Book Review:Eat What You Love Love What You Eat

Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat: How To Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle.
Michelle May. Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2009.
398 pages.

In her follow up to Am I Hungry? Dr. Michelle May wastes no time in telling us the purpose of this new book. It is stated clearly and succinctly on the cover. The book is designed to teach you how to break what Dr. May describes as the eat-repent-repeat cycle. The book objective is to teach readers to "eat mindfully" after answering the question, "Am I hungry."

The book is divided into four parts:

Think-to help you gain awareness of your eating habits by asking why, when, where, and how much you eat and to make you aware of what you believe -- think -- feel -- do

Nourish-to provide nutrition information

Live-to address adding physical activity

Eat-to provide recipes and tips to manage eating under special circumstances

The book is interesting and easy to read although sometimes the graphics were a little confusing to me. I particularly liked her use of the continuum concept throughout the book. In my opinion, it can be easy for people to fall into the perfectionist trap of all-or-nothing thinking.

Dr. May continually emphasizes that all things in life are somewhere on a continuum and it is not necessary to be at the extreme end of the continuum. What's important is to be striving for optimum health, in other words, traveling in the positive direction on the continuum.

This book has the best explanation of yoyo dieting I have yet to read. The book describes three types of eating, intuitive, restrictive, and overeating. Yoyo dieting is a change from overeating to restrictive eating and then from restrictive eating to overeating again. This is the springboard of the eat-repent-repeat cycle. Here is an excerpt from the book.

The problem is that a yo-yo is either up or down. You're either tightly wound up in rules or you're unraveling and heading toward the bottom again. Even if you decide you don't want to spend the rest of your life in one of these two extremes, there's no real in-between.

The common advice to "follow a healthy lifestyle" usually means exercise and watch what you eat--not terribly helpful if you've been trying unsuccessfully to do that for years.

Instead of a yo-yo, I prefer to think of a pendulum. A pendulum, while still conjuring up images of extremes, will find a gentle arc somewhere in the middle as it loses energy.

What I mean is that when you finally stop wasting so much of your energy on overeating and dieting, you'll naturally settle into a more comfortable, centered space, freeing up your energy for more enjoyable, productive, and fulfilling activities.

Michelle May emphasizes flexibility rather than rigidity in all parts of life, not just eating. She also points out that we need to make an energy investment into four parts of ourselves--body, mind, heart and spirit.

In one of the characteristic "mindful moments" (an aside that succinctly illustrates her point) she reminds us, "When you're focused on food (or not eating food) you can't focus on living your life. When you focus on living your life, food becomes much less important."

The book contains lots of strategies for dealing with this complicated issue but I do feel some of the strategies were a bit simplistic and were not specific enough so that readers could easily incorporate the strategies on a daily basis.

In my opinion, there are two kinds of people who deal with an overeating problem:

1. those who want to be told what to do to fix it
2. those who want to understand the problem

I'm not sure that this book would appeal to those who only want solutions and/or specific strategies,and are focused on behavioral strategies, but I think it has a massive appeal to those who are looking beyond how to fix it, and are seeking an answer to understanding the emotional component of overeating.

On my rating scale of