A compassionate book that provides intriguing insights and useful strategies.
Registered dietician Ellis offers a self-help guide for people with unhealthy eating patterns.
“Food Cuddler,” “Food Whisperer,” and “Procrastin-Eater” are just a few of the author’s creatively named categories in this book, which aims to help readers analyze and improve their dysfunctional relationships with food. Eating should be a simple process, she asserts; the main reason to eat is hunger, and fullness is the cue to stop. What Ellis terms “Emotion-Triggered Eating” is often subconscious, however. Early humans lived in a time of food scarcity, she notes, and anxiety was once a function of survival, making people hardwired to overeat and self-soothe with food. Ellis mixes biological and psychological concepts with empathy. Using anonymized composites of her own clients, she offers relatable studies that show how past and present family dynamics can play a role in disordered eating: “Kavitha,” a “Less-Structured Eater,” is a busy mother who never gives herself time to eat, making her a “professional grazer.” Widowed Annamaria, a “Food Cuddler,” uses comfort food to give her “a big hug from within,” numbing her grief; as a child, she was encouraged to eat in times of sadness or disappointment. Ellis’ writing is brisk and engaging, and the book contains a quiz to gain awareness of one’s eating patterns. Advice includes keeping a food diary, using a hunger/fullness meter, engaging in mindful eating practices, and keeping a record of one’s moods. Ellis also includes comforting affirmations for each category, always emphasizing that an important part of healing is self-love. After readers narrow down their own eating styles, they would do well to read sections for other categories as well, as there’s much wisdom to be found in these pages.
A compassionate book that provides intriguing insights and useful strategies.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781636982090
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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