Most people say that when they lose weight and look better, they'll like themselves more. Jean Fain suggests that we've got it all backward. The best way to lose weight and look your best is to stop dieting and start with loving who you are. With The Self-Compassion Diet, this Harvard Medical School-affiliated psychotherapist shares a re...

Create a healthier and happier life by treating yourself with compassion rather than shame. Imagine a graph with two lines. One indicates happiness, the other tracks how you feel about your body. If you’re like millions of people, the lines do not intersect. But what if they did? This practical, inspirational, and visually lively book shows you the way to a sense of well-being attained by understanding how to love, connect, and care for yourself—and that includes your mind as well as your body. Body Kindness is based on four principles. WHAT YOU DO: the choices you make about food, exercise, sleep, and more HOW YOU FEEL: befriending your emotions and standing up to the unhelpful voice in your head WHO YOU ARE: goal-setting based on your personal values WHERE YOU BELONG: body-loving support from people and communities that help you create a meaningful life With mind and body exercises to keep your energy spiraling up and prompts to help you identify what YOU really want and care about, Body Kindness helps you let go of things you can't control and embrace the things you can by finding the workable, daily steps that fit you best. It's the anti-diet book that leads to a more joyful and meaningful life.

Have you tried every diet or weight loss plan under the sun, but still can’t manage to lose weight and keep it off? You aren’t alone. Each year, Americans spend billions of dollars on weight-loss products, yet we continue to have the highest obesity rate in the world. After trying and failing countless times, you have to begin to wonder, “What am I doing wrong?” The problem with most fad diets is that they only attack the symptom of the problem, not the cause. No matter how much you try to deny yourself the food you crave, you always end up reverting back to bad habits. You might even lose weight initially, but more often than not you’ll gain it back—with a couple extra pounds to boot! In order to make real change in your life, you need to change the way you think about food, weight, and what’s most important to you. The Diet Trap offers proven-effective methods based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help you develop mindful eating habits, self-compassion, and a greater understanding of what it means to live a valued life. ACT is a values-based therapy that has been proven effective for the treatment of weight loss. Because ACT encourages you to accept and experience uncomfortable emotions—rather than succumb to emotional eating—it helps you to stay on your path to lose weight, while also helping you develop compassion toward yourself, no matter how much you weigh. Written by two researchers in the field of ACT, this book offers evidence-based solutions to help you fundamentally change the way you think about food, so that you can successfully lose weight, get healthy, and live a happy, fulfilling life without costly and frustrating fad diets.

“If diets worked, we'd all be thin by now. Instead, we have enlisted hundreds of millions of people into a war we can't win." What’s the secret to losing weight? If you’re like most of us, you’ve tried cutting calories, sipping weird smoothies, avoiding fats, and swapping out sugar for Splenda. The real secret is that all of those things are likely to make you weigh more in a few years, not less. In fact, a good predictor of who will gain weight is who says they plan to lose some. Last year, 108 million Americans went on diets, to the applause of doctors, family, and friends. But long-term studies of dieters consistently find that they’re more likely to end up gaining weight in the next two to fifteen years than people who don’t diet. Neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt spent three decades in her own punishing cycle of starving and regaining before turning her scientific eye to the research on weight and health. What she found defies the conventional wisdom about dieting: ·Telling children that they’re overweight makes them more likely to gain weight over the next few years. Weight shaming has the same effect on adults. ·The calories you absorb from a slice of pizza depend on your genes and on your gut bac­teria. So does the number of calories you’re burning right now. ·Most people who lose a lot of weight suffer from obsessive thoughts, binge eating, depres­sion, and anxiety. They also burn less energy and find eating much more rewarding than it was before they lost weight. ·Fighting against your body’s set point—a cen­tral tenet of most diet plans—is exhausting, psychologically damaging, and ultimately counterproductive. If dieting makes us fat, what should we do instead to stay healthy and reduce the risks of diabetes, heart disease, and other obesity-related conditions? With clarity and candor, Aamodt makes a spirited case for abandoning diets in favor of behav­iors that will truly improve and extend our lives.

You Can Change Your Relationship to Food Eating with Fierce Kindness is not a diet, but a way to revolutionize how you think about yourself and about food. Eating with fierce kindness and compassion toward yourself, instead of shame and self-blame, will empower you to change your relationship to food and see yourself in a whole new light. This book will guide you toward an understanding of why and how you are eating so you can successfully change your eating patterns. As you learn to reduce the stress and impulsivity that often drives emotional eating, you'll also practice new ways to savor food and finally nourish your body the way it deserves.

You know the cycle: you have a stressful day and find yourself snacking or overeating at dinner to make yourself feel better. The ritual of eating becomes so calming, you can't stop-and the guilt and self-criticism you feel can lead you to overeat even more the next day. What you may not know is that simply replacing your negative feelings with compassion for yourself can interrupt this cycle so that you can meet your emotional needs without resorting to overeating. The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Ending Overeating presents an evidence-based program designed to help you grow a deep and abiding love for your body and health that transcends your emotional connection with food. As you work through the worksheets and evaluations in this book, you'll discover the specific reasons for your overeating, find out which foods trigger you to overeat, and then develop satisfying meal plans for getting your eating back on track. You'll also build compassionate-mind skills for dealing with stress, self-criticism, and shame, and establish a balanced eating pattern that will free you from the overeating cycle.

A clinical psychologist and eating disorder specialist busts common myths around food, nutrition, and weight loss to set you on a path towards healing and self-love. A 10-step approach to ditching diet culture, healing your relationship with food, and cultivating compassion for your body. Diets don’t work—and it’s not your fault. As a culture, we’re told (and tell ourselves) that if we just lose the weight—try a little harder, have a little more willpower, or deprive ourselves for a little bit longer—we’ll be happier, healthier, and more confident. But it’s not true. Clinical psychologist Alexis Conason debunks the myths we’ve been sold about food, nutrition, health, and weight loss, and offers an antidote to the pain and harmful health consequences that result from yo-yo diets, untenable food regimens, and quick fixes. Conason, who is also an eating disorder specialist, shows readers how radically shifting our relationship to food and our own bodies can be incredibly healing, nourishing, and can help us to better love and care for ourselves. Enriched with case studies, practical meditations, stories, lessons, and activities, her 10-step program will help you: • Challenge your assumptions about weight and health • Understand the ways that our emotions can impact how and why we eat • Embrace your “yum” and tune into taste with mindful eating • Trust your body to be your guide and find real fullness Reframing dieting and diet “failure” as pervasive aspects of our culture—not individual failures—The Diet-Free Revolution offers a roadmap to healing, self-acceptance, and radical new ways of relating to and loving our bodies.