Regina Oswald’s LIBERATION FROM THE DIET PRISON bears the subtitle “A Journey to Body-Mind Harmony,” and as such wears its heart on its sleeve. As stated in the introduction, it is an unapologetically anti-diet book. Indeed, Oswald asserts that the reader deserves a life “free from diets, restrictions, and self-punishment.” Having begun her first diet in her early teens, Oswald writes movingly of building what she calls “my own diet prison—and [becoming] its warden, its prisoner, and even the official who occasionally granted pardons. But every time I stepped out into freedom, allowing myself to relax, I inevitably found myself back in the same cell.”
Instead of such a regime, Oswald advocates against the rigidity of dieting and for a more nuanced approach to nutrition that places emphasis on education about healthy choices and individual agency (the whole rooted in Oswald’s course, "Body-Mind Harmony"). Chapters are designed to be read at the pace of one per week, and they contain nutritional advice without being prescriptive. The reader is encouraged to learn “the secrets of not just outer beauty, but inner harmony and radiance.” Within each chapter can be found thoughts on exercises, mindfulness, and what Oswald calls the “Body-Mind Harmony Practicum”—which offers a way to translate the material into real-life scenarios. The presentation is slick, and each chapter benefits from copious references from both scholarly and popular sources.
Oswald’s voice is clear, encouraging, and unambiguous—though the occasional invocations of Christian belief may not connect equally with every reader. One also wonders if the asides on lifestyle in general might have been better dispensed with. It is not so much that what Oswald has to say on, for example, social media usage is unsound. On the contrary; the idea of populating one’s social media feed with materials from positive-oriented content creators is intuitively a good idea. But at these points, the focus of the book is lost, and the adjustment in reading position (though momentary) is noticeable.
Such passages do not unduly detract from the whole, however. LIBERATION FROM THE DIET PRISON’s most impressive aspects are its coherence, its essential yet accessible learned nature, and its upbeat tone. Few books in the genre offer as much positivity.
In its relentlessly positive outlook, learned yet easy-to-follow style, and reader-oriented structure, Regina Oswald’s LIBERATION FROM THE DIET PRISON: A Journey to Body-Mind Harmony represents an impressive contribution to the nutrition genre.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader