Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight — and What We Can Do about it, by Harriet Brown (2015)

Body of Truth is an inspired and inspiring well-researched book about our cultural obsession with weight, our fetishization of thinness, and our demonization of fat. It is a compelling read which will make us think more deeply about the attitudes we have about our bodies and our health.

Over the past twenty-five years, our quest for thinness has morphed into a relentless obsession with weight and body image. In our culture, "fat" has become a four-letter word. Or, as Lance Armstrong said to the wife of a former teammate, "I called you crazy. I called you a bitch. But I never called you fat."

How did we get to this place where the worst insult you can hurl at someone is "fat"? Where women and girls (and increasingly men and boys) will diet, purge, overeat, undereat, and berate themselves and others, all in the name of being thin?

As a science journalist, Harriet Brown has explored this collective longing and fixation from an objective perspective; as a mother, wife, and woman with "weight issues," she has struggled to understand it on a personal level. Now, in Body of Truth, Brown systematically unpacks what's been offered as "truth" about weight and health.

Starting with the four biggest lies, Brown shows how research has been manipulated; how the medical profession is complicit in keeping us in the dark; how big pharma and big, empty promises equal big, big dollars; how much of what we know (or think we know) about health and weight is wrong. And how all of those affect all of us every day, whether we know it or not.

The quest for health and wellness has never been more urgent, yet most of us continue to buy into fad diets and unattainable body ideals, unaware of the damage we're doing to ourselves. Through interviews, research, and her own experience, Brown not only gives us the real story on weight, health, and beauty, but also offers concrete suggestions for how each of us can sort through the lies and misconceptions and make peace with and for ourselves.

The video below is an example of determination in dealing with a desire for food.

The Diet Fix, Why Diets Fail, And How To Make Yours Work (2014) by Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, M.D.  promotes a sane, compassionate approach to getting a grip on food and weight. He points out that 90% of all diets end in failure and addresses how to fix the way we lose weight to make results last. 

Dr. Freedhoff, says, "at the end of the day if you don't like the life you're living while you're losing weight, you're virtually certain to gain it back." This book doesn't push or demonize any food group and provides a step-by-step process for a frustrated person trying to lose weight and keep it off in a healthy manner.

I've chosen The Diet Fix as the next book for discussion here in DietHobby's BOOKTALK. If you are interested in discussing the book or seeing videos about it be sure to check out that section.

This diet book doesn’t recommend any particular diet. It has no strict meal plan with foods that are either celebrated or demonized. There are no traumatic sacrifices required. No starvation, no cleanses, and no miracle supplements.

The Diet Fix contains no outlandish promises, no strict dietary rules, no excessive exercise, and no recommendations for supplements and potions. The book is a excellent science-based guide for anyone looking for credible advice on permanently sustainable weight loss.

Dr. Freedhoff starts out by listing “Dieting’s Seven Deadly Sins” which is the label he attaches to commonly held beliefs about dieting. These are:

1. Hunger . "If I'm not hungry, my diet's not working." Dr. Freedhoff argues that any diet plan that leaves you hungry won’t be sustainable.
   
   
2. Sacrifice. "No, no birthday cake for me, thanks". Dr. Freedhoff says that perpetual sacrifice of things that you enjoy will make any diet fail.
   
   
3. Willpower. "If I close my eyes and run past the cupboard, I can make it to the bedroom without hitting the chips." Dr. Freedhoff says that willpower is important, but permanent resistance is almost certainly futile.
   
   
4. Blind food restrictions. "The only way to lose weight is to kick this (insert food or food group here) out of my life".  Dr. Freedhoff is adamant we need to manage, but not banish, certain food groups.
   
   
5. Sweat. "You have to sweat, and sweat a lot. Bonus points if you feel like puking."  Dr. Freedhoff reminds us that moving more is not going to cause significant weight loss, and in the long run, you can’t outrun your fork.
   
