Late 2011, or early 2012 I purchased and read Brain over Binge (2011) by Karen Heidebrech, and decided that it deserves the attention of a review here on DietHobby.

Brain over Binge gives an informative scientific perspective on binge eating as well as an interesting personal account. Instead of viewing bingeing as a symptom of complex psychological problems, Heidebrech explains why traditional eating disorder therapy often fails. She explains how she came to understand her bingeing was a function of her brain, and how she used the power of her brain to recover.

Brain Over Binge gives an alternative method of “eating disorder” recovery. The author uses principles of contemporary neuroscience to explain the traps of disordered eating, and how she herself has found recovery from her own binge behavior.

Traditional eating disorder recovery focuses on labeling one’s eating behavior as dysfunctional, then identifying underlying reasons or triggers for that eating behavior, and then having the person attempt to control, correct, or respond differently to their own flaws or environmental stressors. This is an impossible task, because one can never control all of life's stressors and personal vulnerabilities, and believing that this is the only way to recover is often a set-up for failure.

Instead of focusing on emotions, stress, self-esteem and many of the other common explanations offered in conventional treatment, Brain Over Binge provides that binge eating is the result of allowing the urges that spring from one's "animal" brain to override the wisdom of one's "highest human" brain. By surrendering all the power to the animal brain, the binge eater ends up feeling as if she/he has no choice but to give in to the urge to binge, no matter how irrational or self-destructive it is to do so.

Brain over Binge presents a 5-step process for taking back your power over the urges. Heidebrech backs up the simplicity of the cure with an explanation of the research that supports the credibility of her approach. She also relates her own experience to show that one can recover from binge eating without having to be perfect or live a stress-free life.

Bingeing doesn’t always result from external situations. Bingeing itself creates more and more cues to binge in response to everyday life situations. The more situations one responds to by bingeing, the more cues there are to binge. The answer is not to get rid of everyday situations, but to interrupt the cycle, which is done, paradoxically, by dismissing disordered urges as "neurological junk," thereby avoiding reinforcing the behavior and weakening the undesired neurological pathways.

  As a reduced obese person who has personally experienced a lifetime of difficulty with binge behavior, as well as more than 20 years of Therapy involving that issue, I found myself in agreement with a great many of the concepts within this book, and I highly recommend it for adults who would like to experience some recovery from their own binge behaviors.

Originally posted on August 28, 2012, updated for new viewers.

A Craving is a feeling that we’ve attached an action to.  The video at the bottom of this article is of former addict, Lucy Bainbridge, and therapist, Elaine Hilides, sharing a 3 Principles perspective on Addiction and Cravings.

For those people who are interested in learning more about Elaine Hilides, … as part of my Diet Hobby, I purchased and read Elaine Hilides book, Mindfullness The No-Diet Diet Book (2013), quite some time ago, before becoming interested in the 3 Principles concept. At the time of my first reading, I judged the book to be okay, but rather ordinary and unimpressive.

Because I was impressed by the video interview below - which I discovered during my current study of the 3 Principles as related to my struggle with dieting and weight control. Because the interview impressed me, I re-read Elaine Hilides book to see if had overlooked something that might be personally helpful.

Upon my second reading, I found that the book starts with an interesting 3 Principles approach to weight-control before it jumps into a presentation of the author’s own dietary personal beliefs - which are presented as factual truths. The author’s beliefs include specific techniques and guidelines involving intuitive eating, behavior modification, and eating primarily “real” non-processed food.

A common 3 Principles saying is that “we feel our thinking”, and of course, my own thinking is often about weight issues. Therefore, I was interested in the following ideas.

You have a story, and idea, about yourself, your weight and your eating and you believe that your story is real, although this is an illusion because YOU created the story.

We all fall into the illusion that the feelings we experience about our weight and food problems are real. But we all experience reality through our own filters and perceptions, and we create our reality moment by moment by whatever we are thinking at that moment.

Yes, the chair you’re sitting in is real, but your experience of the chair might be different to someone else’s experience of that chair. You might think the chair is comfortable but another person might disagree. The chair exists, but it is your thoughts about the chair that creates your experience of it your reality, your story.

Each of us is living in our own version of reality. Think back to your Christmas Day celebration. Each person who was present will have a different story about that event. Once you recognize that you are telling yourself a story, you can see that thought is a vehicle you use to create your story and your reality.

Repeating your old, tired story of why you do what you do, limits you and keeps you stuck in the same place.

