Secrets from the eating lab : the science of weight loss, the myth of willpower, and why you should never diet again

by Traci Mann

2015

Status

Available

Call number

RM 222.2 .M3257 2015

Collection

New Books - 3rd floor near East exit

User reviews

LibraryThing member TheoSmit

A must read for anybody interested in finding out more about how bodies and the Food Industry work. These days that is everybody, isn't it?

A breath of sanity in a world dominated by that very same Food Industry.

If you are a fan of Brian Wansink's books, you will enjoy hers as well and vice versa.

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LibraryThing member rmagahiz

This is an anecdotal book based in part from the author's extensive research into the psychology of eating and weight during studies in California and in Minnesota. You can tell how she relished the subterfuge required to tease out honest responses from her subjects rather than ones based on what

they thought their ideas about eating ought to have been. In the first couple of sections, the author takes down the idea of diets as ways to achieve better health and more attractive appearance, showing how the human mind finds ways to defeat the dieter's intentions to maintain the size that has been programmed in.
In the second part, the author turns to less rigorous discussion about what a person can do to find and stick to a moderate range of weight, including strategies for tricking oneself to comply with one's conscious intentions. This I found to be more reminiscent of the kind of regular self-help prescriptions one can find in so many other books. That made it seem less essential, in a way, though of course it would not have done to have left these sections off and leave the weight-conscious reader no way to deal with the cruel ironies set out in the earlier part. I sped through this section without having that sense of confronting counterintuitive truths that made the first half of the book so entertaining.

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Publication

New York, NY : HarperWave, [2015]

Description

From her office in the University of Minnesota's Health and Eating Lab, professor Traci Mann researches self-control and dieting. And what she has discovered is groundbreaking. Not only do diets not work; they often result in weight gain. Americans are losing the battle of the bulge because our bodies and brains are not hardwired to resist food-the very idea of it works against our biological imperative to survive. In Secrets From the Eating Lab, Mann challenges assumptions-including those that make up the very foundation of the weight loss industry-about how diets work and why they fail. The result of more than two decades of research, it offers cutting-edge science and exciting new insights into the American obesity epidemic and our relationship with eating and food.… (more)