Books to help you reset your relationship with food

Nutritionist and bestselling author of Just Eat It Laura Thomas PhD is back with How to Just Eat It. She uses the principles of intuitive eating, from mindful eating practices and understanding hunger and what it feels like to be full, to focusing on changing our mindset, in order to develop a judgement-free approach to food. Laura also helps us to understand and spot diet culture in the media and society. Her wonderful practice called ‘Diet Culture Bullsh*t Bingo’ involves spotting phrases such as ‘burning off food’, ‘cleanse’ and ‘80/20 rule’ to help understand and learn to identify diet culture (and how it affects us) in everyday life, social media, TV and even our own language.

‘A story of a young person who learned to dislike themselves and grew into an adult who had become accustomed to punishing their body.’ Sound familiar? Behavioural Change Specialist Shahroo Izadi knows this story only too well, having been through her own journey of weight loss by changing habits and dealing with food addiction, rather than punishing herself through dieting. In her second book The Last Diet (which follows her brilliant debut The Kindness Method), Shahroo promises no more diets: ‘I’m going to show you how to enjoyably manage your weight for the rest of your life, and I’ll do it without telling you what to eat.’ Instead, her focus is self-worth. Bringing together addiction treatment and tools to help build low self-esteem and banish negative self-talk, Shahroo provides tools to help you make choices based on self-love, rather than self-hate. ‘Starting to be kinder to yourself immediately (regardless of your weight) will make weight-loss goals easier to achieve.’ 

Renowned nutrition expert, physician and founder of the NutritionFacts website Dr Michael Greger delivers the ground-breaking science of long-term weight loss in easy to understand language. How Not to Diet is a fascinating read, jam-packed with interesting science to help you understand how to approach food and your body using scientific fact, and how to debunk many of the diet culture myths we’re regularly fed. For example, Greger explains: ‘the ‘fat gene’ you may have heard about (called FTO, short for ‘FaT mass and Obesity associated’) is the gene most strongly linked to obesity, but it explains less than 1 per cent of the difference between people (a mere 0.34 per cent).  FTO codes for a brain protein that appears to affect your appetite . . .  to result in a difference in intake of a few hundred extra calories a year, while what it took to lead to the obesity epidemic is more like a few hundred calories a day. Obesity does tend to run in families, but so do lousy diets.’ The conclusion? Diet trumps genes! It also ventures into fascinating theory around the modern impact of easily available food, alongside our evolution in which we were hardwired in a time of scarcity to consume every available calorie. Plus, for ultimate support, Greger’s How Not to Diet Cookbook supplements his scientific-based approach with 100 specially designed recipes for healthy weight loss.