Slimming Down Without The Diet Mentailty

Many people have heard about the diet mentality. What is the diet mentality? It is the constant mindfulness on the kind of food a person eats. While many people are mindful of what they eat, they are still able to focus on other activities in life. A person with a constant mindfulness on food are not able to stop thinking about they eat. They are completely consumed by it.

Most individuals with this mentality divide food into "good" and "bad." This type of mindset leads people to feel that any food eaten from the "bad" category will make the person "bad" in some way. Then they feel guilty about what they did and beat themselves up for not being "strong enough" to resist the food. Conversely, if a person eats anything in the "good" category then they are a "good" person and they feel happy and good about themselves. Allowing food have such power over their emotional well-being is highly detrimental to a person's self esteem and view of themselves. How does a person feel about themselves if they are eating "bad" foods all the time? They feel like they are horrible losers that are out of control. These types of feeling and behaviors can snowball. The person will probably develop an eating disorder if they have not already developed one. They will try to only eat "good" foods, but when they find that they are tempted and eat "bad" foods they will binge -- eat a very large amount very quickly -- and purge (bulimia nervosa) or starve themselves (anorexia nervosa). Most eating disorders at their base are the sufferer's need to be perfect in every way and the way they eat is one of the few things they feel they can control.

Is there a diet mentality in the United States as a country? There seems to be since the mass media and diet industry plays on these feelings to get American's to buy their products. There are celebrity diet gurus with no training in nutrition or weight management telling people what to eat and what foods are "good" and "bad." This industry has essentially created the diet mentality as a way for people to buy more books and listen to their crooked advice. Almost the entire industry of popular diet books are made to play on people's need to feel good about themselves and their desire to lose weight. The United States has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world and these popular weight loss celebrities are not helping the situation. In fact, it could be argued that they are actually making it worse. It is obvious that their programs for weight loss don't work, because if they did Americans would not have a weight problem.

In addition, it is getting harder to separate real science and real weight management professionals from the quacks. Most real professionals choose to call foods healthy or unhealthy and work with people using techniques for careful scientific study. People desperately want to be healthy but the way these celebrity diet gurus pass around misinformation the real science based health information has become drowned out. We must be very careful to not fall prey to the "good" food and "bad" food mentality. We must realize that all food can be part of a healthy diet and that we are not bad if we eat a "bad" food. Fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are the base to any healthy diet but eating this way does not make us "good" people. We are good people by are everyday actions toward each other. It has nothing to do with what we eat.

Book Review: The DASH Diet To End Obesity by William M. Manger

The DASH Diet To End Obesity is a small book that contains information about the obesity epidemic and how the DASH diet can help reduce it. The book mainly gives tips on how to lose weight instead of being about the DASH diet itself. Most of the information is helpful but basic.

The book starts with a explanation of how obesity is affecting the health of Americans. It explains how much an individual should weigh, the related diseases (high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes) that can develop from being overweight or obese, and how these conditions can be prevented. Most of this information is very basic and can be found online or through reading other books. There is a brief discussion on how the food industry can affect our choices and the choices our children make when deciding what to eat. This is interesting information that could have been expanded.

The next section discusses what Americans are doing wrong with their current diets. Americans appear to be doing a lot wrong.  Overeating is making us age faster and is decreasing our quality of life as we age. We also drink to many of our calories in the sugar filled soft drinks. There is some good science in this section that could also be expanded. This information is very easy to understand and drives home that over consumption is contributing to the obesity problem.

Next, the book gives a very basic overview of the DASH diet. There are no sample meal plans or menu suggestions, but a chart of how many servings per day a person should consume. This information is not a good resource for actually implementing the DASH diet into your life. It gives no information on how to actually change your eating habits to fit with the recommendations of the diet. Some basic information would have been more helpful but there is none. The book does give some very helpful tips on general healthy eating and weight loss. These tips make up the most helpful part of the book. The suggestions are realistic and most people would have no trouble implementing at least a few of them.

The chapter for using the DASH diet with diabetes was quite helpful. This section gives basic information on how carbohydrates and insulin work in the body, then discusses how counting carbohydrates can fit into the general DASH plan. DASH emphasizes vegetable and fruit consumption as the base of the diet which is very healthy for people with diabetes. This section gives a sample meal plan and carbohydrate count for the food included. There are also tips for portion sizes when selecting carbohydrate containing foods.

The last chapter is about salt. Sodium restriction is a very important component of the DASH diet. The current recommendation is that individuals with high blood pressure consume 1500mg of sodium or less a day. The chapter explains how sodium effects the body and kidneys. There is also a chart for common foods with their sodium levels. This chapter is helpful for learning why sodium is unhealthy and a few tips for lower sodium intake. The information could have been more detailed to better explain how to decrease sodium. Most processed food items have a large amount of sodium and a list of requirements for lower sodium would have been appropriate. Lower sodium recipes would have been extremely helpful in this section.

Overall, the book has some good information but is too basic to help someone implement the DASH plan into their daily life. A much better book would be The DASH Diet For Weight Loss.

View all my reviews