The Self-Compassion Diet

I enjoy perusing the shelves of my local online digital library in search of all kinds of self-help audio books. No, not because I'm crazy (although I may not recognize it would I ;). I just have a strong desire to be efficient and continue to progress and just make my life easier.

I stumbled across "The Self-Compassion Diet". I had never heard of it and the picture on the front of the audio book showed two hands filled with big red juicy looking strawberries. I was hooked. Good marketing. :)

The Self-Compassion Diet

Guided Practices to Lose Weight with Loving Kindness

As cheesy as this sounds, I think it has a good concept going. We often look at our relationship with food as a struggle. Love and War: A battle between you and food. Food is an amazing gift that I believe should be enjoyed and I think it extremely important to look at food a certain way to have a complete lifestyle change that has lasting results. I think this book may have some good insights to help us look at food differently. We shall see. I have not read (or listened I should say) the book yet and will be making my comments as I go along. 

The book was written by a Harvard Psychotherapist specializing in eating issues, Jean Fain. It is a step-by-step plan for weight loss that is deemed to work better than all those fad diets out there.

First off, the audiobook narrator is a little hard to listen to at first. I have learned to always keep listening, you will get used to their style. Also, this audiobook is not actually the same as The Self-Compassion Diet book. It is an adjunct to the book, helping the listener learn and apply the concepts in the book.

This audiobook focuses on 3 ways to losing weight and has sections on each.
Self Compassion
Mindful Eating
Hypnosis

Self-compassion decreases emotional eating and helps you make healthier choices.
Self compassion is an awareness of what's happening in the moment with as much acceptance of yourself as possible. This is not the same as self-esteem.
The book then takes you through meditation exercises with breathing, posture and focus of the mind.
I find meditation in general quite relaxing actually, especially when done right after an aerobic exercise.
This meditation is teaching you methods of gaining self-compassion.
I personally am not caring for this mediation guidance. I do not find this useful but I also do not have an emotional eating issue so I would be curious to see if this helps someone who does have it.

Anyway, not a book I would really read again but it had some interesting concepts in it.