Not a Quick Fix

The book required me to self reflect and when directed by the author, to write. Some of the ideas resonated with me, while others had no meaning. If you are looking to examine your relationship with food, maybe any shame you feel with food, this book is a good place to start.^^

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Disappointing and predictable Self-Help

I found this book disappointing. I was expecting some new ideas on this very common subject. Unfortunately I found the message not unlike many similar self-help books. ie. "just tell yourself to make changes in your life and it will happen eventually albeit with much difficulty,". I find that message very simplistic and unrealistic. At one point the author throws out the platitude "if I can do it anyone can do it!". But in my experience that statement does simply not hold water. If it were that simple most of us would not be as the author defines us "disordered eaters". For me the main problem with this book is that it devotes far too much time over analyzing "why we over or under eat" and not nearly enough time on solutions to this problem.

While I admit many of the author's ideas about why we overeat are valid on the surface, they don’t touch on the underlying cause of overeating. Specifically she barely mentions the idea that the main reason we overeat as a species is because as humans we're pre-determined to do so. It's deeply ingrained in our DNA.

Modern humans evolved about 200,000 years ago. For about 190,000 of those years food resources were extremely scarce. During those many thousand years we humans survived as hunter/gatherers which meant that we probably only ate 2-3 times per week! Under those harsh conditions we adapted to the environment by overeating whenever the opportunity arose. In other words in order to avoid starvation when humans found food they learned to eat as much as possible, past the point of satiation. By doing so their bodies would store the extra calories as fat and use those calories when the food was again scarce. This cycle of feast and famine was repeated for thousands of years and so became part of our deeply ingrained instinct. Only in the last 10,000 years after we evolved to become better at sourcing and producing food did our need to overeat become less necessary. Even then, up until the last few hundred years most humans on this planet were still living in poverty with many populations being undernourished.

Simply put for most of humanity's existence we only survived because we learned the "habit of overeating". Ironically that habit is now killing us, because for most of the modern world food is no longer scarce. For most humans on this planet malnutrition is a thing of past generations. The problem now is that we live with this redundant habit that is so strong it's almost impossible for most of us to change or at least sustain! We are trying to change a brain pattern in one lifetime that has evolved over thousands of lifetimes! Very few humans have that kind of ability, which is why so many overweight people find this kind of sustainable change almost impossible.

That is why I say this author's ideas are unrealistic. For most of us that overeat although it's possible to make radical short term change it is highly unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. In fact very few humans have the unique ability to change or sustain these brain patterns, which is why most of us when put in a situation of food abundance will do what comes naturally and resort to our deeply ingrained instinct of overeating! The subconscious voice in our brain is sending us the message that we need to store extra calories for the coming famine. And our conscious brain is for most of us simply not strong enough to override that.

Ironically this author describes those very few people who have the ability to do this as "normal eaters". Thats like describing Michael Phellps as a "normal swimmer"! On the contrary! In fact it is most humans who overeat that are the "normal eaters" because by definition normal eaters describe what "most people" normally do! The author should have used the term “healthy eaters” to describe those few that do not overeat! For we all agree that overeating in a world of food abundance is not healthy eating.

Finally on the issue of under eating or food restricting, I have no disagreement with the author. This is very obviously a modern First Word problem and a serious mental illness, and in fact goes against the very human survival instinct I spoke about above.

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