Squee! and a book

[rivkat]

cathexys recorded a podfic of Tricking! (My very first hookerfic! Of a sort, anyway.)

David A. Kessler, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite: The most striking thing about self-help books to me is how individualistic they are.  Kessler spends a bunch of time talking about how food has been deliberately designed to get us to engage in what he calls conditioned hypereating: packed and layered with sugar, fat and salt to make them hyperpalatable, so much beyond what exists in nature and so easy to eat--almost predigested--that we eat more and more, thinking less and less.  And yet his solutions are (1) personal: commit to thinking really hard about food, a lot, and making tough choices again and again, and (2) at the societal level, label foods aggressively, stigmatize hyperpalatable food like we stigmatize cigarettes, and stigmatize the companies that make such foods.  (He doesn't say stigmatize the people who eat such foods, but he doesn't say anything in defense of those people either, and given the cigarette analogy and the way in which disgust works, not to mention the current cultural dialogue around fat, his proposals would also stigmatize those people.)  If we could rely on norms instead of regulations, we might not have all this hyperpalatable food around: he points out that Americans bring food to meetings where Europeans would never expect eating to occur; many of my students will be eating and drinking in class; etc. He doesn't discuss the ways in which the foods he decries have been heavily subsidized; he doesn't discuss what it would take to get less-processed food more widely available to Americans; he doesn't discuss money or why lots of people might feel like their lives are so hard that they deserve some reward or at least can't spare the time and energy to follow one more set of guidelines.  Anyway, the book is clunkily written, with lots of overused formulations ("I asked X to tell me about ..."), but if you want a cognitive behavioral-type set of strategies for controlling your eating, combined with a lot of the scientific background for why today's food is so hard to resist--and who knows, such people may well exist--it's not terrible, just repetitive.

Comments

[erda]

I can't stand being read to, but I checked ot the podfic anyway, mainly ust because it's interesting to see what people sound like. It's always so different from the way they sound in my head. Then I got interested in the story again so I listened to the whole thing. It's such a good story, hot and filled with little surprise turns in the narrative.

On the eating book, you're not selling me on it with your review. I like cognitive behavior techniques in some areas, particularly in dealing with anxiety, but it seems irrelevant here.

I'm always amazed at how suggestible my stomach is. Show me someone enjoying a Big Mac and I start wanting meat, but I'm just as likely to want something healthy if I see someone taking great pleasure in eating it.
I might like to see fast food commercials treated like cigarette ads some day. Maybe. I haven't given it a lot of thought.

[rivkat]

I have huge self-squicking issues--I can only reread my older stories if I'm in just the right mood, because otherwise I only see the bad stuff about them. So I thought I'd have a hard time with podfic of my stories, but it turns out I can sometimes survive it! But in general I prefer to read rather than listen; I only listen when I can't read, like when I'm driving or walking somewhere. Anyway, I'm glad the story still worked for you in that format!

I wasn't exactly attempting to sell anyone on the book; it struck me as something that might help a particular kind of person with particular goals--someone who prides herself on her rationality but has trouble reconciling that with the way she's eating. For her (who's not all that different from me), the book might provide some explanation/rationalization that might make some choices easier. But I don't think it's a great book, nor is it a book that would be useful for everyone trying to lose weight. I suspect that CBT (oh fandom, you have ruined me with your acronyms) is actually good for weight loss--it's just difficult.