You Are WHY You Eat: Change Your Food Attitude, Change Your Life

by Ramani Durvasula, Vanessa Williams (Foreword by)

Overview

In You Are WHY You Eat, food becomes a digestible metaphor. If you are gorging and numbing yourself with food, are you doing the same thing in life? Instead of trying to please others all the time, what would happen if you listened to your inner voice? What if you could find a way to stop eating, stop working at a bad job, stop a bad relationship before you walk down the aisle—stop anything when you are full? Understanding WHY you eat can lead to real and lasting change--both in your weight loss and all other areas of your life.

     You Are WHY You Eat teaches readers to take back control in their lives. Dr. Ramani takes an iconoclastic, brave, edgy, and witty approach to self-help. She teaches you to unearth that inner voice, and let it be heard. She turns all of your childhood teachings upside down and forces you to take responsibility for your choices in life. Through real-life anecdotes and exercises, she gives you the tools you need to live on your terms, not those of the stakeholders that surround you. It will help you trust yourself and act from the gut, while making that gut smaller at the same time. And in so doing, it will help people live lives that are braver, more authentic, and less riddled with regret. You can change your food attitude and change your life!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780762791682
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	01/14/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	426,182
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dr. Ramani isn’t just peddling her wares based on a stack of textbooks and years of education. She lives her message and draws from 20 years of scientific, clinical, and teaching experience. Married for 12 years, raised in a culturally conservative and traditional family, she lived the gospel of duty, expectations and rules, and rarely honored her inner voice. As a result, Dr. Ramani was obese and unhappy. She counseled patients, but she’d never quite figured it all out herself. She was tenured, but felt her academic career was floundering. She wasn’t dancing to her own music.

Today, aside from being 85 pounds lighter and svelte, she’s on top of the world. She’s a reality show maven, a sought after news expert on all things popular culture and mental health. She’s teamed up to blog for Dr. Oz and has appeared on his show discussing food addiction. She writes for WebMD and ShareCare as well. The websites on which she is featured have over 100 million hits per month. Her expertise has been tapped by a long list of national print, online, cable, and broadcast media. She’s appeared in two reality TV shows as well and is currently shooting a pilot of her own for Oxygen. TV loves Dr. Ramani because she avoids the jargon, speaks from the heart and from experience, and resonates with everyone watching.

She has counseled her patients out of hundreds and hundreds of pounds of excess weight. Most of them go to see her to lose weight and end up, after a very short time, realizing, they are there to fix something else—the food and weight is just the portal. What started as a consultation about weight loss becomes a journey into finding love, changing careers, living dreams, and being authentic.

            The American Association of University Women awarded Dr. Ramani the Emerging Scholar Award in 2002. It’s given to one woman, nationwide, across all fields annually to recognize one of the most promising young female scholars in the country. California State University of Los Angeles awarded her the Outstanding Woman Award in 2003. Dr. Ramani is also part of the governance of the American Psychological Association, recently completing a term as Chair of the Committee on Psychology and AIDS, and currently a member of the Committee on Women and Psychology. Through her work on this committee she is informing policy on critical issues such as the sexualization of women and girls, and human trafficking.

Read an Excerpt

"Start by asking yourself one simple, but significant question: Does your life look the way you want it to look? Sadly, most of us are living in a script written by other people, and as a result, many of us learned long ago to stop trusting our own instincts. If we can't listen to our bodies and do something as simple as push away a plate of food when we are full, how can we listen to ourselves when it comes to the rest of our lives?"

   

Table of Contents

Foreword vii

Introduction ix

Part 1 The WHY Foundation 1

Chapter 1 Tapping Your Spider Senses 3

Chapter 2 Stakeholders and Their Hold on You 16

Chapter 3 The Not-So-Golden Rules 41

Chapter 4 Conquering Fear 59

Chapter 5 Gatekeeping 75

Chapter 6 Using Data Wisely 87

Chapter 7 The Promise of One 97

Part 2 Join the Dirty-Plate Club 103

Chapter 8 How Do You Eat? 104

Chapter 9 Brains, Behavior, and Bagels 121

Chapter 10 Mastering the Cookie Jar-Knowing How to Pull the Triggers 135

Chapter 11 Quit the Clean-Plate Club 152

Part 3 Eating Patterns = Life Patterns 163

Chapter 12 Food as Metaphor 164

Chapter 13 Love and Relationships: When Do You Hold and When Do You Fold? 169

Chapter 14 Full from Your Job? Follow Your Dream 189

Chapter 15 Retail Therapy 202

Part 4 Taking Risks and Learning to Fly 211

Chapter 16 The Body Count 212

Chapter 17 The Mindful Moment 224

Chapter 18 Anarchy or Authenticity? 236

Epilogue 243

Acknowledgments 245

Notes 248

Resources/Tools 254

Reading Group Guide 257

Index 260

About the Author 267

Editorial Reviews

I recommend You Are Why You Eat to anyone who eats and anyone who wants to be happy. I really liked how Dr. Ramani Durvasula shared her own stories from her life about weight gain and love loss. In a very entertaining way, she explains how she took control of her life, lost weight and found love.” —Cheryl Hines

is a groundbreaking book that will help people take control of their lives and more importantly live a life that is authentic. By connecting readers to their emotions and learning to find an authentic self, Dr Ramani tackles the most important factors that create our issues around food. She reveals that many of our problems begin with food and our desire to please others. Once we can master the food triggers and listen to ourselves we can also learn to self-regulate in other areas of our lives. A brilliant new look at living an authentic life. Read this book and change your life!” —Dr. Drew Pinsky
 
“Dr. Ramani is really onto something with her philosophy, ‘The Promise of One.’ It's a simple approach to changing your life one moment at a time. .. and it can work!”
—Jeff Probst

“Dr. Ramani Durvasula provides an insightful look into what causes eating problems for many women today, and offers a practical step-by-step guide for how to gain control of why you eat and ultimately who you are.  This book can change the way you eat and the way you live.” —Fary M. Cachelin, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, UNC Charlotte


“We have long known that health and well-being are directed by physical, emotional, and social conditions. This multifaceted and intelligent understanding to eating and weight loss is what Dr. Ramani keenly investigates in her book You Are WHY You Eat. Dr. Ramani provides astute insights and practical suggestions that inform all of us on how we must listen to our bodies, attend to our emotions, and be aware of our social environments if each of us is to effectively manage what we eat and control weight in a manner that attends to whole of who we each are. This book draws on state of the art scientific knowledge from the behavioral and health sciences and translates this knowledge into a practical and helpful suggestions and strategies.” —Perry N. Halkitis, Ph.D., Professor of Applied Psychology, Public Health, and Medicine, New York University

From the Publisher

Jane Jacobs’s soothing, full-bodied voice offers a richly satisfying narration in this examination of the reasons we overeat. Jacobs’s lilt conveys the irony and insights of the quotations that introduce the chapters, and her deft pauses emphasize key words and concepts in the material itself. Jacobs’s voice is clear and direct when she asks questions that demand introspection about goals, relationships, and behaviors. Her tone is persuasive when offering suggestions on how to recognize the areas in life that cause the emptiness and angst that lead to overeating. Though the introduction is drawn out and some of the content is repetitive, Jacobs’s consistently energetic reading provides the listener with encouragement to address vital issues, modify unhealthy behavior, and stay on track with goals. M.F. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2013 - AudioFile