I need to stay away from the bookstore.

Seriously, the place just makes me angry because I write for a shit-filled genre. The fitness, health and weight loss industry is full of assholes: authors who make false promises, gurus who are pushing the next fad diet, and scammers who take your money and give you nothing of value.

I represent the real facts about getting in shape based on the weight of scientific evidence, and if you can’t handle it then you can just go be fat somewhere else. Yeah, I can be an asshole too. At least I’m an honest one.

I’m also an asshole who cares. You should read my book because I care about being right. I care about my readers getting results because it makes me look good. I care about people buying my books and then telling all their friends because it actually works for them. I care, really I do.

Anyway, back to the other assholes.

Not all of them are really assholes, but I can’t believe some of the crap I see on the shelves in the diet-book section. I don’t want to name names. In fact, I didn’t even want to blog this at all because I think criticising one’s competitors is what someone does when they have no confidence in their own work. Criticising is easy, whereas creating is hard. I guess I do both.

I’ve got plenty of confidence in my own work, but when someone who’s had a gastric bypass writes a diet book then I’ve got to say something. I didn’t read the book. I didn’t even pick it up off the shelf. I just recognized the guy on the cover and knew he’d had a gastric bypass because it was covered in the media, so my what-the-fuck-o-meter went into the red zone. Maybe his book is actually good. Maybe it talks about his bypass and his struggles and all that. Actually, now I’m starting to think his book might be okay for people who are considering weight loss surgery. Okay, scratch that example. I don’t write about surgical options because I’m targeting guys that need to lose less than about 70 pounds.

Still, it doesn’t change the fact that there is a lot of crap on the shelves. I saw one book with a guy on the cover who had a weasely-looking, used-car-salesman vibe about him (except in a nicer suit) with a title promising that he could make people thin. Guess what, I can make you thin too. I can chain you to a treadmill and stand behind you with a cattle prod while only feeding you a Calorie-restricted diet of healthy food. I guarantee that would make you thin, but neither of us would like the process.

The only person who can say with even a modicum of authority that he or she can make you thin is a surgeon who performs things like liposuction or gastric bypass. Without surgery or incarceration involving forced labor the only person who can make you thin is YOU. I looked at the used car salesman’s book and it didn’t have that many pages, the type was large and so were the spaces between lines. The few sentences I read looked pretty fluffy too. There just didn’t seem to be much to it. Probably just another asshole.

I scanned a few more titles and I can’t even begin to describe the bullshit. Everyone has some new angle about how to lose weight. Hype the latest gimmick or trick to sell books is all they care about. I’d say about half the books are crap. Yes, I know that I was judging books by their covers. Don’t pretend like you’ve never done it.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good books too, but when you’re in your car you don’t notice the good drivers, you notice the assholes. I’m not a Nazi and would never advocate the burning of books, but if I was locked in a bookstore during a Day After Tomorrow moment I know which ones would go on the bonfire first.

I then walked over to the exercise book section, where there are far fewer assholes. There is the odd one, but I feel like I’m in better company here. Some of these books are about just exercise, while others are about a mix of exercise and nutrition. Most qualify as not bad or pretty good, although a lot of them flog supplements that I think are unnecessary. They advocate hard work and they teach a variety of exercises, which are good things in my opinion. Still, I think I’ve got a good niche to carve out of this group. Most of them are targeted at people who already exercise regularly. There isn’t much on the shelves about beginners getting started and taking them to a high level of fitness and nutritional health. What’s more, there is very little in the way of true lifestyle planning and motivational information. Finally, the writing for most part bores me. It’s either some warm and fuzzy group hug writing style, or testosterone-fueled chest thumping. Ack and double ack. Didn’t anyone ever tell these people that exercise is supposed to be fun?

At that point in my musings / competitive analysis my daughter came up and poked me in the kidney. “Daddy, I want this book.” She held in her hand the latest copy of Dear Dumb Diary. Now there is a book I can relate to.