   
6. Perfection. "I have to be perfectly perfect or else I'll never lose weight".   Dr. Freedhoff says that striving for perfection will only bring disappointment, and that real diets must be flexible enough to accommodate setbacks.
   
   
7. Denial. "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels" “The diet was great—I just couldn’t stick with it” is a common refrain. But why couldn't they?  Dr. Freedhoff says it's because people need a payoff to offset their suffering. When weight is dropping, people can live in denial of their actual suffering, but when the scale slows down, stops, or starts going back up, suffering gets harder to sustain, and harder to deny.
   

 Next, Dr. Freedhoff lists “Dieting’s Seven Deadly Traumas”, which are going to kill your diet if you experience them for a prolonged period of time. These are:

1. Guilt
2. Shame
3. Failure
4. Depression
5. Despair
6. Binge Eating
7. Weight Cycling and Metabolic Shutdown

The core of the book is focused on what Dr. Freedhoff calls the “Ten Day Reset” that is designed to “reset” behaviors and recalibrate expectation about what a “diet” really should be.

Each day describes how to develop a new set of skills to support permanent behavior change.

One of the points that Dr. Freedhoff repeatedly emphasizes is in order to make permanent changes in your weight, you must be prepared to make permanent changes in your life. And the more weight you want to lose, the more of your life you must be prepared to permanently change.

Any intervention that is too difficult to sustain will eventually be abandoned, so Dr. Freedhoff emphasizes that one’s target weight must be based on a “best weight”.

The “best weight” is the point at which you’ve found a balance between your weight and your own satisfaction and willingness to stick to a plan. There are no promises of magical and unsustainable weight loss. This is an approach for a lifetime.

The ten days of Dr. Freedhoff's reset process are as follows:

1.  Gearing up: Scales, for you and for your kitchen, to measure and weigh food, and yourself, accurately. A journal for a food diary is essential. And buy food. Dr. Freedhoff emphasizes healthier choices and thoughtful selections, and recommends minimizing refined carbs, including juice, while promoting whole foods. He doesn’t demonize any food group, except artificially-created trans fats.

2. The food diary: All food has a metabolic cost, and it’s measured in calories. It’s promoted as a tool to guide eating, and make eating more conscientious. Dr. Freedhoff not only encourages logging what was eaten, but also the calories, when it was eaten, and any hunger cravings. There are a number of online sites and phone apps that make logging take only minutes per day.

3. Banishing hunger: Keep hunger pains at bay by eating regularly: Don’t skip breakfast, eat every 2-3 hours, and include adequate protein, for satiety, every time you eat. Your daily calorie “budget” needs to be allocated across your meals.

4. Cook: Regularly eating purchased and prepared meals make it more difficult to control portions and calories. Cook real foods focusing on healthy ingredients. Minimize using refined and processed foods as much as possible, but not so much that you’ll give up.

5. Think: Describe your best weight—one in which you’re living the healthiest life you can honestly enjoy.

6. Exercise: You can’t out-exercise a bad diet, but regular exercise helps keep weight off, and changes your attitude for the better. And exercise has enormous health benefits beyond any impact on weight. What exercise? Something. Anything. “Some is good, more is better, everything counts”

7. Indulge: There are no forbidden foods. Real life includes indulgences, and permanently denying yourself pleasurable foods, whatever they may be, makes any diet plan unsustainable. So one must learn to manage indulgences in a calorically-responsible way. Dr Freedhoff suggests asking yourself two questions: “Is it worth the calories?” and “How much of it do I need to be happy?”

8. Eat out: Cooking is crucial, but eating out is part of life for many—so navigating a restaurant successfully is an essential weight management skill. Dr. Freedhoff suggests knowing your calories, pre-eating, moderating alcohol, and making thoughtful choices between calories and food you’ll actually enjoy.

9. Goal setting: Behavior change is accelerated when goals are achieved. The two most important goals are (1) to eat the smallest number of calories possible --while still liking your life --and (2) to exercise as much as you can enjoy.

