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A Review of: “Change Your Mind, ChangeYour Body”Sandra Friedman MA aa Salal Communications Ltd. , Sechelt, BCPublished online: 19 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Sandra Friedman MA (2006) A Review of: “Change Your Mind, ChangeYour Body”, Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention, 14:1, 81-84, DOI:10.1080/10640260500297325

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Eating Disorders, 14:81–93, 2006Copyright © 2005 Taylor & FrancisISSN: 1064-0266 print/1532-530X onlineDOI: 10.1080/10640260500297325

UEDI1064-02661532-530XEating Disorders, Vol. 13, No. 05, September 2005: pp. 0–0Eating DisordersBook ReviewsBook Reviews

Book Reviews

CATHERINE BAKER-PITTS, Editor

Change Your Mind, Change Your Body: Feeling Good About YourBody and Self After 40, by Ann Kearney-Cooke, Ph.D. with FlorenceIsaacs Atria Books: 2004, 268 pages, $14.00.

In the introduction to Change Your Mind, Change Your Body Ann Kearney-Cooke defines midlife transformation as a whole new way of thinking aboutyourself and your appearance and about developing your own beauty idealencompassing attitude, energy, strength, and openness to new possibilities.

In Chapter 1 “Do You Have a Problem with Your Age” Kearney Cookeassumes that “Nobody wants to get older, of course.” However, it is onlyafter we’ve grieved for our losses such as our menstrual cycle, our parentsand peers, changes in our health and our goals and dreams that can webreak out of old patterns, take risks and move outside the cage.

Chapter 2 “Origins of Body Image” describes the processes that play arole in the development of a negative body image. Through internalizationwe absorb into our belief system the way our body has been talked about.How parents assess their child’s or adolescent’s weight is a powerful predic-tor of how children perceive their own weight. Through projection ourbody becomes a screen on which we project the negative feelings we haveabout ourselves as well as anxiety and other feelings that are difficult tohandle. Identification occurs when we model how our mother felt about herown body. Women who are insecure about their own bodies tend to bemore critical of how their daughters look. Culture treats women as objectsand attributes our power to having a perfect body. Because our bodies arethe one thing we think we can control, changing them through weight-lossor cosmetic surgery can offer the illusion of mastery—an illusion because,in reality, the underlying issues are never addressed.

Chapter 3 “Set a Realistic Weight Goal” explains that body fat increasesas we get older because our metabolism slows down, making it more diffi-cult to maintain weight or lose it. Over two-thirds of the risk of obesity canbe attributed to our genes. Kearney-Cooke warns us of the health risks ofobesity. She challenges us to set a realistic weight goal by reducing our

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Body Mass Index to under 25 which she defines as a “healthy weight” or bylosing 10% of our body weight in pounds. Weight-loss occurs not throughdieting which encourages binges but through a lifestyle that is built aroundcardiac workouts, strength training sessions, taking the time to buy freshfruit and prepare healthy meals, relaxing, and enjoying quiet time and med-itation so we don’t respond to stress by overeating. She encourages us toeat when the body asks to be fed and to reject extremes such as using thescale every day.

Chapter 4 teaches us how to “Beat Emotional Eating”—the main reasonwhy 28% of diets fail. Kearney-Cooke maintains that “all of us will surrenderto temptation” when life is hectic. When stresses outnumber resources,symptoms like overeating or drinking appear to modulate the pain of anunbalanced lifestyle. Because food helps us fill unmet needs she encour-ages us to examine our relationships, to set boundaries with others, to iden-tify relationships that make us hungry, to control our neediness and to learnto tolerate emptiness. For long-term weight-loss it is essential to learn to lis-ten to internal cues about hunger and to establish food boundaries such asprepackaging food in advance.

Chapter 5 “Exercise for Strength and Power” encourages us to look atexercise as a pathway to competence, skill-mastery, and expansion of thecapacity to function instead of mainly as a way to lose weight. Our bodyideal should include a standard of fitness which is made up of cardiovascu-lar fitness, muscle strength and endurance, flexibility, balance and agility,and body composition. Kearney-Cooke presents strategies that will help usexercise and discusses barriers that might stand in our way such as distortedways of thinking, self-consciousness about our bodies, boredom, and over-reaction to mistakes and setbacks. She maintains that “exercise is really themost crucial component of weight-loss because it affects metabolism andburns calories.”

Chapter 6 “Commit to Deliberate Self-Care” encourages us to take careof ourselves and our bodies instead of trying to make them perfect. We canuse strategies such as rating ourselves on how we are treating our body,keeping a daily activity log and visualizing positive body behaviours andreducing stress. It also provides us with skills for defending against “dietsabotage” in our relationships.

Chapter 7 teaches us to “Assess Relationships” which form the contextin which the midlife developmental process occurs. Kearney-Cooke encour-ages us to develop relationships that help us reach our goals, feel goodabout ourselves, and care for our body. Strategies include rewriting the mar-riage contract, revitalizing a tired marriage, energizing our sexual relation-ships, developing an adult relationship with our parents, taking inventory ofour friendships and learning to get what we want.

