Book Review: What’s Eating You? by Kathleen Alleaume

Rating:

We’re a funny species. We know what we need to do. We know what we should be eating and should not be eating. We know all about exercise. We are totally au fait with comfort eating. We’re cohesive of the fact that too much booze and fat, and too many sweets will undo our health and turn our outer shell to pudge.

So why do we continue to do it? Eat crap, I mean.

Enter What’s Eating You? – a book that looks into the psychology of food and our friendship (or love affair) with cravings. Author Kathleen Alleaume is a trusted health expert in nutrition, fitness and wellness. With a degree in Exercise Sciences and Masters in nutrition, Kathleen is an accredited Exercise Physiologist and Nutritionist and is a founding principal of The Right Balance Consultancy.

With a passion for translating science jargon into layperson speak, Kathleen has created a book completely devoid of calories and instead packed with healthful information on how to get your relationship with food in balance. In What’s Eating You? she covers key triggers and reasons why we crave certain food types, and in so doing, reveals (hallelujah!) effective ways to quash the addiction and take better control of what’s going in and the resultant output on our waistlines.

Readers can learn to make peace with food by assessing their own triggers and eating style, then planning ways to beat the craving, with loads of ideas on food substitutes, tracking progress, assessing your moods (huzzah! someone who links food with emotion – this one’s for us, girls!), supplements, stress, biological reactions and more. They can also get the low down on fad diets and detox, experience some pretty major myth-busting and reality checks, and benefit from such timely advice as breathing, self-talk and learning the psychology of habit change.

But best of all – readers will come away armed with the best possible tool for permanent lifestyle changes – knowledge.

I absolutely love how the author tackles myths in this book – how ‘full’ is not your friend, not to mention the commercial ‘low fat’ debacle. I love how she provides mantras we can chant to reprogramme our food habits (“I will eat until satisfaction, not fullness”). I love how she talks of the negative effects of a fact-paced life and how stress affects how we eat. I love how frank she is – and how she tackles emotional food connection head-on with some whack-over-the-noggin observations like ‘need’ verses ‘desire’ and that ubiquitous bewdy – food as emotional anaesthetic.

The book is written in a clear, warm and concise manner that avoids the bog-down, and is lifted with lots of helpful tips, case studies for relatability, checklists and alerts. In keeping with a smarter way to tackle health – ie: through the head and heart and not necessarily the belly – Kathleen takes a holistic approach in her book that promises longer term and more solid benefits – after all, are we not comprised of more than our thighs or how our butt looks in a bikini?

As a confirmed sugar addict on a post-Christmas candy-cane hangover, this book was a goldmine of priceless reminders and new information that has brought fresh hope to this sugar-crusted body, mind and heart. 2012 may just be my year to whack my addiction into submission.