Customer Reviews

Fed Up! : The Breakthrough Ten-Step, No-Diet Fitness Plan

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"The only effective means of protecting yourself from developing an eating disorder is to avoid diets that push you, both psychologically and biologically, toward a destructive new level of food restriction and weight preoccupation." - Wendy Oliver-Pyatt, M.D.

In Fed Up! Wendy presents a back-to-basics approach to healthy living. First, she dispels the myths associated with dieting and boldly declares:

"Dieting wreaks havoc on the mind, body and soul."

Dieting has failed us. Dieting preys on our insecurities. Scientific research indicates that dieters only succeed in weight loss 2% of the time. Dieting also leads to a tense and uncomfortable relationship with food. In fact, Diets can in fact encourage eating disorders.

In reality, the less I eat, the more weight I seem to gain. Wendy explains why this occurs! I'm a big fan of the Suzanne Somers' approach because I'm now a believer that it is not really how much you eat, but more the combination of what you eat and when. The only time I've ever lost weight and kept it off was when I was eating more food! Imagine that.

Personally, I think dieting is depressing and I'm happy to see Wendy saying that diets don't work. I don't have time to count all those silly calories and I get so stressed out trying to figure out how much of this, how much of that. I give up in a day.

With a diet, you know that all the weight you are trying so hard to get rid of is going to come back as soon as you go back to your regular routine. So it seems you should try to find balance and a healthy lifestyle that includes foods that are good for you and will encourage a healthy approach to eating. There are foods you should be eating to encourage health. Those foods are not discussed in this book. This book deals with eating from a psychological perspective.

Wendy also deals with the following questions:

Why do we allow the diet industry to get rich while we become overweight?
Do you have an eating disorder?
Why do we accept our cultural myths about dieting?
Are you addicted to exercise?
Is your weight gain related to a medical condition?
What effect does cortisol have on your body? Can the stress of being on a diet actually make you gain weight?

So, we are still hungry, we crave foods we are told are bad for us and we want to have the perfect figure and the perfect life. Wendy gives us a dose of reality by stating the facts.

Our society has presented a pleasing view of an unpleasant situation. Models are unhealthy. The images we see flashing across our screens, in magazines and on every billboard scream "Be like me," "I'm attractive," I'm what you want to be." Yet have you ever heard that some models lay in bed all day because they feel so sick and depressed they have no life besides modeling? I've heard these stories.

The advertising industry is doing more harm than good all while filling their pockets with our money. They are feeding off our insecurity, our desire to belong and be loved. America is obsessed with beauty. As Wendy points out, "Perfectionism breeds low self-esteem." The harder we try to become "perfect," the more "imperfect" we feel.

"With the advent of the mass media, however, women now find themselves being compared not just to the girl down the street, but also to the most beautiful (and often surgically enhanced) women in the world. It's no longer good enough to look normal'; instead, you need to look like Calista Flockhart or Demi Moore." pg. 35

Wendy gives us back a calm sense of control. She encourages the reader to achieve a sense of balance in their life through maintaining a healthy view of life.

While she encourages us to evaluate our own lives, she also explains what didn't work for her and what isn't working for millions of Americans. She herself struggled with an eating disorder for ten years.

Her purpose in writing "Fed Up!" is to encourage a "nationwide rethinking about whether dieting and maintaining mental lists of so called good and bad foods actually leads to long term health and weight management." She wants her readers to think seriously about the impact of cultural pressures and the pursuit of unrealistic beauty standards.

Wendy's book provides steps you can take to achieve a healthy mind and body. You will become more relaxed in your relationship with food and consider the psychological barriers to health and fitness.

The steps are:

Step One: Recognize Your Exhaustion: Is Food Preoccupations Running Your Life?

In this chapter, you can take a "Are You Exhausted?" Self-Inventory test. The results may surprise you.

Step Two: Reject the Cultural Myths That Make You Diet and Gain Weight

In this chapter you will find information on how to calculate your BMI (Body Mass Index). This will help you figure out what weight you should be as opposed to how much you weigh now. With a few simple calculations you will find out if you are actually underweight, a healthy weight or overweight.

Step Three: Decide That You Are Good Enough Today to Love Yourself Today
Step Four: Learn to Experience, Trust and Enjoy Hunger and Satiation
Step Five: Straight Talk about Exercise
Step Six: Get Your Doctor on Your Weight-Loss Team
Step Seven: Learn to Wait to Lose Weight
Step Eight: Break Through the Secrecy
Step Nine: Redefine Your Life: What's More Important to You Than Dieting?
Step Ten: Give to the Next Generation: Preventing Eating Disorders and Obesity in Children

This is not a book about fancy meal plans, supplements, exercise equipment, foods you should and should not eat. There are no diets in this book!

