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Rating: 
Summary: Be Comfortable in Your Own Skin
Review: An excellent book for those who simply can't diet anymore. Weight loss is possible with this program but by the time you get to your natural weight you won't care anymore. You'll already be living as though you were perfectly beautiful. This book makes a lot of sense.
I'm at the airport posting this review and looking forward to my long flight now that I have this book. Halfway through I simply cannot put it down. Just like my delicious cup of s o y f e e. It's a coffee substitute that's been helping me ween off caffeine since my doctor mentioned it. Made from soy it even lowered my cholesterol. Look for it online at www.s o y c o f f ee.com. Oh, gotta run or I'll miss my flight!.
Rating: 
Summary: When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies
Review: I am a recovering anorexic and reading this book has been the biggest help on my road to recovery. Not only that but I recommend this book to any woman who has ever dieted or has ever felt unhappy with her body. this book is empowering spiritually, mentally and physically. I read this book like I read the Bible and I want every woman out there to realize that fat is not bad, food is not the enemy and that there is nothing wrong with the way you are at this very moment. If you ever do anything for yourself and your mental state of mind, read this book, you will feel so much better after the first day !
Rating:
Summary: A great resource for overcoming your eating disorder.
Review: I'd like to address the review below me by "Gym Goddess" before I get started. The plan they encourage about carrying around a food bag is part of their plan to overcome binge/compulsive eating, which is an eating disorder. It might not make sense to you, because it may not seem "healthy" or "listening to your body", but this just proves that attitudes like that are the result of buying into society's disordered eating and diet obsessed culture. In fact, the plan is the most compassionate, truthful, rational way to overcome eating disorders, which are NEVER about food.
Let me give some background of where I am because I think this places the book in the proper scope of understanding. I am recovered from Binge eating disorder, which I have had for about 20 years. I see a therapist about once a month for a good venting session as well as perspective and I'm also on an antidepressant. EDs are never about food. Eds are the result of pushing down your problems by stuffing yourself with food (or not eating it, in the case of Anorexia). This way, you can superficially stay in "food mode".. you can blame the food, you can go on a diet, you can obsess about scales, points, calories, carbs and "being healthy" INSTEAD of dealing with the problems that you have no coping skills to deal with.
"Overcoming Overeating" and "When Women Stop hating their Bodies" are companion books that help set the stage that American society and their obsessions with diets are not only detrimental to women, through pushing women to diet to conform to society's definition of beautiful (for now, a man body with huge breast implants), American society pushes women into eating disorders.
Bad body thoughts are a companion to food obsession that help you avoid your problems. Feeling "FAT" is an ED sufferer's way of trying to distract themselves from what is really going on with themselves by obsessing about their bodies.
How do you escape bad body thoughts? You become your own caretaker.
WWSHTB continues the plan given in "Overcoming Overeating" and takes you through not only unraveling your thought processes, which are twisted around food, but also shows you HOW to become your own caretaker by feeding yourself when hungry, carrying around food in case you get hungry (whichever food YOU crave) and how to deal with "mouth hunger" (which is eating when food calls to you).
In addition to showing you how to initially become your own care taker by FEEDING yourself, "WWSHTB" picks up where 'Overcoming Overeating" left off, which is taking you past the plan to overcome bingeing and mouth hunger, by showing you how to face your problems by sitting with them and looking at the problem from a different perspective. At some point, when food is no longer a friend or a lover, you'll still need to address residual issues which will occassionally cause you to fall into your old coping skill of eating. They show you how to do that!
This book has many gems in it. My favorite line is on pg. 203: "You do not need food when you have yourself." Wow! It is so simple, yet so profound. In other words, when you become your own caretaker by feeding yourself not only on demand, but also when you have mouth hunger, and when you give yourself unconditional permission to eat whatever it is you crave, and when you take all emotions away from food so that a peach is the emotional equivalent to fudge, THEN you can start to unravel the twisted logic that placed you in the path of an eating disorder. And when you develop new coping skills so that bingeing and mouth hunger go away, THEN you will have developed a new sense of self, a self that will always be there for you and where it wont' even occur to you to eat for reasons other than hunger.
And it is through that process, one which our diet-obsessed culture cannot possibly understand, you will have trumped society's irrational standards because you won't buy into them any more!
I would like to personally thank the authors for this book: I *get* it now! :)
Rating:
Summary: You can appreciate yourself!
Review: Recently I ran into an acquaintance. When I asked how she was doing, she immediately began complaining about her body, her thighs, how fat she felt. I looked at her. She was probably around 5'6" and weighed about 120 dripping wet. She looked terrific, but felt miserable. So many of us bodybash. This book will help you free yourself from bodybashing. You can learn that no matter what your weight or how you look you can feel wonderful. Why focus on your negatives when you have so many positives. This book can empower you to go beyond obsession with food and weight and negative thinking to a place where you can appreciate and love yourself regardless of size. And many folks will find these tools help them become their natural size. This is an excellent book as is "Overcoming Overeating" by Hirschmann and Munter.
