In an effort to get more healthy this year, and try to deal with my weight issues, I’ve been reading a number of diet-related books lately. Obviously, there’s no shortage of them, so the trick is to find what is helpful, vs. what is mostly annoying. I made the impulse decision to purchase The Writing Diet by Julia Cameron earlier this week, and even had a bit of time over the last couple of days to start reading it.
It’s not really so much a diet (although there is an eating plan in there that’s not so bad as they go) as an approach for dealing with food issues. That is, you can use the principles espoused by the book with any eating plan that works for you. While I haven’t yet started to apply the book’s lessons, I think there’s some good stuff in there.
The basic premise of The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right Size is that you’re often eating for emotional reasons, or because of long-established unhealthy patterns. So by writing instead of eating, you can bring those emotions to the surface, where they lose the power to compel you to eat. Following the techniques in the book is also supposed to help you address the unhealthy patterns regarding food you’ve established, through a series of writing exercises.
There are a number of techniques adopted by 12-step programs, and anecdotes that illustrate how people have implemented the suggested tactics. Recently, I read the book Intuitive Eating, and it seems pretty similar, in that the techniques are designed to get at the root of why you eat unhealthy foods and sabotage your efforts to lose weight. All of the common self-delusions and rationalizations are there and will sound familiar to anyone who has attempted — and failed — to lose weight in the past.
I have so many things I want to implement in my life right now, and so little time. Life is a massive to-do list, and the hard work of self-improvement often takes a backseat to just living. But I do hope to implement some of Cameron’s techniques and see if it makes a difference and/or boosts what success I’m already having so far this year eating healthy.
