I have been looking for a book on dieting that might motivate me to eat better. Looking for suggestions!
Extreme ownership by jocko willink and fat loss forever by Layne Norton. Jocko’s book isn’t a nutrition book but I applied the principles discussed and applied them to my nutrition. Norton’s book just simply made nutrition black and white for me, and allowed me to go from being anorexic, to seeing food as calories and not good or bad.
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. It is the guide by which I try to plan my diet. It’s where the famous “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” quote comes from. basically, it encourages you to give up the idea of calories, micronutrient tracking, fad diets, whatever for the sake of traditional eating patterns, listening to your body, and eating real food instead of processed food-like products. I’ve largely been doing this (best I can on a time budget with limited cooking resources as a college student with no kitchen) since I read the book and have never felt better or happier. I still rely on some processed foods (bread, Smucker’s Brand Natural Peanut Butter, store-bought hummus, frozen vegetables, canned fish) but there is no denying that this book has helped me eat far better than I ever have before. It made me much more confident and happy with my relationship with food, and I highly recommend it; I feel it can do the same for many others!
I’m reading a great textbook for a Nutrition class called Understanding Nutrition. My take away from the class is: the amount of Information out there pretty startling when you compare it to what people subscribe to with fad diets. There are registered and licensed dietitians out there who know more than most doctors about the health benefits of having a healthy diet and what an actual balanced diet will do for people.
Biggest wow fact I have learned so far revolves around cardiac disease in the United States. If someone dies in the United States, there is a 1/4 chance that they died from a cardiac event, which is the leading cause of death in the United States. The second leading cause of death is cancer. THE TOP TWO KILLERS in the United States have a direct correlation to diet. Per the CDC, roughly 650,000 people die a year from cardiac disease. Every year! To put it into perspective, I think around 730,000 people died from Covid so far this past year? But cardiac disease hasn’t had a breakout or a delta variant to explain the death count, that is just an ongoing annual death rate, and we hear very little about it in schools, news, or social media. Lots of death could be prevented with prioritizing a healthy diet and exercise.
Meanwhile my fat ass is on Reddit for at least an hour a day, looking at memes and letting my heart rot inside my chest.
I’m working on it guys :D
My TLDR is take a nutrition class. They are legit and backed with scientific process and research.
The Wahls Protocol by Dr. Terry Wahls. She came down with MS, did all the latest treatments and meds and only got worse. Finally she went back to the basics to look at what nutrients cells actually need, and she came up with a paleo type diet with lots of vegetables. After changing her diet, her health improved and she ditched her wheelchair. Now she is doing large scale trial groups and has found her anti inflammatory diet works for most chronic conditions, not just MS. She was even on Tedx and you can look up the Tedx talk on YouTube.
Plant Paradox by Dr Stephen Gundry. I had to read it twice, and it still was hard to believe. When I started following the diet -with a little faith - I couldn’t believe how much weight I lost and how good I felt.
‘underground wellness’ was a podcast series that had some really amazing nutrition and health information, especially in relation to hormone imbalances and diet.
The main guy would have a wide variety of health and nutrition doctors, authors and review studies, books, their own experiences and findings etc. Made some pretty amazing connections. Good range between ‘traditional’ and more alternative perspectives. Really helped me understand that ‘food is fuel’. Picked up some good book recommendations there too.
They aren’t making new episodes anymore, but the originals are still up and available as far as I know. Not a book, but def worth checking out!
“Intuitive Eating” by Evelyn Tribole. If you’re not familiar with intuitive eating, it can give you many insights about the psychological side of eating. It changed my outlook on dieting and eating in general, a very helpful book.
I really liked the “4 hour body” by Tim Ferris. Lots of good and bad in that book, but basically stop eating: bread, dairy, and sugar and you’ll see results. Very much enjoyed the workout routines and different exercises in it.
Mucusless diet healing system by prof. Arnold Ehret annotated by prof. Spira. There is so much to learn about nutrition and this just allowed me to have an understanding of how my own body reacts to certain foods.
Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar–Your Brain’s Silent Killers
Book by David Perlmutter and Kristin Loberg
Cutting gluten and carbs helped me get rid of inflammations and knee pains.
Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
by Geneen Roth
So many nuggets of insights! This book really gave me pause into how and why I eat the way I did when I first read it. It certainly was life changing for me back then.
If you’re going to eat at the refrigerator, pull up a chair.
I had issues with binge eating then going on restricting diets then binge eating more and this book really really helped me break that loop.
Eat well or die slowly. I’m a medical student who’s knowledge on diet was turned upside down because of this book recommended by my GI attending(certified in obesity medicine). It discusses the controversy of cholesterol/fat in diets and low carb with incredible research citations. It’s super easy to read though with medical jargon put in layman’s terms. Highly highly recommend.
Lean Habits- Georgie Fear. The title sounds like a diet book but it’s not. It’s a basic guideline of how to eat and how to know if its too much or too little. Kind of like plate method but to me its more logical and healthier but also without restricting. Love this book think should be requirement for everyone to read. The author messed up with the title makes it seem like a fad diet
I am not a nutritionist at all, but I recently had gallbladder problems and it has forced me to:
-Stop drinking alcohol
-Greatly reduce my intake of salt/fat/sugar/acidic foods
-Drink a lot more water
-Exercise more
Sort of forced me into a healthy lifestyle, talk to your coworkers/relatives see if you know anyone who has galbladder problems.
I think the best thing you can do is buy whole foods (frozen veggies/meat that have nothing else added to them) and doing the cooking yourself.
I can’t buy a premade frozen meal because they add so much salt/fat/sugar that it inflames my malfunctioning galbladder (and the surrounding organs).
Fast food is out of the question. (except sushi sashimi, I have no problems eating raw fish)
All I really eat is fish/chicken, whole veggies/fruit, and some brown rice. Of course I season all of these things with vegetable spices, just no salt/butter.
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I’m joking here but if you were desperate you could just contact hepatitis and be forced into the same diet.
“Feeding your lies” by Vani Hari. It’s not necessarily a dieting book, but one about our food industry as a whole and the lack of regulations put in place to protect our interests. It was very eye opening.
Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease. Though not strictly about diet, this book introduced me to the research conducted by Dr. Ornish, and later duplicated by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, that demonstrated that a low-fat, whole-food, plant-based diet can allow the human body to reverse heart disease, the number one killer of men and women in the United States. This book, plus others like Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, and The Starch Solution by Dr. John McDougall, plus the documentary file Forks Over Knives convinced me to convert to a low-fat, whole-food, plant-based diet.
The Atkins Diet Revolution.
I was never heavy, but after grad school I put on about 30 pounds over a few years (I am 6’2” but it was still a lot for me personally). I started snoring really loudly driving my wife crazy, and so on.
After seeing myself in some pictures from Disney I bought this book, used on Amazon. I dropped the first 20 pounds in about 40 days, and the rest in another month.
I have more or less been on it since then, but not religiously and I have kept the weight off for 20 years.
Nat Geo The Blue Zone . It tells about five different zones around the world where people live to be over 100. The magazine goes over the food they eat in each zone, they’re meditative states and lifestyle. No fad diet’s. No ridiculous eating methods. Just a good solid Way of life.
Eat to Live by Joel Furhman. It’s been years since I read it but what I remember most was changing my mindset on food.Using food as fuel and giving my body what it needs to function.It really resonated with me that I needed to change my entire thinking about food and how it correlates with my body and how I can perform better, feel better and function better when I’m eating for fuel and not for just how things taste.