Customer Reviews

How to Survive Your Diet and Conquer Your Food Issues Forever

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I've lost over 100 pounds on the South Beach diet, so what am I doing here talking about a book that isn't about diets? After two years I just couldn't diet anymore. And I was very frightened that I was going to gain all that weight right back, and more to boot, because that is what 95% of the successful dieters out there do.

I like this book because it isn't a new diet plan. It isn't about giving up everything you learned while you successfully dieted. It is about keeping all of the good stuff you learned, and moving on to new good stuff, so you can keep off the weight you've already lost, and maybe even get the weight loss moving again, if you still need to lose, or accepting you've reached your correct weight if you don't need to lose anymore. And it looks like that is happening to me too after almost a year of very slow weight loss I've begun to lose again.

This book is about learning to listen to your body and finding out just how much you really need to eat to be happy and satisfied. And just how little you really want can be a shocking experience when you've always been afraid of being hungry on a diet.

This book is about NOT beating yourself up.

But what if you haven't already been successful on a diet. This book is for you too. It is very likely that with this book you don't ever need to go on a formal diet. You probably just need to learn these lessons we all were born knowing, and forgot.

Linda Moran's book is a must read for anyone who is fed up with dieting as a way of controlling their weight. Linda's viewpoint is that instead of focusing on what you eat or how much you exercise, your focus should be on listening to you what your body is telling you it needs to sustain itself, to guide your eating.

It has been my contention for a long time that behavior therapists, like Linda are the best resources to go to for anyone who struggles with their weight, not to a diet or exercise guru. Because overeating, the source of weight gain, is a learned behavior. We all started out with our innate connection to hunger (eating barometer) in tact, until we learned to disconnect from it, override it and gain weight. Dieting keeps us disconnected from our bodies...because we keep listening to someone else's advice about what, when and how much to eat, NOT to what our own stomachs are telling us we really need at any given moment.

Our bodies only really want enough food to satisfy our physical need for more fuel, and no more. When our thoughts or emotions dictate our eating, rather than responding to what our stomachs are telling us we actually need to sustain ourselves, we overeat and gain weight. And if you really tune in and listen to your stomach, instead of your head or emotions, you'll discover it doesn't take a lot of food to make your hunger disappear.

We learned to adopt overeating behaviors, like emotional eating. So we can learn new behaviors around food and eating, like eating to satisfy physical hungers, not emotional ones, which will have us be thin.

I highly recommend you read Linda's book. It will give you the possibility of weight loss without dieting. And you'll discover new freedoms around food and eating that you never before thought possible.

I've suffered from eating disorders for three years, I'm tired of unsuccessful dieting and eating foods that taste chemical: this book has given me a choice.
Linda's sensible approach gently encourages the reader to take responsibility for their eating habits, to learn to recognise the body's signals and to take control of their food mentality.
Anyone who has ever experienced a helpless or out-of-control feeling about their diet or their weight needs to read this book, because it is such a relief to know that there is another way.

For dieters about to embark on their next "miracle" diet, I recommend that they first read and digest this eloquent and potentially life-changing book.

In this stunning book, author Linda Moran reveals the naked truth about dieting: that, in the long run, restrictive eating doesn't work for most dieters. That when dieters deny themselves delicious and full-fat foods, they are fighting an innate and ingrained biological drive designed to help the human race survive--a battle dieters are not likely to win.

So if a potential dieter wants to lose a few pounds, forget about it, accept one's fatness, and move on, right?

Maybe not.

Moran, owner of the Yahoo! Dietsurvivors: Non-dieting for Intellectuals Health Group, offers an alternative to dieting: intuitive eating.

In the chapter "How Children Eat," Moran asks the reader to observe children at the table: intuitively, they eat when they're hungry and stop when they're satisfied. They'll leave a cookie on their plates without feeling guilty about starving children in some third world country. Moran says that former dieters can train themselves to eat like children, to enjoy what they really want of that cookie and throw the rest away, without feeling deprivation or guilt.

In a dispassionate tone, the author analyzes some of the currently popular diets and discusses the pros and cons of each program. She never tells the reader to forego all diets. Indeed, in her introduction, Moran says, "I'm not saying, `Don't diet.' Rather a diet is a lion to be tamed by YOU." Too often, the diet becomes the Truth, an all-or-nothing proposition resulting in black and white thinking.

Moran concedes that diets do work for a few dieters, but emphasizes that "a diet works best if the dieter doesn't take it too seriously." In other words, a diet should not be worshiped as the "god" of the moment, but, rather, be used as a tool for helping the dieter make effective and sustainable life change.

The author questions conventional dieting wisdom and proposes some seemingly paradoxical ideas for consideration:

--Weight-loss diets can actually promote greed
--All foods should be "legalized"
--One should give into food cravings.
--One does not need to exercise to lose weight
--Stress can be positive
--Small portions of delicious food will satisfy
--Naturally thin people are not immune to serious food issues

Moran does NOT

--Include recipes
--Offer any calorie-counting programs
--Tell readers to eat specific foods
--Scold

Moran doesn't claim that the work of intuitive eating will be easy, recognizing that it takes time to unlearn old diet rules and incorporate new thinking. Furthermore, she offers her own story only to establish her credibility and to show her own path to eating enlightenment, not to impose new rules on the reader.

Most importantly, the author respects the intellect of the reader. In her conclusion, Moran says,

"This book is not about rules, but about your thinking. My suggestions may or may not work for you. It's more important that you take ownership of your eating, learn to apply reasonableness as a standard instead of calorie counts or scale numbers, and start to use your own judgment about the advice you hear. Especially, you might find suspect anything that sounds too black and white."

The author does not claim to have all the answers, which, in my opinion, strengthens her credibility and establishes her as a true pioneer in the weight management industry.

