Reddit Reddit reviews The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite

We found 15 Reddit comments about The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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15 Reddit comments about The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite:

u/crispypretzel · 18 pointsr/weightroom

OK - a lot to unpack here

>Personally I found it motivating rather than chastising

Do people really need more "motivation" to lose weight? I think that most fat people really do hate their bodies and feel motivated to become lean, but that isn't making anyone any thinner.

>I struggle to lose weight because overeating is my "natural state". Food is enjoyable to me. There's nothing really more to my current weight other than "I overeat by a lot".

IMO there is nothing "natural" about the food that we consume or the way we consume it. If you are overeating, I think it's worthwhile to examine your habits. Are you eating while distracted - at your desk, in the car, while watching TV, standing in front of the fridge, walking around the house? It's amazing how much less I eat if I commit to eating sitting down and completely free of distractions. Are you overconsuming hyperpalatable foods and going out to eat a lot? Do you fail to meal prep or carry healthy snacks, then become ravenous and overeat shitty food?

>I need to take ownership of the fact that I'm fat because I'm ill disciplined in that regard.

I agree with this but I think it's so much more constructive to take ownership of the process rather than your progress. Instead of setting a body-oriented "be lean and sexy" goal, you can set process goals: I will track my macros, I will bring lunch to work every day, I will not exceed 1 beer per week, I will not go out to eat more than X times, I will eat every meal sitting down and free of distractions, etc. The score takes care of itself. The "put down the fork fatty" so-called "motivational" bullshit fails to address any of this. Per Jamie:

>The simplest solution here is a tangible, Van Damme-style hard target of a goal.  By this, I do not mean some sort of silly-ass intra-office weightloss competition- you need something REAL.  Something in which you'll look like an ass if you fail.  You need the fear of failure and a desire for success simultaneously pushing you forward, to ever greater heights.

This isn't helpful. Ultimately the process is what will determine whether or not you lose weight anyway, the solution isn't to just create a shitload of anxiety around your body composition with an arbitrary timeline. Address your bad habits, celebrate the small victories of adherence, and don't get wrapped up in the cycle of self-loathing.

>Do you think this is aimed at people who fall under that umbrella or to people who's totals are shitty because they're fatter than they should be?

There is a spectrum. Do I think that Jamie advocates being a 6' 155 lb DYEL male, no. Do I think this is aimed at someone like me who chooses to compete as an undersized 148 at 21-22% bf rather than maintain at 18-19% and cut to 132, absolutely. Like I said I'm basing some of this off "Prepare for War" which is basically his manifesto on cutting weight for meets.

More generally, I think that focusing on "relative strength" for a weight class can be (and usually is) counterproductive. I think that if people focused on their body composition and performance in a big-picture long-game sort of mentality rather than arbitrary weight class boundaries they might see much more progress. I've seen far too many people spin their wheels for ages because they can't accept that they're just going to be a little chubbier. So they never spend any of their time in a surplus or building muscle, yet they never get truly lean either.

u/ZeroPly · 13 pointsr/intermittentfasting

It's something called hyperpalatability:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-hyperpalatable-foods-could-turn-you-into-a-food-add-1575144399

Modern engineered food is designed to light up your brain's pleasure centers, and consequently make you crave it. It's a carefully balanced combination of fat, sugar, and salt, which together are extremely addictive. Almost all pizza contains enough sugar to do the job.

Hyperpalatable food lights up pleasure centers just like hard drugs do. There's something called the Yale Food Addiction scale, which measures how addictive a food is, based on this conditioning. Here are the worst of the worst:

Pizza – 4.01

Chocolate – 3.73

Chips – 3.73

Cookies – 3.71

Ice cream – 3.68

French fries – 3.60

Cheeseburgers – 3.50

Soda (sugar-sweetened) – 3.29

Cake – 3.26

Cheese – 3.22

Bacon – 3.03

Fried chicken – 2.97

As you can see, pizza is #1 on that list. If you like pizza, I would strongly recommend that you make it from scratch, will will let you control what's going in there. If you're eating commercial stuff like Pizza Hut or Papa John's, you might as well be doing cocaine.

