Mindfulness—a practice of focusing awareness derived from Buddhist tradition—has taken hold of the national imagination over the past few years, with advocates applying its principles to everything from office life to relationships.
The concept has also shown up in diet and fitness titles, and this season’s health shelf is particularly rich with books on spirituality-based eating, along with other titles that shed light on the psychological facets of nutrition and fitness.
In The Joy of Half a Cookie (Perigee, Jan. 2016), Jean Kristeller, with Alisa Bowman, offers a “low-key primer to using mindfulness and meditation to lose weight and cultivate a healthier relationship with eating,” according to PW’s review, which also called the book “healthy and wise.”
Marian Lizzi, editorial director of Tarcher Perigee, says the book speaks to an “increasing frustration with gimmicky diets” that don’t work for many people. Those plans, she says, “rely on willpower instead of addressing the emotional aspect of the problem. It seems like people are looking for ways to have healthier relationships with food, rather than just looking for rules to follow.”
Readers who appreciate the structured style of traditional weight-loss programs can look to titles such as Meditate Your Weight by Tiffany Cruikshank (Harmony, Apr. 2016). The book lays out a 21-day weight-loss plan that uses meditation and mindfulness techniques. “What used to be the domain of the mind-body-spirit books has been becoming more mainstream for quite some time,” says Heather Jackson, v-p and executive editor at Harmony. “The mainstream reader is ready for diet books that take on meditation.”
Authors are addressing physical concerns with a variety of spiritual practices, not just mindfulness and mediation. The Chakra Kitchen by Sarah Wilkinson (Cico, out now) offers an approach to eating that incorporates chakras, or spiritual energy centers in the body.
Cindy Richards, publisher at Cico, says, “People are no longer looking at diet in isolation, but as part of a whole lifestyle.” She adds that the spiritual perspective on eating is becoming more widespread, “in part as a result of the popularity of mindfulness as a philosophy,” as well as “the rise in the trend for ‘clean eating’—the pursuit of purer, unprocessed foods.”
Emotional Eating
A number of titles focus on the intersection of food and feelings. Riding Through Thick and Thin by Melinda Folse (Trafalgar Square, Jan. 2016) tackles the issue of body image through the author’s account of her weight-related insecurity, and how horseback riding has helped her work through it.
Rebecca Didier, senior editor at Trafalgar Square, says the book is an example of a burgeoning “whole-health approach” to diet and fitness. “Rather than just saying, ‘I need to lose this many pounds,’ [you’re] seeing why you need to make that change,” she says. “You’re more likely to stay fitter for longer if you’re doing it for the right reasons.”
The same feel-good, food-positive approach also shows up in Gizzi’s Healthy Appetite (Interlink, out now), by U.K.-based food writer and TV personality Gizzi Erskine. The cookbook delivers recipes based on the idea that healthy eating and enjoyable eating are not mutually exclusive.
“Healthy eating is no longer associated with sacrificing style or flavor,” says Leyla Moushabeck, associate publisher and cookbook editor at Interlink. “It doesn’t have to mean depriving yourself of a little decadence.”
Perception is also central to fitness. How Bad Do You Want It? by Matt Fitzgerald (VeloPress, out now) examines the ways in which athletes can surmount mental obstacles. According to the publisher, the book relays a number of “psychobiological findings,” such as that “faith in your training is as important as the training itself,” and that “there’s no such thing as going as fast as you can—only faster than before.”
Other titles due this season apply therapeutic practices to diet and fitness. Thin from Within: The Powerful Self-Coaching Program for Permanent Weight Loss by psychologist Joseph J. Luciani (Amacom, Jan. 2016) offers techniques for breaking habits that negatively effect wellness. Amacom senior editor Stephen Power says, “Everyone is becoming more sophisticated and self-aware when it comes to their own habits, and books like these help them ‘hack’ their brains.”
In a more clinical vein, Motivational Interviewing for Nutrition and Fitness by Dawn Clifford and Laura Curtis (Guilford, Jan. 2016) addresses diet and exercise through motivational interviewing, a technique that was developed in the 1980s and is often used to treat addiction.
Jim Nageotte, senior editor at Guilford, says motivational interviewing “offers an alternative to coercive, top-down approaches to getting people to change.” Echoing the spirit of many of this season’s health titles, he adds, “You could think of it as the opposite of tough love.”
