A year ago I was deep into writing about my life-long diet addiction. How I got into it, how it affected my life, how I managed to pull free and lose weight in the process.

I started this project as a way to get re-focused and balanced with healthy meals after we moved to Guatemala. Everything felt weird and upside down, including the way I was eating.

Originally, I wasn’t thinking about it for publication. For one thing, I didn’t want to write a “diet” book, because it wasn’t about dieting. Unless you count all the harm I did to myself through years of dieting.

I didn’t want to write about anything beyond my own story. I wasn’t trying to prove anything to people.

Finally, it began to take shape into three parts: the Memoir, the Plan, and the Program. Once the format was clear, it came together quickly. The writing was the easy part, I think. The hardest was revisiting my past diet addictions, realizing how bad it had been for so long.

Still, I’m glad I followed through on this project. Readers have told me how grateful they are for my willingness to be open with my story, how reading about my experience has helped them. This makes it worth anything I went through to write the words and finish the book.

(More information about Slim Within the book can be found here. The Facebook page Slim Within Workshops can be found here.)