https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Down-Diet-Eating-Pleasure

I’m so excited for our first book. I had no problem choosing this particular book as the first up for review. It’s a fantastic place to begin discovering what, besides diet and exercise, figures into the puzzle of having a healthy, happy relationship with food and with our bodies.

The book is broken down into eight main chapters, each teaching about an element of metabolic power, with a preface and introduction up front and a postscript at the end. The book is structured to focus, by weeks, on an element of metabolic power: Relaxation, Quality, Awareness, Rhythm, Pleasure, Thought, Story, and the Sacred. Very basically defined, our metabolism is how effectively our body converts calories into energy. We’re inundated with info on foods and exercises that are supposed to ramp up our metabolism and, while those certainly may help, there is so much more to that equation. Now, since this is a book review, not a book report, I’m not going to describe any further the elements in this book that figure into that equation; I’ll just let them be a teaser to pique your interest.

I must confess that as much as I love this book, I have two issues with it: the title and the “eight week” part. The title labels this as a diet book, and for marketing purposes, I can understand why. You get a lot more hits on an internet search and potentially reach a much wider audience by including the word “diet” in the title. But make no mistake – this is not about another diet to try. There are no menus or recipes. It never tells you what to eat. It takes you right where you are and gives you tools and info that can vastly broaden your thoughts and perspective of the whole food and body thing. So yeah, not a “diet” book.

Secondly, I guess it can be an eight-week program, but it’s way too rich to be fully understood and implemented in only eight weeks. Because of the claims of much of the diet industry, saying this is an eight-week program can give the idea that if you devote eight weeks of your life to following these principles, then you’ll be “fixed” – you’ll have mastered “Eating for Pleasure, Energy, and Weight Loss.” If you go in thinking that, you’ll end up with just another empty promise that didn’t work. In all fairness, though, the cover does label it as “An 8-Week Breakthrough Program,” and a breakthrough is entirely possible, likely even, in that amount of time.

The first time I went through this book I mostly stayed to the eight week schedule. And that works well…as an introduction. Now as I go back to it again and again, I focus on whichever principle draws me in at that moment, and I stay with it until I feel I’ve got a handle on it again. Needless to say, that’s often more than a week.

If you feel like you’ve beaten your head against the wall trying everything and gained no satisfaction in your quest for weight loss, better health, or simply peace and balance in your relationship with food and your body, this book is definitely for you.

Let me know what you think. I’d love to get your take on it.