If you truly wish to lose weight permanently, or understand how you are manipulated on a daily basis by the food industry, this is the book for you. Only with true understanding of what you are facing can change come. For those who are disappointed that this is not similar to other step-by-step weight loss books that walk the reader through a set program, there seems to be a disconnect in understanding what this book says. There is NO single effective way to overcome "hypereating" except through education and understanding your own motivations and behavior. The bottom line is that these foods, highly processed foods need to be avoided. How you avoid them is an individual choice however.

I have to say I was quite disappointed by this book. Kessler has great credentials, and I expected a fairly dense tome full of facts and figures. Instead, this is a breeze of a book - I finished it in less than three hours - full of examples using Kessler's own food idiosyncrasies. His prescription for how to break the cycle sounds an awful lot like Weight Watchers, quite honestly. I don't really see anything new here for anyone with more than a passing interest in the food industry. I mean, big surprise, Applebee's doesn't employ massive numbers of sous chefs in their restaurants, it all comes to them premade and ready to heat up. I suppose if you had no interest whatsoever in where your food came from and all of a sudden it was sprung on you that a chicken nugget isn't really the same thing as a chicken leg, well, it might be valuable.

Great read. I feel I benefited greatly from reading this book. Eating out is a whole different world now!

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. While it validated most of the information I had and many things I suspected, it still did not leave me anywhere near hopeful for either my own future or the future of this country regarding obesity. He's made a powerful case to the layperson regarding the action of sugar, fat and salt on the body and mind. He says that conditioned hypereating is at the core of it all, and that our bodies are engineered to react to the combinations of sugar, fat and salt like powerful, addictive drugs. He clearly makes a point that corporations are engineering food to fill this addiction very consciously...addicts cough up money...and after all, there will always be more addicts, seeing that unlike other addictive substances which can be avoided, food must be a part of every person's life. His solutions are mostly based on cognitive therapy; remapping the brain's response to food, and changing our patterns and behaviors to stop overeating and eating bad foods. He says that hypereating is not a failing of will...more like a failure of our construction...and this can be overcome. But when it comes down to it, I feel no hopefulness from this book. Only a sense that my understanding has been correct; that the corporations will do anything to get humans hooked by combinations of ingredients that will kill us as assuredly as tobacco, alcohol, or other drugs. My sense of outrage is, therefore, justified.