There is nothing to re-learn. You just have to remember what you already know. It’s a simple approach. There are no complicated techniques to remember or affirmations to repeat. There is nothing to do or apply, it is “is” in the same way that you walk and breathe.

This new and simple paradigm is not about changing your thoughts with positive thinking and positive affirmations.

It points you to an understanding of what thought is and how you can use the power of thought to free yourself from making unhelpful food choices and then beating yourself up over that choice.

Many have lost their way by thinking that they can’t change and so “why try?”

You have the magic in you. You have free will. Life isn’t happening to you. The more you remember that external situations, food or circumstances have no power over you, the more freedom you have.

You can have the freedom to have a wonderful relationship with food by rediscovering your own innate health, and letting go of the thoughts that are causing the bad feeling you have about your weight.

When you get into a thought storm about your weight, your mind is full and noisy, and clinging to a diet sheet ... as if that is the answer ... only adds to your thinking and muddles your mind even more. You already have the answer. When you allow your thoughts to quiet down, your mood shifts which gives you space to allow new thoughts in.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the book is similar to most diet or "non-diet" books, in that it consists of the author sharing her specific personal dietary beliefs as if they were an Ultimate Truth.

Ms. Hilides’ message is that one can regain health by choosing the “right” foods in order to keep the body running optimally while paying close attention to one’s thoughts, which are the driving force behind every decision made about what one allows oneself to eat.

While the author indicates that people should follow their body's own personal wisdom in order to be guided toward energy and health, that message is contradicted by the prevalence of specific recommendations to embrace and follow the author’s own personal dietary beliefs.

  Despite the fact that I do not personally embrace the author's dietary preferences nor her dietary recommendations, I found the 3 Principle perspectives on Addiction and Cravings, as shown in the video below, to be valuable enough to be included here in my digital scrapbook, DietHobby.

Michael Neill, the author of The Inside-Out Revolution

(2013)  is an established well known radio show host, transformational coach, and best-selling author of other self-help books. What makes this book distinctive is what he describes as an "Inside-Out Understanding".

He says that our Society has an "Outside-In" mindset:

"The prevailing model in our culture is that our experience of life is created from the outside in - that is, what happens to us on the outside determines our experience on the inside. People or circumstances `make' us happy, angry, sad, fearful, or loving, and the game of life is to find, attract, create, or manifest the right people and circumstances in order to have more of the good feelings and fewer of the bad ones."

The book is based on The Three Principles. These are:

Mind.
There is an energy and intelligence behind life.

Consciousness.
The capacity to be aware and experience life is innate in human beings. It is a universal phenomenon. Our level of awareness in any given moment determines the quality of our experience.

Thought.
We create our individual experience of reality via the vehicle of thought. Thought is the missing link between the formless world of pure potentiality and the created world of form.

Neill says that the difference in making a change in one's mindset in how we view things can unchain us from the limitations we feel bound in, and he quotes: "A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push."

He says to remember that you're only one thought away from happiness, you're only one thought away from sadness. The secret lies in Thought. Thought is the missing link that everybody in this world is looking for. Each of us has a selective choice …by way of thought …whether to experience happiness, something positive and meaningful, or, negative and sad, dragging us down emotionally.

Neill quotes his mentor, Syd Banks, on a transformative moment: "When you are ready, you will find what you're looking for. I don't care who you are. I don't care where you are. If you're in the middle of the Sahara Desert...and it's time for you to find the answer, the right person will appear in the middle of the desert and let you know."

The author points out:  “The moment we see that every feeling is just the shadow of a thought, we stop being scared of our feelings and just feel them.”

Below is an entertaining video describing the concepts of the book.

"Ditching Diets: How to lose weight in a way you can maintain" (2013) by Gillian Riley, is a revised and updated edition of “Beating Overeating (2009)… which was a condensed, revised, and updated edition of the original, longer book: Eating Less: Say Goodbye to Overeating (2006).

Ditching Diets is the third edition of a book containing advice of the author, Gillian Riley, who is an addiction counselor in the UK. It disagrees with the conventional Intuitive Eating advice ‘to eat when hungry and stop when full’. She uses the three core issues of Choice, Motivation and Temptation to introduce a way of different thinking about eating food and losing weight.

Cognitive techniques are explained in terms of brain function, showing readers how to work with what happens in the brain, instead of against it. The aim is to raise awareness of the addictive nature of overeating, creating a healthy, relaxed and realistically imperfect relationship with food.

The hope is that sustainable weight loss will be achieved through the elimination of overwhelming and persistent cravings, obsession with food, feelings of deprivation and rebellious rule breaking. Success with the plan would be successful weight-loss and maintenance while eliminating the need for “diets” – which Ms. Riley defines as restrictive eating plans devised by others.

