s -10 degrees out and your pipes are frozen.

Powell is a natural when it comes to connecting with her readers, which is probably why her blog generated so much buzz, both from readers and media alike. And while her self-deprecating sense of humor can sometimes dissolve into whininess, she never really loses her edge, or her sense of purpose. Even on day 365, she’s working her way through Mayonnaise Collee and ending the evening “back exactly where we started–just Eric and me, three cats and Buffy…sitting on a couch in the outer boroughs, eating, with Julia chortling alongside us….”

The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl

Ree Drummond, aka The Pioneer Woman, is one of the best bloggers in the world. Her country home cooking recipes are amazing and her photography is even better! This blogging superstar’s cookbook is amazing!

From Amazon: Blogger-turned-author Drummond gives readers a slice of frontier life in this likeable-enough collection of recipes and dispatches from the Oklahoma ranch she shares with her husband and children. Replicating the step-by-step photography that made her blog such a hit, Drummond walks readers through dishes ranging from simple-Guacamole, Chili, Artichoke Dip-to more complex, such as from-scratch Cinnamon Rolls and Sherried Tomato Soup. Drummond’s careful coaching will help anyone intimidated by the kitchen fearlessly crank out favorites like Chicken Fried Steak, Meat Loaf and Rib Eye Steak with Whiskey Cream Sauce. While the recipes are reliable home cooking standards, relentless references to her husband, known as the Marlboro Man, range from distracting to juvenile, giving what could have been a comfort food classic the feel of a junior-high class project.