Review – I’ll Have What She’s Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting by Rebecca Harrington (COYER Challenge #3)

First, thanks to Edelweiss and Random House Vintage for allowing me to read an e-galley of this title.  It sparked my interest when I first saw it because several years ago I read a bunch of diet type books like this, and really enjoyed them.  This was a very short but sweet read.  And I feel like there could probably have been more added to it, as I think back to the other diet stories I read:  Secrets of a Former Fat Girl,  Half-Assed, The Amazing Adventures of Diet Girl, The Incredible Shrinking Critic, and Confessions of a Carb Queen. 

The humor in which this story was told was as good as any of the others that I read.  I loved how the author seemed to try to have dinner parties with her friends and get them to try to eat what she was eating.  I loved all the observations she had about the people who had the diets that she tried to follow.  One observation that I really loved was with Cameron Diaz’s diet.  According to the author, Diaz had always been able to eat whatever she wanted and never gained weight.  But she decided that it wasn’t “fair” to her body to keep eating like that.  I agree with the author, Harrington, when she says that “If I was skinny no matter what, I would eat a Burger King Rodeo Burger every day.”  For me it wouldn’t be the Burger King, but I definitely would eat what I wanted instead of trying to eat some weird diet.

The author tried a total of 14 different celebrity diets according to this book, including not only Cameron Diaz, but also Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and Dolly Parton to name a few of them.  If they had an exercise plan also, she mentioned trying some of those.  I don’t think she lasted more than a week or two on any of the diets, but she shortened them to fit.  In a way this reminds me not only of the diet memoirs I named in the first paragraph, but also of the books by A.J. Jacobs, like The Guinea Pig Diaries or Drop Dead Healthy. 

As I said, I wish there had been a bit more to the book.  At one point she off-handedly mentions having a boyfriend, but up until that one point, and nowhere after that point do we hear anything else about this person. I think maybe a bit more personal tidbits, or should I say details about her friends, family, etc, would make it better.  True, these days shorter books that could be considered humor are often popular, but I don’t think it would necessarily add that much length to add a bit more detail.  To repeat what I said at the beginning, it was a short, but sweet, as in fun, read.  I do recommend it to anyone, which is everyone, who has ever tried a fad diet, or even wondered what a fad diet might really consist of.