I struggled with weight most of my life. When I read Kessler's book, it opened my eyes as to how useless discipline was, against what the food industry is doing these days:

https://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605294578

u/hxcjosh23 · 7 pointsr/loseit

Taken from [This Post] (https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/6eoiht/dieting_tips_for_the_beginner/)

3) It’s possible to succeed on a diet of pop tarts, Mountain Dew, pizza, and fried chicken, but this is not ideal. Calorie dense foods like donuts and french fries (as well as most forms of liquid calories) are easy to eat and are largely devoid of fiber and micronutrients. Therefore, we can consume large quantities of these foods quickly and mindlessly without ever becoming full. In some cases, these foods are even artificially engineered to override our normal inhibitions, making it incredibly difficult to stop eating once you start (see [The End of Overeating] (https://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605294578)). It’s straightforward to see why these types of foods can cause us to overconsume calories. These foods are not off limits, but one should always consume them slowly and mindfully and be careful to choose a portion size that fits within one’s macronutrient framework.

u/larkasaur · 6 pointsr/EnoughTrumpSpam

>is an obesity promoting social environment positive body acceptance or something?

Things like having a culture where people bring fattening but tempting junk food to work; environments that discourage walking; attractively packaged and hyper-palatable junk food in the stores, promote obesity.

The former Surgeon-general Dr. David Kessler wrote a book The End of Overeating which discusses how well food is engineered to be hyper-palatable. The food companies do well when people can't stop eating their products.

Also Marion Nestle, professor of public health, talks about this; how American agriculture produced a surplus of calories and the food companies had to figure out how to get people to eat it all. The pressures of the free market made them very clever at this.

The obesity epidemic is very damaging to people's health and very expensive.

>consider that for the first time child obesity rates were dropping thanks to Michelle Obama's school programs

That's good to hear.

u/pewpewberty · 4 pointsr/Paleo

There are two good, scientific books that have nothing to do with cavemen and everything to do with the science of how our bodies work that are worth reading. If she doesn't want to read them because its "too hard" or "time consuming" she really doesn't care that much about her health and its not worth pushing the issue. Sounds harsh, but its true. If she really wants to be healthy and wants to take the time to change, she should look at these resources.

Why We Get Fat

The End of Overeating

*Deleted my name at the end of this comment. I signed it like an email, and don't know why!

u/rsp35 · 4 pointsr/xxketo

The extra sugar is a way of getting customers to come back. There's a book called "The End of Overeating" that speaks to how fast food restaurants manipulate their ingredients (using more salt, fat, and sugars) so that it activates the reward center in our brains, resulting in people coming back for more.

Makes sense to me. When I haven't had fast food for so long, I don't crave it.

https://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605294578

u/RedPanda5150 · 3 pointsr/loseit

This phenomenon is covered a lot in the book The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. It's written by a former FDA commissioner who spent a lot of time interviewing executives at various food companies. It turns out a lot of money is spent making junk food as "hyper palatable" as possible. Shape, texture, colors, marketing - it's all highly engineered. Part of it is combining sugar, salt, and fat in just the right way to maximally light up the reward centers of the brain. But another part of it (more evil, IMHO) is purposefully leaving out one or two essential amino acids so that no matter how much of that product you eat you are never quite satisfied, and keep going back for more.

u/pushabloom · 2 pointsr/NoFap

I would also recommend these two books. They are both great in that neither one is a 'self-help' book but rather the most up to date science about (resisting) addictive behaviors.

http://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Human-Strength/dp/0143122231/ - Willpower is like a gas tank. A lot of the 'side effect' reboot stories you get here are explained by this book.

http://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605294578/ - I read this one twice while I lost 60 pounds. Most of the things said about food and methods to avoid breaking from one's diet apply equally well to nofap.

u/JeffWright123 · 2 pointsr/ketoscience

> ...there is a whole flavor industry behind processed food that works at making flavor profiles for addictive foods.

Totally. My eyes were opened when I read "The End Of Overeating." Big-food corporations will stop at nothing in their quest to enslave all of us. And this is not mild hyperbole at all.

u/PuckGoodfellow · 2 pointsr/loseit

Exactly this. The End of Overeating is all about how salt, fat, & sugar are used in combination by the food industry to keep us addicted. It's an easy and relatively quick read.

u/Jeepersca · 1 pointr/Paleo

There's an excellent book on the topic. (Note: author wasn't happy with the title the publishers chose). Dr. Kessler's book goes into detail about the billion dollar food industry which seeks to maximize food flavor - through sugar, fat, salt, and crazy crazy chemical combinations allowing more complex flavorings that essentially deaden the American palette to more natural, subtle flavor. How food is made to be textured (in some ways like it's already chewed) so that consumers don't have to work hard to eat it. It's somewhat depressing and an EXCELLENT reason to not eat frankenfoods! Here's his interview on NPR.

u/CMac86 · 1 pointr/loseit

I don't know how much you like to read, but the book that helps me out quite a bit is The End of Overeating by David Kessler. Every time I fall off the wagon, I reread it. It becomes a lot easier to say "No, I'll pass on the Orange Chicken from Panda Express and get something that will actually fill me up".


