MAS o Menos

I’ve read quite a few books on nutrition and dieting over the years.  What are the best ones?  Here are my top five.  Each title is linked to my full review.  Note that these books are not traditional dieting books like South Beach, The Zone or some low-fat nonsense.  I believe these books do the best job of filtering out the noise and misinformation.

1 - Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink

Why do the majority of dieters fail?  As the title states: we eat more than we think.  This book explores the psychology of eating.  It is a quick and easy read.  Mindless Eating covers dining expectations, comfort food, group eating, package sizes and physical versus emotional hunger.   This book also has a must read chapter for parents.  Read this prior to the start of a diet, especially if you are one of those “all or nothing” dieters.

2 – The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth About What You Should Eat and Why by Jonny Bowden

Dieting isn’t just about removing unhealthy food.  You should be adding more healthy food.  The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth will help you fall in love with food.  Since discovering this book, I’ve become a food explorer.  Eating a wide variety of healthy food is the surest path to being trim.

3 – In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

We are bombarded with messages of fear when it comes to food.  Studies come and go telling us which foods are good and which ones are bad.  And then a few years later, we learn the study was wrong and the opposite is really true.  This is a book to restore common sense when it comes to eating.

4 – The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram Your Genes for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health, and Boundless Energy by Mark Sisson

Regular readers of this site already know that my research led me to try the paleolithic approach to nutrition.  It works.  It works better than anything I’ve ever tried before and with less effort.  Counting calories and running on treadmills is a recipe for failure.  Mark Sisson does a phenomenal job explaining evolutionary fitness and the hormonal approach to fat loss.

When people are first exposed to evolutionary nutrition they can recoil.  I know I did. The best way to approach it is by first finding points of agreement (processed carbs are evil) and then slowly adding new habits.  I’m still not 100% in the paleolithic camp and I probably never will be.  If I can reach my goals following many of the principles most of the time, then that is good enough for me.  The Primal Blueprint takes a difficult topic and makes it extremely accessible.

5 – The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (the first half)

This is a long book and I am only including the first half of it on my Top 5 list.  Changing the way we eat often just requires some education.  The first section of this book covers the industrial aspect to food.  The pollution, the hormones, the environment and nutritional damage.  It is all in there.  The second section covers how things should work in a sustainable system.  This book will change how you approach food as a consumer.  Those changes will help you get lean.

Tags: advice, diet, psychology, superfoods, tips