The author, Gillian Riley, feels that the best way to lose weight is by developing a personal style of eating that one can live with, because such an eating style will be flexible and probably unique to that person.

She attempts to teach people to stop eating so much by changing their thought processes because she believes that the prohibitions normally involved within a “dieting mindset” contribute to the problem.

Gillian Riley Disagrees with advice such as:

• to eat only when hungry and stop when full;
  
• to overeat favorite foods to learn to get over them;
  
• to find the right kind or combination of carbs, proteins and fats, or micronutrients;
  
• to deal with one’s emotions in order to stop wanting to eat so much.

Because:

None of this takes into account what happens in the brain when one’s natural, survival drive to eat (and eat and eat) becomes activated. The purpose of this drive is to get one through the next famine, but in times of plenty the drive causes disaster. Therefore, nutritional advice often makes little difference. One can know what’s healthy, but can find it impossible to stick to “healthy” eating.

The author attempts to help people discover:

• how to eat in ways they truly want to live with, rather than ways they later regret;
  
• how to eat less without following any rules, either their own or those taken from others;
  
• how to develop the motivation to make changes, and
  
• how stay in touch with that motivation long term.

The author believes that this manner of thinking will eliminate:

• persistent cravings and obsession with food
  
• feelings of deprivation, misery or irritability when not overeating
  
• an all-or-nothing relationship with food
  
• rebellious overeating and bingeing.

 I bought "Ditching Diets" (2013) on my Kindle, and after reading that book through, and reviewing articles on the author’s website, I also purchased a hard copy from Amazon for future study, and ordered her CD and a copy of the original edition, Eating Less: Say Goodbye to Overeating (2006). I have not yet reviewed the CD or the first edition of the book, however, I've previously read the other books which the author recommends at the end of "Ditching Diets".

Frankly I was a bit surprised that I missed reading Ms. Riley's original book, however, in retrospect the year 2006 was when I reached my own personal weight-goal, and my focus was successfully working to maintain my weight-loss through conventional means. A few years later, when I began updating my reviews of various books, I suspect that I avoided it specifically because I clumped it together with the many “Intuitive Eating” books on the market, and later when I updated my research of books on Intuitive Eating concepts, I did not run across it.

  The author, Gillian Riley, has read many of the same books I’ve read, and on many issues, we share a similar point of view. Her online articles, Intuitive Eating 1, 2 and 3, are the first time I’ve seen a Professional Counselor precisely state many of my own findings, beliefs, and opinions about Intuitive Eating, and I will be posting copies of those articles here at DietHobby at a later time.

Ms Riley’s techniques are a bit different from those of a typical “eating disorder” counselor, although she appears to share the conventional negative definition and viewpoint of “Dieting”. My own personal definition is far broader and includes all forms of eating, including “unrestricted” eating. My own definition of “Diet” includes any “non-Diet” plan which doesn’t recommend specific amounts, or kinds of food, but still has recommendations on the issues of food and eating. Under that definition, I consider Intuitive Eating or Eating Disorder type plans as simply another form of Dieting.

Ms. Riley recommends a focus on “healthy” eating. I do agree with her definition of a focus on “healthy” foods being a focus on how specific foods make one feel. I praise Ms. Riley for not pushing her own food preferences onto others, which I find unusual for an “expert” who espouses a “real food” or “paleo” way-of-eating/ diet / lifestyle.

Ms. Riley recommends that people abandon the scale, calorie counting, or food restrictions. This conforms with the intuitive eating / eating disorder position – i.e. the belief that a calorie counting way of thinking/ eating causes a disconnect from one’s appetite and body, and makes an obsession with either eating or not eating. I disagree with that position, and think that weighing, calorie counting, and tracking food should not be abandoned by any person who is able to view these behaviors as merely useful and objective tools of measurement. Wishful thinking and Denial are often subjective side-effects of Intuitive Eating or Eating Healthy approaches, and the use of these objective tools tend to ground people in reality, and help them avoid Denial. For me, personally, the use of the scale and calorie counting has become a helpful and rather enjoyable habit.

I will be doing more research along this line, and plan to do some personal experimentation of Ms. Riley’s techniques. Of course, while doing this, I will continue to track my weight and all of my daily food intake in my software food journal… just as I have done successfully for the past 8+ years. I understand that these behaviors may not be advisable for those people who have never established them as enjoyable habits, however, I doubt that Ms Riley’s techniques and such habits are mutually exclusive.

