Registered dietitian and certified life coach Karie Cassell offers readers a new perspective on weight loss in her new book The Domino Diet: How to Heal from the Inside Out. She advocates for a more informed perspective on weight loss and overall health that is less focused on calories and diet and more focused on the big picture of healing yourself on multiple levels. Rather than succumb to the effects of yo-yo dieting where you lose a few pounds, then gain them back, and then try again, Cassell recommends using his Domino Diet Formula, which helps you adjust various areas of your life. When all those areas are taken care of, they will fall into place like a domino effect.
As Karie explains, the reason diets often don’t work is that when we lose weight, the subconscious can try to find it again, leading to inevitable plateaus and little success from yo-yo dieting. However, when we trade yo-yos for dominoes, we will be much more successful. We will begin to heal from the inside out, releasing conditions and diagnoses to enjoy better health. As Karie reminds us, in as little as 120 days, we can renew at an optimal cellular level. The Domino Diet Formula will allow you to break free of what ails you to create a newer, healthier you.
The Domino Diet is divided into six sections, each on a specific domino or area that needs to be adjusted in order for us to gain and maintain proper body weight and stay healthy. Those dominoes include our thoughts, feelings, and hormones. Karie guides us through the exploration of the six dominoes with the end result that when we line them up correctly, we will achieve freedom, not just freedom from the extra pounds, but freedom from many of the heartaches that afflict to other areas of our lives.
The Domino Diet is much more than a diet book. In fact, Karie is quick to point out the problem with most diets. As a dietitian, she knows it’s more reasonable to suggest a range of calorie intake depending on active vs. non-active days rather than a flat-calorie approach. After all, as she points out, we don’t live in a fixed world. Also, we need to reinterpret what the bathroom scale tells us. In general, as Karie states, restricted diets are counterproductive to true healing and “it’s time to stop thinking about diet and start thinking about healing.”
An important way to heal is to see why we eat. If we don’t eat because we are hungry, we are most likely eating emotionally. We need to explore the failures, guilt, chaos, and stuck feelings that make up our emotional eating patterns. We also need to change how we feel about our bodies. Research shows that 80 percent of women and almost the same number of men are not happy with their bodies. Karie wants us to change our relationship with our bodies by changing our thoughts. She offers positive affirmations throughout the book that we can use to come to appreciate all that our bodies do for us while also leveling the mind where it all begins.
Some of the ways that we can achieve weight loss that Karie illustrates really surprised me. An example is her discussion of the importance of breathing. She states that “with the combination of deep breathing (to get more O2 and CO2) and adequate sleep, weight loss can literally happen in her dreams.” She also recommends that we take a look at how and where we eat. Many of us eat while watching the news, which is usually bad news rather than “good chews.” That results in a stressful eating environment, and stress adds to weight gain. With action steps that guide you through the book with examples like The Power of Meal Pause, she’ll “rest and digest” and enjoy food again.
We must also consider the psychological reasons behind our food choices. We live in a society of abundance, but just a generation or two ago, that was not the case. Our grandparents lived through the Great Depression and the food rationing of World War II. They didn’t always have enough food, and that led them to easily succumb to marketing strategies that taught them to buy two for the price of one, basically hoarding food and passing those behaviors on to us. We need to adapt to modern times, letting go of the belief that we should eat everything on our plate or stock up on food when it’s on sale because there might not be enough later. Perhaps my favorite point in the entire book is when Karie said we need to stop acting like every meal is the “last supper.” It’s time to ditch scarcity thinking and embrace abundance, guilt-free!
Another topic I never considered is the effects of menopause and “manopause” on our eating habits. Karie suggests that we retrain ourselves to not think of this period as a midlife crisis, but as a midlife awakening. She says that it would be abnormal to not have a midlife awakening, so we should celebrate this moment, not just eat to get through it.
Other factors that affect our weight include holding grudges. As Karie says, “Forgiveness is like vegetables: like it or not, it’s good for you.” In addition, we can fear what it will be like to have the weight we want; in short, we fear success. We create scary scenarios like thinking that we’ll never have fun again if we commit to a health program, and that we’ll have to spend a lot of money we don’t have on new clothes if we lose weight. Karie makes it clear that we can still have fun; we just need a little restraint: “It’s not all or nothing. It’s not about Christmas. It’s about Christmas lasting a month, camping all season, and Fridays forever.”
Those are just a few highlights of The Domino Diet. Karie writes in a down-to-earth, honest, and humorous style that is laced with insight, along with reflections, affirmations, and great quotes that will motivate you to make the changes you need to experience the full joy of feeling mentally and physically healthy. . I hope you will read this book and line up your dominoes to create results you will love.
