Customer Reviews

The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I am an avid reader and recreational writer. When I heard about this book in a health magazine, I thought the concept sounded interesting and decided to check it out. I received the book today, and I have already finished reading it. Julia Cameron advises her readers to do what many weight-loss experts say works, write about your eating. Her idea is most people overeat because of stress or depression, or some other outside influence. As a writing teacher she witnesses the theraputic effect of writing with dealing with daily life problems. She intructs readers to write every day. Write about when they eat or when they want to eat. Why they are eating and why they chose the foods they did. She also instructs readers to walk everyday, even if it is only 5 minutes, just get some sort of exercise in. I look forward to starting the activities and daily writing assignments in the book. This book is training wheels for someone trying to control their emotional eating and a support system as you work toward writing and living a healthy lifestyle

From the second I purchased this book I was not able to put it down. It is simply inspirational. I have already implemented Cameron's advice into my daily life and have noticed changes not only in my weight, but also in my psychological well-being.

One of my favorite chapters was on walking. I used to think that I hated walking, but forcing myself to take daily walks and then write about them made me realize that I enjoy walking, but simply prefer to walk alone and not tell anyone I'm walking. For me, it's a secret hobby. I probably would not have realized this without daily reflection time in my writings.

As a struggling and overweight writer, I can say that this book has been pivotal to turning my life around. I'm happier, I'm thinner, and I'm able to write more each day.

Even if you're not a writer, I strongly recommend buying this book. Cameron makes it easy for everyone to follow this path. Best of all, she doesn't specify what you can eat and when, but leaves the choices up to you. She simply opens up your Inner Mentor and helps you realize who you want to be.

Do read this book and be inspired to try some new techniques for healthy living! I especially liked the chapters on exercise (walking) and lingerie!

I was dismayed, though, that Julie Cameron appears to have an unhappy relationship with food despite her advice to have culinary adventures (makes me think someone else wrote that chapter!). She talks about good and bad foods, chocolate as being the devil's food, being "good" on your diet and eating "legally" and it seems that sugar rarely or never passes her lips. She also referred to dieting as a "war".

The concept of food as good or bad and moral judgements surrounding eating are, in my opinion, really misguided. I have lost a lot of weight and I have a happy relationships with all foods (even the "devil's food" - chocolate!). There is no such thing as a good or bad food - some foods should just be eaten more judiciously than others. I disagree with her recommendation of eating artifical foods like Splenda and sugar free Jello (Sugar-free Jello appeared in the book so many times that I started to suspect a product placement!)

It really seemed that Julie has a very adverserial relationship with food which negatively colored all the other wonderful things about the book. When she described having a third of her friend's dessert and then barely making it through her teaching that evening and waking up with a sugar hangover the next day, I thought, "This is not right". Anybody should be able to split a dessert three ways and feel great about themselves and certainly suffer no ill effect. Her reaction was either grossly exaggerated or she seems, to me, to be disordered in her relationship to food.

I hope Julie Cameron finds some peace in her relationship with food and that she does a rewrite of this book someday. Eating right should be joyful and relaxed - not a daily battle with forces of good and evil duking it out!

Having said that, there were nuggets in this book which made me glad I bought it.

*****
This outstanding new book from creativity guru Julia Cameron explores the idea that creativity can block overeating, and the opposite, that overeating can block creativity. After reading the book, and trying it out it my own life, I know that this is true for me.

Using seven key tools, readers are given ideas to overcome their problems with overeating. The seven tools are morning pages (stream of consciousness writing in the mornings), journaling (especially at times of being tempted to overeat), walking, asking oneself four key questions about hunger and food choices, culinary artist dates, HALT (hungry-angry-lonely-tired), and the body buddy.

This book will be of key interest to anyone who does creative work. However, it will also be helpful to those who do not...releasing blocked creativity can be an important aid in dealing with overeating and weight issues.

The book also includes almost forty chapters that cover "situations and solutions" like relapse, night eating, food as sedative, affirmations, and much more. The are part musings from Julia Cameron, part common sense advice about weight loss, and part wisdom from twelve step programs. All combine to make a powerful program of recovery for those people who are open to writing and/or to accessing their creativity in a more powerful way while at the same time empowering themselves to deal with their food issues.

I found this book very helpful and inspirational. I don't know of anything else like it out there. Each of the fifty or so chapters has exercises you can do at the end, and I can't imagine how this could not be helpful for anyone who is open to working even a few of the ideas the author puts forth.

Highly recommended.
*****

This book is essentially written from a very disordered place. Julia Cameron is GREAT on the creativity work she does, but needs to stay out of this area, as it is clearly a problematic one in her life. I work with people with eating disorders and purchased this book hoping to find a tool that would help them. I would never suggest it to anyone struggling with food issues (or, I guess, anyone at all). She is afraid of and unfriendly toward food. Peace with food must involve acceptance of our appetites and development of trust in our bodies' ultimate knowledge of what we need. We can learn to be comfortable with sweet or salty of fatty foods, and once they are no longer a forbidden enemy, peace is possible. There are many other helpful books addressing intuitive eating (Eating Mindfully is one), compulsive overeating (books by Geneen Roth, or a book called Overcoming Overeating can be helpful), or recovery from eating disorders (Ira Sacker's newest book--name escapes me, Life without ED).

I had several reactions when I saw Julia Cameron's The Writing Diet.