I commend you for taking action at such a young age. I didn't start doing it until I was 23-24.

Tips:

You're at an age where lifting will start to become beneficial (as you go through puberty, testosterone pretty much spikes). Use that to your advantage. Strength workouts will help spike your metabolism, but I would not aim for any more than 3 days per week.

Ease into the diet. Going from 3-4k calories a day to 1900 will be a challenge. What I did initially was make small swaps (actual examples from what I did). E.g., instead of regular Coke, drink a diet. Instead of hitting McDonalds/fast food 7 days per week, drop it to 3 days. Instead of getting pizza twice a week, swap it to every other week. Instead of a snack cake/candy bar, eat a piece or two of fruit. Eat home made and healthy meals that still taste good-my go-to meal at this point is chicken breast (baked or made in a slow cooker), sweet potatoes (microwaved, baked, mashed, etc), and some form of veggie. As long as you're not pan frying everything in a ton of oil or butter, that type of meal is a significant improvement over the typical junk food and is actually filling.

I strongly dislike salads, even now. So, I took inspiration from Wendy's. Adding a handful of mixed berries or a chopped up apple as well as a serving of protein (chicken breast, typically) to a large serving of mixed greens made salads infinitely more appealing to me.

Consistency trumps all, yet one meal off your plan won't derail a month's worth of progress. The key is to keep it to one meal. So, on my current meal/nutrition plan (that I've been on for the bulk of the last 6 months), I eat 40 meals per week (6 meals per day for 5 days, 5 meals per day for 2 days). If 1 out of 40 meals is off plan, it does not derail me-I might bloat some due to water retention, but it does not derail this train.

Establishing routines makes it all easier. I've been on my current workout routine for over six months. My mornings are now on autopilot. It is just before 5AM where I am at, and as soon as I click "comment" on this post, I'm leaving for the gym. I'd rather futz around on social media, but I NEED to get this workout in before my work day starts.

u/thinking_wordy · 1 pointr/diet

Hey Fuzzy. One of the biggest suggestions I have for you is figuring out specifically what is going on inside of you that seems to be causing these mood changes.

https://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605294578

This book is pretty bomb.com, and chock full of the biology that comes into play when eating and dieting. Your mood is getting shitty and irritable because you're getting "intense food cravings for food you can't have," you say? You're going through withdrawal symptoms. Processed food, fried fatty foods, artificial sugars: these all effectively hijack your brain's neurochemistry and make it run wild.

Artificial sugars activate the same neural reward centers that cocaine activates. Eating these foods feels good, and makes us feel good, and does so because, not so very long ago, fats and sugars and salts were all scarce, and so our brain rewarded our bodies with feel good juju so as to motivate us to get more. Pack in the calories during times of feast and plenty so as to survive times of famine. But times have changed, and if you're looking for diet advice, now we're fresh out of famine.

As far as waiting till you're angry to go to the gym? Fuck that noise. Build it into your routine so as to mitigate feeling angry in the first place. Endorphins are a hell of a drug, and are natural pick me ups.

As far as cravings go? Eat more fruits. Salt your meats till you stop craving the shit you crave but can't eat. Lots and lots of water. Then more water, with a willpower chaser. As tough as this is, living a life full of self hate and pity is much, much tougher.

You're asking for help, and that's an awesome step. Know you're not alone, and you're doing your best to progress. Be kind to yourself; don't beat yourself up if you fall off the wagon, but be mindful of it, pick yourself up, and get yourself back on said wagon. Don't give up. Your life is worth the effort.

u/joestronomo · 0 pointsr/loseit

Ok - my opinion on this is controversial, but you can't beat food addictions with strict calorie counting. An analogy...

Suppose you're an alcoholic drinking a fifth a day. I tell you to cut your drinking down by just 1oz a day. One lousy ounce. So tomorrow you drink 24oz, then 23oz, and tada - by the end of the month, you're stone cold sober.

Except you and I both know that doesn't have a chance in hell of actually working.

Just like alcoholism, food addictions require extensive behavioral changes. You can't count your way out of it, or rely on raw discipline. Look at the number of people on here who have gone through weight cycling their entire lives.

One of my favorite books that helped me change things around:

https://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605294578/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538592700&sr=8-1&keywords=end+of+overeating

It doesn't really tell you how to win, but it takes the veil off the beast that you're fighting.

u/Outlaw-In-Law · 0 pointsr/news

As former Commissioner of FDA David Kessler discovered and revealed in his book, "The End of Overeating", the 3 most detrimental elements in our diets are high concentrations of fat, salt, and/or sugar.