Essentials: Healthy Eating & Eating Disorders - Anorexia, Bulimia, Binging

Food plays a profound role in our lives: It nourishes our bodies, satisfies our cravings, provides comfort, and serves as a focal point for celebrations. However, the relentless pressure to be thin, combined with conflicting advice on what and how much to eat, can turn eating into a struggle for many people. For them, the pleasures associated with food are overshadowed by guilt, shame, and a fear of making dietary mistakes.

In Intuitive Eating, dietician Evelyn Tribole and nutritionist Elyse Resch suggest a way to overcome this internal struggle and cultivate a healthy relationship with food: Fulfill your body’s needs by tuning out what others say you should eat and tuning in to what your body wants to eat.

This guide explores how succumbing to the pressure of dieting damages your relationship with food, and it presents advice for tuning in to your body and fostering a more positive connection to it. Additionally, we’ll expand on the authors’ ideas with research and advice from other health experts.

Do you struggle with bad habits? Do you try to create good habits that will bring positive changes to your life, but have trouble making them stick? In Atomic Habits, James Clear argues that adopting the right habits will drastically improve your life—but to do so, you must understand how habits work and how you can change yours.

In this guide, you’ll discover why habits matter and the three mindsets you can use to create them. You’ll then learn how habits form and the four keys to changing yours. Finally, you’ll learn how to continue improving habits you've implemented. Along the way, we’ll examine how other psychologists and experts approach habit formation, and we’ll explore how Clear’s theories either align with or differ from theirs.

Food plays a profound role in our lives: It nourishes our bodies, satisfies our cravings, provides comfort, and serves as a focal point for celebrations. However, the relentless pressure to be thin, combined with conflicting advice on what and how much to eat, can turn eating into a struggle for many people. For them, the pleasures associated with food are overshadowed by guilt, shame, and a fear of making dietary mistakes.

In Intuitive Eating, dietician Evelyn Tribole and nutritionist Elyse Resch suggest a way to overcome this internal struggle and cultivate a healthy relationship with food: Fulfill your body’s needs by tuning out what others say you should eat and tuning in to what your body wants to eat.

This guide explores how succumbing to the pressure of dieting damages your relationship with food, and it presents advice for tuning in to your body and fostering a more positive connection to it. Additionally, we’ll expand on the authors’ ideas with research and advice from other health experts.

In Come As You Are, author Emily Nagoski uses scientific research and her years of experience as a sex educator to change the negative way that women talk, think, and feel about their sexuality due to years of misinformation and harmful cultural messaging surrounding sex. Arguing that a scientific perspective on sexuality can free women from unrealistic standards and help them to appreciate their individual experiences, Nagoski considers sexuality from every biological angle while dispelling cultural misconceptions along the way.

In this guide, we’ll follow Nagoski’s exploration of topics ranging from basic anatomy and the mechanics of sexual response to individual experiences of arousal, desire, and orgasm. As we discuss each of these concepts, we’ll compare Nagoski’s arguments to those of other experts in her field, discuss additional research on human sexuality, and add historical and cultural context to her ideas.

Does it sometimes feel like everybody else has life figured out except you? Rachel Hollis, author of Girl, Wash Your Face, wants you to know that’s a lie. Life is messy and complicated for everyone, but once you understand that you are in control of your life, you can begin to live with passion, joy and confidence.

Aimed at women who feel overwhelmed and unworthy, Girl, Wash Your Face examines 20 lies that can hold you back from becoming who you were meant to be. Hollis details her own mistakes, traumas and life lessons, and shares with readers the strategies she used to overcome these lies and find true happiness.

Food plays a profound role in our lives: It nourishes our bodies, satisfies our cravings, provides comfort, and serves as a focal point for celebrations. However, the relentless pressure to be thin, combined with conflicting advice on what and how much to eat, can turn eating into a struggle for many people. For them, the pleasures associated with food are overshadowed by guilt, shame, and a fear of making dietary mistakes.

In Intuitive Eating, dietician Evelyn Tribole and nutritionist Elyse Resch suggest a way to overcome this internal struggle and cultivate a healthy relationship with food: Fulfill your body’s needs by tuning out what others say you should eat and tuning in to what your body wants to eat.

This guide explores how succumbing to the pressure of dieting damages your relationship with food, and it presents advice for tuning in to your body and fostering a more positive connection to it. Additionally, we’ll expand on the authors’ ideas with research and advice from other health experts.

While most people spend their lives chasing happiness, their efforts are often counterproductive. In Habits of a Happy Brain, Loretta Breuning explains that our brains evolved to promote our ancestors’ survival by triggering “happy” chemicals to reward behaviors like eating and hunting for food. In modern times, we’ve replaced those effort-based rewards with quick fixes—such as binge-eating candy or chips—that offer instant gratification but leave us unfulfilled. Over time, these quick fixes become habits that are difficult to break. However, there’s hope: Breuning says that by understanding how your brain achieves happiness, you can rewire it to build positive, sustainable happiness habits instead.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the brain chemistry of happiness, how harmful happiness-seeking patterns develop, and Breuning’s methods for building and maintaining healthier happiness habits. In commentary, we’ll supplement Breuning’s arguments and recommendations with research and additional sources on happiness and productivity, like That Little Voice in Your Head by Mo Gawdat.