Plump profit for diet bloggers as cookbook sets non-fiction record
IN THIS age of wellness bloggers and mindful eating, diet recipes appeared to have fallen out of fashion.
But a cookery book inspired by a trip to Slimming World has set a new record as the fastest-selling non-fiction title since records began.
Pinch of Nom, by Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson, has sold 210,506 copies in its first week of sale. Only three authors have shifted more copies in one week, all of them fiction writers: JK Rowling, EL James and Dan Brown.
The previous non-fiction record holder was Sir Alex Ferguson, whose memoir My Autobiography sold 115,000 copies in its first seven days.
The book is a spin-off from the Pinch of Nom blog, which Featherstone and Allinson set up in 2016.
The couple, who ran a restaurant in the Wirral, had joined a Slimming World group and realised that members had no idea how to cook healthy meals from scratch. They drew on Allinson’s background as a chef to create recipes that would suit the diet rules.
The blog was an instant hit, with recipes tagged as Slimming World or Weight Watchers friendly.
The book features low calorie, low fat versions of family favourites plus their versions of takeaways, dubbed “fakeaways”. It has succeeded with the minimum amount of marketing, with sales driven by the pair’s 1.5 million Facebook followers.
♦private slimming clinics are doling out appetite suppressants to patients without significant weight problems, and failing to stop teenagers getting hold of them, a watchdog has warned.
Inspections by the Care Quality Commission found almost half of such clinics were failing to provide safe care, with clinics supplying dangerous drugs in high quantities.
Some clinics which are supposed to provide services only to adults were found to be failing to carry out any identity checks on patients’ ages.
Patients were put on diets without any target weight, with drugs continuing to be prescribed below the national guidance thresholds of body mass index, which says they should only be prescribed to those who are obese.