A lively dieting guide that takes mental health into account.
Bennett investigates the underlying causes of dieting relapses in this health guide.
Even the most health-conscious eaters sometimes crack. Bennett was already a professional health coach, author, and antisugar crusader when she moved to California to care for her dying mother; when her mother died a year later, the exhausted, grieving Bennett turned to carbohydrates for emotional support. “While movie popcorn was my hands-down favorite,” recalls Bennett, “I also went hog-wild over corn-anything, especially popped, fried, toasted, ultra-processed crunchy nibbles and other so-called comfort foods.” Each binge ended in promises to eat right the next day, but each new day led inevitably to backsliding. Within six months—a period during which one of her health books became a bestseller—she had gained 21 pounds. “It was impossible to escape the humbling irony,” she writes. “I felt like a Huge Health Hypocrite.” With this book, Bennett describes how she pulled herself out of her junk food nosedive while offering readers a roadmap to curbing their own self-destructive eating habits. She gets not just at the “what” of an unhealthy diet—the usual suspects of sugars, carbs, and highly processed foods—but the “why.” Why do we blow our diets? Why do we eat to assuage negative feelings? Why do we take comfort in foods that make us so uncomfortable? A healthy diet begins in the mind, and Bennet offers a three-week regimen to get readers in the right headspace to protect their bodies—and their emotions—in a sustainable way. “Coach Connie” writes energetic prose that makes the whole book feel like a conversation. “Admittedly, I’m biased, because I’m a professional writer and author,” she writes in a section about journaling, “but I’ve found tremendous relief, eye-opening insights, and much-needed peace of mind just by putting my thoughts, feelings, and worries on paper.” Bennett is perhaps overly fond of capitalizations and acronyms (like FEASTS—Fast, Easy, Awesome, Simple, Tested Strategies) and she advocates for the controversial ketogenic diet. Even so, much here will prove useful for chronic diet-breakers.
A lively dieting guide that takes mental health into account.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798886452808
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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