This book is about taking control of your mind and body. Wendy offers advice on how to develop an enjoyable, effective and sustainable fitness program. She also discusses how parents can help prevent eating disorders in their children.

"Fed Up!" shows you how to enjoy the primordial pleasures of eating
while focusing on how to avoid the modern madness of diets.

If you are ready to break free from the prison of dieting, this ten-step plan will help
you to control your eating, lose excess pound and maintain your ideal weight.

Inspirational and Insightful.

~The Rebecca Review

We live in an eating disordered culture and Wendy Oliver-Pyatt understands that. More importantly, she can help us recover from it. Fed Up! is a practical, smart guide for anyone who really wants to break free of the lies we are told --- and continue to tell ourselves --- about food, exercise, and physical appearance.

As a psychotherapist, I have treated clients with eating disorders for the past 15 years. These clients are some of the most intelligent, delightful and creative people I have ever known. But in spite of such tremendous competence, they fall under the spell of the irrational beliefs and misaligned values of eating disordered thinking. It is not an easy thing to deprogram oneself from this insanity, but it can be done. And Dr. Oliver-Pyatt's book is one extremely valuable tool to help accomplish this important mission.

It is safe to say that everyone can learn something of value from this book. I recommend it without reservation.

- Thom Rutledge, author of Embracing Fear (HarperSanFrancisco)

I had the good fortune of previewing Fed Up! and found it to be a life-saver! Though doctors and nutritionist claim that we don't need to diet to lose weight, we all know that their comments are quickly followed by the admonition to simply "Change your eating habits. Eat healthily!" If we could do that, we wouldn't need their help in the first place! Author Wendy Oliver-Pyatt dares to call even such seemingly innocuous advice what it, in fact, is: a diet. And she dares to suggest what chronic dieters like myself wish we could believe: dieting doesn't work (despite the fact that a million dollar industry wants us to believe otherwise). Fed Up! takes both a compassionate and logical look at the endless struggles faced by us dieters and overeaters. Because Dr. Oliver-Pyatt is a physician, she is able to offer concrete evidence to prove that dieting not only doesn't work, but it actually back-fires, causing people to actually gain weight. As a former dieter herself, she empathizes with our pain and gently leads us toward the solution. We can believe her because we know she has traveled the same road. She shares her own heart-wrenching struggles, as well as those of many others she has worked with. For those of us battling with food and/or weight issues, this book is a must-read. I felt, perhaps for the first time, as though I had been freed from dieters' prison. I am learning to love myself as I am, while also learning how to achieve a healthy, attractive body. I am also learning to make peace with food. And best of all -- I get to eat! I cannot recommend Fed Up! highly enough!

I own every diet/weight loss/fitness book known to man AND I've wasted thousands of dollars on various diets, prescription diet pills and alternative treatments for my weight. I've battled bulimia, starved myself, gone on all liquid diets, acupuncture, weight watchers - you name it! Nothing has worked long term. Now I know why. Pyatt lays it all out for you in plain english. I felt like she had witnessed my entire life and wrote this book especially for me!

Everything is addressed in this book - Unrealistic expectations set up by the media, medical issues, how not to pass the food obsession on to your children. She helps to take away the guilt without giving excuses. No more diets doesn't mean more weight gain. So don't worry. She's not trying to make you be happy with an overweight and unhealthy body.

Even though she does say that MY medical condition (PCOS) does require a diet with certain restrictions to achieve any kind of weight loss (bummer), I wish I had this book when I was 13 years old. It would have saved me alot of grief and I'd probably be a healthier more fit person today.

I'm planning on buying a copy of this book for all my friends and loved ones that have been and are going through the same thing. I may even buy an extra copy to give to my doctor and a few to leave in his waiting room!

Heck, I might even take up a collection to hire a fleet of helicopters to drop a few copies over every junior high and high school in the United States!

I first read a blurb about Dr. Pyatt's book in a fitness magazine. I was intrigued and, as a medical writer, wanted to learn more. So, with an editor's blessing, I arranged an interview with Dr. Pyatt and wrote a feature story about the work she has done throughout her life to help both men and women find their way back from the chaos created by dieting and disordered eating in response to the messages society bombards us with every day. We can never be thin enough. Thus, we are not "good enough." It's a vicious cycle, and difficult to break.

Dr. Pyatt's voice, in person and throughout her book, is encouraging, gentle, supportive, and wise. She does NOT ignore nutrition, potential medical problems, or the necessity for regular exercise. Neither does she leave readers feeling that if they DON'T exercise, they are "bad." In a world full of diet- and weight-related myths, "Fed Up" is a volume of common sense.

