Traci Mann

Echoing other reviews, the first half of the book is superbly good, but the second half is a bit wanting as the strategies she offers are nothing you haven't heard before. Mann and her team have done the world a good service by pulling together an unbiased review of the available research on diets. Her writing is not at all dry; she has a well balanced wit and sense of humor so it makes a very enjoyable read. I do wish there were some discussion of diabetes and other nutrition related disorders, as not all dieting is just restricting calories and it would be wonderful to have her factual analysis in that area as well. However, accepting the limits of the book for what they are, it is a great read and a good dose of realtiy. The awful truth is just what we all probably know deep down: eat reasonably, exercise, and be the shape you are. There are no magic bullets.… (mehr)

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.… (mehr)