Five Minutes Peace

BOOK REVIEW: The Joy Diet by Martha Beck

To pinch from the M&S adverts, Martha Beck is not just a life coach, she's "Oprah Winfrey's life coach".

And The Joy Diet isn't a weightloss diet. Martha explains in the introduction that she's using the original meaning of the word diet, "a way of living or thinking," and the book's subtitle is "10 daily practices for a happier life".  The thing I love about Martha Beck is though she's that very new agey thing - a life coach - she's profoundly practical.  She's also extremely funny. 

The ten practices (or "ingredients") of The Joy Diet are "nothing" (i.e. meditation), "truth" - telling the truth about your life and situation (you should also, as Martha puts it, "offer compassion to your inner lying scumbag"), "desire", "creativity", "risk", "treats" (my favourite), "play", "laughter", "connection" and "feasting".  See, Martha is all about being good to yourself and listening to your body (and soul) to work out what's wrong with your life and how you can make it right.

BOOK REVIEW: Helping Me Help Myself by Beth Lisick

I am a self-confessed self-help junkie, so I was really looking forward to reading Beth Lisick's second book, particularly since I'd heard great things about her first, Everybody into the Pool.

Unlike me, Beth is a self-help skeptic, but following the realisation that, at age 37, she was sleeping in a room with plastic sheeting covering a damp patch on the wall, doing a job for which she had to dress up as a banana, and too unfit to keep up with her four-year-old son, she decides self-help can't, well, hurt and so undertakes to examine (and hopefully improve) one area of her life each month for a year.