Secure Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences Of Our Obsession With Weight Loss Published By Sandra Aamodt Edition

insight into the dieting world and culture and how much it has control over our lives, Interesting facts and statistics also, This book had some good nuggets of wisdom, There were way too many pages devoted to outlining various animal torture studies and I ended up skimming most of those chapters, Finally, a scientist who bridges the gap between the emerging behavioral theories of weight loss and our current disastrous attempts to diet our way thin! I cant wait for this to be published so I can give it to patients.

Dr. Henry S. Lodge, Professor at Columbia University Medical Center and CoAuthor of Younger Next Year

In this deeply researched book, Aamodt demolishes the conventional wisdom on dieting, building a compelling case that if we want to be healthier, we should diet less, not more.
Essential reading for todays weightobsessed culture,
Traci Mann, PHD, Author of Secrets from the Eating Lab

This important book sounds a muchneeded alarm about the longterm damage that dieting does to our bodies and minds.
Highly recommended for chronic calorie counters and anyone trying to raise healthy, sane children in an insane food world,
Jonathan Bailor, Author of The Calorie Myth and Founder of sanesolution, com

Aamodt, a neuroscientist, explains the science behind the way your body controls your weight, showing why it can be so hard to lose those extra pounds.
A host of sobering statistics reveal just how taken in we are by empty and expensive promises,
Drew Turney, Cosmos An excellent nonfiction book that spells the facts! Why Diets Make Us Fat: the unintended consequences of our obsession with weight loss and what to do instead is an eye opener.
The primary premise of the book is easy to understand if you are familiar with the Set Point Theory which is making a comeback, Set Point Theory explains that all of us have a natural weight range that can fluctuate up or down by aboutpounds, It is the weight we maintain with ease, Our personal Set Point does not usually conform to the height/weight charts that we all know, If we try to lower or raise our weight beyond our Set Point then our bodies fight to return to our Set Point weight,

Ms. Aamodt also includes other topics like fat prejudice and societal norms, At this time it is unclear that once we achieve this higher Set Point if we can ever get back to our original Set Point, I got a lot of excellent information and tips from this nonfiction book in Pakistan, As an experienced meditator I would have liked to see more on how mindful eating worked for her and was left with certain questions such as if one is to eat a diet balanced in fruits, vegetables, meats and grains how does that square with eating when hungry and stopping when full I would also like to know if one doesn't get hungry untilPM and needs to go to bed at:PM should he/she eat that late at night before going to bed

This is the reason why most of us "fail" to maintain weight loss no matter how hard we try.
The is especially true if the weight loss is significant, I would recommend everyone to get this nonfiction book online in Pakistan from Chapters bookstore at sitelink pk/collections/nonf You could give it as a gift to someone interested in fitness and health or read it yourself and improve your own fitness, Unfortunately, if we have yoyo dieted over many years and have regained more weight the research indicates that our Set Point can actually rise to the new weight and we fight to maintain this new higher weight.
At this time it is unclear that once we achieve this higher Set Point if we can ever get back to our original Set Point,
Fascinating and important! I think there are some awesome information in this book, They should be known to the world,
But as with many books that is based on getting the facts out to people, it is far to long, To many stories about people that feels constructed, And a lot of repetition,

I would rate itfor the information, but the stories and the assumtion that the reader is "stupid" and needs a lot of repetition, drag it down to a.
Interesting, but very dry. It referenced so many studies that I ended up skimming to get the gist,
Eye opening! Frustration! So many years wasted on diets, But so many questions answered why diets don't work, I had living proof yet couldn't see the truth beyond the next diet, This book changed my future, No more diets. I read this book for the neuroscience, It was primarily written, however, less to explain the science than to provide a guide for what to do with the science but in this review, I want to focus on the science aspects, and how they intersect with social ideas.
I want to confess at the outset to an inherent reluctance to discuss how, or whether, to lose weight, Weight is both an intensely personal and intensely political subject, particularly for women, I have friends who have been deeply harmed and abused by our society's conviction that weightloss is objectively a good thing and I have friends who work very hard to lose weight.
Like parenting and marriage, weightloss issues are areas where broad social issues and trends crush down in entirely individual configurations upon women, and it is all too easy to get judgemental of choices that occur in a constrained and subjective environment.

So, back to the science! Because Aamodt's focus is firmly on understanding the impact, she uses both evidence from behavioral studies, with cognitive, psychiatric and neuroscience making it harder to pull apart the different evidence for different claims.
I would have liked, for example, a more pulledtogether explanation of the role of the hippocampus in maintaining a setrange weight, including the various inputs beyond measuring fat cells that come in, and how much we understand of the areas coming out.
The role of gut parasites was wellexplained in parts, but the extent to which the brain and the parasites interact was left unclear to me I am going to have to read sitelinkGiulia Enders' sitelinkGut: The Inside Story of Our Bodys Most Underrated Organ , and that may help.

