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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
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
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