The Life Diet with Laura Jane Williams

How to Build a Life

I first met Laura just after I’d lost my job on the radio. I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do next so when I saw tickets for her writing workshop I took it as a sign. It was in a fancy house in Notting Hill and I arrived to find her in the kitchen making everyone tea. She hosted festive drinks that Christmas and we became firm friends.

Laura is the author of 12 (TWELVE!) books and is a Substack bestseller with her newsletter, How to Build a Life for anyone “bang in the thick of life’s mess and mayhem… who are still trying to find the magic.”

In 2019 she released an audio book, The Life Diet, which as someone in a constant state of overwhelm, I LOVED. Below you will find something she has written for us about what it means to have less to have more. It’s a real treat and I’m thrilled to have her, so enjoy.

And you can read the chat we had about finding joy, overcoming perfectionism and how you can celebrate yourself, over on her newsletter. If you fancy it, you can do that here.

Laura says, “I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, decorate my house like a tart’s boudoir, and lift very heavy weights. Those four things are my entire personality. Oh! And so is my new writing course for 2025! Get involved!”

Hi. My name is Laura Jane Williams, and I’m here to say: I’m obsessed with how we go about building our lives. And because I’m obsessed about how to build my life in a way that feels as good as it possibly can, I’m on a “Life Diet”.

Let me say from the off that my Life Diet isn’t about calories.

My Life Diet is about all the other stuff we consume – everything from the clothes we wear, to the TV we watch, to the people we spend our time with. My Life Diet is what I let feed my heart, and my mind and my soul.

Before I made up this “diet”, I spent too many years indiscriminately internalising other people’s opinions of me. I consumed trash TV by the bucketload. Gorged on endless social media scrolling. I frittered away my time in a way that meant when I got into bed at night I couldn’t figure out how my to-do list had gotten longer. I felt heavy and lethargic and a bit like I was underwater, or wading through treacle. Do you know that feeling? When everything feels harder than it should?

There was no sense of curation in my life and it made me miserable.

Old Laura didn’t consciously check in with herself to figure out what was important to her, and what made her feel balanced or joyful or contented or connected, so life felt like a rough slog of overwhelm punctuated by tiny pockets of delight – which quite frankly wasn’t enough. I deserve more than tiny pockets of delight! I want every day to be delightful!

Eventually I realised: our time, and our attention, is a finite resource. We don’t get it back. We get one chance to use it, so we have to consciously decide how  if we’re even gonna get close to a chance at happiness. (And by happiness I mean being grateful and feeling contented. In balance. Harmonious, if you will.)

I don’t buy in to the belief that life should be hard. I know there are hard times, but those tornadoes of hard are easier to overcome when you generally live in balance.

What if the point of it all – life, and building one - might not be to ‘get through it’ or ‘rise to the top’ or ‘suffer now for redemption later’? What if the point of it all – life – might be to experience the fullest joy of our mortal experience?

What if the point of us being here is to be born, drink down as much of what makes us joyful as possible, and then to die, to make room for somebody else to do the same?

That’s my plan. I’m here to love, be loved, have a laugh and then peace out.

So. Now I deliberately, purposefully, and actively decide what my mind, body, soul and heart consume, and how much, week by week, day by day, minute by minute, to best serve my own self.

My “Life Diet”, this notion of curating our lives, is a philosophy based entirely in boundaries – which is a sticky issue in itself because I don’t know about you, but me? I was taught that it’s nice to be nice. That it’s cool to do what other people do. That it’s best not to ruffle any feathers and that the most liked people are the people who go with the flow… and the objective is to be liked.

That’s crazy, because as I’ve got older the people I see who are happiest – the most contented with themselves, by themselves – are the ones with the most self-aware boundaries, knowing that having boundaries will annoy some people.

Elizabeth Gilbert once posted this to her Instagram:

Something I have learned in life is that people who have no boundaries are constantly furious. Furious, victimized, hurt, offended, and outraged. If you cannot figure out how to uphold the healthy, accurate, and appropriate distance between yourself and every person in your life (and it will be a different distance for every person in your life) then you will never know a moment of serenity. Not everybody gets to have full access to you.

I would add to that, not everybody gets full access to you – and nor does everything.

My manifesto – my “Life Diet” – is about finding the courage and self-discipline to uphold the boundaries I decide.

Curating my life is about flipping the bird to keeping up with the Joneses, and marching to the beat of my own drum. It’s being the art director of my own existence. And it stands to reason that when we’re so focused on our own path, our own feelings, we stop comparing ourselves to others too – we stop envying what other people have when we know we’re operating at our own fullest contentment.

My Life Diet is about looking at my wardrobe, my belongings, my relationships, my bloody Amazon Prime, finances, goals, time and ultimately even my thoughts thoughts, so that the good in my life is fed, and everything else is drowned out in line with your values. It goes like this: is this helpful, or not helpful? Helpful things get to stay. Not helpful things, I have to drop from my wardrobe/phone/Instagram follows/kitchen drawers/email/the way I think about where I’d like to be in five years.

Sarah Wilson calls it the ‘crowding out’ theory: when there’s so much good, there’s less room for the bad.

Of course, only you can decide what qualifies as ‘good’, and it will look different for all of us. But once you decide what your version of “good” is, I implore you: forget the rest.

Be utterly selfish with how you dish out your intentions, so that your time and energy mean something.

Care about fewer things, more deeply.

I truly believe that when we get our Life Diet right, we get more space, more time, more energy – and the things we do consume end up giving us so very much more.

You’re allowed to dictate how you want people and things to play their part in your life, and in what way. This is your sign.

Be selfish.

Be deliberate.

Be you.

That’s The Life Diet.

For more of Laura you can find her books everywhere books are sold, and subscribe to her newsletter about how to build a life when life is so full, here.