The No Need to Diet Book: Become a Diet Rebel and Make Friends with Food
Our obsession with being healthy and living forever has driven us to push our bodies to the absolute limits, but still every year we’re being told how unhealthy we are as a population. Despite a wealth of information at our fingertips, there are still so many things we get wrong about food and health.
The No Need To Diet Book explains the reasons why diets and over exercising don’t work; the problems with eating for aesthetic goals; the science behind orthorexia, food anxieties and emotional eating, and other unhealthy habits formed by misinformation. This book will challenge our misconceptions about what is healthy, and get to the heart of it using evidence-based science.
Why do we get so hung up about food?
What is health?
Think about that question for a moment. How would you define health? Would you say you are healthy? How important is your health? What would you sacrifice in order to achieve good health?
These are really tough questions, and I don’t think there is necessarily one right answer. Health is an elusive term, and one that many people think they understand until they’re asked about it. The most obvious and common answer is that health is the absence of disease. But how can health merely be the state of being free from illness or injury? What if someone has a chronic disease or a genetic condition? Does that mean they are never healthy?
One day, the World Health Organization decided to define health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’, a step further than the ‘health = no disease’ idea. But this has been subject to a great deal of criticism, particularly due to the rise of chronic disease. To be in a ‘complete’ state of health is nigh on impossible for most people most of the time, and so this goal is quite unrealistic. Also, the WHO definition of health was set in the 1940s, which is quite some time ago, and hasn’t been updated since, even though the health landscape has shifted dramatically. Whereas we used to be mostly affected by communicable diseases, like polio or smallpox, now we are faced with chronic conditions that affect people for many years of their life.
Is poor health something that always needs to be fixed? Some would argue that we have a moral responsibility to be healthy, but again, what if that’s not possible? If you look anywhere in the media or to public-health initiatives, you’ll see messages about how we’re going through a chronic health crisis. But of course, we have an answer to pretty much all these chronic diseases: whether it’s heart disease or diabetes, the answer is simple – we have too many fat people! Put them all on diets and everything will be fine!
Сategory: Cooking, Diets | Health, Self-improvement
Date: March 7th, 2019
Number of pages: 271 pages
Language: English
Format: EPUB