Rating:
Summary: Best book out there on food/body obession
Review: The best book out there on eating/weight obsession (I'd also recommend books by Geneen Roth & Susie Orbach). Well-written, realistic, and honest. You'll be wasting your money on ANY book that talks about dieting...this book gets to the root of eating problems, instead of offering short-term solutions.
Rating: 
Summary: Good ideas, bad plan
Review: There is a great idea at the core of this book: Women hate their bodies because there is a constant cultural onslaught which tells women that you can only be valuable if you are thin. (Though the authors don't delve into the idea that in addition to being thin you have to be young and pretty, in my opinion, that it is also part of the cultural message.) So, to the extent that the authors delve into the emotional costs of that message, this is a great book. Yes, we should love our bodies...they are beautiful whatever their size, appearance or age. And, women's bodies have the extraordinary ability to create life. Where this book lost me was in the example of one woman who has made "peace" with her body. This woman carries a goodie bag around and eats candy, pies, high fat foods. But, all while at peace with "listening" to her body and responding to what she preceives as her bodies true desires (freed from cultural pressures.) Well, frankly, this woman, in my opinion isn't treating her body as if she loves it. She is treating her body by a seemingly constant ingestion of foods which do not nourish her body. If her body then responds by additional weight, and the problems with come from additional weight, she is "at peace" with her body, any issues come from the oppressive male culture, and she'll just munch happily along. I think that the authors would better serve their reading public if they emphasized that loving your body doesn't mean malnourishing your body. It seems to me a far more empowering message to tell women that they have much to offer the world and can offer that more effectively by eating healthfully and living healthfully.
Rating:
Summary: Good ideas, bad plan
Review: There is a great idea at the core of this book: Women hate their bodies because there is a constant cultural onslaught which tells women that you can only be valuable if you are thin. (Though the authors don't delve into the idea that in addition to being thin you have to be young and pretty, in my opinion, that it is also part of the cultural message.) So, to the extent that the authors delve into the emotional costs of that message, this is a great book. Yes, we should love our bodies...they are beautiful whatever their size, appearance or age. And, women's bodies have the extraordinary ability to create life. Where this book lost me was in the example of one woman who has made "peace" with her body. This woman carries a goodie bag around and eats candy, pies, high fat foods. But, all while at peace with "listening" to her body and responding to what she preceives as her bodies true desires (freed from cultural pressures.) Well, frankly, this woman, in my opinion isn't treating her body as if she loves it. She is treating her body by a seemingly constant ingestion of foods which do not nourish her body. If her body then responds by additional weight, and the problems with come from additional weight, she is "at peace" with her body, any issues come from the oppressive male culture, and she'll just munch happily along. I think that the authors would better serve their reading public if they emphasized that loving your body doesn't mean malnourishing your body. It seems to me a far more empowering message to tell women that they have much to offer the world and can offer that more effectively by eating healthfully and living healthfully.
Rating:
Summary: Best book out there on food/body obession
Review: This book has got to be the most self-indulgent book I have ever read, and I did not find it helpful at all (being overweight myself). While I do agree that overeating & other food behaviors can point to a tendency to avoid emotional issues I think it is very misleading to insist that this is always so. While I do believe that beating yourself up endlessly is counter-productive this notion of continual "body talk" and conversations with body parts and the "inner caretaker" seems excessive. To atrribute eating behavior to male opression of females, and that this gives rise to something the authors call "Bad Body Fever" is a way of saying that women can't help but be influenced by the male-dominated culture, which I do not believe. To me books of this kind speak volumes about the self-obsessed nature of American culture overall than anything else. The often-heard phrase "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" applies here: I say that sometimes overeating is just overeating. It's time for psychobable to simply take it's place in the grand variety of human experience and stop being used as the touchstone and only real answer to all of life's problems. Unless you want to spend endless hours blaming culture for your difficulty, or scraping through your childhood and psychie for the "real answer" don't bother with this book.
Rating:
Summary: When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies : Freeing Yourself
Review: This book will change your way of thinking about yourself and about your role in society. It explains in detail the way women associate many of their problems with food. It encourages you to change and to love yourself unconditionally, and to learn to be a gentle caretaker to yourself. It really is a rewarding experience to read and live by the philosophies explained. Living without unhealthy body obsessions, but instead with love, will lead you to a much happier existence. I encourage you to read this, even if you don't think you have an eating problem. The book really applies to all women. Learn to love yourself, and stop hating your body! I highly reccommend this, obviously...:)
Rating:
Summary: This is an empowering and compelling feminist resource.
Review: This book will change your way of thinking about yourself and about your role in society. It explains in detail the way women associate many of their problems with food. It encourages you to change and to love yourself unconditionally, and to learn to be a gentle caretaker to yourself. It really is a rewarding experience to read and live by the philosophies explained. Living without unhealthy body obsessions, but instead with love, will lead you to a much happier existence. I encourage you to read this, even if you don't think you have an eating problem. The book really applies to all women. Learn to love yourself, and stop hating your body! I highly reccommend this, obviously...:)
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