A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year From an obesity and neuroscience researcher with a knack for engaging, humorous storytelling, The Hungry Brain uses cutting-edge science to answer the questions: why do we overeat, and what can we do about it? No one wants to overeat. And certainly no one wants to overeat for years, become overweight, and end up with a high risk of diabetes or heart disease--yet two thirds of Americans do precisely that. Even though we know better, we often eat too much. Why does our behavior betray our own intentions to be lean and healthy? The problem, argues obesity and neuroscience researcher Stephan J. Guyenet, is not necessarily a lack of willpower or an incorrect understanding of what to eat. Rather, our appetites and food choices are led astray by ancient, instinctive brain circuits that play by the rules of a survival game that no longer exists. And these circuits don’t care about how you look in a bathing suit next summer. To make the case, The Hungry Brain takes readers on an eye-opening journey through cutting-edge neuroscience that has never before been available to a general audience. The Hungry Brain delivers profound insights into why the brain undermines our weight goals and transforms these insights into practical guidelines for eating well and staying slim. Along the way, it explores how the human brain works, revealing how this mysterious organ makes us who we are.

Thinking Fast and Slow meets The End of Overeating in this fascinating exploration of how the brain’s dual thinking processes regulate when, what, and how much we eat.

The author explains research that shows nutrition can be a powerful influence in halting deterioration of the brain, and suggests nutrients that may play a protective role against Alzheimer's disease.

A “thought-provoking and powerful” study that reframes everything you’ve been taught about addiction and recovery—from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Myth of Normal (Bruce Perry, author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog). A world-renowned trauma expert combines real-life stories with cutting-edge research to offer a holistic approach to understanding addiction—its origins, its place in society, and the importance of self-compassion in recovery. Based on Gabor Maté’s two decades of experience as a medical doctor and his groundbreaking work with people with addiction on Vancouver’s skid row, this #1 international bestseller radically re-envisions a much misunderstood condition by taking a compassionate approach to substance abuse and addiction recovery. In the same vein as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts traces the root causes of addiction to childhood trauma and examines the pervasiveness of addiction in society. Dr. Maté presents addiction not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout—and perhaps underpins—our society. It is not a medical “condition” distinct from the lives it affects but rather the result of a complex interplay among personal history, emotional and neurological development, brain chemistry, and the drugs and behaviors of addiction. Simplifying a wide array of brain and addiction research findings from around the globe, the book avoids glib self-help remedies, instead promoting a thorough and compassionate self-understanding as the first key to healing and wellness. Dr. Maté argues persuasively against contemporary health, social, and criminal justice policies toward addiction and how they perpetuate the War on Drugs. The mix of personal stories—including the author’s candid discussion of his own “high-status” addictive tendencies—and science with positive solutions makes the book equally useful for lay readers and professionals.

This is the ultimate guide to getting your brain in tip-top shape and keeping it healthy via the foods you eat. With a worldwide ageing population, and cases of dementia as well as severe depression and anxiety alarmingly on the rise, the need to look after your brain optimally has never been more important. It has now been proven beyond a doubt that it is possible to improve focus and memory, reduce stress and anxiety, and think more clearly simply by enjoying a diet rich in the right nutrients. In Part 1 of Feed Your Brain, Delia takes you through her 7-step program, simply and clearly explaining the science behind how the brain works, and showing how vitamins, minerals, fats, oils, carbohydrates and proteins affect brain function. Part 2 of the book features delicious, quick and easy recipes that can form the basis of your new diet while also providing you with inspiration to come up with your own ideas in the kitchen.

This book offers a breath of fresh air for diet-weary people. The book reveals how to choose heart- and brain-healthy foods to make you thin. The former acting Chief of Paediatric Neurosurgery at Denver Children's Hospital, Dr Larry McCleary became fascinated by the paradox of the fattening of America and the brain starvation being seen in ageing brains. His research led to this innovative conclusion: Calories we are consuming bypass our brains and end up being stored in fat cells. He outlines the Brain-Belly connection that describes how sticky fat cells send mixed messages to the brain, causing us to experience persistent hunger, to overeat, and to get fat as a result. His book offers a unique approach that enables us to get in touch with the signals our bodies generate so that we work with, not against, our innate metabolic machinery. This makes weight loss easy and keeps hunger at bay while providing our brains with high-octane fuel that keeps us mentally sharp. By breaking down how different styles of eating "cruise-ship" diets, starvation diets, among others -- affect us, the author reveals a novel perspective on the counterintuitive benefits of brain-healthy fat consumption. Dr McCleary's Feed Your Brain Lose Your Belly Diet and Activity program was clinically tested with a group that called themselves the "Biggest Losers", and the results were amazing. The firsthand accounts of their heartache and despair and how they overcame these feelings and successfully lost weight are inspirational. This book pairs its advice with 7 days' worth of helpful meal plans and plenty of delicious recipes. Learning to choose foods that prevent the production of sticky fat cells, rather than forcing ourselves to eat less, is the best way to feed our hungry brain cells and stay thin.

