A reasonable and accessible treatise on why losing weight is often so hard.
A nutritional guide debunks some misconceptions surrounding weight loss.
Weight-loss advice is everywhere, and yet it can often be contradictory. Is diet more important than exercise? Does fasting, avoiding carbs, or counting calories work? What about all the supplements and meal plans? With this book, Davis dives into the confusing and often false messaging surrounding weight loss. He demonstrates that the weight-loss industry has produced spurious solutions going back to its origins in the 19th century. The problem has only gotten more tangled with time. Ubiquitous junk food, social media echo chambers, shoddy research, lax journalistic standards, financial incentives, and a host of cognitive biases convince readers that the newest trend is proven to work when the evidence isn’t there or the results are only temporary. This landscape has made it more difficult than ever to get into a desirable shape while simultaneously creating unrealistic standards and making people feel ashamed for their inability to shed pounds. Chapter by chapter, the author confronts some of the most salient ideas about weight loss, exploring their history and dissecting them using the latest science. He even tackles what he says might be the biggest lie of all: that dieting and exercise reliably contribute to weight loss. The book is appropriately slim but packed with information. Davis, with a background in both journalism and public health, writes with authority and candor. “There’s no question that exercise is essential for good health,” he argues. “But it’s unrealistic to count on exercise to produce weight loss, and doing so can keep people from enjoying the many benefits of physical activity by causing them to become discouraged and give up when it doesn’t deliver as promised.” The manual is inherently intriguing, even for those lucky people not looking to lose weight. Diet is a foundational aspect of daily life, and learning how misunderstood certain aspects of it are makes for engaging reading. There are areas of the author’s argument that some might quibble with, but his ultimate weight-loss suggestions—yes, he does believe it is possible—are surprisingly simple and difficult to refute.
A reasonable and accessible treatise on why losing weight is often so hard.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Everwell Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2021
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
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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