Thinfluence: Use the Power of Your Relationships and Environment to Get and Stay Thin for Life by Walter C. Willett

Thinfluence: Use the Power of Your Relationships and Environment to Get and Stay Thin for Life Reviews

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  Online Eccentric Librarian

  
  

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  Thinfluence should not be considered a stand alone diet book; rather, this is a an excellent supplement/resource to any diet or lifestyle change program you follow to help increase your ability to lose weight and eat healthier. What this book does that I haven't seen any other do is to tackle the outside social influences that inhibit or make much more difficult the ability to eat healthier. I've read diet books about carbs, calories, emotions, genetics, hormones, age, etc., but this is the first book I've seen solely dedicated to tackling issues of family, friends, workplace, and environment/location.
  
  The book is broken down as follows: Chapter 1 is an introduction to the ideas in Thinfluence. Chapter 2 discusses emotional eating and how to deal with it. Chapter 3 tackles family and how to deal with everyone's varied eating habits (the thin ones, the lazy ones, the stubborn ones, etc.) and strategies to bring them into a better eating lifestyle with you. Chapter 4 covers friends and any organizations you may be in - coping with eating out, eating in various celebration situations, etc. Chapter 5 discusses how to eat better in the workplace. Chapter 6 shows how to evaluate your 'food environment' and make it easier and more enticing to eat the right foods. Chapter 7 also discusses the food environment, this time tackling tv watching and exercise. Chapter 8 goes over media influences on our food choices, including junk food commercials and 'quick fix' diets. Chapter 9 discusses policy - how to work with your local city, state, and other government officials to develop programs and policies for better eating lifestyles. The last chapter summarizes without repetition.
  
  All the chapters have personal examples of people with weight problems and the factors that were contributing to that problem. At the end of each chapter are subsections called Analyze, Act, and Influence. Analyze asks a short series of questions to hone in on your particular situation. Once you add up your responses in the Analyze section, you'll get a score that you reference in the Act area to create the best possible solution to your personal problem areas with weight loss. Influence lists the positive outcomes that result from addressing that chapter's issues - motivation, really. The Analyze questionnaires are typically only 3 questions long and very easy to answer - they work in levels of degree of a certain aspect or problem.
  
  The author does a good job of ensuring the book can target each reader's unique situation. It doesn't feel generic at all and a lot of situations are covered - from kids who want junk food all day, grandmothers who reward with food, to coworkers who pressure you through peer situations at company lunches or dinners.
  
  If the book has a flaw, it's that being overweight is too often a lonely thing but the emphasis throughout the book is to use peer groups to motivate. Readers are given different ideas for finding peers who also want to lose weight but e.g., a stay-at-home mom without an extensive social network could find this daunting.
  
  Thinfluence isn't a diet book and there are no recipes. But it is a lifestyle evaluation and reeducation plan to help with one of the most difficult and least addressed issues of any diet: the influence that peers and your environment have on your eating choices. The book does an excellent job of suggesting solutions, most of which are not drastic, to deal with the 'soft' side of a diet (read: social).
  
  As noted earlier, this is a great companion for ANY diet book or program since it addresses an real problem that rarely, if ever, gets considered. Yet is such a huge factor on our ability to not only lose weight but to redefine our lifestyles in order to live longer and healthier.
  
  Reviewed from an ARC.
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  Joe

  Good intentions drowned in unnecessarily wordy explanations with additional padding. I have no doubt that Willett is a sincere, intelligent person, but I feel like his writing is trying to be unnecessarily verbose. Sometimes less is more.
  
  Thinfluence could have been cut down by at least 50% and still achieved the same goals. If someone asked me if they should read this book, I'd tell them to save some time and read a good summary of it instead.
  
  I'm happy that I've been exposed to the material in Thinfluence, just not satisfied with how long it took to deliver that material.
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  Mathias

  fascist blabla
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  Firyar

  The tile sounds horrible but this book has acutally good advices and is science-oriented.
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  Megz

  I am not prone to reading health books. In fact, Thinfluence was the first “diet” book that I have ever read, although one can’t strictly call it a diet book. I decided to read it because the authors seem to have some clout, unlike some other “health fundis”.
  
  Essentially, more than addressing eating plans, Thinfluence addresses the influences that affect our dietary health. I am not certain that it is a new concept entirely, but it is worded and conceptualized in a better fashion than ever before.
  
  The idea is that although we like to give weight issues individual blame, and we like to tell people that they alone can “fix” themselves, weight and health are really influenced by a myriad of factors, including your family, your workplace and your environment.
  
  Though this is relatively easily grasped, the authors then explain how we can make use of these influences to better our states of health, rather than letting them influence to our detriment.
  
  Of course, Thinfluence assumes that you already want to live a healthier lifestyle, and if you are still at the point of pre-contemplation, it is not going to be quite as useful.
  
  I thought that most of the tips for action were reasonably do-able. Especially as it focuses on an American audience, the advice may be quite applicable.
  
  For me, as a soon-to-be doctor in South Africa, it was an interesting change of perspective and I have some ideas of how I can adapt these ideas to motivate my own patients. The book is definitely written with the layperson in mind, but I think family physicians and other healthcare practitioners could still gain some good insight from this.
  
  Thinfluence is kind of like a meta-analysis of healthy lifestyles. I appreciate that everything written is backed up not only with anecdotes but also with real studies. This already makes it golden in the world of health-books.
  
  I worried a bit that to an unfocussed reader, the book may be another way to scapegoat their health problems. My other concern is that, although the authors acknowledge that weight is merely a symptoms, they do focus an awful lot on weight as the outcome, rather than health. I can see that it is not intended but in some sections it still appears that way.
  
  Overall, a worthwhile read.
  
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  GONZA

  Interesting version of a diet that does not provide menu, but rather establishing a set of strategic relationships with the environment that surrounds the person who wants to lose weight; the question that the author arises is quite effective: in which way the environment that surrounds us affects our eating habits and how our incapacity to maintain a healthy balanced diet. New point of view for the same old problem of nutrition education.
  
  Versione interessante di una dieta che non prevede menú, quanto piuttosto lo stabilire una serie di relazioni strategiche con l'ambiente che circonda la persona che vuole dimagrire; la domanda che l'autore si pone é piuttosto efficace: quanto l'ambiente che ci circonda influisce sulle nostre abitudini alimentari e quanto sulla nostra incapacitá di mantenere un'alimentazione sana e bilanciata. Nuovo punto di vista per il solito vecchio problema dell'educazione alimentare.
  
  THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND RODALE INC. FOR THE PREVIEW!
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  Katarina

  Very interesting to read, full of great information, which seems so obvious when you read it, but not anything I've ever really thought about. But now that I have read it, it makes so much sense that my family, friends, co-workers, and my home or other environments have an effect on me, my mood, my perception, my habits, esp eating habits, and the amount of exercise I get.
  
  The book is structured in such a way that each chapter deals with one influencer on your life, but each chapter builds on previous ones.
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  Nancy

  There's some really good information in this book and one of the better things it does is truly point out the fact that it takes more than will power and exercise to lose weight. If you're interested in pursuing this--and if you live in Fort Wayne--let me know. I see a good group developing around this book.