The method may be frightening at first to those of us who have been "brainwashed" from our youngest days--admonished for being overweight, perpetually dieting, falling prey to the promises of every new "program" that comes down the pike. It's hard to let go of the fear of NOT dieting, and Dr. Pyatt knows this. But by turning to her book again and again, readers will find that they gradually learn to accept their bodies, to set more realistic goals, and to stand up against the impossible expectations of a society obsessed with anorexic ideals.

As for myself, I have lost and gained weight time and again. I have re-read this book three times. Last night, I completed the questionnaire in Chapter 4 for the third time, and was extremely happy to see that my highly negative body image and damaging weight obsession has significantly decreased in intensity. I don't expect 40 years of brainwashing (and dieting from the age of 7) to go away overnight. I just want to live a life free from constant obsessing about food and weight and how I look. This is the peace of mind that Dr. Pyatt offers, through the process she outlines in "Fed Up."

I cannot recommend this book highly enough to any man or woman who 1)is tired of endless, futile dieting; 2)wants to lose (or gain) weight; and 3) wants to take a stand against the unrealistic messages and expectations of our weight-obsessed society.

Give up dieting? No way. That's what I used to think.

I suffered with anorexia/bulimia for over twenty years. Dieting was my life. It made me feel confident and in control. But the truth is that I had very low self-esteem, and food was in control - not me. I am now recovered from my eating disorder. A key element in my recovery was giving up on dieting completely. Today I am diet-free and living a life that I never thought was possible.

Wendy Oliver-Pyatt's book, Fed Up!, can lead you to a healthy, fit lifestyle, too. Her breakthrough ten-step, no-diet fitness plan is extremely practical and can easily be applied to your everyday life. It is so refreshing to read a book about health and fitness that does not give long lists of what you can and cannot eat. Dr. Oliver-Pyatt legalizes all food and simultaneously gives you the freedom to truly live your life.

If you hunger for a relaxed attitude toward food and are ready to throw away your diet books, read Fed-Up! You are worth it.

Jenni Schaefer, author of Life Without Ed: How One Woman Declared Independence from her Eating Disorder and How You Can Too (McGraw-Hill)

This is an awesome book that will teach you a way to live and not diet or be obsessed about your weight.This book will help you develop a healthy relationship to your own body, the food you eat and you will loose weight without dieting. Fed Up will help you develop a lifelong way of feeling and looking great without the crazy Yo Yo of diets. It is also a good read with lots of useful information that affects all of us that have had difficulties with food. I recommend this book strongly.

This excellent book was a wake-up call that I sorely needed. I have been on Weight Watchers for a year and a half, and thought I had dealt with all my food demons. Yet I was living in fear of food - going to the extent of throwing it away and hiding it from myself! Wendy Oliver-Pyatt's book covers why many Americans have a love/hate relationship with food, and why diets do not work.

The first several chapters are about one's psychological relationship with food. Much of it stems in the way we are raised, and the way that our culture treats food. We have an abundance of food in America, and at the same time, thin bodies are the ideal. Both food and thinness are fetishized, leading many men and women into a quandary.

Wendy explains how diets do work in the short-term, but in the long-term they can cause depression, food cravings, and weight-gain. She struck a chord with me when she mentioned how many people are afraid to eat normally because they fear gaining weight.

I have already started to try Wendy's suggested mindset. She talks about honoring your hunger without overeating, and exercising to the extent that you still enjoy it. I have friends that can seemingly eat whatever they like without worrying about it like I do. Then I notice that they don't seem to obsess over food, and they naturally take as much as their body needs - no more no less. This is what the book's author suggests as the way to reach your optimum body weight.

Of course, I already eat fairly healthy and exercise regularly. I think this book is best for dietaholics, people who are tired of restricting themselves, but are concerned about maintaining a healthy weight if they stop. I already want to send copies to some of my friends and am planning on bringing this book to my Weight Watchers meeting.

My fiance bought this book for me as a gift and I have been grateful ever since.I am on his account so the review will appear with his name, which is why I signed underneath.

This book changed my entire outlook on life, not just my weight. I was trapped in a vicious cycle of dieting that was causing me severe depression and a general lack of appreciation towards my entire existence. This book taught me to look at myself in the mirror and know that I am beautiful, and that there is so much more to life then food.

I think the best piece of advice is to really tell yourself that you can eat, anything you want whenever you want, then you just stop craving food and start having a healthy relationship with it.

I don't know what to say, now that food is slowly taking up the space it should be in my life (less space!), I have so much more energy and passion towards a lot of other things, so thanks wendy. one of my wishes in life now is; may every girl or guy who has struggled with their weight read this book and start to love themselves like they should!!

and wendy...thank you

-dalia

Until I read this book, I used to binge every time I had a stressful day. I think this book is the answer for persons who struggle with the many facets of what food can do to one's psycological and physcial well being. I too had read numerous book in order to fight the war against food, but now I feel I have won the war. Food does not control my life anymore, rather I control the food.

Good-luck