10. Troubleshoot: Making permanent change can inevitably lead to roadblocks, and Dr. Freedhoff looks at the commonly encountered roadblocks to sustainability.

Dr. Freedhoff is adamant that there is no one perfect “diet” for everyone, and while The Diet Fix provides some general guidelines for successful dieting, it doesn’t prescribe any one particular diet.

The behaviors and skills recommended by Dr. Freedhoff are relevant to any approach to weight loss. He says that as long as you’re enjoying any type of dieting approach, and you see that behavior as sustainable for you in the long-term, then that diet will work for you.

Dr. Freedhoff says, "If you don't like the life you're living while you're losing, eventually you're going to find yourself going back to the life you were living before you lost. " Doing this will cause your body to re-gain the weight-loss.

Dr. Freedhoff repeatedly emphasizes that healthy living is a lifelong approach—not something you can repair with a “quick fix” diet or detox.

Dr. Freedhoff tackles a number of diet and obesity issues throughout the book, blowing up cherished myths throughout. He says that:

Calories do matter.

Low carb/Low fat/Paleo/Vegan are all acceptable—if you can sustain it, and as long as you watch caloric balance. Dr. Freedhoff argues against demonizing any food, even chocolate, and he cautions that your diet must be sustainable.

The enemy isn’t carbs/fat/glucose/gluten. Cutting out food groups can sometimes deliver short term results, but they’re difficult to maintain over the long term.

Dietary fats are not the enemy. Saturated fat is not the health risk it was once believed to be. Unsaturated fats may offer health benefits, so ensuring these are part of your diet is probably a good idea.

There are no magical supplements. There is no persuasive evidence to support the long-term effectiveness of any supplement.

Artificial sweeteners are safe, and can be beneficial as part of a weight loss strategy.

Dr. Freedhoff talks about weighing and scale addiction.

He says that physiologically, plateaus don't exist. Unless it's a temporary trick of the scale, . . . if you're not losing, either you're burning fewer calories than you think; you're eating more than you think; or some combination thereof.

He says although there's no Plateau, but there IS such a thing as a "FLOOR". If you've truly stopped losing weight, there are really only two questions you need to ask yourself.

1. Could I happily eat any less?
2. Could I happily exercise any more?

If the answer is "yes" then you can tighten things up, but If the answer to both is "no", there's nothing left for you to do.

This is because if you can't happily eat any less and you can't happily exercise any more -- then it's unlikely that this will ever become part of your permanent behavior.

I enjoyed this book, and use many of its principles.  I am a long-time fan of Dr. Yoni Freedhoff's blog, Weighty Matters, and I've quoted many of his ideas and articles here at DietHobby.

Dr. Freedhoff has set up a special website for this book which contains an interesting and useful calculator to help people with his recommendations. It gives calculations for RMR, Calories, Exercise Activities, as well as a division of protein grams between meals and snacks based on individual caloric intake. I've included a link to this calculator here at DietHobby under RESOURCES, links.

You can also click HERE to go directly to his calculator.

Originally posted on May 21, 2014, updated for new viewers.

The Willpower Instinct (2011) was written by Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., who is a health psychologist at Stanford School of Medicine where she teaches a course called “The Science of Willpower”.

This book combines insights from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine to explain exactly what willpower is, how it works, and why it matters. The book has 10 chapters which reflect the author’s 10-week course, and is written in an interesting and easy style, without academic pompousness:

1. Effective willpower - just noticing what's happening is key.

2. The willpower instinct - anything that puts a stress on your mind or body can sabotage self-control but too much willpower is stressful.

3. Self-control is like a muscle - it gets tired from use but regular exercise makes it stronger.

4. Why being good encourages bad behavior - we use past good behavior to justify indulgences.

5. Why we mistake wanting for happiness - even false promises of reward make us feel alert and captivated, so we chase satisfaction from things that don't deliver.

