Making Eating Fun
In the 'Eating is Fun' chapter, he has you go through the eating journal you've kept to find out your triggers for overeating and when and how you tend to indulge. He does stress the fact that you really can eat your favorite foods, but you'll have to work to do it by identifying triggers and patterns and carefully planning how you'll integrate some of your favorites into your diet without overdoing it. You determine what you want, how often you'll eat it, where and when you'll eat it and how you'll plan for the extra calories. This is an excellent approach to eating without dieting, although, again, this takes some effort and I wonder how many people will really plan things out in this kind of detail.
He goes into portion sizes and the information here is nothing new--take smaller bites, use smaller dishes, put your fork down between bites, etc. He also has a nice section on how to deal with people who stand in the way or even sabotage your weight loss efforts.
He ends the chapter by emphasizing that eating healthy really can be fun--once you take the emotions out of it and eat for hunger, you can enjoy eating without feeling guilty all the time.
Change Your Body Image
Dr. Abramson's chapters on body image provide some excellent insight into how body image can affect every part of our lives, including efforts to lose weight. He talks about how many of us focus on our flaws, avoid looking at ourselves in mirrors and just generally expend too much energy on what we think is wrong with us. To get started, you determine how you think about your body by answering a few questions and then list all the words you use to describe your body so you can get a sense of your own negative thoughts.
He also discusses how perceptions of how we think we look are rarely based on reality and how a negative body image can keep us from participating in life.
The next chapter helps you improve your body image and he states that "...hating your body is not helpful. You can like your body and still lose weight." To do that, you first monitor your body image by:
- Keeping a Body Image Record
- Looking into past experiences to find where your negative thoughts come from
- Clean up your thinking by focusing on the body parts you like, and
- Practice looking in the mirror and viewing yourself objectively.
This chapter offers awareness about how you look at your body and how those negative thoughts can hinder weight loss.
Moving Your Body
The section on exercise is probably the most disappointing in the book, but maybe that's because I'm the Exercise Guide. As in many weight loss books, he's covered eating in excruciating detail, but glosses over the exercise in a couple of short chapters.
Probably the best part of the exercise section is the first part in which he has you figure out what you think about exercise and where you got your ideas about moving your body. He also has you figure out your activity levels each day and helps you determine your reasons for not exercising. He goes through the many health and psychological benefits of exercise and then discusses the different stages of change and where you might be within those stages.
He focuses more on adding general activity than on structured exercise programs, talking about walking, using pedometers and choosing activities you enjoy. He does give some information about formal exercise, choosing a gym and maintaining your motivation, but provides no details about cardio, strength training, flexibility or setting up a program.
The last two chapters of the book focus on raising healthy kids and what you can do to make your family, schools and communities healthier.
Conclusion
Overall, this is an excellent book that helps readers figure out how they treat their bodies when it comes to eating and exercise. Rather than offering a structured program or diet, the point is to dig into your own past experiences, look at the patterns you've established and figure out where (or if) you went wrong. The information on eating and body image is excellent, while the exercise section is a little less detailed and doesn't really provide readers with specifics on where to start. Though the food and body image journals are great tools, the many different journals you keep are a little confusing. There's no real timeline for how long you keep them and how they all tie in together. A chapter pulling all these tools together into a checklist or step-by-step would be helpful. His tone is straightforward and appealing and he takes great care to take the shame out of being overweight and, instead, focus on the solution. I think he sometimes minimizes how much work it requires to keep all these journals and be objective about such emotional issues but, overall, readers will get a lot out of this book.
