Body Intelligence

(Edward Abramson, PhD)

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According to Body Intelligence:  Lose Weight, Keep It Off, and Feel Great About Your Body Without Dieting!, (McGraw-Hill, 2005, $21.95, hardcover), by Edward Abramson, PhD, there are three components to successful weight loss:  eating intelligently, looking at your body intelligently, and using your body intelligently.  Body intelligence is something you are born with.  Dr. Abramson explains that as a baby you would eat according to physical need for nourishment, you liked your body, and welcomed the opportunity to move your body.  You ate when you were hungry, and stopped when you were full.  As you grew and were exposed to society, something changed.  Your environment began to influence your eating, resulting in your eating even when you weren't hungry.  You learned self-criticism, and didn't like parts of your body so much anymore.  And physical exertion became less and less desirable.

Over the years, habitual dieting may have left you out of touch with your physical hunger. Abramson believes that emotional eating is less likely if you give up dieting. He aims to help you make the necessary changes to ditch dieting for good and successfully reclaim your body intelligence.

An expert on eating and weight disorders, Dr. Abramson is a professor of psychology at California State University, and a former director of the Eating Disorders Center at Chico Community Hospital.  He has appeared on 20/20, Hard Copy, PBS, and other TV and radio programs.  He has been quoted in articles in several publications, including Reader's Digest, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Self, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.

Body Intelligence is one of few diet books to extensively examine the causes and solutions to issue of emotional eating. Abramson explains that, as children, we learned the "rules of eating" from our parents, and friends.  We learned the structure of eating meals and snacks, the context of eating (do's and don't of where to eat) and the appropriateness of food and food combinations.  Body Intelligence advises you to look more carefully at what is happening when you say you are hungry.  What are your motivations for eating?  What type of hunger are you experiencing? When you know why you want to eat, you will be able to fill that need, often with less food, or sometimes without eating anything.  You will learn to identify the types of external cues that trigger your eating and determine the proper response to those cues. 

Scattered throughout the book are quizzes and mental exercises  which help to personalize and reinforce the information learned in each chapter.  The book discusses how to take back your body image, and overcome exercise inertia.  BestDietForMe.com editors were pleased to find that the book includes a chapter on how to raise your child with body intelligence so they can reduce unnecessary eating, develop a healthy, realistic body image and become comfortable with physical activity.

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