6. How feeling bad leads to giving in - self-compassion is a far better strategy than beating ourselves up.

7. We discount both future rewards and future costs - we consistently act against our own long-term interests and we illogically believe our future selves will (magically) have more willpower.

8. Why willpower is contagious - humans are hardwired to connect and we mimic and mirror both willpower failures and willpower successes of our social network.

9. Inner acceptance improves outer control - attempts to fight instincts and desires ironically make them worse.

10. Final thoughts - the aha moment.

If one wants to change a Habit or understand why one has failed at doing this in the past, "The Willpower Instinct" is worth reading. Kelly McGonigal presents neuroscience and psychology in a way that a reader can understand, and provides concepts that one can use to improve the quality of daily life. She encourages experimentation and self-inquiry, while presenting practical, tried and true methods to help to kick bad habits and to create new ones.

This book could be a valuable resource for those who are struggling with a Diet, or dealing with an “Eating Disorder”, as it can help to provide insight and understanding. At the end of the day, creating or sustaining a habit or an addiction involves making choices.

Turning to a substance in a time of stress, or whenever, is a choice one makes, and through repeatedly performing this action, one’s brain creates "shortcuts" that enable one to do it more often/efficiently and make refusing very difficult and anxiety-inducing. The author explains this in a very clear, well-researched manner, including the ways our primitive brains trick us into saying "yes", and she then provides strategies for improving one's ability to say no.

Originally posted on November 4, 2012, updated for new viewers.

                                      
 
Late 2011, or early 2012 I purchased and read Brain over Binge (2011) by Karen Heidebrech, and decided that it deserves the attention of a review here on DietHobby.

Brain over Binge gives an informative scientific perspective on binge eating as well as an interesting personal account. Instead of viewing bingeing as a symptom of complex psychological problems, Heidebrech explains why traditional eating disorder therapy often fails. She explains how she came to understand her bingeing was a function of her brain, and how she used the power of her brain to recover.

Brain Over Binge gives an alternative method of “eating disorder” recovery. The author uses principles of contemporary neuroscience to explain the traps of disordered eating, and how she herself has found recovery from her own binge behavior.

Traditional eating disorder recovery focuses on labeling one’s eating behavior as dysfunctional, then identifying underlying reasons or triggers for that eating behavior, and then having the person attempt to control, correct, or respond differently to their own flaws or environmental stressors. This is an impossible task, because one can never control all of life's stressors and personal vulnerabilities, and believing that this is the only way to recover is often a set-up for failure.

Instead of focusing on emotions, stress, self-esteem and many of the other common explanations offered in conventional treatment, Brain Over Binge provides that binge eating is the result of allowing the urges that spring from one's "animal" brain to override the wisdom of one's "highest human" brain. By surrendering all the power to the animal brain, the binge eater ends up feeling as if she/he has no choice but to give in to the urge to binge, no matter how irrational or self-destructive it is to do so.

Brain over Binge presents a 5-step process for taking back your power over the urges. Heidebrech backs up the simplicity of the cure with an explanation of the research that supports the credibility of her approach. She also relates her own experience to show that one can recover from binge eating without having to be perfect or live a stress-free life.

Bingeing doesn’t always result from external situations. Bingeing itself creates more and more cues to binge in response to everyday life situations. The more situations one responds to by bingeing, the more cues there are to binge. The answer is not to get rid of everyday situations, but to interrupt the cycle, which is done, paradoxically, by dismissing disordered urges as "neurological junk," thereby avoiding reinforcing the behavior and weakening the undesired neurological pathways.

  As a reduced obese person who has personally experienced a lifetime of difficulty with binge behavior, as well as more than 20 years of Therapy involving that issue, I found myself in agreement with a great many of the concepts within this book, and I highly recommend it for adults who would like to experience some recovery from their own binge behaviors.

Originally posted on August 28, 2012, updated for new viewers.

