Customer Reviews

Waistland: The (R)Evolutionary Crisis Behind Our Weight and Fitness Crisis

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Waistland's main premise is that you can't just "trust your instincts" or "listen to your body" in the current food environment. Barrett goes on a hunt into prehistory to show how our bodies evolved in a world where salt, sugar, and fat were scarce and desirable. Now we live in a word where those substances are not only plentiful, but in which images of them are beamed at us constantly. Waistland describes how refined foods affect us similarly to addictive drugs.

Barrett says we need to learn to "listen to our intellect" before our brains evolve back to the minimum needed to locate the Twinkies in the grocery aisle. She advocates radical change for those seeking to eat healthier and lose weight. Simply ordering the smaller size of fries or eating desert twice a week is actually harder physically in terms triggering hunger signals than eliminating them entirely: more painful in the first few days but ultimately easier to maintain because insulin, glucose, and leptin levels normalize.

Barrett also trashes the "too busy to time to eat healthy" argument. She has a half joking, half serious "recipe"section that points out you can dump tuna over baby spinach or walk out of a 7-11 with nuts and fruit faster than you can get through the line at a burger chain. For those with "no time to exercise," she reminds us the average American watches more than 3 hours of TV a day.

She also has suggestions for society to change the whole food environment. She points out that short of banning foods--which she does advocate for transfats--we can start by reversing crazy policies like subsidizing the growing of corn and sugar and instead setting financial incentives to favor healthy vegetables.

Waistland is full of research culled form academic sources you haven't seen in popular books before. But it's also an extremely entertaining read, with witty observations and delightful New Yorker cartoons. Whether you're just trying to understand our society's health problems or wanting to get yourself back on track with sane eating and exercise, this is the smartest, most readable book out there on the topic.

I am already on board with the various ideas presented in the book regarding health, culture and lifestyle, and found the book amazing. It was like having a full semester of information with a fascinating university professor in your hands. I picked up the book 2 weeks ago, not having chosen it as a diet book, but the very next day I made big changes in my eating habits, and have already lost 4 pounds. As of 2 weeks ago I was 25 pounds overweight, so I'm hoping the trend continues, and fully expecting it to. I had been trying to lose weight with no success for over 2 years (I already work out about 5 times a week), and this book has really changed my life. My energy level is already so much higher after just 2 weeks. Again, I just picked this book up as an interesting read, and had no idea it would change my life, and quality of life, like this. THANK YOU to the author of this book.

Even if you have no weight to lose, I recommend the book as an excellent read. There are other topics covered which greatly improve quality of life as well.

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edited to add: It has now been almost 9 weeks since I picked up this book, and I am down FOURTEEN pounds. Just from this book, nothing else. Amazing! This book is very dear to me. Two of my friends are now reading it after my nonstop talk about it.

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edited one year later: I ended up losing a total of 35 pounds (and keeping it off!) as a result of reading this book. WOO HOO!!!

This book describes why more radical approaches to weight loss may be easier to follow than so-called moderate measures. The human body evolved to survive in the environment of our hunter-gatherer past. Our instincts are for finding once scarce fats, sugar and salt. For our ancestors, the physical exertion associated with foraging for food also kept weights down. Today, most of us lead sedentary lives. Fast foods and supermarket convenience stores appeal to our instincts even more than the natural foods for they they evolved. Barrett offers psychological perspectives for changing how we view food and weight loss and ways of incorporating exercise into our daily routines. She even suggests methods for rewiring the reward circuitry of the brain to reinforce healthy eating habits. Interesting, good advice!

Americans have a lower rate of success in dieting than they do with drug rehabilitation, which tells us that we are doing something wrong. So whenever a new perspective on the American diet comes out, I am quick to jump on it.

This book isn't so much of a diet guide as it is a commentary on the way the human body is meant to eat and how we can get there. What makes this book different is that it challenges many of the strongly held beliefs that we have in place about dieting today, such as: our hunter-gatherer ancestors were always on the brink of starvation and struggling with their health (they weren't), that dieting isn't about willpower (it is), that the modern body ideal is too skinny (it hasn't changed much over the years and Marilyn Monroe was tiny, when she did gain weight towards the end of her life, she was slammed by the press for being fat) or even that we can lose weight without sacrifice.

This book tells us about how our bodies were made to eat through years of evolution, mainly vegetables, fruits and protein with only a little grain, with no refined anything, and it tell us how our modern world fights us in achieving that ideal. It also discusses the consequences of our modern diet and rounds it all out by telling us how we might return to a healthy diet. The author only makes a few suggestions on how to diet on a personal level, but rounds it all out with broader suggestions on how we can change the American food system in general to bring us back to the way that we should be eating.

To be sure, this book makes some controversial statements (we should lay off anything refined altogether because it is easier than practicing moderation, suggesting hypnotherapy and that we should treat refined foods like drugs) but it also makes some great suggestions and superb points. Whether you agree with everything this author has to say or not, I would suggest that anyone concerned about their health at least give this book a read.

I'm a fairly healthy eater and ordered this book when I read an interview with the author in US News and World Reports that I liked. I was expecting to learn mostly about why most other people eat aren't paying attention to what they eat, but I found myself getting some tips for my own health also. The book is based on solid research and it's funny, enlightening and sad all at the same time. Enlightening because it's very specific about what strategies work best to get healthy; sad because of documenting the trends that many people aren't going to change for a long time. After reading this book, I'm motivated to eat even healthier and to get back to more exercise than I've done in a while; the chapter on exercise has some great advice on what to do based on whether you've never exercised or are a lapsed jock and how to make your workday more active if you thought you were stuck in a desk-job profession. A great read!

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We are in the midst of a "globesity" epidemic. Assuming that current trends persist, the next generation of humans may well be the first one in which parents outlive their children.

We are programmed to be more afraid of spiders than of cigarettes and to follow leaders who promise to protect us from terrorists but never mention the fat in our food.

If you want to learn why we are insufficiently fearful about the biggest threats to our lives and to be entertained while you are enlightened, then you should read this book.

I first read this book in manuscript and thought it wonderful and fascinating. If the reading population has good sense, this will be a best seller.

Dr. Morton Schatzman, MD

This was actually an excellent read. It was very entertaining and informative. It has given me the motivation I needed to "Stop the Madness" and only eat real food....

I never would have thought that the instincts we've developed during evolution would also drive us to high levels of obesity. Deirdre Barrett shocked me with a critical thought or statistic on almost every page. From the first chapter to the last, this booked changed my perspective on the REAL issues with America's health and showed me steps we can take to improve our ever expanding problem. Being from generation "Y" that not only expects great content but also to be entertained, this book has become one of my favorites. Dr. Barret's sense of humor and satire kept me reading long after my ADHD usually allows me too. This book made me realize that even our highly evolved human brains are effected by super normal stimuli everyday. My hope is that our brains are big enough to learn to control our instincts in a world of junk food and immobility, before it effects our health and happiness.

Her findings and advice are revolutionary and enlightening. Her notion of rejecting supernormal stimuli and recalibrating our tastebuds is sorely needed.

Whether you are just trying to understand why our society is in such bad shape physically or looking for the best advice scientific research generates on weight loss or excercise, this book is smart, witty and readable. It introduces the concept of "supernormal stimuli" which is the focus of Barrett's 2010 book analyzing the cause of a broader range of our society's problems, but here the focus stays on health and how to improve it. Highly recommended!