Judson Brewer

The thing about diet and exercise and weight loss is that they mostly don't work. Humans are immensely resistant to ongoing changes in body composition. Brewer, a psychiatrist, neurologist, and mindfulness coach, offers his summary of what might be a more successful program. The basic premise is that you have to break the habits of disordered eating and learn to listen to your body again. Modern snack foods are addictive, at the perfect triple point of sweet, salty, and fatty. Due to past show more experiences, we eat to deal with moods like depression, anxiety, and boredom. Obviously, you can't eat your way out of a bad mood.

Processed food was literally designed for you to eat. Organic is just some crap they found on the ground.

There's a lot of neurojargon, like references to the orbitofrontal cortex, dopamine, and various memory systems, but the basic technique is mindfulness based. No one has enough discipline to simply override the urge the eat, especially not over the long term. What is possible is to recognize the patterns and moods that trigger compulsive eating and develop new habits. Techniques like mindful eating, using attention to savor food rather than shoveling it down, and RAIN (recognize, accept, investigate, nurture) on junk food cravings can help us relearn 'proper' experiences around eating an entire carne asada super burrito, or a pound of jellybeans. As we learn to take pleasure in healthier foods and remember that junk food comes with a price, better eating habits come naturally.

This book recommends a 21 day course of exercises. There's also an Eat Right Now app, which I found expensive ($100 a year), and a little intrusive with notifications. I can do mindfulness for free, ya know. I'll also say as a natural born hater, I am not doing a loving-kindness meditation. Finally, I just have some stress and boredom eating, which is likely amenable to this kind of intervention. If you have a diagnosed eating disorder, I'm not sure mindfulness is the right approach. show less

This checked a lot of boxes for my preferred nonfiction reading, with lots of good review from past reads on habits, addiction, brain function, and mindfulness.
The book has been described by others as accessible, and I guess it is, especially in comparison to what I imagine the scholarly articles and books referenced in his notes would be like. But I still found it challenging, and I can’t I say I completely understood every concept he introduced. Even though it had a diagram and show more everything, I still didn’t completely get dependent origination, for example. Thankfully, I don’t think that was vital to getting something out of the book.
He spent Part 1 giving examples of different types of habits and addictions, and those chapters were interesting, especially the idea of addiction to self. In Part 2, he shared his ideas for how a mindful approach can be used to break habits and addictions. I thought chapter 10—Training Resilience—was the best chapter in this section, and if he’d lost me a bit during the previous chapter, this one brought me back.
The main idea is to use your triggers or stressors as a compass to see which way you’re going and its ultimate destination. In other words, instead of fighting against what’s happening, you take a closer look, and a closer look at how you’re inclined to react, instead of just mindlessly reacting. His idea is that doing so will free you up to choose a different action than what’s been your default. One thing I really want to retain is the following passage:

When starting any type of un-or antiresistance training...we can apply these three types of gym metrics to our reactivity throughout the day. How often do we react by taking something personally?...How heavy is the burden, meaning, how contracted do we get? And finally, How long do we carry it around? Gaining a clear view of our reactivity will naturally point us to its opposite: letting go.

I read it at chapter-a-day speed, which was about my limit on how much I could absorb at a time.

Recommended. show less

The topic is incredibly interesting and the author obviously knowledgeable, but the book is not well written. It's choppy, filled with (ironically) self-referential stories about the author's own experiences, and doesn't really provide much instruction, unless you count the the epilogue promoting his startup. He seems to try to write a hybrid of a pop science and self help book and a memoir and it just doesn't hold together.

I read this book to see what it can bring to the improvement of teaching and learning - although this is not quite its focal point.
However, Brewer clearly connects addiction and its perceived rewards to the human condition and our way of (non)thinking, charts his life's course as an example of how meditation can move a person away from addictive behavior to mindfulness and joyful immersion into meaningful activities such as learning and working. A good read that should spark some interesting show more thoughts. show less