Leading Harvard Medical School expert and "obesity warrior" (Time magazine) Dr. David Ludwig rewrites the rules on weight loss, diet, and health in this guide to retraining your cells and reclaiming your health for life. Forget everything you've been taught about dieting. In Always Hungry?, renowned endocrinologist Dr. David Ludwig explains why traditional diets don't work and presents a radical new plan to help you lose weight without hunger, improve your health, and feel great. For over two decades, Dr. Ludwig has been at the forefront of research into weight control. His groundbreaking studies show that overeating doesn't make you fat; the process of getting fat makes you overeat. That's because fat cells play a key role in determining how much weight you gain or lose. Low-fat diets work against you by triggering fat cells to hoard more calories for themselves, leaving too few for the rest of the body. This "hungry fat" sets off a dangerous chain reaction that leaves you feeling ravenous as your metabolism slows down. Cutting calories only makes the situation worse by creating a battle between mind and metabolism that we're destined to lose. You gain more weight even as you struggle to eat less food. Always Hungry? turns dieting on its head with a three-phase program that ignores calories and targets fat cells directly. The recipes and meal plan include luscious high-fat foods (like nuts and nut butters, full-fat dairy, avocados, and dark chocolate), savory proteins, and natural carbohydrates. The result? Fat cells release their excess calories, and you lose weight - and inches - without battling cravings and constant hunger. This is dieting without deprivation. Forget calories. Forget cravings. Forget dieting. Always hungry? reveals a liberating new way to tame hunger and lose weight for good.

A food psychologist identifies hidden factors, motivations, and cues that cause overeating and offers practical solutions to help avoid these hidden traps and enjoy food without putting on excess pounds.

Losing weight and successfully maintaining it over the long term is not as much about what you put in your stomach; it's more about what's happening in the brain. In Brain-Powered Weight Loss, psychotherapist and weight management expert Eliza Kingsford shows that more than 90 percent of people who go on diet programs (even healthy ones) fail or eventually regain because they have a dysfunctional relationship with food. Changing this relationship by changing the way you think about and behave around food is what it takes to permanently achieve weight-loss success. Kingsford’s 11-step first-of-its-kind program enlists dozens of mind-altering and behavior-changing exercises and techniques that shows you how to: • Identify and reverse the conscious and unconscious thinking errors and food triggers that lead to the behaviors that drive our food decisions. • Let go of the mindset of going on or off a diet in favor of a conscious quest to pursue a lifestyle of healthy eating and everyday activity--one that can last forever. • Successfully use what Kingsford calls "dealing skills" to outsmart high-risk situations, tame stressful times, and prevent an eating "slip" from leading to a setback or all-out binge. • Find out if you have what emerging research shows is an addiction to certain high-fat and sugar-added, processed foods that can be as powerful as addiction to cigarettes and narcotics. • Design a personal healthy eating program built on Kingsford's 10 Principles of Healthy Eating.

“If you want to build better health and a better future, this book makes an excellent tool kit.”—David A. Kessler, MD, author of The End of Overeating and former commissioner of the FDA It sometimes seems as if everyone around us is being diagnosed with a chronic illness—and that we might soon join them. In Disease-Proof, leading specialist in preventive medicine Dr. David Katz draws upon the latest scientific evidence and decades of clinical experience to explain how we can slash our risk of every major chronic disease—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, dementia, and obesity—by an astounding 80%. Dr. Katz arms us with skillpower: a proven, user-friendly set of tools that helps us make simple behavioral changes that have a tremendous effect on our health and well-being. Inspiring, groundbreaking, and prescriptive, Disease-Proof proves making lasting lifestyle changes is easier than we think.