Michael Neill, the author of The Inside-Out Revolution

(2013)  is an established well known radio show host, transformational coach, and best-selling author of other self-help books. What makes this book distinctive is what he describes as an "Inside-Out Understanding".

He says that our Society has an "Outside-In" mindset:

"The prevailing model in our culture is that our experience of life is created from the outside in - that is, what happens to us on the outside determines our experience on the inside. People or circumstances `make' us happy, angry, sad, fearful, or loving, and the game of life is to find, attract, create, or manifest the right people and circumstances in order to have more of the good feelings and fewer of the bad ones."

The book is based on The Three Principles. These are:

Mind.
There is an energy and intelligence behind life.

Consciousness.
The capacity to be aware and experience life is innate in human beings. It is a universal phenomenon. Our level of awareness in any given moment determines the quality of our experience.

Thought.
We create our individual experience of reality via the vehicle of thought. Thought is the missing link between the formless world of pure potentiality and the created world of form.

Neill says that the difference in making a change in one's mindset in how we view things can unchain us from the limitations we feel bound in, and he quotes: "A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push."

He says to remember that you're only one thought away from happiness, you're only one thought away from sadness. The secret lies in Thought. Thought is the missing link that everybody in this world is looking for. Each of us has a selective choice …by way of thought …whether to experience happiness, something positive and meaningful, or, negative and sad, dragging us down emotionally.

Neill quotes his mentor, Syd Banks, on a transformative moment: "When you are ready, you will find what you're looking for. I don't care who you are. I don't care where you are. If you're in the middle of the Sahara Desert...and it's time for you to find the answer, the right person will appear in the middle of the desert and let you know."

The author points out:  “The moment we see that every feeling is just the shadow of a thought, we stop being scared of our feelings and just feel them....

"Ditching Diets: How to lose weight in a way you can maintain" (2013) by Gillian Riley, is a revised and updated edition of “Beating Overeating (2009)… which was a condensed, revised, and updated edition of the original, longer book: Eating Less: Say Goodbye to Overeating (2006).

Ditching Diets is the third edition of a book containing advice of the author, Gillian Riley, who is an addiction counselor in the UK. It disagrees with the conventional Intuitive Eating advice ‘to eat when hungry and stop when full’. She uses the three core issues of Choice, Motivation and Temptation to introduce a way of different thinking about eating food and losing weight.

Cognitive techniques are explained in terms of brain function, showing readers how to work with what happens in the brain, instead of against it. The aim is to raise awareness of the addictive nature of overeating, creating a healthy, relaxed and realistically imperfect relationship with food.

The hope is that sustainable weight loss will be achieved through the elimination of overwhelming and persistent cravings, obsession with food, feelings of deprivation and rebellious rule breaking. Success with the plan would be successful weight-loss and maintenance while eliminating the need for “diets” – which Ms. Riley defines as restrictive eating plans devised by others.

The author, Gillian Riley, feels that the best way to lose weight is by developing a personal style of eating that one can live with, because such an eating style will be flexible and probably unique to that person.

She attempts to teach people to stop eating so much by changing their thought processes because she believes that the prohibitions normally involved within a “dieting mindset” contribute to the problem.

Gillian Riley Disagrees with advice such as:

• to eat only when hungry and stop when full;
  
• to overeat favorite foods to learn to get over them;
  
• to find the right kind or combination of carbs, proteins and fats, or micronutrients;
  
• to deal with one’s emotions in order to stop wanting to eat so much.

Because:

None of this takes into account what happens in the brain when one’s natural, survival drive to eat (and eat and eat) becomes activated. The purpose of this drive is to get one through the next famine, but in times of plenty the drive causes disaster. Therefore, nutritional...

In Defense of Food” (2009) was written by Michael Pollan who is a Professor of Journalism at University of California at Berkeley. Pollan is not a doctor, a scientist, or a nutritionist - he’s a journalist.

Pollan's message is:

Go back to nature, eat whole foods. Don’t diet.
Don't overeat; instead eat slowly, and enjoy your meals.
Our curse is processed food.
Artificially 'improved' foods and natural foods have very little in common..

The best-selling, "In Defense of Food" provides a guided tour of 20th century food science, a history of "nutritionism" in America and a snapshot of the marriage of government and the food industry. It then works as a hard-sell for the “real food” movement.   Pollan's arguments are basically:

• High-fructose corn syrup is the devil's brew. It must be removed from one’s diet.
  
  
• Avoid any food product that makes health claims, these mean it's probably not really food.
  
  
• In a supermarket, don't shop in the center aisles. Avoid anything that can't rot, anything with an ingredient you can't pronounce.
  
  
• "Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does." Avoid buying foods sold at mini-markets.
  
  
• "You are what you eat eats too." One must pay attention to what is fed to one’s food.
  
  
• "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." By which Pollan means: Eat natural food, the kind your grandmother served because the food industry had not yet learned that the big money was in processing, not harvesting. Use meat sparingly. Eat your greens, the leafier and more varied the better.
   
• In short: Kiss the Western diet goodbye. Look to the cultures where people eat well and live long. Trust your gut. Literally.

 In all this, Pollan insists that you have to save yourself. He says that the government is so overwhelmed by the lobbying and marketing power of the processed food industry that the American diet is now 50% sugar in one form or another, and calories that provide "virtually nothing but energy." Politicians are terrified to take on the food industry. And as for the medical profession, the key moment, Pollan writes, is when "doctors ...