Although at first I thought that Julia Cameron was just spinning off her patented Artist's Way techniques to take advantage of America's unquenchable thirst for diets, it turns out that she used some of these techniques herself to lose weight that she gained as a side effect of a medication she was taking. The best part of the book is that it gives readers a way to develop a mindfulness practice that is essential when trying to deal with the emotional aspects of eating and our relationship with food. You can certainly develop this practice in other ways -- any kind of spiritual practice will do -- but, if you don't have one, this book is a great place to start.

It was the part of the book that veered into nutrition that I have a few concerns about.

First of all, she makes many, many references to Splenda and artificially sweetened products like diet Jello as ways to satisfy cravings for sweet foods. Artificial sweeteners are not healthy foods, and, in my opinion, don't belong as a daily part of a healthy diet. There are many better ways to deal with a sweet-tooth than resorting to a product that, molecularly, looks more like a cyanide molecule than a sucrose molecule.

Secondly, at more than one point, the book alludes to satisfying a craving for a food that might not be allowed on your diet (ice cream, mac & cheese) and then "making up" for it with more exercise or some other kind of atonement. I just hate that kind of thinking, and I hate to see it perpetuated. One of my favorite new food stories is that when you show the French a picture of a luscious chocolate cake, they think "celebrate." The word that comes to mind for most Americans upon seeing the same picture is "guilt." When you get your body into balance, your body is able to handle that cake and ice cream at your child's birthday party without your tacking on an extra hour on the treadmill. In other words, you can have your cake and the celebration - it is possible.

I think is a great book for developing techniques to explore your relationship to food and self-care,but not so great for the nutritional advice.

Diane Carlyle
Health Coach

The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size
I became aware of this book and started doing what was recommended. I have been faithful to doing 3 morning pages. What I have noticed is that my mind is making better choices, I am calmer, and I am making better food choices. My appetite seems more under control and I have lost 4 lbs in the last week.
Buy the book you won't regret it.

I came across this book in January and was immediately curious. I bought a copy and started reading, doing the exercises and the writing. So far I have lost 20 pounds. This book taught me how to vent with paper and pen instead of a fork and spoon. I love this book so much I have bought copies for friends.

I've read more than enough diet books during my lifetime, from the sensible to the faddish, from the scientific to the ridiculous, without solving my weight problem. After absorbing the "wisdom" of all those books, I swore to ignore this year's diet book crop.

Then, I discovered Julia Cameron's The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size (Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2007). With a title like that, how could I resist?

It seems that Cameron, author of The Artist's Way and much more--non-fiction, fiction, plays, poetry--teaches a twelve-week course in "creative unblocking." As her students became more creative, they astonished their teacher by becoming slimmer as well. She observed that "weight loss is a frequent by-product of creative recovery." Apparently, "Overeating blocks our creativity [and] we [also] can use creativity to block our overeating."

This book is divided into two sections, "The Tools" and "Situations and Solutions." The tools begin with "Morning Pages": basically writing three daily pages of a journal. This is the same mind-clearing, self-revealing journal exercise I've long recommended and frequently practiced. "Writing Morning Pages, our mindless lives are behind us." These pages are great places to examine all relationships, including that to food. The Morning Pages evolve into full-fledged journals, by this time addressing eating matters for those with weight concerns. Other useful tools include walking and finding a "body buddy" to cheer one on, among others.

The "Situations and Solutions" of Part Two cover more than thirty common food situations, generally with writing suggestions and/or examples. For "Scaling the Scale," Cameron quotes a student who writes, "I feel the scale is all that stands between me and disaster. I can only imagine what would happen if I tried to go a month without its input." The cure for bathroom scale panic, according to the author, is to weight oneself monthly, not daily.

In "Eating to Please," the author points out that many believe that food is love, so we eat what a loved one eats and join in extravagant meals. We may eat to show our appreciation for "Aunt Helen's cheesecake" or other festive goodies. The suggested writing task to overcome this tendency is to "write out the worst scenario you can imagine if you refuse a dining experience." Use humor; what will happen if you stand up for yourself? "How would it feel to stick to your own agenda and even lose weight during the holiday season?" That would be great, but it's never happened to me.

This is an interestiong book, and I suspect that any fledgling or would-be writer who completed all the suggested writing tasks could develop a better relationship with food, a better figure, and some additional creative skills as well.

While the sheer number of situations and writing tasks intimidates me a bit, this book is full of cleverly-written common sense. This is a book that requires action. It does not suit the couch potato style of reading for escape or entertainment, so put down that bowl of chips and pick up a pen!

There are some wonderful nuggets of wisdom in this book. The idea of clean-eating, clean-living and working through repressed emotions to avoid compulsive eating are not new, but they are eminently readable in Cameron's lovely prose.

The only issues I had in this book is that there is a hint of disordered-eating mentality, such as when the author talks about having an isolated piece of pie and a cup of tea at a diner as a "relapse", endorsing artificially sweetened foods (artificial sweeteners do not help with weight loss, and may in fact trigger sugar cravings), and "saving calories" in order to have a "binge" of favorite comfort foods...these are not normal attitudes towards food.

I would probably purchase this book in paperback (I first borrowed it from the library), if only to have on hand some inspirational reading when I want to explore the roots of my tendency towards compulsive eating. But I would not read it for nutritional advice.