I have not read Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, but when I heard about Julie Powell's concept for the book, I thought it was a great idea, and sure, was a bit jealous I hadn't thought of it first. Powell cooks a year's worth of recipes from a classic Julia Child cookbook. As a gourmand, I love that. Get in there with the guts and braising and veal stock, and make kitchen magic, the old fashioned way. 

The fact that her adventure took place in a Long Island City apartment was somehow befitting. Julia Child had humble origins, I think, and it's appropriate that a new generation discover her through the pen of a young, harried office worker who found comfort in the rhythms of bygone ways of preparing classic, amazing food. 
Anyway, Powell is writing articles now– today she had a piece in The Washington Post Bookworld section about diets. It was a round-up; quick hits on current diet books, along with a standard inverted ending. Fine, whatever. If I pitch that, my email doesn't get answered, but hey, it's Julie Powell, name recognition, James Beard Food Journalism Award Winner, I understand. But I guess that's what got me. How does someone who won a prestigious award end up writing a dismissive, unhelpful diet roundup in the Post? 
Here's where my bias comes in–she wrote a pretty negative blurb about The Shangri-La Diet, a diet which I read about extensively, and even wrote a freelance article about my experiences with. Unfortunately, I'm some combination of a bad writer and an unknown writer– I'm still trying to suss out which, but the byproduct is that the article was rejected by the mag I pitched it to, and follow up attempts with similar markets have been unsuccessful. 
Here's my point: if you look at the Shangri-La Diet critically, there's alot there that suggests it's a pretty big breakthrough into understanding how our bodies work, and why, thanks to the status quo, two-thirds of this country's population are overweight, half of those obese. That's an epidemic, and it's been caused by drastic changes in our life styles and food supplies. We're sedentary, but in the presence of good food, our bodies have eveolved to eat as if every meal may be our last. Thus Roberts' emphasis on appetite control, rather than magical combinations of proteins, fats, sugars and our friend the carb. 
The Shangri-La Diet addresses the root problems of being overweight. I have no reason to advocate it except that it's worked for me, and that, in reading the book, Roberts does a great job of taking many isolated studies and synthesizing them into a compelling thesis about weight and appetite control. The book feels like an A-ha moment in the field. It's too damn easy to dismiss the diet just because it sounds kooky. 
I'm disappointed there hasn't been a fairer hearing of his ideas, given that no one else seems to have solved this crisis. (Dieting, a crisis? Aren't I being a bit dramatic? Look at the amount of money spent on obesity related hospital care, and remember that when your insurance premiums go up again next year. Now who's being dramatic?) 
Naturally, all this intersects with my main problem right now– I'm dedicated to writing, but am having a hard time figuring out how to get published. Maybe I should ditch my Shangri-La Diet story. It's an honest account of my trying to figure out how something so crazy sounding could possibly work, and how it affected me when I started trying it. Perhaps I'll start pitching 200 snarky words about how stupid you'd have to be to think that nutritionists, with their .300 batting average for keeping people not fat, might be wrong about their approach to weight-control. Yeah, that's the ticket…