Intuitive Eating This Critique Focuses on Chapter

Intuitive Eating

This critique focuses on Chapter Eighteen of the book Intuitive Eating: A Recovery Book for the Chronic Dieter. By Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. The writers are instructing their audience on how to eat successfully in order to maintain a satisfactory and still healthy weight. They use an outline form and cover their topics in an orderly fashion. The goal of Chapter Eighteen is to discuss dieting. Its objectives are to present readers with information that supports their theory that dieting is unhealthy, inefficient for weight control, and even dangerous, and to inform readers of a viable alternative to dieting as it is commonly practiced.

The authors use subtitles used to present steps. Step One is Recognize and Acknowledge the Danger That Dieting Causes. Step Two is Be Aware of Diet-Mentality Traits and Thinking. Step Three: Get Rid of the Dieter's Tools. (Tribole and Resch, 1995) The steps are really instructions, followed by supporting facts, statistics, quotes, the authors' and other's opinions, and personal anecdotes from the authors' work as dietitians and nutritionists.

This article is written with an informative tone in a scholarly and slightly dry style. It imparts a great deal of information in an attempt to persuade the reader of the authors' expertise. The supporting information is factual, concise, accurate, and plentiful. There is much variety among their sources, almost too much. At times the article just seems to be a vain and plodding list of reasons why the authors know what they are talking about. However, there is a lot of good information and the authors' treatment of weight control is a good one. In this writer's opinion, Tribole and Resch met the goal of their writing in this article. This writer personally did not particularly enjoy this reading but appreciated the extent of the information at the end of it.

The Stress Myth

In The Stress Myth, Richard Reeves discusses the prevalence of surveys that claim today's workforce is subject to demands that are "stretching us beyond human limits, demanding punishing hours and eroding personal relationships." (2001) Reeves says that the reverse is actually true: that the term "stress" is overused, misrepresented, and exaggerated. He says that the stress myth is being perpetuated by surveys that manipulate respondents into answering Yes to the question of whether or not they experience job-related stress by defining this as "consistently working more than forty hours per week" and "thinking about work outside working hours." (Reeves, 2001) He says that, in reality, as workers we have never had it so good. (2001)

The tone of this article was argumentative. Reeves' point-of-view was made clear immediately as soon as the title: The Stress Myth. The title makes it clear to the reader that this author is going to present a concept, in this case stress, and argue against it in some way. The way that Reeves does this is with the claim that job-related stress as a sociological problem is being distorted and exaggerated by manipulative surveys and inaccurate statistics. His argument is that stress in and caused by the work place is actually non-existent, manufactured and inflated by these melodramatic surveys. He says that at its worst, work-place stress is merely a form of ambition and a drive to be successful, or in other words, stress is a healthy response to difficult but overall satisfying professional challenges and demands.