The holidays are winding down and it is time to adjust to going back to eating well and taking care of ourselves. This year I will be training for the San Francisco Bay to Breakers and competing in a triathlon. Part of the physical training includes re-training the brain and how it looks at food.
In honor of the new year and your own healthy resolutions, I am providing a comprehensive list of healthy body image books for better health in 2010.
Hopefully these books can help you with your New Year’s resolution to live a healthier life .
Here are my 8 best books for getting a healthy body for the New Year -
- Love Your Body (Change The Way you Feel About The Body You Have) – Authors Tami Brannon-Quan and Lisa Licavoli designed this book to help people learn more about their bodies to start to appreciate them as the gift that they are. They explore the constant negative thoughts, unrealistic expectations, perfectionism and body hatred that keep us down, depressed and struggling. This book is about hope. It will help you end your body struggles and learn to love and accept yourself.
- 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food – In this book by Susan Albers, author of Eating Mindfully, she offers a collection of 50 mindfulness skills and practices for relaxing the body in times of stress and ending dependence on eating as a means of coping with difficult emotions. She gives easy ways to soothe urges to overeat, and to learn how to differentiate emotion-driven hunger from healthy hunger.
- Crave: Why You Binge Eat and How to Stop – Clinical psychologist Cynthia M. Bulik, who is trained in psychiatric genetics, is a leading authority on eating disorders such as binge eating (BED). For twenty years she and other researchers have tracked thousands of people, and have found that BED runs in families. They found an astonishingly high heritability of 47 percent. In this book Crave helps readers understand why they crave specific foods, recognize what triggers their strong urges, and get control over their responses to those triggers.
- Love Your Body, Love Your Life (5 Steps to End Negative Body Obsession and Start Living Happily and Confidently) – This book is Sarah Maria’s personal journey to loving her body and her life with a proven path for those seeking a healthy, conscious relationship with their bodies. This book comes with exercises, case studies, testimonials and the 5-steps, so anyone can learn how to stop obsessing over food and their body and achieve permanent peace with both.
- Meal by Meal (365 Daily Meditations for Finding Balance Through Mindful Eating) – Buddhist devotee Donald Altman, shows how to find peace by focusing on food issues one meal at a time. He shares inspirational daily meditations, including quotes from Zen stories, Native American practices, Hindu scriptures, the Bible, and sages from all major wisdom traditions. He also explores food preparation, rituals, and social attitudes. With daily reflections, Altman enables people to make wise food choices and create balance in their lives.
- Intuitive Eating (A Recovery Book For The Chronic Dieter; Rediscover The Pleasures Of Eating And Rebuild Your Body Image) – Authors and nutrition therapists Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch suggest that the best way for dieters to finally make peace with food and body image is to emulate the natural, intuitive eating habits of very young children. Suggestions include rejecting a diet mentality (often based on deprivation and denial); eating only when hungry; stopping when full; and learning to separate emotional from physical needs.
- When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies (Freeing Yourself from Food and Weight Obsession) – Authors Carol Munter and Jane Hirschmann explore the many reasons why women cling to diets despite overwhelming evidence that diets don’t work. In fact, diets turn us into compulsive eaters who are obsessed with food and weight. They call this syndrome “Bad Body Fever” and demonstrate how “bad body thoughts” are clues to our emotional lives. They explore the difficulties women encounter replacing dieting with demand feeding. And finally, they teach how to think about problems rather than eat about them.
- The Rules of “Normal” Eating (A Commonsense Approach for Dieters, Overeaters, Undereaters, Emotional Eaters, and Everyone in Between!) – Author Karen R. Koenig lays out the four basic rules that “normal” eaters follow instinctively — eating when they’re hungry, choosing foods that satisfy them, eating with awareness and enjoyment, and stopping when they’re full or satisfied. Along with specific skills and techniques that help promote change, the book presents a proven cognitive-behavioral model of transformation that targets beliefs, feelings, and behaviors about food and eating and points the way toward genuine physical and emotional fulfillment.
Here’s to your better health this year as the 8 Women Dreamers begin to train for the San Francisco Bay to Breakers in May.
Are there any healthy body books which have helped you achieve your own personal health goals? If so, list them in your comments below!
May all your New Year’s Resolutions come true.
Veronica
Veronica completed two dreams with 8 Women Dream before rotating off the team in December of 2010.
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