Advertising creatives are often known for their side projects, but Alex Bogusky, co-chairman at Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, has come up with a more unusual proposition than the norm - a diet book.

Titled The 9-inch "Diet", the book has a simple premise: rather than adopting a new fad diet, we should simply eat smaller portions. The revelation came to Bogusky while on holiday, when he couldn't fit his plates into the 1940s kitchen at his holiday home. "I was sitting there thinking, 'What kind of idiot makes a cabinet that won't fit plates?'," he explains. "You know, it's always hard to see your own culture. I realised that no idiot does that, the plates must have grown. So I started looking into it and they had grown a lot over a period of about 40 years. So I thought 'I'm going to write a diet book' - it's not like it's a goal or something that I dreamed of doing."

The 9-Inch Diet proposes that we return to eating our food from nine inch plates, which was the average size in the US for decades, but are now virtually impossible to buy. "The nine inch plate was around for a long time, and we were all a lot thinner," continues Bogusky. "We happened to be about 30 per cent thinner, which is about the difference in the amount of food that sits on our plates now. So it's not complicated and there's not recipes in the book - although I got a recipe from my mum for meatloaf as my token recipe - but it traces the history, it's a bit of a cultural send-up of portions and what's happened and who's to blame."

The 9-Inch Diet book will be published in December this year, just in time for Christmas...