Reviews for Diary of an Exercise Addict

The average rating for Diary of an Exercise Addict based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-07-22 00:00:00 Rmi Lauzon This is what it felt like to read this book: "I was stressed. I started exercising. Then I lost weight. I kept exercising. Then my mom got worried. I ate." Compare that to how it feels to read this excerpt from Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia: "It does not hit you until later. The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive. Frostbite does not hurt until it starts to thaw. First it is numb. Then the shock of pain rips through the body. And then, every winter after, it aches." Needless to say, I thought this book was too surface, there was barely any reflection. It was "boohoo, I was sad", but without the why and how the sad came about, or was dealt with after the eating came back. This book was barely worth the calories it took to turn the pages.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-03-27 00:00:00 Riccardo Caranci This should really be two and a half stars, but I round down. Diary of an Exercise Addict was good, an easy and relatively quick read that for the most part held my attention. Unfortunately she wandered away from the point quite often--I wasn't particularly concerned about her relationships or sex life, mainly because that wasn't what I was reading this for. More about her interaction with her family would and less about various romantic interests have been great; don't tell me that a woman has to be an individual and find herself outside of romantic attachments, all the while using those same intimate relationships to mark the milestones of recovery. Also? Didn't give a damn about her sex life. If Friedman had focused more on her disorder, even if all she did was cut out the extraneous bits, an additional star would have been given for the massive improvement. At times this felt like a public service announcement, a giveaway that Friedman has done some public speaking on the matter, and for a subject so rooted in emotions, that so overwhelms the senses, this work has a strange lack of emotion. A little too whitewashed to stand up in the genre, at least for my tastes.