Customer Reviews

The Overfed Head: What If Everything You Know About Weight Loss Is Wrong?

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2 star:		(1)
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I just finished reading the Overfed Head for the second time and I liked it even better the second time. I initially read the book in the context of my struggle with weight, the second reading was to assess the book as a resource for a psychotherapy client. The book reads well and the content is sound. On a personal level I felt the author was telling me the very thing I could never understand about my naturally thin friends. I knew they ate what they wanted and they seemed satified. I could not figure out how they experenced that satisfaction. I am now having that satisfied feeling with each experience of eating. It does require practice but what a joy to practice enjoying food!

On a professional level I will utilize this book with clients. The reason why I feel it is appropiate to use is the information is sound and seems to be based on a blend of positive psychology and cognitive theray principles. I work from a psychodynamic frame however, I find this quite compatable with the work I am doing. The author promotes being curious about ourselves, mindfulness and avoids transfering the responsibility for our bodies to anyone other than ourselves. The hunger and satisfaction tool is excellent. The author also alerts the reader to the positive but sometimes frightning side benefit of having the emotional issues we have been "feeding" present themselves for more direct and helpfull attention.

I guess I should have said I am a Clinical Nurse Specialist in psychiatry with 30+ years of experience.

This is a must read if you or someone you care about is struggling with weight control.

Coming from a triathlon background I thought I would never have trouble with my weight. I was wrong.. Don't get me wrong.. I'm not obese. I just have come to a point in my life where that 10-15 puonds has become a part of me. All of the workouts and all of the watching closly what went into my Mouth, just allowed me to not gain any more.

Then I read Rob Stevens book. the Overfed Head. I was interested in what Rob had to say since I knew he was a fellow triathlete and someone that I have watched compete in some of my very same races. What a great discovery. All of a sudden I'm still training, not freaked out about what I consume and I am starting to trim off that extra layer. What a relief to discover I don't have to shove down any more carrots and salads, if that is not what I want. What a feeling of liberation to be able to eat what sounds good and still feel in control. It's like this book gave me the green light to live again. I mean eat again. I think my body had forgotten how to listen and how to feel. I had lost a very inate concept of knowing when I was hungry and knowing when I was not. Rob Stevens laid it all out for me, inspired me and helped me become an internal, thoughtful eating machine. This book gave me the tools to guage my hunger and to really feel out what my body was asking for. I feel like I have choices and control over what I want, rather than munching on what I think I should put in my mouth.

Thanks for the lessons. I feell like I am more intune and will finally be able to say farewell to those last 10, just by listening to what my body needed all along.

This book discusses how diets screw with your body and your mind. Starving and depriving lead to your body going into starvation mode and your metabolism going to hell so you can't lose wait. Constantly thinking about what you can and can't eat gives you a food obsession so all you think about is food. This book is a guiding hand to lead you out of the swamp of emotional eating, unconscious eating, and food obsession. When you stop and think about it, the same can be said for shopping. You may actually need a pair of shoes, you may need four pairs of shoes, but do you really need 15, 20, or more. You have a pair of jeans that fit, do you really need 5?
This book discusses how to fill a need and not to overfill a need (much like filling a gas tank but not putting so much gas into that it spills onto the pavement)
Once you get a handle on this issue the weight (and credit card debt) naturally goes down.
Just wait until you stomach growls, eat carefully, and stop when you are no longer hungery. When the TUMMY is happy, not when the mouth is! If your not hungry don't eat!

Is it hard for you to fit on a plane seat? Is lifting difficult? Is it time-consuming to shop for clothes? Do you miss your steak and potatoes because you're always on a diet? These are often the predominant struggles of overweight men. Many, although not all men, restrict their weight woes to the physical.

This book, written by Rob Stevens, is great for both men and women, but is written from a man's perspective, with an emphasis on results.

