enLIGHTened: How I Lost 40 Pounds with a Yoga Mat, Fresh Pineapples, and a Beagle-Pointer
enLIGHTened: How I Lost 40 Pounds with a Yoga Mat, Fresh Pineapples, and a Beagle-Pointer is a funny memoir about weight loss, yoga, and asserting the parallel between living a happy and satisfied lifestyle with living a healthy lifestyle. enLIGHTened is Jessica Berger Gross’ personal journey to find happiness and content in her life. And for her part, that journey includes yoga. Gross begins every chapter with a yoga position and a Yoga Sutra (per the preface to the book, the Yoga Sutras are “the key text of yoga philosophy”). Truthfulness, Moderation, and Introspection are among the sutras described in this book and applied to Gross’ personal struggle for self-confidence and its impact on her weight.
So how does her book live up to these sutras?
Truthfulness. Did I enjoy this book? Yes. Having gone from size 18 to 6 in the past five years, I know all too well about weight struggles. I understand the self-confidence struggles, and the parallel between the two as well. I enjoyed how Gross addressed “The Myth of the Feminist French Fry,” a section about how wanting to be a healthy weight is not an indication of whether or not one was a real feminist because while big can certainly be beautiful, it is by no means healthy. Wanting and working at maintaining the right weight is not pandering to a man-deemed image of what a woman should look like — it’s wanting to be healthy, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Moderation. Everything in moderation. This book is no exception to that rule. Gross has written meaningfully about achieving content with her life, yet the book maintains an air of “It worked for me, and it’s great. If it works for you, that’s great too. If it doesn’t work for you, though, something else will. You just gotta keep looking.” I don’t know anything at all about yoga except that I tried it once, yet my lack of yoga knowledge does not detract from enjoying the book because Gross doesn’t overdo it on blending the yoga principles with her personal journey. Gross also talks of why she chooses to be vegetarian without accusing meat eaters of being crazed carnivores (a hard line to walk). She’s also honest about her experiences (LOL line: “I’m not going to lie. At first, the juice fast sucked.”) She demands nothing of her readers except an open mind to hear what she has to say about her personal struggles, and the philosophies that helped her through them. On another note, I immediately embraced her “How to Eat Like a Yogi” description, which suggests that at the end of a meal your stomach should be “1/2 full with food, 1/4 full with water, and 1/4 empty with room for air.” Sound easy? Just you try.
Self-study and Introspection. I’m just going to quote Gross, since she summed it up so concisely: “You can work out on a treadmill for as long as you like, eat apples and cauliflower heads for dinner, and lose all the weight you want, but until you take the time to do some serious internal work, you probably won’t be able to bring about the kind of lasting life changes you’re craving.” enLIGHTened is about the introspective journey everyone is on, the “why do we do what we do?” journey. Gross goes from her childhood with her sometimes-abusive father to her life-changing trip to Nepal to her confronting her parents about her childhood to her struggle with infertility and back to her as she is today. At the end of this book, when you close the cover, you might think to yourself, “Wow, what a journey.” But that wow comes from the realization that she’s only in the middle of hers. As am I. As are you all (or all y’all, as we say in the South). The question is, who among us know what journey we’re on and why we’re on it? Gross appears to have gotten a handle on that. Care to take a peek? You won’t be disappointed.
Buy the book here.
See other reviews of the book at Lime and Food for Thought.
Jessica Berger Gross’ website here.
Lastly, Gross edited a phenomenal book, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, which was just mentioned in USA Weekend and she also writes the Mama’s Boy column for Literary Mama.
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This book sounds great! I especially like the fact that Gross doesn’t push her own method as the be-all-and-end-all. It is true that people all have their own ways to lose (and gain) weight. And she’s right about dieters needing more than a method to knock off calories: a friend of ours once lost 150 lbs and put it all back on. He won’t KEEP it off until he manages to shake whatever is making him eat so much in the first place.
I’ve done yoga for years, though I’ve been lax lately. I can certainly attest to the peace of mind it can bring. And I know it does help some people lose weight: when I lived in Japan, a fellow yoga student claimed she’d lost 60 pounds after doing yoga for a year.
Sounds like a great book!