Writing for diet magazines in my dieting past

Throughout my blog (if you have read it for the past 19 months!), I have made references to the fact that I used to write for diet magazines - hell, I used to DIET! And is only 19 months ago that I decided, after reading Beyond Chocolate, that I knew diets were not the way forward for me anymore (although I did read Diet Breaking: Having It All Without Having To Diet by Mary Evans Young in my mid-twenties).

My past work in the diet media contributes to my ability to write from experience and, being inside the industry to even that extent, it allows me an even better ability to know what I'm talking about.

I stopped writing for magazines such as WeightWatchers and Boost! (Scottish Slimmers magazine) when I changed my way of thinking about dieting. And this is fair enough I think. But why wouldn't I write for these magazines while I, like many other people, believed that diets were the answer?

And what's more - I know from an inside perspective how difficult it is to go against the grain in the media related to the diet industry - it pays for so much of the advertising that contributes to the health and women's press, that these publications are very reluctant to publish anything that opposes that view (because their advertisers wouldn't like it very much).

It was far easier for me to get diet articles commissioned, than it is for me now to get non-diet articles commissioned!