I had read Rebecca Harrington's diet posts online and I was excited to see an entire book from her on the subject. Viewing celebrity dieting and our cultural obsession with women's bodies, how fit they are, what they eat and how they exercise to look a certain way, and the lengths that they will go to in order to fulfill some arbitrary idea of perfection that we, ourselves, created... and to do it all with a non-preachy humor, makes for a spectacular premise for a collection.

I was definitely disappointed, though, that the book just seemingly threw together the columns that she already wrote, without adding much of anything else. I hadn't read all of her columns before picking up this book (so I was definitely interested throughout the entire book) but I HAD read some, including "I Tried Gwyneth Paltrow's Diet" and even though I read it months ago, I could immediately recall enough to tell that it was copied verbatim here.

The individual chapters for each diet were far too short -- what might work for an online article did not feel nearly in depth enough for a book. Harrington is funny and clearly committed to these diet "experiments" but we do not get nearly enough of her actual thoughts and experiences on these crazy diets. Plus, she is just not on some of them long enough. Two days on one, four days on another? It would have been far better if she committed to a set amount of time for each diet, like 7 days. It would haven given her more to write about, at least.

Also, I would have loved for her to talk more about why she "loves diets" so much, what really prompted her to check out all of these diets (did she want to expose just how insane eating this way is, or was she actually just looking to lose weight and used it as a way to get a column and book deal?) Her closing remarks saw a shadow of this discussion coming through, but there needed to be much more. Is this a diet advocacy book, or one that wants to expose the unhealthiness of such regimes? The fact that I don't know means this book failed in one huge way.

It was very entertaining to read and I got through it in less than an hour. But I think there were some huge opportunities for greatness that were missed out here and it's a shame.