A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir of living with obesity

Sarah Vincent, author of Death by Dim Sim, started to put on weight in her teenage years.

After years of crash dieting and following dangerous food fads that never seemed to work, she had an epiphany while heading back to her desk with a bag of her daily fix of dim sims. At 122 kg she realised that if she didn’t change, the amount and type of food she was eating would eventually kill her.

Sarah writes extremely well in a conversational style memoir telling a humorous and startlingly honest account of her life. From loving but dysfunctional parents, her own anxiety and struggles to be accepted, the spectre of cancer for both her and her husband and her husband’s mental illness, Sarah has faced a lot and overcome it. The book details the struggles of expensive and uncaring doctors, ridiculous exercise and diet regimes and her cravings for chocolate biscuits. 

Sarah had me laughing and crying as she took me through the most humiliating things about being obese: skin-tags, chafing, getting stuck in the bath, boring clothes, not being able to play with her children and the worst… well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.

By following the advice of a nutritionist, who is also a personal friend, Sarah, at last, manages to get her eating under control and loses 40 kg. To help others Sarah details the diet, called Bunting, which is low carbohydrate and high fat and offers advice as to how nutrients work and how the body utilises them.

This where the book falls down for me. Sarah has spent a lot of time gaining our trust from her very personal revelations but does not know how the body digests and utilises food. She offers food facts mixed with food fads, over-simplifications, contradictions and downright dangerous and incorrect opinions. I was a Food Scientist for 40 years; nutrition was part of my job.

The Bunting diet, along with its cousins Paleo and Atkins, is not supported by mainstream nutritionists and science.  Coconut oil, which features regularly, is a saturated fat and is not recommended by any major health organisation. And gluten-free food is expensive and unnecessary unless you are gluten sensitive. Her assertion that insulin is a fat-storing hormone is an incorrect oversimplification – you eat more energy than you use, you will put on weight, no matter what combination of foods you eat.

This is a well-written book, and it may inspire those who need to lose weight to do just that, but please take the nutritional and diet advice with a large pinch of salt. First half of book – 4 stars. Second half – 1 star.

Death By Dim Sim by Sarah Vincent is available now from Dymocks. Click here to learn more.