Julia Cameron’s The Writing Diet

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

First — not another diet book! Second — another diet book! True confession: reading diet books is a hobby of mine that never grows old because there is always another one. Hint: there is something wrong with this picture, and it’s not that I like reading diet books.

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. Some of the exercises are terrific — I plan on trying some of them and reporting back on them here.

It was the part of the book that veered into nutrition that I had a problem with.

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. I’ll write more about that later, but if you’d like to learn more about some of the issues around Splenda please check out Mercola.com. 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.” What I believe is that 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.