When I chit-chat with people, I always ask them if they have read anything interesting lately. I can’t talk about television or movies or music or sports or technology in an intelligent manner. But I can bore you with the latest book that’s captured my brain cells.

The end of overeating: Taking control of the insatiable American appetite by David A. Kessler

The author graduated from Harvard medical school and the University of Chicago law school and his book is really good. He gives the science behind food addiction, what your brain is doing and the cue-urge-reward from the environment that produces your food-eating habits.

You do it because you’ve done it.

“Along with taste and other sensory characteristics, our preferences are strongly influenced by what has happened to us in the past. A history of personal experience gives particular foods an emotional charge, and those emotions become lodged in our memory.”

The pleasure in food lies in the anticipation. The cues of being in the kitchen or smelling a certain smell or hearing the package crinkle all create the urge to eat something. Oh, you remember how good this tasted! And the reward centers in your noggin light up when you succumb. Do it enough and it becomes a habit. You don’t think about it.

Combine sugar and salt and fat and you create deliciousness. This combination is also extremely addictive because it makes your brain’s reward center go wild. Hog wild.

The food industry does its best to exploit this addiction, making foods highly palatable, easy to chew and swallow, loaded with yum, and adding flavor chemicals instead of what we would normally think of as ingredients, to make it cheap enough for the masses.

We eat way more calories a day than we should because the calories are so easy and delicious.

You change your food addiction habit the same way you change any habit. Figure out the cue and interrupt it or avoid it.

This book had some good information on macronutrients as well. A calorie is a calorie, but how long that calorie sits in your stomach determines how long until you’re hungry again.

• Protein strolls out of your stomach at four calories per minute. It’s the best at satiation.
• Sugar flees your stomach at ten calories a minute. You’ll be hungry again soon, but it does give you an immediate burst of energy.
• Fat lingers in your stomach, leaving at two calories per minute. But our stomach likes fat, so it doesn’t tell our brain that we’re full as quickly as it does with the other macronutrients, so it’s easy to overeat foods high in fat. Once you’re done eating though, fat will keep you full.
• The body processes foods high in fiber slowly, so those will also keep your stomach satisfied.

His words on exercise are spot on, so I’ll just leave them here.

“Exercise is a substitute reward. Exercise engages the same neural regions as other mood-enhancing rewards and produces similar chemical responses. Just as a smoker needs a cigarette, someone who exercises regularly comes to depend on the positive effects it produces.

Exercise can also reinforce an altered self-image. You begin to identify yourself as a healthy, athletic person, someone capable of making positive choices, and that in turn gives you an incentive to maintain control.”

The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life by Noah Lukeman

This book gives advice and exercises and strategies and thoughts on writing fiction. Fiction! I always imagine that word with an exclamation point.

I can read some of my past blog posts and appreciate some bit of profundity or chuckle at a turn of phrase. Did I really create that? That’s fun.

But I read my fiction and only cringe. The stories are so stilted and the characters are so flat. I need to get better at this because I have a mystery novel that needs freedom from my brain.

I didn’t do any of the exercises in the book, but I think I probably should. You should too if you want to write fiction.

We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere by Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Nadel

I picked this book up because Gillian Anderson is Dana Scully.

All of these self help books are the same, aren’t they? Meditate. Be good to your body. Be nice to yourself. I’m sorry to say that this one rather bored me and I didn’t like the style, so I stopped about 60 pages in.

The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin

The author is a child prodigy, famous chess player, and one of the best tai chi chuan dudes in the world.

He has an excellent mentality and approach to life with a growth mindset and the understanding that immersion and flow make mastery. It takes thousands of hours mindfully puzzling through things to become the best. You have to examine it on the micro level to understand the macro level.

This guy operates in a different zone. He talks about intuition and I got a bit lost. Of course he also recommends meditation and, interestingly enough, high intensity cardio interval training to get your stress levels under control. I can take that last suggestion. HIIT cardio is my favorite cardio.

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina

I cried through 70% of this book. We meet elephants in Africa, wolves in the U.S., and whales and dolphins in the ocean. These creatures are Who creatures and not It creatures. They are all individuals with distinct personalities who matter to their social group. We tag along with the people who have been watching and studying these specific animals for years and we get more than a glimpse into their lives.

People kill these creatures because people are oftentimes terrible. It’s heart-wrenching getting to know a specific, majestic animal and then learning of its horrible, premature death. I do not recommend this book because it will haunt you afterwards. Sometimes, the world is so sad and wrong.