Review of Body Sense: Balancing Your Weight and Emotions (Paperback)

Most books about weighing more than you want, or having eating disorders, treat the issue like a chemistry problem.Change what you put in your mouth, and the weight will reach more appropriate levels.While that's certainly true to a point, many people are using food as a source of badly needed emotional solace.If they ignore their emotional needs, inappropriate uses of food may well continue.That's the situation that this book approaches.
Body Sense is unusually good at helping you locate sources of explicit and repressed emotions that can be influencing your eating.I was astonished at how many childhood memories the questions dredged up that I had not thought about in 40 or more years.The book also wisely focuses you on identifying which foods trigger binges and other inappropriate behavior, allergic reactions, blood sugar highs and lows, and other individual-specific reactions.There's also some basic information about how body chemicals affect mood and physiology, and ways that choice of foods can help.
Body Sense overcomes my main complaint about books offering new diets in that they usually offer one solution for everyone, and each person has to follow the advice pretty rigidly.As more research is conducted, it is becoming clear that individual reactions to foods vary quite a lot.For example, Live Right 4 Your Type shows that blood type is one important differentiating factor.In the future, we will probably learn more.For example, other research has shown that some people just have slower metabolisms than others, and will weigh more than people who eat more.Until better methods of finding out about our bodies is available, carefully understanding our reactions to food in an emotional and physiological sense is a logical and constructive step to take.
I had three negative reactions to the book that concerned me, as much as I liked what I described above.
First, we all have had bad experiences in our lives.If we are 5 pounds overweight, do we need to drag through all of that?10 pounds overweight?20 pounds overweight?30 pounds overweight?I'm not sure that this degree of psychological self-examination is required unless the degree of eating disorder is pretty great.If more examination is needed, shouldn't we have some professional help?
Second, the book doesn't say much about exercise except to warn against overdoing it.Most people would benefit from more fitness from exercise more than they would from losing a few pounds.I can imagine that people have very big hang-ups about exercise from their psychological backgrounds that need to be addressed as well.I was surprised that a book called Body Sense didn't include this topic.
Third, the process described here would take many months to do for most people.How many people will have the persistence and patience to work through this many issues on their own?In my experience, very few.The process here needs either some streamlining, or some way to make a person want to keep pursuing it.
Ultimately, who's to say that your weight is the biggest symptom you should be challenging?After all, it's mostly social norms that cause people to even think about their weight.I would argue that the harm we do to others and ourselves outside of how we eat is often worse.Perhaps the psychological approach here should be more like in Life Strategies, in trying to identify where change is needed first . . . before launching off into dealing with that area.
What can you do today that will be positive, gratifying, and something you would be proud to share with the world?


Product Description
This book holds that losing weight is not about willpower or miracle cures, but about becoming comfortable with difficult feelings. Emphasizing individual choice, it offers an action plan, a process, and a ray of hope for chronic dieters.

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