Books

Item Description

Hardcover edition of “Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession with Weight Loss“ by Sandra Aamodt, Ph.D., with a personalized inscription from the author.

Despite dieting’s popularity, its practical results are dismal, including long-term weight gain, health-damaging stress, and eating disorders. Many people believe that unless they control their appetite, they will gain weight and die young. This common belief gets it backward. Dieting makes many people fatter and less healthy in the long run because it impairs their ability to recognize hunger, which increases vulnerability to binge eating, emotional eating, and food marketing. The vast majority of dieters regain their lost weight, because when dieting makes an obese person thinner, the brain responds just as it would if a normal-weight person were starving, by increasing hunger, reducing physical activity in subconscious ways, and suppressing metabolism. In short, diets fail because our brains are working correctly. Instead of fighting this system, we can use mindful eating to work with it. This book will show you how.

Item Special Note

Sandra Aamodt, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and science writer, most recently the author of Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession with Weight Loss. Her talk at TEDGlobal 2013 about why she stopped dieting and started eating mindfully has received over 3.5 million views, and she has published opinion pieces in The New York Times and elsewhere.

In collaboration with Sam Wang from Princeton University, she wrote two other books. Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life was named Young Adult Science Book of the Year by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009. Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College was published in 2011.

She received her undergraduate degree in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Rochester. After four years of postdoctoral research at Yale University, she joined Nature Neuroscience, a leading scientific journal in the field of brain research, in 1998 and was editor in chief from 2003 to 2008.

In her free time, Sandra loves dancing, truck camping, travel photography, hiking, and cooking. You can reach her via sandraaamodt.com, on Twitter @sandra_aamodt, or at sandra.aamodt@gmail.com.