In Defense of Food” (2009) was written by Michael Pollan who is a Professor of Journalism at University of California at Berkeley. Pollan is not a doctor, a scientist, or a nutritionist - he’s a journalist.

Pollan's message is:

Go back to nature, eat whole foods. Don’t diet.
Don't overeat; instead eat slowly, and enjoy your meals.
Our curse is processed food.
Artificially 'improved' foods and natural foods have very little in common..

The best-selling, "In Defense of Food" provides a guided tour of 20th century food science, a history of "nutritionism" in America and a snapshot of the marriage of government and the food industry. It then works as a hard-sell for the “real food” movement.   Pollan's arguments are basically:

• High-fructose corn syrup is the devil's brew. It must be removed from one’s diet.
  
  
• Avoid any food product that makes health claims, these mean it's probably not really food.
  
  
• In a supermarket, don't shop in the center aisles. Avoid anything that can't rot, anything with an ingredient you can't pronounce.
  
  
• "Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does." Avoid buying foods sold at mini-markets.
  
  
• "You are what you eat eats too." One must pay attention to what is fed to one’s food.
  
  
• "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." By which Pollan means: Eat natural food, the kind your grandmother served because the food industry had not yet learned that the big money was in processing, not harvesting. Use meat sparingly. Eat your greens, the leafier and more varied the better.
   
• In short: Kiss the Western diet goodbye. Look to the cultures where people eat well and live long. Trust your gut. Literally.

 In all this, Pollan insists that you have to save yourself. He says that the government is so overwhelmed by the lobbying and marketing power of the processed food industry that the American diet is now 50% sugar in one form or another, and calories that provide "virtually nothing but energy." Politicians are terrified to take on the food industry. And as for the medical profession, the key moment, Pollan writes, is when "doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospital".

Pollan is a not a scientist,  and doesn't seem to find it very important to ground his assertions with unimpeachable facts. His book is based on notions of a romanticized past, and his advice can sometimes be contradictory ("don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize" but "eat tofu" - - If your grandmother didn't come from Asia, it's doubtful she would recognize anything made of bean curd) and he tends to cite sources that he likes, rather than sources he's really investigated.

For example, Pollan would never list a dairy-industry pamphlet as one of his sources, but he gleefully quotes some rather doubtful statements from an organic-food-industry pamphlet, and apparently didn't bother to ask even one secondary source to verify them.

He writes a compelling essay showing that nutrition and dietary habits are incredibly difficult for scientists to study, and implies that any information based on nutritional studies is flawed, yet quotes certain studies as if they are somehow immune to this problem. Pollan maintains that the American government's health-education programs are a major cause of the obesity epidemic, yet his descriptions of these programs contain many inaccuracies. 

 Pollan's tone appears occasionally condescending. He seems overly impressed with some of his own statements, such as his claim that humans are the only animals that turn to experts to tell them what to eat. Even if one accepts that this is true, humans do a lot of things that animals don't do, and in many cases, we should be glad of it.

Some people seem to reverence this book like the Bible.  Personally, I found it an interesting book, but one that needs be read critically, taking Pollen’s "facts" with a grain of salt. I, personally, didn't actually find the book insightful. He made a lot of scientific claims, but failed to support them. A great many readers seem to greatly care about Pollan's personal opinions, however, I’m not one of them.

Clearly the grandmothers with which Pollan is familiar were different from my own. I’m over 65 years old, and my own grandmothers, who were both born in the late 1800s, spent a lot of time processing and preserving their food, and most everything they cooked, including vegetables, contained a great deal of added saturated fat, sugar and/or white flour and other starchy foods. Pollan’s “real” food arguments, and his assumptions about the eating histories of our ancestors, seemed a bit naïve; and his opinions appeared to be strongly influenced by his own personal educational, economic, and cultural biases.

 I found the following food and health expert’s critique to be rather refreshing.

A Critique of Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food”
         by Mike Gibney, 4/23/2012
                      Professor of Food & Health at University College in Dublin, Ireland.

Michael Pollan’s book “In Defense of Food’ has been a global best seller within the genre of books on food and health. It appears to be extremely popular among journalists since it bashes conventional wisdom on food. Twice, correspondents for the Irish Times chose to feature this book and marvel at its wisdom. Pollan’s book is peppered with half-truths, circular arguments and highly selective supporting material. His fundamental point is that we should focus our dietary choice on foods and not bother too much, if at all, with all of this nutritional advice that abounds today.

Pollen’s belief that health is the driver of food choice in the modern era is a cornerstone of his argument. Take for example the statement he makes: “That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new, and I think, destructive idea”.

