THE LATINA ANTI-DIET: A Dietitian's Guide to Authentic Health that Celebrates Culture and Full-Flavor Living, good, supportive guide to eating

THE LATINA ANTI-DIET: A Dietitian's Guide to Authentic Health that Celebrates Culture and Full-Flavor Living
DALINA SOTO
Ballantine Books
$14.99 ebook, available 18 March 2025

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Break away from diet culture while still honoring your body and incorporating cultural foods in this fresh, expansive guide from the registered dietitian and creator of Your Latina Nutritionist.

Diet culture is facing a reckoning, and intuitive eating has been leading the charge. The movement has taken the internet by storm, encouraging us to stop dieting and make food choices that feel good for our bodies rather than follow influencers and their shakes.

But intuitive eating is missing a key ingredient: culture. Like many movements, intuitive eating has become co-opted by a select few—placing the focus on “mainstream” food while discounting cultural cuisines. But how can we gain a healthy attitude towards food when our foods—our arroz, habichuelas, and plátanos—are left out of the conversation?

Dalina Soto is here to add them back to our plates.

As a registered dietitian, Soto understands the pros and cons of intuitive eating. As a first-generation Dominican American, she’s also seen firsthand how this movement has only catered to a certain demographic. With her easy-to-follow CHULA method, Soto teaches us how to:

Challenge negative thoughts

Honor our bodies and health

Understand our needs

Listen to our hunger

Acknowledge our emotions

She gives us tools to confront diet culture and the whitewashing of food so we can go back to eating what we love while managing our health.

Engaging and incisive, The Latina Anti-Diet is for everyone who’s been told to lay off the tortillas and swap their white rice for brown. Soto shows us that food is so much more than calories; it’s about celebrating our culture and living a life full of flavor.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Food, fat, and flavor start with the same letter for a reason. I'm deeply anti-diet. This book crystalizes my objections to the diet industry's be-afraid-of-your-food message, its relentless focus on women and the concomitant relentless bombardment of negativity about appearance, or more stealthily but with the same objective, relentless "health" messaging that is anything but healthy.

The author is a social-media Force. She's got followers in droves...legions...and she's been giving this very practical method to get yourself into a healthy, sustainable pattern of eating the food you enjoy for a while now. I hadn't heard of her because I'm not all that interested in diets except to belittle and insult the anti-food goblins that perpetrate and perpetuate the anti-food messaging that damages so many people.

What else can I say? If you think you need a diet book, you really need this book. Skip the "one weird trick" fads, spend your time and your treasure here. Author Soto is Cicero to the Br'er Rabbits that abound in this space. She spends a deal of her page-count telling stories about those who've used her method...CHULA, explained above...to mend their fractured relationship to food. There's a lot of informative and explanatory text, so it's not just a paper version of an infomercial; the aim was to recreate her social-media presence's warm, approachable presentation of self. I found it effective, and agreeable, where I expected to feel it was kinda cringe.

*I*, a certifiable curmudgeon with a long-standing hatred of the dietmongers, am rating this book 5 stars and recommending it to people who think they need to diet. Push a pin in that idea until you've read this book.