Customer Reviews

Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul: Essentials of Eating for Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Well-Being

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I read it one rainy day and it really got me thinking. The first part reviews food based spiritual practices in various cultures, and the second explores ways that we can use the food we eat to enrich our own spirits and our lives. Fascinating ideas. It seems so many of us have lost our connection with food and don't really consider it. This book helped me renew my understanding of what it means to be human, so integral is food to all of our lives.

Over the years, I've read a lot about the influence that thoughts and feelings have on health and well-being. FEEDING THE BODY, NOURISHING THE SOUL is especially unique in that it explores new nutrition territory: the link between thoughts, feelings, and food. Because the book isn't a quick fix, not only did I find myself slowing down in order to "get" what the author was writing about, over time, I also realized that I was seeing and appreciating food in a new way. For me, this book has been an extraordinary journey.

From FEEDING THE BODY, NOURISHING THE SOUL emerges a description of nutrition as a spiritual art. I found it to be a thought-provoking challenge of our current notions about health and nutrition. This is because it explores the crossroads of spirituality and food...a path to true nourishment. Drawing on sources as seemingly diverse as yogic nutrition, food and mood, Christian communion, and ancient Jewish and Native American dietary practices, as well as on her own extensive observation and research, the author restores our rightful relationship to food. This book has forever changed the way I eat and think about food.

This is an extraordinary book that changed the way I see food and its role in my life. I'm fascinated about the subject of food, nutrition, and diets, but I've never read anything like this book before. More and more, after reading it, I've been able to let go of a diet mentality, and instead, actually begin to enjoy food.

Feeding the Body... is filled with incredible insights about food that most of us no longer acknowledge or are aware of. A word of warning: This book isn't a "quick fix," nor is it an "easy read." Being able to benefit from its abundant wisdom asks that you take the time to read it carefully while considering its insights--in the same way you might mull over poetry. For me, this has been an exception read, and a wonderful food journey I will always remember.

Feeding the body, nurishing the soul leads us to experience the same soul in all. Kesten brilliantly looks at how we all have the same basic need for feeding and maintaining the body, yet express it so differently. By following the different rituals page by page, she leads us to communion with our own soul and then unties us, though our differences. I use this book to envision blessing my food and seeing it though the eyes of other cultures and it has been eye opening. Thank you for writing about this most important topic.

Deborah Kesten has restored my faith in books about nutrition. Normally, I can't read anything about "diet." All that info about carbs, proteins and fats being good one day, bad the next, make my head explode. Deborah Kesten's approach is like a good friend, who sees you're confused, sits you down, and gently guides you back to clarity--and she does it with grace and a committment to feeding the spirit as well. She makes eating not only safe again but a true delight.

I have no idea why this woman chooses to use Judaism as her first example if she isn't interested in what Judaism really has to say about food. There is a lot of wrong information in that section about the order, origins, and attitudes behind Jewish dietary law. She has tried to turn Kashrut into an ethical argument for vegetarianism which it is not. This is because all of her resources are books which focus on Jewish attitudes toward vegetarianism and not on traditions of Jewish eating. In a religion which has so many specifications for how to eat meat, which animals to eat, and the intricacies of ritual slaughter ... how can she say that kashrut and vegetarianism are even related? The few pieces of Jewish traditions in eating that she featured barely grazed the surface of the importance of food in Judaism. I don't know whether to trust anything she says about other religions when she has written so much wrong information about my own.

A friend recommended this book, so I bought it because we were both fed up with diets that don't work. After reading the first intro chapter, I knew this book was different. It's not a quick-fix diet book. The practical tips at the end of each chapter have given me the guidelines I've been searching for to eat "normally" and to stop obsessing about food. Because of this book, I now know that a balanced relationship to food calls for reflection and taking the time to turn inward--not following someone else's diet and rules.

I just finished reading this book. The author split the book into two parts. The first part of this book there were about 15 chapters, each dedicated to one religion or another and how each of those religions were spiritually connected to food. It was ok the first couple of chapters but by the time I finished chapter 3, I was ready to go to sleep. It had to be the most dreadfully boring book that I have EVER read. The only chapter that seemed to keep me interested from the first part of the book was the one on native americans. The second part of the book was more interesting. She spoke more of the psychology of why we have eating disorders, but I would not recommend anyone buying this book for those few chapters. This book was a complete waste of money. In a few words, it sucked.

This book is extraordinary in that it is a re-visioning of nutrition and food; I've never read anything like it before. More and more, as I read each chapter, I came away with an entirely new perspective about what food is. Now, I no longer see food as merely fuel that keeps us going; rather, it is a gift that can nourish us on many levels--if we're willing to take the time to absorb the wisdom in this book.

Since reading Feeding the Body..., not only do I appreciate food a lot more, I'm actually enjoying it in a more meaningful way. For those of you who are interested in relating to food in a new way, this book is a gem. Specifically, it will show you how to move beyond a diet mentality, and return to the life-giving pleasures of food that most of us no longer acknowledge. Another consideration: This book is packed with incredible new insights about food and nutrition, but it isn't a "quick fix," nor is it an "easy read." Getting the benefits of its wisdom calls for reading it carefully, and taking the time to consider what it has to say. If you do, it may change your view of food forever.