Last updated on January 29th, 2020 at 12:41 pm
It’s my big dream to live a healthier life. To achieve my dream I need to change my destructive eating habits and commit to a regular exercise routine.
As part of my dream goals for the year, I will be training for the San Francisco Bay to Breakers in May and then competing in a triathlon by the end of the year. Part of the physical training includes re-training my brain on how I look at food.
Recent research suggests that besides behavioral similarities among people who might be addicted to food and those addicted to other substances. The research also suggests that people with food addictions respond to food cues in much the same way that alcoholics respond to drinking cues. That initial stimulus–a picture of a pizza, a smoky bar–sparks deep-seated cravings in both cases. Also, the dulled restraint-related brain activity that takes place when a food-addicted person drinks a milkshake may parallel what happens with alcoholics who take a sip of alcohol and then can’t stop drinking. (Source: Tori DeAngelis/American Psychological Association)
This latest research makes perfect sense to me. I have experienced the addiction phenomenon of craving towards sweets. Upon eating something sweet like ice cream, a reaction in my body occurs where I crave even more sweets. When this happens, I cannot control my consumption and end up eating more than I initially intended. One bowl of ice cream turns into two and so forth.
As part of my dream journey, I want to share with you a list of some of my favorite healthy body image books. Hopefully, these books can help you as they have helped me.
8 Books for a Healthy Body Image
1. Love Your Body: Change The Way you Feel About The Body You Have
Authors Tami Brannon-Quan and Lisa Licavoli designed this book to help people learn more about their bodies to start to appreciate them as the gift that they are. They explore the constant negative thoughts, unrealistic expectations, perfectionism and body hatred that keep us down, depressed and struggling.
This book is about hope. It will help you end your body struggles and learn to love and accept yourself.
2. 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food
In this book by Susan Albers, author of Eating Mindfully, she offers a collection of 50 mindfulness skills and practices for relaxing the body in times of stress and ending dependence on eating as a means of coping with difficult emotions. She gives easy ways to soothe urges to overeat and to learn how to differentiate emotion-driven hunger from healthy hunger.
You’ll not only discover easy ways to soothe urges to overeat, but you’ll also learn how to differentiate emotion-driven hunger from healthy hunger. Reach for this book instead of the refrigerator next time you feel the urge to snack.
3. Crave: Why You Binge Eat and How to Stop
Clinical psychologist Cynthia M. Bulik, who is trained in psychiatric genetics, is a leading authority on eating disorders such as binge eating (BED). For twenty years she and other researchers have tracked thousands of people, and have found that BED runs in families. They found astonishingly high heritability of 47 percent.
In this book, Cynthis Bulik helps readers understand why they crave specific foods, recognize what triggers their strong urges, and get control over their responses to those triggers.
This book is Sarah Maria’s personal journey to loving her body and her life with a proven path for those seeking a healthy, conscious relationship with their bodies.
This book comes with exercises, case studies, testimonials, and the 5-steps, so anyone can learn how to stop obsessing over food and their body and achieve permanent peace with both.
5. Meal by Meal: 365 Daily Meditations for Finding Balance Through Mindful Eating
Buddhist devotee, Donald Altman, shows how to find peace by focusing on food issues one meal at a time. He shares inspirational daily meditations, including quotes from Zen stories, Native American practices, Hindu scriptures, the Bible, and sages from all major wisdom traditions. He also explores food preparation, rituals, and social attitudes.
With daily reflections, Altman enables people to make wise food choices and create balance in their lives.
6. Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works
Authors and nutrition therapists Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch suggest that the best way for dieters to finally make peace with food and body image is to emulate the natural, intuitive eating habits of very young children.
Suggestions include rejecting a diet mentality (often based on deprivation and denial); eating only when hungry; stopping when full, and learning to separate emotional from physical needs.
7. When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies: Freeing Yourself from Food and Weight Obsession
Authors Carol Munter and Jane Hirschmann explore the many reasons why women cling to diets despite overwhelming evidence that diets don’t work. In fact, diets turn us into compulsive eaters who are obsessed with food and weight. They call this syndrome “Bad Body Fever” and demonstrate how “bad body thoughts” is clues to our emotional lives.
They explore the difficulties women encounter replacing dieting with demand feeding. And finally, they teach how to think about problems rather than eat about them.
8. The Rules of “Normal” Eating: A Commonsense Approach for Dieters, Overeaters, Undereaters, Emotional Eaters, and Everyone in Between!
Author Karen R. Koenig lays out the four basic rules that “normal” eaters follow instinctively – eating when they’re hungry, choosing foods that satisfy them, eating with awareness and enjoyment, and stopping when they’re full or satisfied.
Along with specific skills and techniques that help promote change, the book presents a proven cognitive-behavioral model of transformation that targets beliefs, feelings, and behaviors about food and eating and points the way toward genuine physical and emotional fulfillment.
Here’s to your better healthy living and nurturing our wounded spirits so we can make our big dreams come true.
Veronica Jacobsen
Veronica Jacobsen manages a sober-living recovery center for women and works to teach women how to live healthy, radiant and productive lives.
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