Product Description

Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett tackles the obesity and fitness crisis from an evolutionary standpoint. In the modern jungle of burgers, couches, and remote controls, obesity is an enormous and growing epidemic. Weight-loss books and diet gurus urge us to "listen to our bodies," but our instincts are designed for the African savannah, not food courts. The sugary and fatty foods that we, as hunter-gatherers, are programmed to forage used to be hard to come by. Now they're as close as the vending machine down the hall.

Radical changes are necessary and, fortunately, are biologically easier than small or gradual changes in diet. Barrett tells us how to reprogram our bodies, break food addictions, and ignore our attraction to "supernormal stimuli"—artificial creations that appeal to our instincts more than the natural objects they mimic. Barrett delves into scientific research—from animal ethology to evolution—to show the disastrous direction in which our instincts have led us, and how, using our intellect, we can get back on course. 50 illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #475198 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
An elegantly written and eye-opening analysis of what makes us fat. -- Steven Pinker, PhD, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works

In this cogent, clearly argued, and thought-provoking book, Barrett shows how we are paying the price for our own plenty. -- David Spiegel, M.D. Medical Director, Center for Integrative Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine; author of Living Beyond Limits

Offers us a way to understand the pandemic of obesity that we find ourselves in. -- John Ratey, M.D. Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School, co-author of Driven to Distraction

About the Author
Deirdre Barrett is an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard Medical School’s Behavioral Medicine Program. She is the author of several books, including Waistland, Trauma and Dream, and Supernormal Stimuli. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Must read!
Waistland's main premise is that you can't just "trust your instincts" or "listen to your body" in the current food environment. Barrett goes on a hunt into prehistory to show how our bodies evolved in a world where salt, sugar, and fat were scarce and desirable. Now we live in a word where those substances are not only plentiful, but in which images of them are beamed at us constantly. Waistland describes how refined foods affect us similarly to addictive drugs.
Barrett says we need to learn to "listen to our intellect" before our brains evolve back to the minimum needed to locate the Twinkies in the grocery aisle. She advocates radical change for those seeking to eat healthier and lose weight. Simply ordering the smaller size of fries or eating desert twice a week is actually harder physically in terms triggering hunger signals than eliminating them entirely: more painful in the first few days but ultimately easier to maintain because insulin, glucose, and leptin levels normalize.
Barrett also trashes the "too busy to time to eat healthy" argument. She has a half joking, half serious "recipe"section that points out you can dump tuna over baby spinach or walk out of a 7-11 with nuts and fruit faster than you can get through the line at a burger chain. For those with "no time to exercise," she reminds us the average American watches more than 3 hours of TV a day.
She also has suggestions for society to change the whole food environment. She points out that short of banning foods--which she does advocate for transfats--we can start by reversing crazy policies like subsidizing the growing of corn and sugar and instead setting financial incentives to favor healthy vegetables.
Waistland is full of research culled form academic sources you haven't seen in popular books before. But it's also an extremely entertaining read, with witty observations and delightful New Yorker cartoons. Whether you're just trying to understand our society's health problems or wanting to get yourself back on track with sane eating and exercise, this is the smartest, most readable book out there on the topic.

Novel, good advice!
This book describes why more radical approaches to weight loss may be easier to follow than so-called moderate measures. The human body evolved to survive in the environment of our hunter-gatherer past. Our instincts are for finding once scarce fats, sugar and salt. For our ancestors, the physical exertion associated with foraging for food also kept weights down. Today, most of us lead sedentary lives. Fast foods and supermarket convenience stores appeal to our instincts even more than the natural foods for they they evolved. Barrett offers psychological perspectives for changing how we view food and weight loss and ways of incorporating exercise into our daily routines. She even suggests methods for rewiring the reward circuitry of the brain to reinforce healthy eating habits. Interesting, good advice!

Motivating book!
I'm a fairly healthy eater and ordered this book when I read an interview with the author in US News and World Reports that I liked. I was expecting to learn mostly about why most other people eat aren't paying attention to what they eat, but I found myself getting some tips for my own health also. The book is based on solid research and it's funny, enlightening and sad all at the same time. Enlightening because it's very specific about what strategies work best to get healthy; sad because of documenting the trends that many people aren't going to change for a long time. After reading this book, I'm motivated to eat even healthier and to get back to more exercise than I've done in a while; the chapter on exercise has some great advice on what to do based on whether you've never exercised or are a lapsed jock and how to make your workday more active if you thought you were stuck in a desk-job profession. A great read!






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