Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite

Worth It: A Journey to Food & Body Freedom is a nonfiction self-help/health and fitness work written by Katherine Weber. Weber is a certified health coach who counsels clients who are trying to break the cycle of diet and bingeing. Anyone who’s ever been on a diet is far-too-familiar with the cravings and hunger pangs that long-term dieting seems to create. Rather than adjusting to the decreased intake of calories and “healthy” choices, our bodies seem to work overtime trying to undo all the hard work, discipline and obsessive counting that dieting entails. Weber spent years attending Weight Watchers meetings and became an inspirational leader and speaker for the organization, but she began to want something more than a life spent counting calories and feeling wracked by guilt over a cookie or ten. She began researching the effects of dieting on the body and mind and came to a startling set of conclusions.

Everything she read pointed to a simple solution to her dilemma. By allowing her body to eat what it was craving, she was minimizing the risks of destructive bingeing. She could, once again, eat normally and enjoy life. Weber was finally willing to forgo the perfect slim image she had always felt she had to achieve in order to be complete and successful in favor of a happy, healthy lifestyle. One big reason that drew her to accept this change in focus was seeing her young daughter watching as Weber ate her bunless hamburger while the rest of the family enjoyed their hamburgers on buns. Did she want her daughter to live the life of self-deprivation and reliance on slimness for self-worth that she had grown up living? What Weber found out along the way was surprisingly refreshing. In this book, she debunks the BMI as the be-all and end-all of healthy weights, and she discusses the benefits of the Health at Every Size Approach. She includes an extensive list of references for readers who might like to further their own knowledge on the subject of diets and health.

Katherine Weber’s Worth It: A Journey to Food & Body Freedom is essential reading for anyone who’s spent most of their life losing weight in a succession of diets and “lifestyles” and feeling like a failure when their body’s survival imperative becomes too strong a force to ignore, and the weight comes right back. It will be especially helpful for those who’ve finally gotten the message that diets not only don’t work, but will probably cause you to gain more weight than you started out with. Weber dispels a lot of popular myths about fat people eating more food than slim ones and being to blame for their condition, and she actually points to studies that show how those excess pounds may actually help you live longer. Her discussion of the bullying and fat-shaming currently endemic is also quite valuable, and her own determination to raise children who see their self-worth as much more than numbers on a scale is laudable indeed. There are tons of diet books out there -- this is not one of them. Worth It: A Journey to Food & Body Freedom is designed to help people get off the crazy train of yo-yo dieting and learn to enjoy food and trust their bodies, and it succeeds brilliantly at that task. It’s most highly recommended.