The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size by Julia Cameron

Throughout my life, I’ve always loved to write. My family complains about my obsession with buying notebooks (which, for the record, I feel I NEED!). In high-school, I loved it when the teacher would fill all three chalkboards with notes for us to copy, then erase them, and fill all three up again! And so, the premise of this book (that you can “write yourself right-size”) had me intrigued.

Author Julia Cameron isn’t a nutritionist or a health professional. She teaches Creativity classes in which she encourages her students to write daily “Morning Pages“… stream-of-consciousness journaling to unleash (or “unblock”) your creative spirit.

In “The Writing Diet“, readers are also encouraged to take up the habit of writing daily “Morning Pages”. Add in Food Journaling, and weekly “Culinary Artist Dates”, and the author claims you’ll start losing weight, just like she saw her Creativity students do.

Cameron also gives some other “tools” which she says will be helpful in your weight-loss journey: Walking, HALT, finding a ‘Body Buddy’,and asking yourself “4 Questions”.

Later in the book, topics such as the bathroom scale, clothing, mirrors, trauma, spirituality, eating-to-please, and exercise (as well as several others) are touched on ~ each gets its own short chapter and a journaling exercise to help you work through your ‘issues’ in these areas.

Reading this book, I did find myself inspired. I was giddy with the excuse to buy new notebooks ((grin)), and have started writing my daily Morning Pages, as well as keeping a detailed Food Journal.

The only thing I really disliked about this book was how Ms. Cameron was labelling foods as “legal” and “illegal“, “good” and “bad“. Her emphasis on “Clean Eating” (avoiding whites/refined carbs & sugars) was too “diety” for me, but I just substituted the word “Healthy” instead of “Clean”, and decided to “take what I love and leave the rest“.

Overall, this was a very interesting book with a very positive feel to it. It even leaned a little towards the principles of “Intuitive Eating” at times!

Rated: B-