Customer Reviews

The Diet Survivor's Handbook: 60 Lessons in Eating, Acceptance and Self-Care

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A great read! This book is the answer to the countless diets that I have tried. The authors present a nurturing, compassionate compelling answer to years of an unhealthy relationship with food and my body. The quotes along the way both inspired me and made me laugh. This is the type of book that I will turn to again and again for support and guidance. After reading this book I am proud to call myself a diet survivor!

This book is a wonderful guide for people who are trying to learn to trust their bodies again. The journey towards becoming an attuned or intuitive eater can be hard, especially for anyone battling back from an eating disorder. This book gives you easy lessons, in short, easy to digest chapters. Its also a small book... perfect for slipping into a purse or backpack. That may seem like a silly comment, but I love it because it means I can take the book with me anywhere, for when I need some extra support.

This is a very user-friendly book that can be read again and again. The simple to understand lessons, wonderful activities to help apply the information, and insightful quotes guided me to a higher level of understanding of my own body/weight issues. With this handbook, I am excitedly changing my focus from the diet-binge cycle to understanding, acceptance and better care of myself. Thank you Ms. Matz and Ms. Frankel!

I liked this book so much I bought one for everyone in my family. I am only 21 years old, but I'm so glad I found this book now so that I won't have to deal with a lifetime of diets and not accepting myself. This book reveals the b.s. associated with the diet industry, and teaches you both to love yourself and to treat your body the right way for YOU. The authors really seem to know what the struggle is like and the best way to handle it--like what it feels in the exact moment you want to binge eat and how to accept yourself, and then change the situation. It consists of short chapters, and sometimes guide charts, which makes it easy to go right back to the information you need at a particular moment. I definitely recommend this book for anyone and everyone, especially teenagers!

This is such a practical book. The exercises and the quotes are so useful. I read the book from cover to cover and then went back through and worked the lessons. Seems like a lot of us can be helped by this no nonsense approach, Thanks Judith and Ellen.

It's a documented fact that thousands try new diets each year - and fail. If you're one who has time and again made the effort and not succeeded, then THE DIET SURVIVOR'S HANDBOOK: 60 LESSONS IN EATING, ACCEPTANCE AND SELF-CARE is for you. Chapters tell how to get away from diets and how to look for a stabilized weight rather than an idea. They advocate letting go of guilt while understand differences between physical hunger and psychological need. And they pack in lessons and activities to support a new way of looking at diets and weight loss. Any would-be dieter or failed dieter will find its premise intriguing - and inspirational.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch

This is a wonderful, readable guide to becoming a "diet survivor". I like how it is structured, with short yet thoughtful chapters so you can read just a little at a time if you want. Great activities as well. I wish it had been around when I was recovering from my eating disorder, but I'm glad I have it now and will be recommending it to friends and colleagues :)

American women and girls (and, increasingly, men and boys) are bombarded with messages about ideal bodies and acceptable weights, "good" and "bad" foods and the health risks of "obesity." Toss in the wealth of other stresses related to contemporary life and a recipe for disordered eating is born.

The disordered eating often takes the form of socially sanctioned and even professionally encouraged dieting and weight-loss behaviors. At the turn of the millennium about 116 million Americans (55% of the adult population) were dieting, supporting a $50 billion weight loss industry.

The result -- a lot of people "walking around feeling that something is terribly wrong with their bodies and themselves," as Matz and Frankel write. "Dieters of all sizes feel their body is unacceptable because it fails to meet the societal view of perfection....The truth is we live in a shame-based culture that says that if your body differs from the coveted thin physique, something is intrinsically wrong with you and in need of fixing."

Matz and Frankel document the damage dieting and other weight-loss focused attitudes and behaviors can do to physical and emotional health, including ways they contribute to compulsive eating. They offer strategies to identify ways in which uncomfortable feelings are channeled into "bad body" (or "fat body") thoughts and sensations, for which dieting or other forms of restrictive eating or weight-loss behavior are grasped at as possible solutions. And they point out that grasping at weight loss as a solution is no more a healthy (or potentially successful) strategy for truly fat women (or men) than it is for those who merely think they're fat, or who are just a few pounds over the societal ideal.

Dieting (restricting what one eats) is often viewed as a solution to compulsive eating (as well as to "obesity") -- but instead is actually a significant CAUSE of compulsive eating. In fact, dieting and other weight-loss related behaviors reinforce bodily dissociation, as individuals override their natural sensations of hunger and satiety in attempts to lose or "manage" weight. Ironically, dieting also tends to make people fatter, due to lowered metabolism and the tendency of many people to regain more weight than they lost as their bodies compensate (and protect) for the self-induced famines.

Is there any other industry in which a failure rate of almost 100% (almost all people who lose weight through dieting will regain it) is blamed on the CONSUMER rather than the product? But the truth, as Matz and Frankel point out, is that people don't fail at dieting....their diets fail THEM.

I've purchased many books over the years on dieting & weight loss, specialty cookbooks, the power of the mind (think thin, why French women don't get fat), etc. but NONE have compared to the straightforward, honest book: The Diet Survivor's Handbook. There are 60 short yet very informative chapters (lessons) on taking a non-dieting approach to living your life, which in turn yields natural weight loss.

Key issues the book focuses on: "Dieting" creates a mental & physical cycle that studies have proven to be inherently flawed & which inevitably backfires. Women must honestly stop striving to reach impossible sizes & standards set by the media - focus instead on finding your body's natural weight (sorry, but that might not be a size 0). What does work is tuning into your body's natural signals of hunger, eating what you honestly crave & stopping deprivation or "forbidden or bad foods," which ultimately cause you to want them more. Also, approaching exercise in a different way -- yes, you will still need to move your body -- but instead of forcing hours at the gym on the treadmill, focus on activities that you actually enjoy and that don't feel like hard work (ie. bowling, walking, bike riding, dancing, etc). Moving your body as often as you can (even if it's just a little bit here & there) will start to make you feel better about yourself, relieve daily stress & help you to become more healthy & in tune with your body needs. If you tune into & satisfy the rest of your body's needs & mental health or well being, losing weight will naturally follow.

The book is also filled with great, realistic examples -- not idealistic tales of other people who struggled "just like you" and found great success. These are real lessons that you can begin trying right away & examples that you can actually relate to. As a person who has struggled with being overweight since childhood, I have read a lot over the years about nutrition, dieting, joined various weight loss programs, exercise regimes, etc. -- all to no avail. Why can I achieve other life goals except for losing weight & keeping it off, which is so dear & important to me? This book has finally given me new information & key insights as to why I keep failing at my dieting efforts. Like many women, I've simply been coming at it from the wrong approach. When you treat the real issue of the mind, spirit & body -- losing weight will happen.

This book is the best approach to learning WHY you feel the way you do about dieting, body image and food and to turning around the negative feelings to help you become healthy again. The individual lessons can be done in any order once you've read it through - very helpful if you have a particular issue come up. I've used it over and over again to help me on my journey away from compulsive and binge eating. Judith and Ellen encourage taking small steps, one thing at a time and focusing on health and self-care - a completely different viewpoint than I've ever used and it has changed my life. I'm relaxed around food, wear clothes that fit me NOW and have opened new areas in my life because I'm not obsessing about food, points, weights, portions, etc. I've rediscovered the joy of movement for how good it feels instead of only working for results - and so I move more often than I ever have.
I now know I am a diet survivor, and this is the the book that started the change in my life.....I highly recommend it.