MSI Press Blog

  Did you overeat during Chistmas (right after overeating on Halloween and Thanksgiving) and plan to do it again on New Year's Eve and Day? This time of year sure is fun (from the good food, happy food, and much food perspective), but it can bring pounds and regrets. So, below are some articles/posts with good (and perhaps surprising) reading on the topic: From HuffPost: The Toxic Phrase We Should Stop Saying around the Holidays The Point: We should go to the gym for health reasons, not with the singular intent to burn off calories  From Webmd: 9 Ways to Manage Binge Eating Disorder over the Holidays The point: Take control to not become the tail being wagged by the dog; while oriented toward binge eating disorder, most of the recommendations work for anyone who tends to eat just a tad too much at this time of year From MSI Press Blog: Recovering from Holiday Overeating: Overcoming the Tyranny of Day One The point: Dr. Christina Fisanick Greer, author of The Optimistic Food Addict

The following excerpt comes from Dr. Fisanick's book, The Optimistic Food Addict (Chapter 6):               The roads were thick with ice the night I told my parents I was pregnant. My boyfriend and I broke the news to my mother first, as we sat on that old, gold couch in the living room, waiting for my dad to get home from the midnight shift.               My mother, who had been a teen mother herself, was disappointed, probably because she knew the hard road ahead of me. She wanted me out, and she was sure my dad would feel the same.               I had just turned seventeen and was in my senior year of high school. I was an underachieving Honors student. I stopped caring about school the day I met my neighbor’s blond haired, blue-eyed best friend. And there I sat next to him, five months pregnant with his child.               The trailer where I grew up was cold that night, like always. The lack of insulation and ancient oil furnace meant frozen pipes and the necessit

  THIS EXCERPT FROM THE OPTIMISTIC FOOD ADDICT SEEMS APPROPRIATE FOR WHAT MANY PEOPLE ARE EXPERIENCING FROM THE "QUARANTINE FIFTEEN" COUNTRY-WIDE AVERAGE POUNDS GAINED OVER THE PAST YEAR.              For a good half an hour before falling asleep, I would try to force my mind to coerce my body to burn itself alive. I hated my fat so much that I would imagine it sizzling like bacon in a skillet, dripping like hot wax off my bones and into the ether. I was determined to will my fat to melt away.              The next morning I would wake up, disappointed to find my thighs and ass still too big to fit comfortably in my third-hand Jordache jeans. And later that night, I’d lay prone in my bed, visually imagining my flesh liquefying in my skin once again.              This dour wishful thinking would go on night after night from the time I was 11 until well into my 20s. And yet many people asked me, nearly as often as I asked myself, if being fat bothered me so much, why couldn’

  Excerpt from The Optimistic Food Addict by Dr. Christina Fisanick. Lovely in My Bones (part 1)                            I remember well wanting to be the woman Theodore Roethke knew. She was “lovely in her bones.” I am not sure that I knew what he meant when I first encountered those lines. In fact, I think back then, around fifth grade, I misunderstood entirely. Trained to understand beauty and worth by the media and American culture from the moment my eyes could see, I figured Roethke meant that this woman was physically stunning—slender, sleek, and, well, skeletal. I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to BE her. But even more, I wanted someone to feel that way about me, to wax poetically over my face and form, but I believed that my body—fat, frumpy, and flabby—would never give rise to such melodic praise.               Whether Roethke’s focus remained solely on this woman’s physical form is debatable, but he never utters her name. We never learn what she does, if she is

  You would be surprised where you might find some unique -- and tasty -- recipes. Some of more interesting books have some special recipes tucked inside them. See, for example... Dia de Muertos . Ever wonder how to make some of those yummy Day of the Dead treats? Sula has the recipes for you! Syrian Folktales . Muna has included more than a folktale from each region of Syria; she has also included recipes from each region of Syria. Maybe this is one of the reasons that this is one of our best-selling books. Girl, You Got This! -- you might be surprised -- contains healthy recipes for mothers-to-be who are paying involved in fitness activities. HOWEVER, unlike Amazon's stubborn classification of The Optimistic Food Addict as a cookbook, it is anything but. Dr. Fisanick, the author, shares personal stories of coping with overeating and provides much self-help and guidance to readers. There is not one recipe there! (Seek instead, recipes in the books listed above.) But, should be i