Product Description

In a close-up look at women's food cravings, a nutrition expert presents a five-week, five-point Optimal Nutrition plan that allows women to create a sensible eating program while anticipating and incorporating food cravings. Reprint.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1630002 in Books
• Published on: 1996-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Waterhouse (Outsmarting the Female Fat Cell) claims that food cravings are natural and healthy. Unfortunately, cravings for chocolate and other sweets can derail the best of traditional diet plans. Still, Waterhouse believes her five-week, five-point nutrition plan for mind and body will engage a woman's instinctive food needs, her positive moods and her healthy body. Five small meals a day, she advises, are better than three larger ones because they satisfy one's hunger. Chocolate and sugar are permissible in moderation, as is fat. The author believes that even though a woman wants to lose weight, she need not reject sweets as "forbidden," so long as her diet takes in the necessary fruits, grains and vegetables. She encourages self-indulgence but condemns overindulgence. And Waterhouse promotes exercise as a factor crucial to success in maintaining or losing weight. Although many diet-wary readers may want to consider her diet advice, the more skeptical will find it crass that she advertises her workshop and speaking services here. A glossary and reference section are included.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Now that she's given hungry women some best-selling advice on Outsmarting the Female Fat Cell, Waterhouse focuses on the one food that causes the most trouble: chocolate.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Waterhouse, who has previously written on fat and females in Outsmarting the Female Fat Cell (1993), now delves into the issue of women's food cravings. According to Waterhouse, a nutritionist and dietitian, cravings are natural to women and, in fact, are what get those endomorphins (pleasurable brain chemicals) moving in the right direction. So when a premenstrual woman craves chocolate, it's really the brain's way of saying, "Give me something that's gonna make me feel better." (Chocolate, with its high percentage of fat and sugar, is eminently suitable for the job.) But society dictates that women should be thin, not feeding their faces with bonbons, so women have got a major conflict going. Waterhouse's solution, which she manages to draw out through many, many pages, is to eat a little bit of what you crave, satisfy your brain, stabilize your moods, and subvert society. That seems simple enough, but it's not a whole book, so in addition readers get the five-week, five-point Optimal Nutrition Plan. Publicity may drive patron interest for this one; thumbs up to the premise, thumbs down to the belabored plan. Ilene Cooper

Customer Reviews

Very sensible
This is one of the best diet or nutrition books I have read. Its main premise, which is the focus for the first several chapters, is that you shouldn't feel guilty eating, and you should eat what you're body really craves. She says that doing this will stabilize your mood, give you more energy, and help you lose weight. Many people who have said this in the past have been called flakes and faddists. But this author is a real nutritionist who shows you why eating like this makes sense, and how to do it, as well as how to work it into a very healthy diet with lots of vegetables, how to eat many meals a day, and how and why to exersize. (This book has given more and better reasons to exersize than any other book I have read.) She tells how to eat what you want, eating five tiny meals a day, having one piece of chocolate when you feel like it, and how to focus on the first three bites of what you're eating. She devotes a great deal of space to why restricing yourself doesn't work, and how someone trying to restrict himself or herself will likely eat much more of that craved food later. Towards the end, the book felt a little disjointed, because she was talking more about what you're diet should look like, rather than how to make such a diet, or why diets don't work. Plus there aren't any footnotes, and I think footnotes are very important in a book like this, to make its claims seem more sensible. For example, the book claims that the only study that linked chocolate with pimples was one where the teenagers smeared it on their faces rather than eat it. I want to know what study that was, and to see the list of the rest of studies, otherwise no one will believe me! But other than those two shortcomings, this was a very complete, consistant, and very logical book, and I would reccomend it to anyone, men or women, who want good reasons to exersize, a good way of eating, and to feel better about eating what they want.

Satisfy food cravings, lose weight, and feel great
This book takes a revolutionary approach to a woman's nutritional needs and how they affect her energy level, mood, and actual weight loss. The author encourages women to learn to follow food cravings and satisfy them within reason. Her view is that denying a food craving is denying your body what it really needs at a given time. She also details a simple exercise plan to coincide with an eating schedule that will produce optimum benefits for women. I highly recommend this book for women of all ages, whether dieting or not.

This Work Belongs In Every Womens Library!
Debra Waterhouse has researched and written a practical work which dispels numerous myths of female food cravings. She brings a practical understanding to the complex body chemistry of women while elevating America's favorite food ... chocolate ... to its place of national prominence!

DON'T JUST BUY ONE COPY! ........ BUY TWO AND MAKE A FRIEND!

Karl W. Grube, Ph.D., Editor of Games By Grube