Connie Bennett is a health-and-wellness lifestyle coach with multiple books to her name, but she’s still human. When her mother was nearing the end of her life and required constant care, Bennett’s strict diet and exercise regimen fell by the wayside. Bennett’s I BLEW MY DIET! NOW WHAT? considers a few reasons that people drop a diet program, and offers some positive strategies for achieving specific goals.
In I BLEW MY DIET, Bennett is clearly speaking from the heart (the link between difficult emotions and unhealthy or disordered eating is easily anecdotally observed), and that meaningfully connects with the reader. There’s also some clear, valuable information, especially in an excellent recipe section in the latter half of the book. The text overall doesn’t feel structured for real learning, though; it’s ultimately headed for a 21-day plan to “Bounce Back Boldly” by incorporating those author-approved recipes.
At the most basic level, ideas come and go without building on one another. In one section of positive strategies, for instance, the recommendation to eat a larger breakfast and smaller dinner is followed by the tip to meditate, which is followed by the suggestion to drink bone broth. None of this advice is wrong on its own (and I BLEW MY DIET gives supporting data for many of its claims), but there isn’t a useful pedagogical structure here. The bigger problem, however, is that this disjuncture characterizes the overall text. Especially drawing as it does on the author’s experiences of stress, grief, and trauma, it seems that the idea is to focus on connections between mental health and eating habits in order to understand why someone hasn’t followed a diet regimen. If this is to be the central pillar of I BLEW MY DIET, it’s surprising that the most obvious and important piece of advice—go to therapy—isn’t early and prominent. Instead, the text constantly weaves back and forth between observations about mental health and suggestions about diet, causing some thematic whiplash.
I BLEW MY DIET speaks to a very specific audience: people with time, money, and a focus on weight loss over other aspects or markers of health. Only those who are free to toss out all the “junk food” in their house and buy the groceries required for the 21-day Bounce Back Boldly plan (which demands dozens of eggs and pounds of meat each week) should expect to get the full experience of this book. Nevertheless, general readers can still pick and choose bits of interesting or useful advice from this buffet of nutritional trivia. Most people simply won’t come away with an entire meaningful regimen.
Connie Bennett’s I BLEW MY DIET! NOW WHAT? has some useful content and interesting references.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader