A compassionate book that provides intriguing insights and useful strategies.
Registered dietician Ellis offers a self-help guide for people with unhealthy eating patterns.
“Food Cuddler,” “Food Whisperer,” and “Procrastin-Eater” are just a few of the author’s creatively named categories in this book, which aims to help readers analyze and improve their dysfunctional relationships with food. Eating should be a simple process, she asserts; the main reason to eat is hunger, and fullness is the cue to stop. What Ellis terms “Emotion-Triggered Eating” is often subconscious, however. Early humans lived in a time of food scarcity, she notes, and anxiety was once a function of survival, making people hardwired to overeat and self-soothe with food. Ellis mixes biological and psychological concepts with empathy. Using anonymized composites of her own clients, she offers relatable studies that show how past and present family dynamics can play a role in disordered eating: “Kavitha,” a “Less-Structured Eater,” is a busy mother who never gives herself time to eat, making her a “professional grazer.” Widowed Annamaria, a “Food Cuddler,” uses comfort food to give her “a big hug from within,” numbing her grief; as a child, she was encouraged to eat in times of sadness or disappointment. Ellis’ writing is brisk and engaging, and the book contains a quiz to gain awareness of one’s eating patterns. Advice includes keeping a food diary, using a hunger/fullness meter, engaging in mindful eating practices, and keeping a record of one’s moods. Ellis also includes comforting affirmations for each category, always emphasizing that an important part of healing is self-love. After readers narrow down their own eating styles, they would do well to read sections for other categories as well, as there’s much wisdom to be found in these pages.
A compassionate book that provides intriguing insights and useful strategies.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781636982090
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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