Format Read: Print

Rating: 4 Stars

(Full disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affliate links).

Welcome back to Your Book Friend! It’s time for another nonfiction mini-review. As the title suggests, this post will contain some chat about diet culture behaviors and food, so if that may be an issue for you, you may want to skip this one. 

The full title of this book is long and full of promises — Anti-Diet: Reclaim your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating. Does it deliver on those promises? Eh. 

Let’s start with the good things, because there are plenty. Anti-Diet is chock full of great information about why diets don’t work, how dieting and anti-fatness became so rooted in our culture, and why it’s important to break free of those deeply engrained lies that hurt our health. I’ve been reading and listening to podcasts about this topic for a couple of years now, and I felt like this book offered a lot of valuable, comprehensive information. 

But does it teach you how to reclaim your time, money, well-being and happiness through intuitive eating? That’s where I struggled with this book. Yes, that’s right, welcome back to “marketing is the problem” corner. I kept waiting for the part where this book shifted from proving why I should want to leave diet culture behind to telling me how to do that. I left the book feeling like we never quite got there. 

Don’t get me wrong — there is actionable advice and suggestions about what you should do peppered throughout the book, and I think it’s a pretty good starting point. But I think some authors assume that intuitive eating is, well, so intuitive that they don’t have to spend much time explaining it. Perhaps it’s where I’m at in my personal journey, but I think it’d be nice for a book that claims it will teach me how to reclaim my life to have a bit more in-depth guidance on, well, how to do that?

If this book had been framed as a deep dive into why diet culture is problematic and why it’s important to feed yourself and accept your body as it is, I think I’d have come away really satisfied. However, a guidebook to what’s next after you decide to ditch dieting, it is not. 

I highly recommend Anti-Diet to anyone who is looking to learn about why diets don’t work and get some history on the issues with our society’s obsession with controlling weight. I am still incredibly glad I read it and think it’s a valuable book — it just doesn’t fully deliver on what it promised, at least for me.