No matter how uncomfortable it can feel at times, uncertainty is a feeling I’d never want to live without. Without it, there is no doubt.

Without doubt, there is no growth. Without growth, mind and body stagnate and life goes stale.

That’s why I’m so glad I read Hungry for More: Stories and Science to Inspire Weight Loss from the Inside Out by Adrienne Youdim, MD, FACP. In the best possible way, it made me doubt - about what I’ll save for later.

As the subtitle suggests, Youdim - an internist who specializes in weight loss and nutrition, edited The Clinician’s Guide to the Treatment of Weight Loss, and has been featured on “The Doctors,” “Dr. Oz,” and “Dr. Phil” - uses patients’ experiences along with her own to provide a broader perspective as to why so many people are overweight. And it’s not just because Paula pigs out on pepperoni pizza or Harry is hooked on Hostess’ Ho-Hos.

While food’s part of it, Youdim believes overweight people hunger for more.

That our desire for food and subsequent desire to lose weight from the excess of it is a “plea ... a yearning for a different way of living, a different way of being” and “exploring our relationship with food is an opportunity to explore our relationship with ourselves.” And become better, happier, healthier people in the process.

Take, for example, the story of Shay’s “hunger for balance.”

Shay embodies all-or-nothing eating mentality. When he diets, he subsists on chicken breasts and salad, “even for breakfast,” for weeks. When he doesn’t, all meals are dine-in or take-out, and the ones at restaurants start with cocktails and end with dessert.

That’s not too atypical, you might say. Neither is Youdim’s advice: for Shay to find “the middle ground.” But then Youdim provides great insight into why ultimately finding balance is “hard and takes work.”

It’s because the opposite, “to live at the extremes, ... requires less thought, less intention, and less compromise.” But if you do live at the extremes, Youdim believes, you never find “equilibrium.”

Youdim makes Shay’s story even more impactful by abandoning the armor of a doctor’s expertise and admitting extreme eating is easier than balanced eating for her as well. While her admission that as a child she ate an entire box of chocolates designed to be sold as part of a school fundraiser may again seem typical, learning that she would eat “nothing but hard-boiled eggs for days” or have nothing more than a spoonful of peanut butter before a 10-to-16-mile run once she became a doctor is far from it.

Moreover, it takes a strong and confident soul to admit to the initial confusion and eventual shame she felt at the age of six when an older family member she barely knew swiped a serving spoon from her hand and said to her mother, “You shouldn’t let her eat that much. She is a big girl already.”

What’s really important about this incident is that until that time Youdim had never considered herself to be overweight. In hindsight she’s not even certain that she was.

But as so often happens in life, a negative seed is planted and sprouts - one that Youdim watered for too long instead of plowing under.

She became “fixated” on her weight, by middle school “was completely absorbed in this negative self-impression,” and only realizes now that she ate too much because what she really hungered for was friendship, acceptance, a sense of belonging. Which leads me back to the personal point I made earlier: that this book, in the best possible way, caused me to doubt.

Until reading Hungry for More, I was sure that my healthy fanaticism about food and exercise was simply a result of wanting to feel my best every day and get the most out of my body in every workout. Now I’m not so sure.

I fully expected to accomplish two things in four years of college: to graduate cum laude and as a 1,000 point scorer in basketball. I accomplished the first, didn’t even get even remotely close to the second - and I still feel a sense of failure when I remember that.

Was becoming “The Fitness Master,” and being so hellbent on winning bike races a way to make amends for my b-ball flameout?

I ate healthfully well before this, but while reading this book, I realized I only started eating like a nutritionally astute monk after the girl I thought I’d marry broke things off. Was becoming so fixated on food a way to deal, or not deal, with this - as well as an excuse to avoid the dating scene?

In short, any book that leads to that sort of introspection is worth reading. Since reading it could also motivate you to shed unwanted and unhealthy weight, doing so in my mind becomes a stone-cold, rock-solid no-brainer.

You can find Hungry for More: Stories and Science to Inspire Weight Loss from the Inside Out on Amazon.