A Craving is a feeling that we’ve attached an action to.  The video at the bottom of this article is of former addict, Lucy Bainbridge, and therapist, Elaine Hilides, sharing a 3 Principles perspective on Addiction and Cravings.

For those people who are interested in learning more about Elaine Hilides, … as part of my Diet Hobby, I purchased and read Elaine Hilides book, Mindfullness The No-Diet Diet Book (2013), quite some time ago, before becoming interested in the 3 Principles concept. At the time of my first reading, I judged the book to be okay, but rather ordinary and unimpressive.

Because I was impressed by the video interview below - which I discovered during my current study of the 3 Principles as related to my struggle with dieting and weight control. Because the interview impressed me, I re-read Elaine Hilides book to see if had overlooked something that might be personally helpful.

Upon my second reading, I found that the book starts with an interesting 3 Principles approach to weight-control before it jumps into a presentation of the author’s own dietary personal beliefs - which are presented as factual truths. The author’s beliefs include specific techniques and guidelines involving intuitive eating, behavior modification, and eating primarily “real” non-processed food.

A common 3 Principles saying is that “we feel our thinking”, and of course, my own thinking is often about weight issues. Therefore, I was interested in the following ideas.

You have a story, and idea, about yourself, your weight and your eating and you believe that your story is real, although this is an illusion because YOU created the story.

We all fall into the illusion that the feelings we experience about our weight and food problems are real. But we all experience reality through our own filters and perceptions, and we create our reality moment by moment by whatever we are thinking at that moment.

Yes, the chair you’re sitting in is real, but your experience of the chair might be different to someone else’s experience of that chair. You might think the chair is comfortable but another person might disagree. The chair exists, but it is your thoughts about the chair that creates your experience of it your reality, your story.

Each of us is living in our own version of reality. Think back to your Christmas Day celebration. Each person who was present will have a different story about that event. Once you recognize that you are telling yourself a story, you can see that thought is a vehicle you use to create your story and your reality.

Repeating your old, tired story of why you do what you do, limits you and keeps you stuck in the same place.

There is nothing to re-learn. You just have to remember what you already know. It’s a simple approach. There are no complicated techniques to remember or affirmations to repeat. There is nothing to do or apply, it is “is” in the same way that you walk and breathe.

This new and simple paradigm is not about changing your thoughts with positive thinking and positive affirmations.

It points you to an understanding of what thought is and how you can use the power of thought to free yourself from making unhelpful food choices and then beating yourself up over that choice.

Many have lost their way by thinking that they can’t change and so “why try?”

You have the magic in you. You have free will. Life isn’t happening to you. The more you remember that external situations, food or circumstances have no power over you, the more freedom you have.

You can have the freedom to have a wonderful relationship with food by rediscovering your own innate health, and letting go of the thoughts that are causing the bad feeling you have about your weight.

When you get into a thought storm about your weight, your mind is full and noisy, and clinging to a diet sheet ... as if that is the answer ... only adds to your thinking and muddles your mind even more. You already have the answer. When you allow your thoughts to quiet down, your mood shifts which gives you space to allow new thoughts in.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the book is similar to most diet or "non-diet" books, in that it consists of the author sharing her specific personal dietary beliefs as if they were an Ultimate Truth.

Ms. Hilides’ message is that one can regain health by choosing the “right” foods in order to keep the body running optimally while paying close attention to one’s thoughts, which are the driving force behind every decision made about what one allows oneself to eat.

While the author indicates that people should follow their body's own personal wisdom in order to be guided toward energy and health, that message is contradicted by the prevalence of specific recommendations to embrace and follow the author’s own personal dietary beliefs.

  Despite the fact that I do not personally embrace the author's dietary preferences nor her dietary recommendations, I found the 3 Principle perspectives on Addiction and Cravings, as shown in the video below, to be valuable enough to be included here in my digital scrapbook, DietHobby.