This is a straightforward explanation of how to eradicate the diet mentality from your mind and replace it with a sensible way to eat that leads to weight loss. A far cry from women's more probing titles, such as "Fat is a Feminist Issue," this book gets right down to the how-to's and nitty gritty of ditching the diet in favor of eating normal, delicious-only meals. The author calls it "intuitive eating."

Rob Stevens lost 140 pounds plus, and has kept it off for seven years. This author explains in simple English why diets make you fat, how to know when you're hungry, and even why the intuitive approach will solve some emotional problems without all the therapeutic fuss.

This is not a surface approach, however. With Steven's light touch, frustrated dieters will find what they're really looking for--a new way to eat. But the outcome can go deeper. Readers learn to question what they've been taught--a skill that can revolutionize lives that feel stuck.

All patients who have gastric bypass surgery need to learn this new way to eat. Doctors do their best to teach a "lifestyle change" to such patients, but it's not always clear what that means, and medical professionals are understandably limited in their time. If this book were required reading for those considering the surgery, it might offer hope for true change, regardless of whether they undergo the procedure.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants a simple guide to freedom from dieting. Physicians should be quick to recommend this book, especially to men, and those who love them. In addition, this book appears to be written at a slightly lower reading level than many of the non-dieting books available today, making it accessible to a broad audience. It is, nonetheless, an engaging read.

Stevens perhaps best sums up the goal of his book when he says, "You have achieved your personal best when the size of your body is no longer an obstacle to anything you want in life."

I have been recommending this book to the members of my Yahoo! message board for non-dieters.

Rob Stevens is on the right track with regards to permanent loss. The idea of listening to your body and eating what you want has surfaced on and off for the past 40 or 50 years (at least), but the American public does not seem to buy this approach. I think many people feel that they'd gain weight doing this. Personally, I've been using a version of this approach for the past 15 years and have maintained a normal weight with very little weight fluctuation. (I also breezed through a pregnancy at age 40, and I contribute this to my low, steady weight gain.) I have just a few additional tips:(1) Wile this approach is easy once you get it, it can be hard for some to actually "get it". (I know it was for me - I tried doing it with mixed success for about 7 years before the lightbulb went off. Once I got it, I have never binged since, and I knew when I "got it" that I would never binge again.) and (2) I don't think one has to be that precise about stopping eating at exactly the moment the hunger stops. When I tried doing that, I think it made it all seem very rigid, and I felt deprived. I believe that there's a point where the hunger stops but one is not quite satiated. It often takes just a few bites more to reach satiation, and it's just through practice that you start getting a feel for that point of satiation. (To me, it truly does feel like something switches off in my brain rather than something in my stomach.) and (3) I think it's also ok to eat when you're not hungry from time to time. (For example, if you eat when you're hungry 90% of the time, you will likely maintain a normal weight.) When you think you can't eat when you're not hungry, it again starts to feel too much like a restriction. For example, at a birthday party, I often eat cake when I'm not actually hungry. I then just wait till I'm hungry again to have something. (I may not get hungry at the usual dinner time, and would possibly skip dinner and have something small later in the evening.) I think that skipping the birthday cake because I'm not hungry would do more harm because I would likely feel deprived. (Even naturally thin people sometime eat when they're not hungry.) and (4) I think it's important to focus in on exactly how you want to eat your food and what kind of food you want to eat. I pay attention to seemingly silly things like the kind of coffee mug I want to drink out of to the color of the donut I want to eat. I try to not question why I want to eat something - I just trust my intuition.
In short, I recommend this book, but would add just a few caveats which I've listed above.

If you've been on a diet, I've probably tried it too. If you've done some cardio/yoga/pilates/weightlifting/hypnosis program to lose weight, I've probably tried that too. So I realize that if someone told you that you don't need to diet or exercise to lose weight, you'd probably freak out a little bit (just like I did). But please Give this method a chance - it actually works! I've lost 8 lbs in 3 weeks. My boyfriend has lost 10 lbs.

