Book Review: The End of Overeating

EndofOvereatingThe End of Overeating by Dr. David A. Kessler has been out for a few years now and I have owned the book for a few years also!  It starts off slow and I had to restart it more than once but I’ve finally made it through.

Basically, the book is about the biological and physical reason of why people overeat.  Why we have uncontrollable cravings and urges to overindulge on certain foods.  It discusses the brain chemistry and reaction to certain types of foods, especially what he calls ultra-palatable foods.  With each chapter, he brings in a new aspect of these foods and how your body reacts.  He essentially comes to the conclusion that this type of overeating is similar to an addiction and can be considered an eating disorder which he terms “conditioned hypereating”.

This is where I felt it was a little slow.  Though the chapters are very short, I felt like he was just dragging on, repeating the same things over and over.  I just couldn’t see where he was going with this.  Once I pushed past this section, I realized it finally changed topic: how to control and counteract your cravings and uncontrollable desires for ultra-palatable foods.

This is where the book got really interesting and all those dragging chapters that came before finally made sense.  The tips and suggestions he gives are based on treatment of other addictions and he references them often.  The funny thing though is that all the things he says to do in order to control your urges for food are basically what I did when I was first starting out!  I just didn’t know what to call it or how to describe it, but essentially this book tells you to do all the same things that made me successful in losing the weight!!  But he does a much better job explaining how to do it and why it works. 

At first, I didn’t enjoy this book because it was too slow but now I think it is a must read for anyone who is struggling with cravings and food urges (including emotional eating).  It will teach you all the tips that I learned that helped me keep myself focused on health and weight loss.  Maybe this book can help one of you!


As you can see, I didn’t want to give away the tips from the book but here is a blog I wrote about one of the ways I avoided unhealthy eating.  The action of taking a motivating phrase to stop urges in their tracks was one of the tips, and I described my mantra (phrase) and how I use it in the blog It’s Not an Option.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: