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Reviews tagging 'Fatphobia'
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
101 reviews
clavishorti's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
When delving into the opening pages of James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the choice of a simple yet highly effective writing style. The language employed is not just a means of communication; its simplicity serves as a unique allure, enabling readers to easily grasp each concept presented by the author.
With high expectations, I ventured further into the pages of this book, hoping for the revelation of profound and original ideas. Unfortunately, this literary journey did not entirely fulfill the lofty expectations I carried. While the book presents a series of principles and ideas relevant to habit formation, there is a tendency for the author to rely on concepts and research from external sources, providing more of a sense of amalgamation than creation. I yearned for a more distinct voice from the author himself. I found myself wanting a deeper connection to James Clear’s own insights and perspectives rather than a predominant reliance on external findings. This absence of a more personal touch left a void in the narrative, impacting the overall resonance of the book.
A notable aspect that stands out is the repetition of messages, which, while intended to ensure reader understanding, sometimes gives rise to monotony. On several occasions, I found myself having to reread pages to ensure comprehensive understanding. Nevertheless, it cannot be ignored that the book also introduces positive elements that add value. Each chapter is accompanied by a summary that provides focus and facilitates reflection, adding a structural dimension that I appreciate. However, as I reached the conclusion, disappointment resurfaced. The ending felt somewhat inadequate, leaving me with a desire for a more thorough understanding or a stronger conclusion.
Although this book may not entirely meet my expectations, I acknowledge that every reader has a unique and subjective experience with a work. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones may not be the perfect answer for everyone, but as a piece of literature paving the way for positive change, it offers inspiration and fundamental considerations that are valuable.
With high expectations, I ventured further into the pages of this book, hoping for the revelation of profound and original ideas. Unfortunately, this literary journey did not entirely fulfill the lofty expectations I carried. While the book presents a series of principles and ideas relevant to habit formation, there is a tendency for the author to rely on concepts and research from external sources, providing more of a sense of amalgamation than creation. I yearned for a more distinct voice from the author himself. I found myself wanting a deeper connection to James Clear’s own insights and perspectives rather than a predominant reliance on external findings. This absence of a more personal touch left a void in the narrative, impacting the overall resonance of the book.
A notable aspect that stands out is the repetition of messages, which, while intended to ensure reader understanding, sometimes gives rise to monotony. On several occasions, I found myself having to reread pages to ensure comprehensive understanding. Nevertheless, it cannot be ignored that the book also introduces positive elements that add value. Each chapter is accompanied by a summary that provides focus and facilitates reflection, adding a structural dimension that I appreciate. However, as I reached the conclusion, disappointment resurfaced. The ending felt somewhat inadequate, leaving me with a desire for a more thorough understanding or a stronger conclusion.
Although this book may not entirely meet my expectations, I acknowledge that every reader has a unique and subjective experience with a work. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones may not be the perfect answer for everyone, but as a piece of literature paving the way for positive change, it offers inspiration and fundamental considerations that are valuable.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Fatphobia and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Body shaming and Eating disorder
qteabeans's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
fast-paced
4.0
Clear, concise, and generally non-judgemental. It tries to balance the idea that you can change your life but that you aren't a failure if your life doesn't look how you want. It looses out on being a top-tier read because it was clearly anti-fat and classist at many points.
Content Warnings
Minor: Fatphobia, Injury/Injury detail, and Classism
gracieec's review against another edition
informative
2.75
Some useful information, but a lot of fat phobia and diet culture. Things like talking about people who lost crazy huge amounts of weight with just a little habit change, or constantly equating fatness work only being unhealthy. I took it all with a grain of salt
Content Warnings
Moderate: Fatphobia
Minor: Eating disorder
ashleybeereads's review
informative
medium-paced
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body shaming and Fatphobia
michelle_bracher's review
I just couldn't with this book which is yet another self-help book that assumes everyone wants to either lose weight or bulk up at the gym. The amount of fat phobia, body shaming and food judgement in this book is shocking. Despite saying early on that people shouldn't be goal orientated, it seems every paragraph has a comment on losing weight or giving up 'junk food'. Clear's fat phobia became very explicit when he casually drops the line 'Getting in shape can help improve your health and your dating prospects' - excuse me?! He also bangs on a lot about weight and health despite the fact that you can't see someone's health from their size and that anorexia remains the most fatal mental health disorder. The author needs to do some serious reading about Health at Every Size (HAES) and start looking at his own lazy sterotyping before he starts preaching to others about their habits.
Clear is also guilty of severely cherry picking his anecdotes, claiming in one that the British cycling team started winning more after their new coach started implementing better sleep routines, training equipment, and outfits and neatly overlooks the fact that around the same time British cycling got a huge monetary injection from the British government allowing them to afford all those things for the first time.
Clear is not a doctor, a dietician, a nutritionalist or a psychologist - he is a blogger who has managed to cobble together enough articles for a book.
Clear is also guilty of severely cherry picking his anecdotes, claiming in one that the British cycling team started winning more after their new coach started implementing better sleep routines, training equipment, and outfits and neatly overlooks the fact that around the same time British cycling got a huge monetary injection from the British government allowing them to afford all those things for the first time.
Clear is not a doctor, a dietician, a nutritionalist or a psychologist - he is a blogger who has managed to cobble together enough articles for a book.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body shaming and Fatphobia
anafuentes's review against another edition
had some good tidbits and was enjoying it for a while but then i got tired of reading about being productive instead of fun fiction. may pick it up later though as i only rented this for a few days from my library. also was a bit uncomfortable with the diet culture stuff when i’m trying to get past that mentality. i get it was examples but there was a bit of misinformation even within the examples.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body shaming and Fatphobia
katharina90's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
This book doesn't contain any new ideas but I can see how the content could be helpful for folks who struggle with their habitual behaviors.
The information is presented in a fairly approachable way and isn't repetitive. Unfortunately the author's tone and examples at times are insensitive, judgmental or just... off.
Suggested strategies for developing new habits include utilizing feedback loops, habit stacking, visual cues, temptation bundling, short-term rewards, habit tracking and accountability partners.
The information is presented in a fairly approachable way and isn't repetitive. Unfortunately the author's tone and examples at times are insensitive, judgmental or just... off.
Suggested strategies for developing new habits include utilizing feedback loops, habit stacking, visual cues, temptation bundling, short-term rewards, habit tracking and accountability partners.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism and Fatphobia
anna_hepworth's review
With a good edit and a better set of examples, this would have been a good book. As it was I felt more and more uncomfortable with each weirdly judgemental example that just showed that the author has had a surprisingly priviledged life. Very prosperity gospel and moral judgements on things like eating and exercise.
I ran out of time on the library loan, and I don't think I'll bother with trying to finish it. There have to be better books on developing and maintaining habits out there.
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Adding my reading notes:
Prologue - yeah, interesting
Ch 1 - kind of good, but the weight loss stuff is going to piss me off
Ch 2 - better to make identity goals rather than outcome goals, because they are easier to maintain. So, 'I want to run 10km' becomes 'I want to be a runner' which becomes the atomic habit which presumably we get later
Nitpick on the weight loss / health thing; need to watch out for that as an unhelpful conflation.
Ch 3 - building better habits. more science (this is a feature of this book). However, also a frustrating conflation of a couple of ideas:
I ran out of time on the library loan, and I don't think I'll bother with trying to finish it. There have to be better books on developing and maintaining habits out there.
--------
Adding my reading notes:
Prologue - yeah, interesting
Ch 1 - kind of good, but the weight loss stuff is going to piss me off
Ch 2 - better to make identity goals rather than outcome goals, because they are easier to maintain. So, 'I want to run 10km' becomes 'I want to be a runner' which becomes the atomic habit which presumably we get later
Nitpick on the weight loss / health thing; need to watch out for that as an unhelpful conflation.
Ch 3 - building better habits. more science (this is a feature of this book). However, also a frustrating conflation of a couple of ideas:
Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy
.. as a person who had shit health habits but was absolutely full on in my 20s, and now has reasonably good health habits and shit energy (if we ignore the going to bed issue) that doesn't actually make sense.
The chapter on making bad habits inconvenient or unpleasant in the moment has a whole lot of delayed punishment as the examples, and the whole thing is about quite unpleasant results. This is not something I want to encourage. After all, it talks about fines -- and one of the things that we know is that when library fines are abolished, more late books come back.
CW: fatphobia. Punishment mentality
The chapter on making bad habits inconvenient or unpleasant in the moment has a whole lot of delayed punishment as the examples, and the whole thing is about quite unpleasant results. This is not something I want to encourage. After all, it talks about fines -- and one of the things that we know is that when library fines are abolished, more late books come back.
CW: fatphobia. Punishment mentality
Content Warnings
Moderate: Fatphobia
alg's review
slow-paced
2.0
Do not read this book.
I picked this up at the suggestion of my therapist and damn, I hated it. The author is not a scientist or a journalist. He in an “entrepreneur” who has written one book and has successfully marketed it enough to get it on bestseller lists which in turn won him the opportunity to collect checks as a featured speaker at corporate events.
He regurgitates (a few) concepts from behavior scientists and then spends the rest of the chapter trying to illustrate them with inappropriately applied anecdotes. In one chapter he talked about making bad habits unattractive as a tool to break them. His anecdote is a thought experiment proposed by a pacifist that the codes to nuclear weapons be imbedded within an innocent bystander so that the bystander would have to die in order for the president to access the nuclear weapon. So in this case the bad habit being broken would be nuclear holocaust? WTF. That was the example that seemed the most out of hand, but there were plenty of others that I thought were not relevant or were poorly applied.
There are a lot of graphs that he uses as devises to explain his ideas but I don’t believe they are actually sourced from any type of data. Seems weird to include since he postures himself as a “habits expert” despite never having done clinical research.
Losing weight is also used as a common goal to apply his habit building to, which seems especially tone-deaf considering how much research has revealed about obesity’s link to genetics, and the ineffectiveness of diets long term. He rarely ties eating and exercising to the value of being healthy in itself, divorced from weight loss. Clear states in the penultimate chapter “a lack of self-awareness is poison”. Ironic.
Ultimately I found the book mostly unhelpful. Chapter 8 talks about when dopamine is delivered during a feedback loop and that was interesting. Should have been an article. Not 250 pages of fluff.
I picked this up at the suggestion of my therapist and damn, I hated it. The author is not a scientist or a journalist. He in an “entrepreneur” who has written one book and has successfully marketed it enough to get it on bestseller lists which in turn won him the opportunity to collect checks as a featured speaker at corporate events.
He regurgitates (a few) concepts from behavior scientists and then spends the rest of the chapter trying to illustrate them with inappropriately applied anecdotes. In one chapter he talked about making bad habits unattractive as a tool to break them. His anecdote is a thought experiment proposed by a pacifist that the codes to nuclear weapons be imbedded within an innocent bystander so that the bystander would have to die in order for the president to access the nuclear weapon. So in this case the bad habit being broken would be nuclear holocaust? WTF. That was the example that seemed the most out of hand, but there were plenty of others that I thought were not relevant or were poorly applied.
There are a lot of graphs that he uses as devises to explain his ideas but I don’t believe they are actually sourced from any type of data. Seems weird to include since he postures himself as a “habits expert” despite never having done clinical research.
Losing weight is also used as a common goal to apply his habit building to, which seems especially tone-deaf considering how much research has revealed about obesity’s link to genetics, and the ineffectiveness of diets long term. He rarely ties eating and exercising to the value of being healthy in itself, divorced from weight loss. Clear states in the penultimate chapter “a lack of self-awareness is poison”. Ironic.
Ultimately I found the book mostly unhelpful. Chapter 8 talks about when dopamine is delivered during a feedback loop and that was interesting. Should have been an article. Not 250 pages of fluff.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Fatphobia
audreyxine's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
3.0
This book gave amazing and simple advice. It is definitely going to make a change in my life and many others' as well. I especially loved the bit about changing the environment and approaching habits with a nonjudgmental attitude. I think these are great ideas and I'm very hopeful after reading this. I do have a couple nitpicky thoughts though:
You can tell the author is an athlete. There are lots of sports metaphors and references to losing weight. I was not a fan of how losing weight and restricting calories were always referred to as positive goals- it can be reductive and harmful to do this. While the simplicity of this book is a big strength, the world is not always so black and white.
You can tell the author is an athlete. There are lots of sports metaphors and references to losing weight. I was not a fan of how losing weight and restricting calories were always referred to as positive goals- it can be reductive and harmful to do this. While the simplicity of this book is a big strength, the world is not always so black and white.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body shaming, Fatphobia, and Injury/Injury detail