Book: The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work by Yoni Freedhoff
Genre: Diet book
Publisher: Harmony Books
Publication date: 2014
Pages: 336

Source: Library, then purchased

A diet book with a positive and encouraging tone.

Summary: The Diet Fix is directed at serial dieters, not that others can’t benefit from it. Freedhoff addresses what he calls Post Traumatic Dieting Disorder with a program to replace diet behaviors that induce guilt and shame with ones that cause pride and pleasure, making them much more rewarding to follow for the long-term.

Thoughts: I’ve been working on and off with this book for several months, along with some on-line dieting friends. We love the gentle, enthusiastic, and hopeful tone of Dr. Yoni (as we’ve come to call him).

I’ll begin with a warning, though, we all started off strong but then had startlingly bad relapses. This isn’t the first book that I liked for its positive tone, only to find myself wondering a few weeks later, what happened. The Way to Eat, that I reviewed a couple of years ago, recommended giving into cravings one too many times, until I actually did and decided that I was better off with my new normal of ignoring cravings because they will go away.

With The Diet Fix, I was convinced that I should never be hungry. Never mind that I have years of experience now that tells me that some days are just hungrier than others. Or, that I know my imagination is plenty strong enough to declare myself hungry when I unexpectedly encounter a treat or desire a distraction from a long work day. After my relapse, I went back to a principle that works better for me: hunger is not an emergency. That was something I learned from the harsher-toned but, often, more practical books by Judith Beck: The Beck Diet Solution and The Complete Beck Diet for Life.

Still, I have made what appears to be a permanent and positive change as a result of reading The Diet Fix. Dr. Yoni recommends what he calls “diarizing.” I can’t quite bring myself to use that word, so I call it “logging.” It’s essentially keeping track of calories, but without the judgment surrounding it that we normally associate with the phrase “counting calories.” I lost 70 pounds without counting calories, but now that I’m working at maintaining the loss, it looks like this is going to really work for me. I started with logs on paper, but now I’m using My Fitness Pal.

Mostly what I get from logging is an awareness that a treat or variation from the way I normally eat is not that big of a deal. Before I started logging, I assumed that I really blew it each time I strayed, which often turned into a multi-day cycle of binge and recrimination. Now, I get back to normal, quickly and without all the drama. What a relief!

Relief seems to be what Dr. Yoni is going for here. If eating right and exercise seem too hard and too much of a struggle, Dr. Yoni is here to help. At moments, he may go too far in the other direction and make it all seem easier than it is, but he’s counteracting a lot of negativity so I’ll forgive the occasional overly optimistic moment.

Appeal: The Diet Fix will help anyone who struggles to maintain a healthy diet and a positive mindset in our modern eating environment.

The Weekend Cooking crowd will like Day 4: Cook!

One of the primary drivers of overweight and obesity in society is our ever-increasing reliance on meals purchased outside the home. What was once just an occasional personal or family treat has become something many of us will do multiple times per week. Between ever-increasing restaurant portions and the fact that restaurants are for more liberal with calories to begin with, cultivating and nurturing a love affair with your kitchen would be a very wise thing to do. p. 108

Challenges: The Diet Fix is my 3rd book (of a hoped for 9) for the Foodies Read Challenge. It’s my 15th book of 2014 for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge. I’ll also link this post to Weekend Cooking at Beth Fish Reads.