Veggie Chic

Veggie Chic interview with the authors of …Hot Chick

by Jul on January 14th, 2008

A couple months ago, I gave the authors of the new book How to Eat Like a Hot Chick a little bit of a hard time for the way they talk to vegetarians in the book. So it’s only fair that I give them a little chance to defend and explain themselves. Jodi Lipper and Cerina Vincent were gracious enough to answer my questions, and I have the exciting answers for you right here.

What’s your definition of a “hot chick”?

We’re glad you asked this because one of our goals with this book is to re-define the term Hot Chick. To us, a Hot Chick does not have to be a size 2 or look like a supermodel. Every woman can be a Hot Chick - it’s just that many of us forget or don’t have the confidence to embrace it! Our full definition of a Hot Chick is in our book, but in a nutshell, we are talking about a confident woman. A Hot Chick is comfortable in her own skin and is aware of her flaws, but does not obsess over them. She is passionate and loves life and does not compete with other women. A Hot Chick can sit solo in a restaurant and eat a piece a chocolate cake with a beer and not feel the least bit guilty. A Hot Chick celebrates her life, and doesn’t feel ashamed to celebrate with food!

What inspired you to write How to Eat Like a Hot Chick?

Like many women, we suffered for years from poor body image. We were overwhelmed by the fad diets that left us confused and scared to death of a piece of bread. But through our friendship, we realized that we were wasting a huge portion of our lives counting calories and obsessing about food. We were missing what should have been our heyday, and we finally decided to let go of our issues, embrace our lives and tell the world (and ourselves) that we were hot. With our newfound confidence, we learned how to enjoy the foods we loved while looking and feeling better than ever. Our inspiration to write this book was to share this new liberating attitude about food with women everywhere. We wanted to share our secrets and information with all the Hot Chicks out there who need that same confidence boost that we did. We hope that our advice will make women celebrate and laugh about food again!

What life experiences/qualifications/super powers do you have which made you the right people to dole out this hot chick eating advice?

We have tried every diet on the planet and boiled down the bits and pieces that make sense in each of them. This research plus a whole lot of common sense and a giant sense of humor about food makes for the advice in How To Eat Like a Hot Chick. We were not born as super-powered Hot Chicks with innate knowledge about how to eat and enjoy food, but as we became more confident in ourselves, we got over our own issues with food and learned how to have it all - the foods we love, confidence, and the bodies we always wanted. We are the right people to write this book because we have been there - we have been through the obsessions and the low self esteem and we want to help women let go of this negativity and enjoy food again.

So what’s with the steak-eating “vegetarians”? You can’t really know MANY girls who eat steak at BBQs who call themselves vegetarians, can you? What made you include this “pet peeve” in the book?

Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. We know it’s hard to believe, but that anecdote really did happen. Between the two of us we have known several girls who say they are vegetarians but then eat meat-and eat it quite often. We didn’t understand this ourselves, which is why we wrote about it. We assume that these women think that they will seem cooler (or hotter) if they call themselves vegetarians, but we don’t agree - not because vegetarians aren’t cool or hot (they are often both) but because lying is not hot, nor is pretending to be something you are not. We had a yoga instructor who claimed to be vegan, but we sat across from her at brunch and watched her eat bacon and eggs! Seriously. Another “vegetarian” friend of ours used to eat Taco Bell and Big Macs and her rationalization was that she was “hung over.” We think this is an insult to real vegetarians, who work hard to treat their bodies well. We really admire vegans and vegetarians, but we don’t admire girls who pretend to be, or who lie to themselves and others.

Would you recommend How to Eat Like a Hot Chick to vegetarians? Why or why not?

Absolutely! This book was written for all women, because all women share the same issues with food and body image. The advice we give has nothing to do with eating or not eating meat. It’s more about changing your mindset and finding ways to cut out calories you won’t miss so that you have room in your diet for the foods you love - whether that’s a steak or chocolate or tofutti cuties. We have a lot of respect for vegetarians. In the book, more often than not, we advise women to leave meat out of typical foods like pizza or sandwiches, and we offer a lot of veggie alternatives. So women can follow our advice whether they eat meat all the time or once in a blue moon or not at all.

Even your book jacket mentions Skinny Bitch, and the similarities between the two books seem too extensive to be a coincidence. Could you comment on the connection?

Believe it or not, we wrote this book 3 years ago before SB was published or we’d ever heard of it. We are grateful to SB because it proved that two women without a medical degree could write a “diet” book. Of course our publisher loves to compare us to SB, but that’s just what they always do to with the most recent successful book in the genre. However, this is a very different book. How to Eat Like a Hot Chick is not about a specific diet regime - it is about ways to keep eating everything you love and feel hotter than ever. We talk to women in a positive, uplifting tone because we want to help all women feel beautiful and sexy and confident. SB is great for chicks who want to get all riled up about being vegan, and How to Eat Like a Hot Chick is for women who want to let go of their food issues and start feeling hot.

Anything else you’d like Veggie Chic readers to know?

We hope that our girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice will make you laugh and remind all of you Veggie Chicks that you are Hot Chicks and you deserve all the goodness and yummy non-meat food that the universe has to offer!
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Many thanks to Jodi and Cerina for taking the time to chat with Veggie Chic. For those of you interested in the book How to Eat Like a Hot Chick, it is available on Amazon. Just to be clear, this book does not recommend a strictly vegetarian diet, although someone interested in eating vegetarian could still incorporate suggestions from the book into their eating style.

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