Doctors and psychologists might do well to give their patients a copy of Moran's book.

Most books under the "self-help" category are misnomers because they are not about the self; they are pontifications by an alleged expert in the field of [fill in your personal struggle], attempting to tell readers how wrong-headed they've become and set them on the road to recovery. Linda Moran's book is a revolutionary reminder that we already have all the "recovery" we need. Conquering food issues forever is a matter of coming to terms with the fact that most humans don't need to be restricted by "a diet." By truly getting in touch with ourselves--all of our physical, emotional and intellectual needs--we can instinctively learn to feed ourselves in thoroughly nourishing and nutritional ways. With a non-diet approach to life we can be satisfied--even happy--with our bodies. In a personable and lucid style of writing, this book gives readers pragmatic insight into psychosocial responses to food, the way culture conditions our eating practices, scientific information on how the body and mind respond to diets, and perhaps most comforting of all, empathic, personal testimonies from the author herself. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever let food get in the way of living life to complete satiety.

Are you caught in a cycle of dieting and all out bingeing? Do you use the scale to measure your self worth? Have you bought every diet book ever written and find you are gradually gaining weight in spite of your constant dieting?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, this book was written for you. In her book, "How to Survive Your Diet" Linda Moran offers suggestions how to solve these problems by using your rational mind.

The ABCDEF steps of cognitive therapy outlined in the book helped me think through my problems with emotional, compulsive and yes, greed eating. I am learning through practicing the principles in the book to wait for natural hunger signals before eating.

A bonus for me was the word index in the back of the book. You can use this as a handy reference to look up specific ideas you would like to review. I will give this book space in my library as a valuable tool to "normal" eating.

The idea is really so simple, you'll wonder why YOU hadn't thought of it. You will begin to explore the JOY of eating small portions. The "no diet" approach actually allows for you to eat those foods you really love. You will begin to take ownership of your eating habits and recognize irrational beliefs about food issues. Instead of measuring, weighing, counting calories and trying to find ways to eat more, Linda Moran teaches you to measure your hunger and satiety and eat with reason. Learning this balance is the key to a life long relationship with our body and what we put in it.

I'm giving this book the highest rating possible because it helped me see through my false beliefs about dieting, food and my body image. It will be the last "diet" book you'll ever need to buy! I know it can help anyone who wants to get off the diet yo-yo go round and become a naturally slender, healthy person again.

Linda Moran's approach to resolving weight problems is based on the same premise which chronic dieters must accept in order to maintain weight loss: How we think about food, eating and our bodies influence the eating habits which determine whether we reach and/or maintain a healthy weight. At the heart of her approach are 5 words: RESIST GREED AND EMBRACE STRESS. Those words span the multitude of rationalizations for overeating and even binge eating. However, Linda's use of those words is neither moralistic nor `new age'. She cuts through the psychobabble of mental health weight loss theory to explicitly describe specific ways to use those 5 words by examining and changing our self-talk.

As someone who struggled with bingeing and purging for 35 years before I learned to listen to and challenge my rationalizations for those `disordered eating habits', I LOVE Linda's comparison of eating disorders to anxiety disorders. Linda explains that people who recover from anxiety disorders do so by changing what they tell themselves. I recovered from my `bulimic' habits exactly the same way without therapy. However, like others who recover from `eating disorder' habits, I continued to struggle with what Linda calls "garden variety overeating". I could not analyze or explain away that simple overeating. Nevertheless, Linda's words "once you clear up the underlying causes of bingeing ... you meet up with greed" pierced my shell of denial and ended my overeating once and for all. Accordingly, I would recommend this book to anyone who ever struggled with `eating disorder' habits.

I only disagree with her chapter of recommendations for `healthy eating'. Fortunately Linda precedes that chapter with a caveat to "use good judgment about everything you hear" and mentions how doctors changed their edict against eggs as "too high in cholesterol". In her review of common popular diets she also suggests that we focus on WHEN and HOW MUCH, rather than WHAT, we eat. As a member of the 1% of Americans who have Celiac Disease and 3 food intolerances (gluten, dairy and soy), I know everyone must decide what's `healthy' for their own body. Nevertheless, I would also recommend this book to anyone on a medically restricting eating program who struggles with weight problems.

Linda Moran offers a practical, cognitive approach to nondieting. She targets beliefs, as opposed to feelings, as the basis of lasting behavioral change. Hers is a balanced, commonsense approach to eating "normally;" that is, without restricting (dieting) or overeating. The book can stand on its own as a guide to the practice of nondieting, or can be used in conjunction with other nondieting books. For those who may have read Overcoming Overeating, this book can act as a guide for moving into Stage Two of that program. The strength of the book lies in its concrete guidelines; it avoids the vagueness that I find so often plagues self-help books.

Applause to Linda Moran for her book. Too many authors of self-help books come off with an I've-been-there-let-me-tell-you-what-you-should-do attitude. You won't find this in Moran's pages. What you WILL find is that the author has respect for her readers. She's struggled with many of the same food issues that her readers have and she understands how such issues can box people in. In "How To Survive Your Diet", Moran opens herself up to share what worked for her yet also gently stresses throughout each chapter that the reader needs to find out for him/herself what best works for him/her. With candor and good humor, Moran reminds us of a fact that too many "eating strugglers" have forgotten- food is meant to be enjoyed and savored. She shows how we can replace our irrational thoughts with saner, healthier ones so we can rediscover the pleasure of eating and find a weight that is good for each of us.

i read the book in one day and think it is amazing how many books you can read on the same issue and still always find something you haven't read before. Amazing.
I liked Linda's book, it is very easy to read and Linda is very down to earth about the whole issue.