The interest in healthy eating is as old as civilization and this obsession is the pursuit of a relatively minor section of society. The vast majority chooses food that they plan to enjoy and, in making those choices, take care to get some level of balance as regards to their personal health. Every study that has examined the drivers of food choice have come away with the conclusion that the “go – no go” part of food choice is whether the consumer likes the food.

Pollan’s assumption that it is the pursuit of health that drives food choice is an opinion based his personal reflections and observations. However, our own research, published in peer-reviewed journals shows the opposite. In a survey of over 14,000 consumers across the EU, some 71% either ‘agreed strongly’ or ‘agreed’ with the statement: “I do not need to make changes to my diet as my diet is already healthy enough”. Figure that Mr. Pollan!

The putative obsession with food and health of modern consumers that Pollan puts forward arises from the dogmatism and doctrine, which he calls “nutritionism”. He argues that nutrition has reduced the food and health issue to nutrients. In his view, nutritionists see foods solely as purveyors of nutrients and summarizes their view thus: “Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts”. He quotes his fellow food saviour and author Marion Nestle who says of nutrition: “…it takes the nutrient out of the food, the food out of the diet and the diet out of the lifestyle”.

Eloquent, but utter baloney! This needs to rebutted along several lines. In 1996, I chaired a joint WHO-FAO committee that issued a report entitled “Preparation and use of food-based dietary guidelines”. The notion behind this was that many developing countries did not have detailed data on the nutrient content of their food supply, that they didn’t have nutritional surveys and that we should encourage the development of healthy eating advice in terms that consumers can understand. Indeed, statistical techniques such as cluster analysis are widely used to study food intake patterns and moreover, there are many examples of systems that score food choice for their nutritional quality. To write a book based on the impression that nutritionists see foods solely in terms of nutrients is simply daft.

Let me go a little further with this. Take the disease spina bifida, which is one of several forms of neural tube defects (NTD) that occur early in pregnancy. Extensive human intervention studies have shown that an increased intake of the B vitamin, folic acid, will significantly reduce the re-occurrence of an NTD birth in women who have previously had a child with this condition. This research has led to a threshold value of folic acid in blood above which this reduction occurs and the research shows that in human intervention studies, it is not possible to attain this threshold with normal foods, naturally rich in folate. Such folate has a rather low bioavailability and the threshold can only be reached if the volunteers consumed foods fortified with synthetic folic acid. This has led to the mandatory fortification of flour in the US with folic acid leading to a dramatic reduction in the incidence of new cases of spina bifida.

What is laughable about Pollan’s approach is that he himself engages in his so-called reductionism because he devotes at least almost 11 pages to the argument for and against the polyunsaturated fats from plants (omega-6 variety) and the polyunsaturated fats from fish (omega-3 variety), ultimately favouring the latter and then ends up with the statement: ”Could it be that the problem with the Western diet is a gross deficiency in this nutrient?” Now Michael you can’t have it both ways. You can’t decry nutritionists for studying individual nutrients in relation to health and then proceed to do so yourself! And remarkably, this champion of foods over nutrients goes on to argue that older persons should take multivitamins. Don’t take a bow Michael. Just stop doing summersaults.

The final piece in his jigsaw is to dismiss the modern processed food, as though bread, cheese, yogurt, pasta, wine, chocolate, coffee and the like are not processed. Their processing details were worked out long ago and so they don’t qualify for the derogatory tag of “processed”. The first sugar refinery was built in Crete in 1000 AD and that the Arabic name for Crete, Qandi, gave rise to what we today call “candy”. This process requires the sugar can to be pulped in water, the water filtered through muslin and the water evaporated in the searing heat of the Crete sunshine, which is why Crete was chosen and not Cork. And Pollan makes the inevitable mistake of the agricultural romanticist that organic food is nutritionally superior to conventionally farmed food, which is palpably untrue.

Pollan is a California food-head, and among the world’s few privileged elite.  Most of the other High Priests of “Healthy Eating” and their “real food” followers tend to give great respect to his unsubstantiated opinions. Pollan’s best-seller status demonstrates that he has been very successful at “preaching to the choir”.

Although a fellow Californian, I am not a “real food” person, nor a Michael Pollan fan.
There are many different ways to look at the world,   and I see a great deal of cultural bias involved in the way that Pollan views it.  As a well-known Journalist, Pollan’s writings have great appeal for educated, white, middle-class, environmentalists, … especially for organic-whole-food-“health-nut” people … many of whom are also employed by the media.