Weight or Shape - Finding Your Way to Diet And Exercise

Fat is bad, sugar is worse, exercise is good but hard to stick to, we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic and the end is nigh. – Everyday we are bombarded with bad news about our weight and its adverse effect on our health. We are offered myriads of diets and each new diet promises finally to be the solution that will work where all the others have failed.  Yet, despite this constant drumming into us of how we should eat, drink, exercise and live, we do not seem to be better off. Our waistlines keep expanding and we do not get happier either. Our inability to come to terms with our weight and shape and to rein in the risks of diabetes, heart disease and stroke gives many of us a strong sense of failure, hopelessness and helplessness. After all, we have tried everything, which could possibly work but it hasn’t. Where to go from here? Continue to watch our weight obsessively and work on the incessant treadmill of diet and exercise or just give up and watch the pounds go on?

Weight or shape – Finding your way to diet and exercise critically explores the relationship between nutrition and its various constituents, diets and exercise regimes and the biological, psychological and environmental odds for and against us when trying to lose weight. Because only if we understand what makes us put on weight, are we in a position to see what we want to do about it and to decide ourselves. The book argues that, irrespective of what our weight is, the goal is to feel good about ourselves, to lose the constant sense of failure and to be finally reconciled with all the demands which our weight and shape, and which we ourselves and society make of us.

Written by a psychiatrist with a special interest in life-style medicine and the relation between psychological and physical well-being, this book provides unique insight into the factors that may determine whether we can achieve our weight and shape goals or not. Irrespective of whether we want to lose 10 kilos or one kilo, whether we have tried to lose weight one or ten times, whether we are hopeful or hopeless about our dieting efforts, whether we think fat or sugar is the real culprit, the book offers advice on how to eat, drink and move well, which may help us to develop a positive attitude to our weight and shape and to ourselves as a whole.

Dr Ursula Werneke is a Consultant Psychiatrist and Associate Professor in Psychiatry at Sunderby Hospital Luleå and Umeå University in Northern Sweden right beneath the Arctic Circle. She trained at the prestigious Mausdley Hospital in London and is a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the UK. Dr Werneke's main interests are lifestyle, nutrition, clinical pharmacology and complementary medicine, and her work in these areas has gained broad international attention. Dr Werneke has been included in Marquis Who’s Who in the World.