Now That You've Lost It
Hi all,
I’ve meant and meant and meant to write a note about this book, but you all know about that road to **** being paved with good intentions. Anyway, without further ado, my thoughts on “Now That You’ve Lost It.”
If we didn’t have Ann Fletcher, Drs. Pamela Peek and Walter Willett, and even Bill Phillips, among others, writing extremely insightful and wonderful helpful books, I might be more enthusiastic about this book. But as it is, they’ve beaten her to the punch, even though she wrote her book first.
Author Joyce Nash hold two Ph.D.s, is a practicing psychologist and is a widely published author. She certainly has the academic credentials, which seem appropriate because this book feels more like a textbook than a self-help book.
I’d even forgotten that I had it. I found it when I was cleaning out bookshelves, and when I opened it, I saw why it had slipped my mind…I didn’t make it past Page 40. This time, I did some quick skimming.
Everything she says is true enough, but it doesn’t have the immediacy of, say, “Thin for Life.” Let me just give you one example: “Obesity if a lifestyle problem,” she writes. “It involves behavior and thinking, and it exists in a social as well as a personal context. Staying at one’s best weight requires a strategy of lifelong weight management that need not be obsessive or overwhelming. Rather, maintaining goal weight needs to be seen as a kind of personal hygiene routine—something one devotes regular but minimal attention to every day, much as one brushes one’s teeth daily.”
If this were Pam Peek or Ann Fletcher, they would go on to flesh out this paragraph with interviews, examples, stories. Dr. Nash doesn’t go that route. Elsewhere in her book, she does use examples of people who have overcome various aspects of weight management, but for me, it just doesn’t have the immediacy and the ring of truth that I find in the other writers, and especially here on 3FC.
“Now That You’ve Lost It” is not a bad book, and if the others hadn’t been written, I’d be pleased to have it. It may be that it suffers simply because it came first …. 1992. So much as been learned and explored since then that writers who have come after her were the lucky beneficiaries.
Let me know if you have any questions.
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