But overwhelmingly, the evidence presented here is very, very strong: and most frighteningly, not really very controversial in its key points, Our brains work well to stop us from becoming underweight, which throughout human history has posed a real threat to survival, There are less checks and balances for gaining weight, because, frankly, it poses less of a risk to us, Even in a modern society, where most of us have access to enough food, mortality rates are higher for those on the skinny end of our spectrum than they are for what our society has designated as overweight, or even on the lower end of the designated obese spectrum.
To understand this, that our brains insistence that we gain, rather than lose, weight is a healthy impulse is central to Aamodt's subsequent explanations,
The mechanisms for this are fascinating, A lot of my reading circles around the sense of self we have this illusion, created by our

own brains, that we have a central decisionmaking point in there somewhere.
Our own personal Picard weighing heh solutions and declaring "Make it so!", But really, our decisions are more like an ant colony with different systems working together to bring information in, gather info from resources like memory and respond with various changes in physical and emotional states.
Because as a society we are so obsessed with controlling weight, it provides a rich example for studying how this process works, How if the info coming in is that your fat stores are declining, you will get hungrier reward food will look more attractive as your brain releases more dopamine every time you see a donut ad you'll feel tired and lethargic as your brain decreases the available resources for exercise.
Aarnodt explains how you can override this system you can use "willpower" your higher reasoning circuits in this case to override your impulsebased behaviours, But willpower is a finite thing, because constantly invoking those parts of the circuitry necessary to do this is draining, It prevents other uses, pathways and grooves from developing, Aarnodt doesn't actually say that resisting your bodies attempts to get you to eat makes you dumber, but she definitely implies it,
It is interesting to put this together with some of the information in sitelinkMarc Lewis's sitelinkThe Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease.
Lewis discusses the neuroscience of eating disorders at length in this book, describing the startling, but accepted, fact that OCD and obsessive eating behaviours are controlled by the limbic system, and patients with them show much stronger connections and loops that skip the higher order brain functions.
By calorie counting obsessively, he concluded, you develop a habit loop which decreases your capacity to make decisions about food based on your longterm plans, your sense of self and community, or your sense of wellbeing.
Binge eating, he argued, was a phenomenon in which people literally could not control their eating, as the brain's reward, desire and habit loops kick in without the strong neurologic networks needed to override them.

In contrast, Aamodt argues, the brain's natural, hippocampusbased, system for managing energy intake and expenditure, is balanced to maintain a roughly consistent amount of body fat, This goes up over time, and can be pushed up, either by a period of deprivation hence dieting making you fat or by a sustained period of plenty.
Consistently eating highfat, low nutrition food amp living a sedentary lifestyle will, over time, she implies, push the set point up, as our brains can't maintain the lower weight in the face of our own resistance.
Her core message that the healthiest thing to do is to let your brain do its job, forget about your weight, but focus on ensuring you surround yourself with healthy food options and pleasurable exercise opportunities feels obvious and simple, despite the constant use of the word mindful.

The terrible thing really, is that this book will disappear as one among many texts arguing the opposite, Despite the fact that science is pretty unambiguous on the fact that dieting makes most people less healthy sometimes dangerously so we live in a world where most doctors will recommend it to most of their female patients the gender disparity she quotes on this is sickening.
Even accepting the current nutritional science on the risk factors that go with the higherend of the BMI spectrum and there is reason to challenge the causation here, it remains lower than the risk factors of being poor, or being lonely.
If even a fraction of the funding or rhetoric of the war on obesity was redirected into programs to reduce social isolation and address inequality, more lives would be saved.
So why do we remain so obsessed It might be the power of the food and diet industry which is literally the same set of companies, It might be about the various forms of social control for women that serve to reinforce sexist ideas, and keep a cycle of selfloathing that prevents women from demanding a better deal.
Or maybe it is about not having understood that our behaviours are more complex than Picardonabridge, and that our brains are more wondrous and diverse than they themselves allow us to imagine.


This book is such a clear explanation of what anyone who's ever tried and failed to lose weight has experienced and blamed him or herself for.
This is a mountain of evidencesupported science, and it can be a bummer to internalize the futility of the struggle, if you don't like your size/shape, But it is also freeing and hopeful to just decide to move forward toward health, which is attainable, Although I did not learn anything I was not already aware of, I do think this book could be of value to those who are dieting and/or struggle with disordered eating.
Sandra Aamodt's clearly laid out arguments, supported by ample statistics, make the case for the positive results of rejecting the "diet culture" and eating the way our ancestors did for both fuel and pleasure.
She is a proponent of "mindful eating" which bears much in common with the intuitive eating style first proposed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, Having an advanced degree in physiology, I already knew the bulk of this information, Yet, even with my degree, my horrible eating habits dominated my life driving me to twice the healthy weight range for my height, A couple years ago, I lostpounds, It has started to creep back, despite my best efforts, I read this book over several sessions on my stationary bike, The emphasis on exercise over calorie restriction is welcome in the age of “you cant outrun a bad diet” advice, Ill most likely never be in the “healthy” weight range, but I had a Dr appointment yeasterday and my/year daily exercise habit is continuing to bear fruit.
My blood sugar is normal, even now without the heavy diabetes meds I was on three years ago, My cholesterol and blood pressure were also both in healthy range, Psychologically, its a hit to see those scale numbers go up, But the scale is not an accurate indicator of health, I know that, but it helps to hear it again, .