Body Intelligence may seem like just another book trying to answer the seemingly unanswerable questions: why are we fat and why do have so much trouble losing weight? While Dr. Abramson's book does cover old ground, it also offers a new way to look at weight management, namely by increasing our 'body intelligence.' He believes that by changing how we eat, how we view our bodies and how we move those bodies, we can learn how to lose weight and live healthy lives.
The Truth About Dieting
The first chapter explains the premise for the entire book, namely what body intelligence is He starts with a scary statistic: "[M]ore than 64 percent of adults are overweight...64 percent of American men and 78 percent of American women are on a diet or watching their weight." His obvious conclusion is that
dieting doesn't work and instead offers a more effective method of increasing body intelligence by targeting three areas:
- Eating intelligently (using food in the right way)
- Looking at your body intelligently (having a realistic and positive body image)
- Using your body intelligently (being comfortable with exercise)
The process of increasing your body intelligence starts with examing your dieting history and why previous diets have failed. Dr. Abramson then discusses our genetic legacy of hoarding fat, which doesn't work well in our current society. He makes a point to steer the blame away from us individually, instead stating this truth: "The difficulty you've had losing weight is not a result of some personality defect or deficiency of character, it is your biological self trying to cope with an enviornment that it was not designed to live in." Couldn't have put it better myself.
Where Body Intelligence Comes From
This is one of the more fascinating chapters, delving into what makes us the way we are. He takes you into your past experiences with your friends, family, enemies, etc. to help you figure out why you eat the way you do, why you have a certain image of your body and why you either move (or don't move) your body on a regular basis. He makes an important point about how family can influence how we eat and what we think about food stating: "The pattern of chronic dieting...frequently can be traced back to well-intentioned parental attempts to control a child's eating." He also describes all the other factors that influence body image (like teasing in grade school) and activity levels (bad experiences in grade school gym class).
This is one of the more interesting chapters, covering an area most other weight loss books don't--namely, what past influences have contributed to how we eat, how we look at ourselves and how we move our bodies. Just this awareness can bring many 'aha!' moments as you delve into your past.
Eating Intelligently
The section on eating is probably the most detailed in the entire book. He first talks about hunger and how we define hunger, which plays a role in how intelligently we eat. There's not much new here--he talks about the different types of eating (external eating, unnecessary eating, emotional eating) we engage in, often without being actually hungry.
In the chapter on emotional eating, he talks about how we often use food to deal with depression, stress, anger, boredom and loneliness. He has you keep an emotional eating journal to suss out your patterns of eating, stressing the importance of writing things down. He also provides some great information about tracking your automatic thoughts (the ones that trigger unnecessary eating) and changing them so you no longer have those triggers. This info comes from the book 'Feeling Good' by Dr. David Burns, which offers some of the best cognitive behavioral therapy ideas for problems like depression, anxiety and stress.
What's powerful about this chapter is that you see what triggers your eating and once you know that, you can take steps to change it. This isn't as easy as he makes it sound, but if you're committed, these strategies can make a real difference in how you eat.
Diets Don't Work
The next chapter deals with dieting and he first covers the low-fat vs. low-carb controversy, stating that neither one is absolutely right and, instead, advocating a balanced diet.
Many times, he stresses the fact that dieting really doesn't work and has you go through your dieting history so you can find out for yourself how dieting has failed in the past. By identifying your dieting attitudes, you can find out how your beliefs about dieting undermine your efforts to lose weight. Some of the common beliefs are: dieting is always painful, I need to be hard on myself to lose weight, since I've failed at dieting, I have no willpower and more ideas you'll probably recognize.
Another powerful task is to list what you expect to get from reaching your ideal weight, helping the reader realize that postponing life until that magical moment is usually a waste of time.
His information on setting realistic goals is some of the best I've seen, having you figure out what realistic weight loss really as as opposed to going by what we think we should weigh.
