Book Review: The End of Overeating

It’s been a while since I did a book review, so I thought I would plug one of the most important books that I have read in a very long time: The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, by Dr. David Kessler.

Those of you who have attended my CHL classes have probably heard me mention my low-carb lifestyle, and how I managed to lose about 100 lbs back in 1999. At that time, I was at 350 lbs, or a little over double my ideal body weight. I was morbidly obese. Now, after losing 100 lbs, I am still substantially overweight, but 50 lbs over is a lot better than 150 lbs over. I probably would not even be here today if I had not lost that weight, and I certainly would not be up to standing in front of a CHL class for 10 hours. I figured I was doing pretty good, staying fairly consistently on my low-carb, low-gluten (100% gluten-free is a major hassle, and while I’m gluten-sensitive, I’m not in the category of Celiac) diet plan for nearly 10 years now. I did some yo-yo-ing around the 250 point, plus or minus about 15 lbs, and I’m currently at 262. I figured that unless I was willing to undergo weight reduction surgery that I was going to be pretty much stuck where I am now.

Until I read Dr. Kessler’s book. Some of the research Dr. Kessler reported on made my skin crawl. You see, for over 40 years, the Food Industry has been running a series of experiments on the general population, and even without fully understanding the science behind it, they have discovered ways to turn off your conscious control of your eating, and stimulate your subconscious into making you eat much more than you need — and continuing the food input long after you are no longer hungry, even to the point of discomfort. In short, we are being fed an array of what amounts to highly addictive narcotics that just superficially resembles food.

The term narcotic is not hyperbole. One of the studies that Dr. Kessler mentioned was testing rats to see how hard they would work for certain rewards; how many lever-presses, or how high they would jump, climb, etc. One researcher found that rats would work slightly harder (about 5% harder) for cocaine than they would for a small serving of chocolate-flavored Ensure.

Dr. Kessler put some of the loose pieces of the puzzle together for me. I knew, for instance, that low-carb works pretty well, and I thought I knew why. Turned out that I was still missing some information. Upon reading the book, I tried several little experiments, and I discovered some pretty interesting things.

One experiment was to simply quit using artificial sweetener in my coffee. I was drinking several cups (mostly decaf) of coffee every day, and I basically had coffee sitting in front of me at work just about all the time. When I finished a cup, I would go get another. When I stopped putting artificial sweetener in my coffee, the strangest thing happened. The taste didn’t really seem dramatically different. It was still coffee, and still a pleasant beverage even though not sweet. BUT — I would be working along, and grab my insulated mug to take a sip of coffee, and it would be COLD! That never happened when the coffee was sweetened. With sweetener, I always managed to drink the coffee fast enough that the very last sip was still warm.

Building on that datapoint, I asked my wife to cut back on sweeteners by at least 50% in everything that she prepared for me that normally used sweetener. I then noticed another startling difference: I felt noticeably fuller after my meager lunch (typically two boiled eggs, a cup of coleslaw, and a gluten-free high-fiber muffin) than I did when my lunch had more sweeteners. I also dropped a couple of pounds that week. I had pretty convincingly demonstrated to myself that artificial sweetener was a big problem for me, and I was just going to have to get used to eating stuff that wasn’t sweet.

That wasn’t the only thing I learned from Dr. Kessler, and it was not the only experiment I ran on myself. In fact, I’m still trying some new stuff, and going back and forth between different ways of eating to note how they affect me. Click here to go to Amazon, where you can buy the book for about $30. Or, if you have a Kindle, you can get the e-book version for $10. If you can’t afford to buy it, then try your public library. Either way, visit Dr. Kessler’s site, and watch the video of Dr. Kessler talking about his book. It’s a great teaser!

I was not particularly satisfied with Dr. Kessler’s “prescription” for how to deal with the problems of hyper-palatable food, but I now have a lot more information to use in the battle, and I’m feeling better about my chances of achieving a normal body weight than I have in a very long time.