Chapter 8 “Learn From Other Cultures” is drawn from a three-day work-shop that Kearney-Cooke conducted for O magazine. In American culture,

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real role-models have been replaced by airbrushed images from the media,and popular images influence social expectations of what is consideredbeautiful. These images deeply affect a woman’s own expectations of howshe should look. Because creating our own ideal of beauty is a protectivefactor against body dissatisfaction, she provides tips from other cultures thatwe can use and encourages us to learn from African American women whoas a group appear to have the most positive body image (among northAmericans).

Chapter 9 “Strut Your Stuff” encourages us to stop trying to be perfectand to revise our concept of mistakes so that the next time we fail, “perhapsby bingeing at breakfast,” we don’t waste energy beating ourselves up.Kearney-Cooke encourages us to develop many sources of self-esteem, tofind role models, to confront our resistance to change, to revisit our precon-ceived notions of older women, and to flaunt it—to break rules and ques-tion long-held assumptions about what you can and cannot do as a womanin midlife.

Chapter 10 “Help Your Daughter Develop a Positive Body Image”encourages us to talk about puberty with our daughters and to encouragephysical strength rather than thinness. Physical activities help girls developimportant life skills. They also can lead our daughters to feel healthy andenergetic and they help burn calories. Kearney-Cooke urges us to share ourown experiences with girls, to help them focus on their strengths and abili-ties and develop rituals of transition, to teach them the importance of downtime, and to be a good role model for healthy eating habits. As mentors wecan help our daughters identify their own values and encourage them to bethemselves.

Change Your Mind, Change Your Body: Feeling Good About Your Bodyand Self After 40 seems like two different volumes under one cover. AnnKearney-Cooke is a distinguished and respected authority on eating disor-ders and body image. “Volume 1” Change Your Mind is all that one wouldexpect from her. She presents a well-grounded theory of body image. Herexperiential exercises will be of value not only to women going throughmidlife, but also to the professionals who may be working with thesewomen. Her case studies are interesting and informative. Her tips, sugges-tions and strategies for changing one’s life and building positive self andbody esteem are most helpful. When the voice of this experienced therapistcomes through, we all benefit from her insights and from her advice.

“Volume 2” Change Your Body explicates the weight-loss componentand is by far the weakest part of the book. All of us could benefit from a lif-estyle of exercise, eating healthily (although she doesn’t define what thatmeans to her), self-awareness, and stress reduction, including time for our-selves. As a model of weight-loss, however, this model is limited to womenwhose weight is near the suggested BMI of 25, who have the financialresources to have treadmills in their living rooms and to participate in a

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variety of physical activities and sports and fitness centres and the time todo this consistently. It does not include women who are already close toBMI 25 through restrictive/problematic eating and exercise regimes andwho still don’t feel good about themselves, women who have all the advan-tages of capital and time but are genetically predisposed to being fat (orhaving a high BMI) and women whose medical conditions preclude achiev-ing this ideal. As well, many women who are inactive need far more help inovercoming the barriers to physical activity than the book provides them.This model offers false hope to many women because it doesn’t take intoaccount that many midlife women are fat due to diet-induced obesity whichis resistant to all but drastic weight-loss measures and that once people arefat, exercise does not necessarily make them thin (although it does makethem healthy).

Ann Kearney-Cooke was raised in a dieting culture. Her struggle tomove away from it is reflected in this book. While she presents an alterna-tive to dieting, the dieting language and attitudes that are pervasivethroughout the book reinforce the paradigm instead of changing it.Although Kearney Cooke encourages us to not use the scale every day,using it at all exerts a powerful influence on how we see and feel aboutourselves. Given the unrelenting messages about weight and self-worth inour culture, the overwhelming prejudice around fat, the misinformationabout the health risks and genesis of obesity, and the righteousness aroundlosing weight, whenever we introduce weight loss—no matter how goodour intention—we destroy self-esteem even while we are trying to build it.Kearney-Cooke’s inclusion of weight-loss as one of the primary goals of thisbook diverts women from benefiting from her skills and experience in help-ing them to change their lives into trying once more to change their bodies.

Sandra Friedman, MASalal Communications Ltd. Sechelt, BC

Overcoming Night Eating Syndrome: A Step-by-step Guide to Break-ing the Cycle, by Kelly Allison, Albert Stunkard and Sara Their, 173 pages,New Harbinger Publications: Oakland; 2004, $14.95

There is a paucity of information about night eating syndrome (NES). Thissmall, easy-reading volume is an outstanding contribution. The informationwill resonate for clinicians, but the intended audience is patients who sufferfrom NES. Sophisticated, state-of-the-art concepts are explained in clear, layterms and a relaxed, conversational style. Woven throughout the text is a

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