Seriously, stop dieting. Stop depriving yourself. Start losing weight. You'll feel so much better. It's not a gimmick. It's not a diet. It's real life. It's what your body was trying to do all those years ago when it used to spit out food when your mother tried to force down a little extra.

A revolutionary book. As an MD, I have been conducting extensive research in medical journals, online and in health related books to find information about controlling food intake, as a way of losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight. I am convinced that taking hunger into account and its disappearance following a meal are essential ingredients to a long term solution. But how to do that? Experiments on rats are not very helpful.
Getting feedback from a rat on the disappearance of hunger? Not easy.

One day I discovered Rob Stevens's book, The Overfed Head. In it, he describes the process of getting connected to hunger feelings, which trigger eating behaviors. He also describes what it feels like to have hunger disappear, which is our body's way of telling us it's time to stop eating.
Brilliant! Stevens offers a method of reconnecting to our natural abilities we has as babies to know how much to eat... when we simply ate when we were hungry and stopped eating when our hunger went away. This is also a time when we maintained a natural and healthy weight.

I went to Stevens' website at thintuition.com and saw that a CD-Rom and an e-course are also available. I am eager to check those out as well. Thanks,Rob!

I found the Overfed Head's approach to weight-loss (and weight-control) a wonderful alternative to other weight-loss programs. Rob Steven's story is an inspirational one that appeals to my straight-forward and logical approach to weight-loss: eat when you're hungry and stop when you're not! What a concept!

But the book goes beyond the traditional lecture and gives some great tips on how to go back to our natural condition of viewing food as fuel, while allowing the eater to enjoy the meal, and feel good about themself! Another lost art for chronic dieters.

One of the unexpected suprises of the book, was how easy it was to read and understand. You don't need a PhD to get the concepts, as Rob Steven's writing style is a pleasure.

If you're in need of a fresh approach to losing and controlling your weight and all the impacted aspects of your life and view of self, read the book, get in touch with your thintuition, and you will feel great!

Finally, a realistic approach to weight loss that makes sense! In his book, "The Overfed Head," Rob Stevens seems to actually describe many of my past behaviors and feelings about weight loss and explains why my attempts ended in failure. My efforts to lose weight using every fad diet that came along were always followed by gained weight once I stopped dieting. Stevens explains that this is typical to any dieter and introduces the concept of "Thintuition," which sounds logical and simple. His approach seems likely to stop the obsession with foods that accompany dieting, as one is trained to think differently about food. Thintuition teaches that you can eat what you want when you're hungry, and discredits the "good food-bad food" ideas that one develops with each new diet. "The Overfed Head" is written in a straightforward, interesting, and fun manner, with much data to back up Stevens' theories about weight loss. I highly recommend this book to any one who is ready to lose weight by learning to eat what their own hunger requires instead of someone else's fad diet. I've tried Thintuition and have been able to lose weight and keep it off and have been able to eat whatever foods I choose. I feel like I've finally been able to break my cycle of yo-yo dieting with Stevens' non-diet approach.

i can not begin to tell you how amazing this book is!!! i received my copy on friday (last week) and began practicing "thintuition" immediately.today is day#5 for me and i have already lost 7#!!!!!i KNOW that i will never ever need to diet again. i have gained and lost over 400# in my lifetime following faithfully all of the "popular diets". Rob Stevens is just a former fat person, who finally became fed up with gaining and losing and gaining back all of his weight. he lost 140# over 5 years ago and is maintaining it through what he calls: "thintuition". out of the kindness and generosity in his heart, he chose to help ALL of the people who are just like him. his book is very easy to read and understand. no technical "jargon", only what he found to work for himself. personally, he has probably saved my life and i am so very greatful. the price of the book is a small investment considering how much i have personally "donated" to our diet industry today. what have you got to lose??? good luck to you on your journey.....finally, there is real hope for us!!