cover image How Much Does Your Soul Weigh?: Diet-Free Solutions to Your Food, Weight, and Body Worries

How Much Does Your Soul Weigh?: Diet-Free Solutions to Your Food, Weight, and Body Worries

Dorie McCubbrey. William Morrow & Company, $24.95 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-06-621375-0

With the favored formula for getting and staying thin changing nearly as often as the weather, McCubbrey (Dr. Dorie's Don't Diet Book) presents a plan that puts souls before scales-and therefore, she maintains, offers readers a lasting solution to weight problems. The key is ""Intuitive Self-Care,"" a program whose followers look inside themselves (instead of to experts) to discover their bodies' unique needs for food and exercise. McCubbrey offers sensible reasons why the games dieters often play (e.g., the ""fat gram game,"" in which fat becomes an evil to be eradicated, or the ""trade-off game,"" in which the foods eaten depend on the exercise completed) don't work, and speaks of her own struggles with anorexia and bulimia, as well as stoutness. By learning to feed her soul and love herself, she improved both her weight and life; in this warm-hearted volume full of client cases and personal anecdotes, she shows readers how to do the same. Strategies include focusing on solutions rather than problems and eliminating emotional attachments to food. While not every one of McCubbrey's clients emerges a perfect size six, they have all, she says, found a comfortable weight, developed better eating habits and become healthier and happier. For readers tired of weight-loss rules and rhetoric, McCubbrey's book might be a breath of fresh air.