Secrets From the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again Kindle Edition

This is a very well written and uniquely informative book in a field glutted with opinions and weak and conflicting advice. It is not a how-to book on losing weight, although it has a few solid behavioral suggestions for making modest healthy changes. This is primarily an interpretation of much of the available evidence regarding obesity and health by psychologist who runs an eating lab at the University of Minnesota and publishes a lot of scholarly peer reviewed work in the field.

Although she is a researcher, Dr. Mann takes pains to distinguish herself from obesity researchers with a public health focus who are motivated to warn people about the dangers of increasing body fat. Her interpretation of the data is often the opposite in some ways from theirs, she sees the growing incidence of body fat and she sees the growing incidence of adult onset diabetes, but she reports that the link between body fat and health problems is far weaker than is implied by the rhetoric of most obesity researchers and much weaker than the popular impression has become. In addition, our efforts to fight obesity have, she concludes, actually become counter-productive because of the manner in which we typically attempt to fight our own biology by restricting calories and exercising in ways that increase our stresses and increase our preoccupation with food, and that both of these things feed back into exacerbating the original problem.

The book starts off ripping into both the commercial diet industry and the focus of a lot of articles by doctors and obesity researchers by announcing that their "3 pillars" are all simply false:

1. That some diets work for losing weight
2. That some diets are healthy for losing weight
3. That obesity itself is deadly

Among the central and most compelling aspects of this book is where Mann observes that our ideal body image often tends to be outside of the range that we can reasonably sustain. And this becomes confused with health concerns and fed by commercial interests. We could transform our bodies potentially through diet and exercise, but at the cost of altering or entire lives in the service of that goal and experiencing extended self-denial and obsession with food.

And the clincher for her argument is that all this self-denial and obsession would be mostly serving our aesthetic ideal rather than actually improving health. She finds that according to best available evidence upon close inspection mortality is not significantly improved by losing weight, unless you are already extremely obese and still have a long life ahead of you. The population in that category is far smaller than the one targeted by both the diet and fitness industries and most obesity researchers.

Mann finds that diets consistently fail in two ways: (1) only a tiny percentage of dieters retain their weight loss, regardless of which diet it is, and (2) even when people lose enough weight to satisfy the goals of improving their risk profile, they rarely lose enough to satisfy their aesthetic preference. This means that according to the person themselves, their diet failed even when for health purposes it succeeds. Our aesthetic goals trump our health goals for the purpose of satisfaction with the diet.

If we should want to attempt small changes that help us regulate our own eating so we can maintain a sustainably lower body weight, Mann offers several well-tested behavioral suggestions along the lines of "nudges" that help us avoid being triggered to eat excessively.

I think her principles seem sound and her use of evidence is compelling. I would say that anyone who wants to lose a few pounds permanently would probably benefit from the sort of cognitive-behavioral suggestions Mann gives in her book.

I do have a criticism of her otherwise superb and unique exposition though.

She argues for a set point model of body weight regulation that maintains our weight within a fairly narrow range but she doesn't really address the obvious question of why people are statistically getting fatter if we are so consistent at maintaining our weight in such a narrow range. She puts most of her focus on obesity not being as deadly as it appears except at the extreme, and she explains why people can't simply diet away unwanted body fat, but she doesn't at all dive into the reasons for our growing bodies.

That's a big topic and it isn't her area of research so I can understand leaving it to others to try to explain, but for me it left a logical hole in her argument that begs to be filled and should have been addressed with at least some general thoughts. She should have touched on the moving of "settling points" that move somewhat rather than implying a single weight range exists for each person. Clearly that range shifts under different clusters of life conditions. That's not just important because we need to explain why we get fatter. It is also important because we need to explain the few outlier cases where people do successfully make the changes needed to lose very large amounts of weight and keep it off for years or decades. They are I think becoming different people in a sense, with different weight regulation settling points resulting from different activity patterns and eating habits and different environmental conditions. She doesn't really seem to allow for that at all. Her insistence that a "diet" doesn't allow for that may give a misleading impression that people _never_ successfully lose significant weight for the long term. That is clearly not true. Playing the odds is fine, and we need to be realistic about what is required, but knowing why the outliers succeed is important as well.

The reason she is right most of the time I think is that it is a lot more work than we expect to be able to do the experimentation and learning and self-observation needed to learn to avoid temptations and prepare our own food in a nutritious way and so on, and as she says, "diet" to most people means eating certain things, not engaging in a challenging ongoing learning process and strategically altering clusters of habits. If you expect to do that sort of thing, then I think it is entirely possible to shift from one "settling point" to another to lose a lot of weight over time and keep it off. She is right that if you do this kind of staged life adjustment to become very lean, you will have a much harder time maintaining it in general until it becomes a developmental change. She is right that this cannot possibly be done in most cases simply by acts of discipline. You have to become smart about it.

As a post-op bariatric patient who has poured many hours into researching weight loss strategies over the course of my life (and more recently pre-surgery), I found this book extremely refreshing. In part, because coming from the lens of a psychologist rather than an MD gave the recommendations and perspective a bit more well-roundedness than the sometimes singularly-focused books written by MDs will -- which is not to say the book is lacking in scientific rigor. That was a huge deal for me that when she said "studies show..." there was obviously reference to said studies, but she also elaborated on those studies and made distinctions between correlation/causation when applicable and also stressed the importance of studies which used proper vs improper methodologies. These things really satisfied my need for being scientifically rigorous in a sea of diet or weight loss books that are sorely lacking. Finally, the author uses humor and wit which make the read a fun one to boot. Highly recommend!

I've been fighting against diabetes for a couple of years. My lifelong pattern, since high school, has been diet, lose, eat everything, regain. That's familiar to a lot of people. Reading Secrets of the Eating Lab by Traci Mann has been helpful. It's a literature review and analysis and includes reporting on the results of her laboratory research at the University of Minnesota. She shoots down (with data) much of the conventional wisdom about the overweight and obesity situation in the U.S. (and other countries). Overweight and obesity are problems, but...obesity is not about to bring the U.S. down...people can be almost all but super morbidly obese and still enjoy good health...comfort food doesn't comfort...diets don't work...exercise doesn't take weight off. But: exercise does help make a person healthier; eating smart versus diet can help people take weight off rather than gaining it after a loss; the discrimination obese people are served up is widespread, unjust, harmful and painful. The book is well worth a read.

Finally someone pointing out the complete lack of causal proof in all these obesity studies! Being overweight will not kill you and may even help you recover from some illnesses. Stress is the culprit you should be worried about. Highly recommended for everyone but especially women sick of being yelled at for being fat. I especially loved that she said you don't have to 'love' your body, that's hard, you just need to be okay with it. So now I'm going to go exercise since that actually will impact my health!

This is one of the best books I've read about this subject. I really appreciated seeing the "science" behind why diets don't work and why exercise is important for our health but it doesn't necessarily impact our weight. I've been on a journey toward freedom from worrying about food and body image, so it was really great to see the proof in the scientific studies: I really needed that. I highly recommend this to anyone who is on a journey toward freedom from diets or who is feeling bad that they are this "skinny" person that the world worships. It's helped me to relax about a lot of things and has helped me think my "healthfully" when it comes to my body (accepting it and respecting it) and exercise (it's really great for overall health--not to be "skinny").